11/18/2004 - 1:03 p.m. | to drink as if lovers

Let me tell you how clever I am. I mean, I would never do something so mundane as to stick down an official song of the day, but I usually stick a line from whatever I'm listening to up in the diary title (or just completely random gibberish). But, check out today's title; were you to try and track down those lyrics, you wouldn't find shit. However, being a Rhett Miller fan, you might sort of recognize it as "Valium Waltz" with "drink" in place of "dream." That is because today's song is the demo version of "Valium Waltz" off the website with that very, very crucial lyric change. WHAT YOU GOT Anyway, I'm done with my mock arrogance. You should probably go download it, though; I love the tripped up verson, but this is so much prettier.

Let me present an analogy to you (I feel as if I am on a roll with analogies, making an excellent one yesterday between coffee and chocolate preference - ask if you really care!): The rogue nation of Natewalshia, formerly a colony of the Republic of WALSHES has been given its independence and is trying very hard to make it on its own with its own little economy and such, but it keeps floundering. While it does produce goods and services, it is currently in the middle of a drought, and the people are clammoring for shit. So, the WALSHES republic, benevolent to a fault, helps this poor little third world nation with some reparations blah blah blah this is fucking going no where. I have $58 to my name as of right now, and while there should be some money out there right now eventually sliding in, I have to hold on until it makes it, stretching things very thin. For instance, I would like to buy Shelly some gas and maybe an oil change because I use her car so much, and I feel really guilty about that and would like to keep the karma flowing as evenly as possible (Tried to find her in the art building thing to give her a ride, can't believe that fucking worked), but her tank gets lower and lower, and I just keep waiting and waiting. Incidentally, even though I am down to such a ridiculously small sum of money, I can hardly control my terrible impulses to buy new t-shirts. Smacko pointed out this site to me the other day - threadless.com - and it is my new favorite for sort of artsy but not really t-shirts. All shirts are user-submitted, and people vote on them, and the best ones actually get made. Smacko said I should try for it, but I mostly have text and stick figures, I dunno how well that would work out. Anyway, these shirts are right up my alley, alternately cute and disturbing, and more with zombies on them than I would ever hope to dream. And, actually, they are in the midst of a sale - $10 - and it takes all my self-restraint for I must save my money....... for the super rare Old 97's promo material on ebay. I am not all that reasonable with my funding, but I just keep expecting that that windfall is right around the corner.

This is a weird, awkward entry already. Carry on!

While we (me) are in the depths of an economic crisis, I am certainly feeling much better than I have since those past few entries. One of the few times, it appears, that writing about it actually helped. Tuesday night was the symphony, and I was on my very best behavior. Yes, I did bring candy to the performance, but several minutes were spent pondering in the Super Pantry which I could eat most unobtrusively (I eventually decided on a packet of Chewy SweetTarts poured into my inner pocket). It also turns out that I had signed myself up for the previous week's concert and am just a huge fuckup. Whoops. See, it was all based on a prediction of my behavior. Would Nate ever put off seeing a bunch of nerds pluck their strings for two, three hours? No, never. Anyway, the symphony was a lot better than I would have thought, and I would now actually consider going again on my own if money were not an issue, 3 days left to bid on Ted Leo t-shirt, etc. Most of the concert was taken up by "Carmina Burana," which is apparently the most well-known, least identified symphony in history. I know for a fact that you would recognize "O Fortuna," the main part of the shit. It's been used in pretty much every commercial and Jerry Bruckheimer movie ever. Incidentally, new Nic Cage movie tomorrow, and I pretty much ache to see it. We spent each half of the concert sitting in a different place, mired in with a group of creepy, often smelly, strangers/Asians. And we also had to do this very stupid looking stuff with our eyes, cupping our hands around them or folding the pinnae in different directions. It's very hard to do that unobtrusively. But still, very good concert. Ricardo Montalban was the very enthusiastic instructor, and they had a huge regular chorus and a creepy one made of private school children. The three opera-y singers were all right, in that two of them were pretty funny (One acted all drunk for the drunk song, and the other exploded a bunch of feathers out before singing my favorite, the very melodramtic song about the roast swan) and one of them was funnily pretty. Then, after the show, our professor, who proves time and again that he is the nicest guy ever, bought us anything we wanted at the little coffee shop place in the theatre. I opted for only a mug of tea because 1) I likes me tea and 2) I sure as hell wasn't going to try and weasel my way in and get acquainted with these people and therefore wanted out ASAP. I know, I know, I should try making friends, but God damn if idle chatter isn't the worst thing ever. I dunno, I guess pretty much anything we ever say is idle chatter, but it's always situations like these that highlight the banality of it. It was all very boy-girl, boy-girl, and I was kind of eavesdropping on a few of the conversations. Just the, uh, highly controlled efforts by King Trollbeard to be cool in front of Beer Slut and Eminem's "friendly" probings into HotThriftStoreChick's past relationships, I dunno, man. It made me want to have a cigarette. And I don't smoke. The implication there being that I would like to engage in an act that will no doubt take 7 - 10 minutes of my life in a hacking, black lung, soul-crushing way rather than try and talk to these people speaks bounds about my nature. I yelled all of "Hands Off" on the ride home, though.

Next next next what is next? Fuck, are we back on Tuesday? Man! I don't make this easy for myself. Let's see... dig dig. The remainder of Tuesday is inconsequential, even amongst this big pile of it. Wait, wait! Correction! I learned something, something very, very important. I was over at Kyle's parents for food, and somehow the subject of my weird wrist deformity came up. In case you haven't seen it, right in the middle of my right wrist is this weird bean-sized lump under my skin. It doesn't hurt or anything, but the other wrist doesn't have it and you can move it around and bite it (I do this often) without harm, but it tends to freak other people out, like Missy. I told her it was my reset button. Anyway, I showed it to Kyle's parents, and they told me it is a ganglion cyst. As I had blindly assumed, it isn't harmful (Kyle's mom even has one), and I guess it is just caused by excessive use of a joint (Make your own masturbation joke here). I could get the fucker popped - it's filled with joint fluid, I guess - but I'm content knowing I don't have wrist cancer or something. Now, if only I could figure out what those weird bumps on my penis are.

Wednesday, I started waking up earlier, and while I waited I more or less through together the perfect Avril Lavigne parody for our jingle thing. I know, I should stop that touting of my limited talents, but I need that a little bit currently, and you will shortly see why. So, I threw together a jingle that was clever and cohesive and musically sound (sort of), but Brian, my partner, is a little too cautious. "It doesn't have a repeating jingle hook." See, but in my mind we can bend those rules. A lot. And I can justify pretty much all of it, even as he is stuttering about it in front of the class. It's like, why are you in this if you want to follow the rules exactly? You need unwavering confidence, and for some reason, I seem to have it. Is this a flaw? Maybe eventually, once the coke takes over, and I start on my own Spritzesque downward spiral, but until then, I shall remain happy as a clam.

FINAL DESTINATION 2!!! YEAH! WOO! LOVE THAT SHIT! I dunno - it's so ridiculous, and you don't care about any of the characters, so I guess it's funny to see them die in hilarious ways. Squish, I am made of Jell-o and all that. Except that sometimes my imagination does sort of run wild, and I get all sad because I bet someone is really sad that these fake people are dead. I would be sad, too. Can't even bury you if you are a pile of goo served under glass. Death is a creepy guy who hangs out by your window, waving his claws (to freak you out) and masturbating wildly.

Hmm.

Then came the car pushing adventure! Spritz flaked out, but of course, you knew that already, so I am being redundant, but then, sometimes it's good to report the information anyway. It is in Spritz's nature to flake, I can't blame the guy. "I have to go to the gym." Pushing a 2 ton car is a workout? Well, anyway, Smacko came over and Tebben, obviously, because in the exact opposite vein, Tebben is just sort of automatically included in help. Not that we take him for granted, heaven's alive, but still. He was gonna be here. So, Shelly steered while Smacko, Tebben, Kyle, and I took shifts pushing the car the 1.35 miles to the mechanic. Actually, closer to 1.5 miles I would think, as Kyle feared main streets (perhaps I should have as well) and kept insisting on these lengthy, ridiculous loop-arounds to get where we needed to be in a much, much longer time frame. Anyway, I can't speak for everyone, but I had a good time. My two passions - hilarious adventures and personal suffering - were combined to great effect. We were all so sweaty and exhausted and we looked absolutely ridiculous running this car down across streets, looking like a bunch of slave laborers (Our spiritual being "Medium Pace" by Adam Sandler). We'd rotate positions every block, resting every three (or less if you count tackling the big piles of leaf bags on the side of the streets, Shelly shrilly warning us not to get twigs in our eyes), praying that we would not encounter traffic. Finally, we got to the home stretch, except it required us to actually go to a relatively busy intersection and run our asses through. I can't believe the shit worked. I scrawled a hurried note on my windshield ("Don't tow my ass; this bitch won't run") and then we started for home. Somewhere along the way, Kyle found a leftover plastic pitchfork from Halloween and started chucking it at people/rabbits/trees/anything. The best part for someone out of context would have been to seen him in the grass by the church, smashing the pitchfork in the ground and yelling like a crazed pagan, "What you got?! I'm gonna kill yo' ass! Come on! Piss on this shit!" He was yelling at a rabbit, but I don't see how anyone could have known that. For services rendered, I bought everyone Wendy's, but even then, transportation fees were only around $17, far cheaper than getting a tow truck, I should think.

As far as I can tell, it probably took them about ten minutes to fix my car. Battery. $130. Well, so it goes. I fought desperately - oh-so hard - not to add anything to my poor little credit card, which I had been chipping away at oh-so slowly. Still, it's done. Car's back to running like a piece of shit, instead of not running like a piece of shit. And, of course, I'll shortly be making thousands upon thousands of dollars a month anyway, so I guess it's not in my interest to worry so much. Because I was worrying for a while. You think on that.

Yes, I did go to the creepy, bright, dingy hotel for the informational meeting for the e-mall.com or whatever the fuck it is. OK, I still don't know what it is - entirely - but I could now definitely give the same vague presentation that all the higher-ups seem to love. Firstly, I was told to wear, like I said, business attire, so I did my best to go all out. By stealing Spritz's clothes. Tie and jacket, everything. The tie clip is mine, though. Well, not only was I the best dressed of all the potential moneyearners there, I was also far too comfortably into the lead regarding looks and intelligence. I mean, OK, I'm a fairly smart guy, but these people were bottom-feeding scum (I guess it would be the type to fall in for a get-rick quick scheme) and still - you'd think at least someone would be attractive! God damn shit, man! I am a fairly grotesque human being, and here I am looking like fucking Suave Joe amongst all these lower rungs. Far too many molestor mustaches and creepy perms. The next closest person to me was the skeptical guy who looked exactly like Murdock from the Gorillaz. Exactly.

Anyway, the meeting was under the supervision of the cult-figure "Andy," a good-natured southern man with an easy-going arrogance in his ways that made him almost convincing, moreso to others maybe. He is so unwavering and cocky and repetitive in his ideas that he could have been any number of faith preachers or self-help gurus. You know Patrick Swayze's character in Donnie Darko? I was having many flashes of him. The majority of the meeting was spent discussing how nice it would be to have both money and time, but they finally got to some details towards the end (the last ten minutes maybe). OK, so there is this site - Quixtar maybe - with all these marketplaces on it. They give you a reasonable price on everything, and you get some sort of rebate back to boot. Good deal. So, step one is you use this website to buy as much of this shit as you can. Change your buying habits and all that. Then, you get as many other people as you can to start using this website in the same way. Then, the amount of the stuff you buy and they stuff they buy (tallied in points) is summed up, and you get some sort of bonus for that, based on these points. These people you recruited are supposed to recruit others and on and on and one, so the more people you get and the more everyone spends, the better off everyone is. "Andy" explicitly said that this was not a pyramid scheme, but I'm not entirely sure how so. Something about how you don't really get the points for the referrals of people you refer, but maybe you do get some of it? I dunno. Still. We are quite far away from any real specifics here, and I see no end in sight. I do see, however, the first signs of shit we are going to have to purchase. CDs and books and shit, a franchise fee, I dunno what else. I will keep playing along with their games for now, as it gives me something extra to write about (and I sort of enjoy being immersed in this strange world of scuzzy people), but the second they want my money, let the firebombing begin. More on that later.