One of the houses that I'm working on has a rooftop which provides this vista.



I wanted to sit there for a long, long time and get a good picture with wonderful clouds and wonderful color. Unfortunately, that roof is perilous. On my first journey up to wait for perfect cloud cover, the bag carrying my camera broke open. I turned around, and contemplatively observed my $1200 camera roll off the third-story roof into fresh concrete oblivion. If that weren't enough, that jerk roof eats your pants, too -- the only way to get down without critically endangering yourself is to scootch on your butt along the troth, on a sandy tar surface which has (to date) put holes in the butt of two of my jeans.

I want to go back to that bastard rooftop with my new better camera for a winter picture, damn it all. But it'll be all covered in ice amd require either a (1) harness or (2) excruciating stupidity to climb. Damn you you damn dirty roof!

Random city pictures!

( All here no look at them rilly )

This last entry was accidentally not private!

I change it to a picture of friends that I love.

I AM CLONE ARMY REDUX [1]

One Mssr. Neal Swift wanted a series of campaign posters and stickers. ( AWAY PHOTOSHOP! )

Everyone knows about CSS Zen Garden. Well, I learned about it pretty late. I am using it, though. To help Morgan out by plagiarizing a Zen Garden template wholesale to make a cheap lil' benefit site for her in fifteen minutes of Dreamweaver and Photoshop putzery. Then Lionel took over with the important job of putting in the text and also making everything different and yet the same through hours and hours of notepad coding. Hooray Lionel! Hooray Morgan! Morgan is going to Tanzania where she will doubtlessly put the zani in Tanzania. This is what the cool kids do: go to nations that have a 'z' in their name.

In other news: ( The Spine Priest )

Bahmannnnnnnnn. Bahhhhmannnnnnn. It's totally a conductor name. Anyway, that's certainly his name. Bahman Saless or some spelling variant thereof. He conducts the Boulder Chamber Orchestra which I am now apparently a part of. I kept telling him that over drinks. You have a total conductor's name. He agrees. I am part of his orchestra now. I am drunk. I was part of it, I tell you, part of it. And I was such a part of it, I came at such a critical time and saved them from an infinite number of untold disasters. By god, they must have looked to me as a hero or something. Who else gets a standing ovation on day one?

Yes, that's important to mention. The conductor called me up onto the stage personally. He said "Here is Sam. Sam, please come up here." I walked sheepishly -- I knew of no other way to -- and there was ovation and smiles and a little girl in a floral skirt was dispatched to run up and hand me a floral bouquet. I was bid to stand before the audience with my flowers. I smiled sheepishly -- I knew of no other way to -- and had the director speak of my selflessness, I think it was. What was I doing being ovated? This was amazing. I am drunk. They were going to send me home with a bunch of bread and pastries, in bags. After having me get handed plant life in front of a madly clapping audience and told to take a bow.

They didn't just send me home. They took me partying. Off with the two conductors and the head honchos and by gum we partied on the rooftop of the west end tavern. Bahmann got a hankering for food and off we went wandering, hopping and searching for anyplace talented enough to provide food after midnight. Hapas, the whole lot, we hopped. I am drunk. Bahman paid for everything before I could even say anything. I stammered and hucked out thanks sheepishly -- I knew of no other way to -- and participated in hugs and ribald commentary.

Gordon picked me up. He was even kind enough to get all the bread and pastries out of my car. I am drunk. I would never have successfully packaged them, but they are now all wrapped and bagged and in our kitchen, two whole bags of bread and pastries, all still fresh. I totally did not deserve to get applauded, but did. The end.

hyooooooo

This has been a full 'off' two months, I think. Terrible sleep patterns, anti-inflammatory drugs, resultant loopiness, and a whole host of family problems. I feel so cliche saying it but it's keeping me from being the same happy funny fun-loving sort of a guy I am. At lease, perhaps in a well documented sense. I am right now recovering, but this is going to take some time (the fact that I'm posting at about 3 in the morning is evidence to that fact).

I have not driven much nor gone much of anywhere, but I get to break from the shell soon, as I have just found out that the treatment for the post-shingles condition is a success, and that I may soon re-enter the world at large. Horray. I have sworn to myself that I'm going to continue to try to update here since people actually bug me that I do not update it and that I do a million things worth mentioning and fail to talk about them here in 'talk about me' land.

( SOME THINGS THOUGH: )

I am very sorry I have not updated my life is a wretched festival of emo pain! Weh!

The school flop: I get a refund. My teachers aren't getting invited back.

My shingles has returned in the form of a post-herpetic condition and my side now aches 24-7 with a dull burning pain that must be numbed with special drugs.

That is enough sadness it is time for ME DANCING

... read my volcano cults right

Sam and Max, my favorite creative anything involving exactly two characters ever, has returned, literally and metaphorically from the dead. They are now 'mouseover' reliant.

Here.

I watched it and it drove me insane

( S for SAMVETTA )

My doggie has returned from the vet and has been a shivering, whimpering very very sad little girl for a number of very long hours. I can't escape the sound of her soft doggie cries, so I'm a lil' mushy right now.

I just found out the particulars. No anesthesia, local or otherwise. Needle aspiration, followed by a cut at the top of the ear, which was pried open so that they could weld the busted blood vessel up with a hot pokey. The two halves of the ear that had been forced apart by the blood clot were then sutured back together and the original cut was stapled. Kachunk, kachunk. The works. The ear will be just fine but she's just been through the puppy equivilant of malicious alien probing abduction: strange, terrifying, extraordinarily painful. She has as of now managed to wedge herself behind a bed in a nest of spare blankets, so she's right now essentially a dog-head sattelite dish poking out of a fluffy hidey-hole.

My brother had to witness the whole process while helping hold her hind legs down. For all of today he has looked like a kid who has just been punched in the face and knows he can do nothing about it. Dog care is hard on us sissies!

Very great, very amazing thing just happened to me tonight.

I went to go attend tonight's Baroque Festival performed by the Boulder Chamber Orchestra. I even paid for an extra ticket so that Preston could attend. While there, I saw Gustavo Melara, who was there with a whole flock of students from CU. He told me that I absolutely should meet up with him before every orchestra so that he could get me seating for about half price.

I filled out a raffle card during the intermission, thinking that it would be fun to do some volunteer work for the orchestra. And hey, it might allow me to go see more than the three or four orchestral performances a year I can typically afford, right?

The raffle drawing was held after the performance concluded; I went in to watch. Apparently, you had to be in attendance to win the raffle. Three no-shows later, the manager draws my name out of the box. ... And even pronounces my name right, which is like two wins in one!

I got a season pass. I get to attend just about any concert in Boulder County at donor-level (first through third row) seating for free. The pass expires in 2008.

I plan not to miss a single use of the card ever ever.

This is ridiculous. It's a warm, windy day, and I'd left a bunch of windows open to circulate air through the house while I was at school.

Right on schedule, a grass fire in the mountains due west of my house breaks out and starts crawling towards the city, eventually balooning up to a 600 acre wildfire. The winds are now bathing my entire neighborhood in rich, creamy, dead tree mist, and my room smells like a well-cooked forest.

Mmmm, smells good, right? Sure, for the first week. This stuff has saturation power.

If the fire is still burning visibly after the sun goes down, I'll go take pictures of fire ridges.

I apologize for the lack of there being anything here.

Mr. SERIOUS BUSINESS is actually really kicking my ass, like I knew he would.

I am right now in a love-hate relationship with procrastination. A thousand thousand things happened that I have already forgotten. My dearest adorable puppy who I love with the fiery fiery passion of a thousand carebears has a blood clot in her ear and I'm going to probably have to hold her while they aspirate. There was some salsa dancing.

The advanced sociology class I'm in right now is also actually freaking the hell out of me, since this one focuses entirely on aspects of deviance, deviant integration, normalization, and social control. SO far it's been a running cavalcade of fascinating things involving how messy humanity is.

Also on account of some totally weird argument I had, I ended up asking some professors a question about rights, and they asked for a transcript of the issue at hand, and they looked at it and two of them were like "HOLY SHIT, MAN. THIS IS X-TREEM RAD. You should join our debate and politics clubs, for serious, wai2go." I told them that I'd think about it, but in all likelihood I would prefer to leave politics and debate on the internet, where it belongs.

The vegetarianism lasts for one more month.

A derivative (read: plagiaristic) work I threw together in Photoshop.



My computer was hijacked suddenly by the worst malevolent software entities known to man. The lead instigator was a Trojan-Spy.HTML.Smitfraud.c using component that likes to call itself SpySheriff. The article details the fascinating process that Spy Sheriff goes through, pretending to be your best buddy while essentially hijacking your computer to sell some bogus software to impressionable computer users.

The totally best part of the infection was not the unclosable "BRAZILFUTBALBABES" windows (Brazilian soccer stars apparently really like coconut oil, like I mean really), but rather the fact that my computer would -- without any windows open -- play Gilette razor commercials on my speaker. Let me tell you people, after hearing these Gilette commercials once every five minutes for five hours (interspaced with McDonalds commercials), I am fully qualified to tell you that GILETTE MAKES ONE ROCKING HARDCORE RAZOR, MAN. FIVE BLADES. It reminds me of Suck's talk o' the razor world.

I danced through the purging process with a grace I am normally not allowed in computer affairs. I'm almost done. My computer chafes from the cleansing fire and is brought all the closer to its last gasp from the taxing affair.

The chinook vanished. It plummeted from nice temperatures to below freezing during my classes. Within hours of my departure, it was snowing, foggy, overcast.

When I woke up this morning, it was warm again, yet the place was covered in snow. The skies were perfectly clear, and it was sunny, but it was still snowing. I looked around and found no cloudsource, then realized that direct sunlight makes falling snow very pretty.

We've now hit the second 'wet' part of winter. Chinook winds always create a dead month or so, where there's no moisture, no water, no snow, warm weather, and lots of wind. This is when Colorado looks barren and dead; there's no leaves, the vegetation is all stone-dry, grey and withered .. excepting the evergreens. All of the dead of winter with none of the pretty snow. Over now!

Since the chinook is kicking in, I don't have to actually scrape ice off my car or truck. I just wait until 10 and it starts sliding off on its own. For a while now, we might get the occasional room-temperature-snow phenomenon.

Today I have learned two things, so far:

1. I've lost 20 pounds and need to eat more! But I am seriously fourpackin' it up.
2. Malware sucks.

Bill Paxton, real name "Private Hudson" appeared to die in the movie Aliens, which I watched when I was somewhere around 7 years old. This broke my heart. He was my hero! He was a character in a horror movie who became potently aware of the dangers of being in a horror movie. We never actually saw him die, so I held out hope.

Apparently, he not only survived, but traveled back through time to become a polygamist with three wives! That is justice for you! Hudson is shown to be man enough for three women, and they are lucky women indeed.



Oh, who am I kidding. It's an HBO series and he's destined to get put through the ringer. He is probably in more danger than he was in Aliens. If he ever says "Game over" on the show, I absolutely promise that I will mail him a piece of paper with a big huge smiley face on it to indicate that I got the reference, and that he is a wonderful person.

ALCOWN'd

Obviously an in joke but I have been upgraded from creepy stalker to hero stalker. It's true!

From the recent history I can dredge up:

I imagine sugargliders as being one of the few animals with X-ray vision, who also never have to blink.

They are called gliders because they can move perfectly horizontally for miles at a time, propelled by a mystic force that makes the sound of a vaccum cleaner. The momentum is eerily constant, too. They stick immediately to whichever surface is first encountered, which has been known to confuse particularly tall tourists.

These are facts about sugargliders. If any of this is wrong, I don't want to be right.

( - )

I wandered through Santa Fe in the dark a number of times, occasionally in light rainfall. The plaza cafes were open well past midnight, and often catered to milling crowds and nocturnal performers. The heart of the city is marked by the epicenter of heat and light; everywhere, there was evidence of art as the heart of the city culture. I took the best shots when I was lost, I think.

Eventually, I'd stop caring about where I was supposed to be, and immediately end up there.

I've had plenty of time to poke through the pictures now that I'm without a decently working vehicle for a few days. But it is fun, as you can see from my wearing of cowboy hats.

( New photos )

My teacher for my Human Sexuality class is going to be secretly called "Mr. SERIOUS BUSINESS" by me from now on. He treats everything like it is SERIOUS BUSINESS and that dilly-dallying and other weaknesses detract from the glory of the SERIOUS BUSINESS paradigm.

Why, when confronted with a slip of paper that he was absolutely supposed to sign and really had no choice but to, he spent ten minutes lecturing me on my 'undue expectations' of him before signing it. When it came down to things he had the option to help me with, though, he'd just ridicule me for asking it, refuse, and move on. How conveniently predictable! I could have used maybe less or no lecturing, perhaps. ( More )

As I was driving back home from school, someone spun out of control and went over the double yellow line into my lane. They went perpendicular to the road, so I dodged them by going into the opposing traffic lane. Immediately after this, I realized why so many people were spinning around and doing this hilarious little dance of vehicular chaos: the roads had completely iced over, and my elegantly timed swerve had put me out of control.

I steered into the swerve. I regained control. Yes! I was now also tilting wildly off the road. No! Okay, I guess I had to steer the other way. Ok, I'm sliding again, but not into the sidewalk. Yes! There's a parked car now in my trajectory.

Thinking with split-second un-genius, I decided that if I was going to hit this parked car, I would like instead to hit it with the back bumper. So, I gunned the accelerator and spun the wheel wildly to the left. Sure enough, I pull a 180. Then I keep accelerating, just because I don't know what's going to happen, and I know I'm going to hit this car anyway. But the acceleration slows me down enough to make it so I instead slide right by the car, missing it by maybe a foot or two. I then come to a slow, not-so-graceful stop, and I watch another person try to dodge the car I dodged, only to end up in the parked car I missed. Crunch. The car that went in front of me ends up fully on the sidewalk with a quarterpanel in a tree. I'm now turned totally around in the opposite lane, so I kind of .. well, go back the way I came. I pass three more wrecks, and there's police cars everywhere trying to mark all the crash sites with flares so people don't run into them. Some of the police cars have already been hit by vehicles who couldn't stop or get out of the lane. The new college students are crawling everywhere at five miles per hour and running into everyone because they're from places where snow is a mythological fable. I crawl too, because I am in a 2WD truck with no weight in the back. I make it home just fine, right as my engine starts reacting oddly to the cold.

Oh god no, Mr. Truck, please do not die. My brother is using my car because his car died and I'm nice, please don't die. I want this truck to work, please, please.

The weather is wonderful as long as one is inclined to not care about transit becoming a ballet-esque comedy of traction errors and neophyte, flatlander driving, which I am. Thick heavy snowflakes have been falling all day long in beautiful snowstorms, the earth swathed in white, the streets paved with a shiny black sheet of pure ice. The night sky casts a coppery glow over everything, as the moisture-heavy air catches the glow of the city lights and reflects it everywhere. Fog banks are drifting in, and the only sounds are those of tires running on wet roads. It's apparently supposed to snow all night long.

I'm just sitting here thinking about how much I like meat.

Meat, meat of every sort, practically. I've been making salads while thinking about meat. Eating buttered bread while thinking about meat. Cooking pasta and thinking about meat.

Soft halibut. Deep sea fishies. Flautas. Sauteed chicken breast with sliced prosciutto. Ribeye steak. Riblets! Tilapia. A boiled hamburger patty at a tavern. Animal style at In n' Out with mustard fried into the patty. Frittura picatta. Marinated chicken picado with sauteed vegetables. Baby gulf shrimp. Peking duck! Peppercorn steak. Nikumaki. Chicken strips in onions and bell peppers. Risotto crab fritters. Salmon smoked in garlic. Shrimp, scallops, and crab in jalisco sauce. Ahi tuna! A big heaping plate of calamari in aioli. Thinly sliced filet mignon in olive oil. An eight ounce, dry aged N.Y. strip steak, topped with blue cheese butter. Beef tataki. Chicken breast with thyme, lemon, and capers. Yellowfin. Pan-seared Alaskan halibut. Fresh crab at a crab house. Arroz con Pollo. Carne asada! Mojara Frita! Ricotta cheese lasagna. Gyoza potstickers. Fishies in udon. Tempura prawns with mustard sauce. Pad thai. Crispy flounder. Spicy pork dumplings. Jerk chicken drummettes. Coleman beef M.D. burger. No, wait - a Kahuna burger. Fried catfish! Jerk salmon! Jerk anything! Lamb picadillo. Duck tacos. Steack carbon.

All of it all of it is meat why

I am going to go jog while thinking about meat, then make some breakfast while thinking about meat. I'll stop thinking about meat afterwards though, otherwise I'll be too distracted while working.

Here comes a totally serious post that will be somewhat difficult for me to put out correctly.

I'm very inebriated right now, which was well worth it, and I had a wonderful time. The night had a hiccup at one point where I found out that a drunk person was driving me around; it's quite entirely absolutely uncool to call oneself a designated just because your 'head is clear enough' and you've 'done this before.'

I'm very particular about this sort of thing, so I ended up having to walk. It's not cold outside. We've got record-setting warm weather and our days have been colder than our nights for three days in a row, now. Anyway it's 2006 now practically everywhere it matters, so it's time for a

STATE OF THE SAM ADDRESS ( because it's my livejournal where I get to talk about me. )

Today I had to hunt down Kristi's car, which has been towed by the City of Longmont.

I leap out the door to retrieve it, then fail to find my keys in any of my pockets. Oh, sure, I've got Kristi's keys, but not mine.

I break into my own home, search forever, then am surprised two hours later to find that I did actually have them; they'd been wedged into the condom pocket of my pants.

whoa SENILITY WARNING

My brother had a group of friends sitting in his room, and the whole lot of them were laughing hysterically for 20 minutes. It just kept going and going. I couldn't figure out what the hell it was, but I kept hearing him say "I can't .. I can't look at it anymore"

I walk in and they're all laughing themselves silly over a picture of the O RLY owl.

They looked like they were all about ready to die. They couldn't take it.

Mystified as I was, I booted up YTMND's "Year of the Owl" for them.

Two of them -- two full grown men, mind you -- fell and hurt themselves.

I've figured out that I'm the only one in my family who really did Christmas this year.

You are staring at all the gifts I still have that I have yet to give out. At the peak of my gift-wrapping project hegemony over the living room floor, one could not walk across to the couches. Such was my power; such was my obsession. These ones remain neglected until I can properly ship them.

I've eaten lots of chocolate and ruined my face. I will not be in any pictures for a week now k. But I love chocolate. This sounds so adolescent, but it's true.

Instead you can have a picture of the christmas dinner I was at, with Lindsie, who has an ( abomination to mankind strapped to her arm. )

I now have a cellphone for the first time in my life.

You know, because I'm, like, 90's style hip.

Jesus, it's too much. The fools gave me a phone that you could upload MP3s to as a ringtone.

I used June's Audacity program to make at least one ringtone for every day of the month, plus about eighty gazillion more for custom rings. Right now I'm getting a ringtone bite out of Tom Waits' "The Piano Has Been Drinking."

I've been doing this for 5 hours now. Oh god, I'm doomed.

See, it used to be, when a person got a cellphone for the first time ever it was, like, 1995, so the phone had the following features:

1. 'Button' technology
2. Might work sometimes

So it made for a good introductory dose that allowed for you to ease into technofetishism with diminishing returns and gradually higher technofetish doses over time.

But what happens to me, then -- the last person in the first world to get a cellphone? It was like taking a wafish 5 year old and giving them a heroin buzz. I've been watching Vcast clips and the Daily Show and reading about Alistair Cooke's bones being stolen and custom-making native resolution backgrounds. Oh please, let the buzz wear off so that I might sleep.

Merry christmas!

call plz

Kristi comes down from Cheyenne to see me perform on the 16th.

This is all well and good, aside from her having rear-ended someone rather violently as she entered Longmont. I meet her after the performance concludes, and she seems near tears in describing her newfound predicament.

Aside from a nice big crunch in the front and a dented, unopenable hood, her lights are mangled and inoperable. It's not safe to drive the car, even in daylight, for fear of the attention it will attract. The person she ran into took it straight in a beefy trailer hitch and had no damage and doesn't do the whole insurance report thing, so she gets off okay in that department. I'm specifically talking about the "No Car Insurance" department.

She attends the cast party with me until 1. I want to be Big Hero Man and want to attempt to get her home to Cheyenne and help however I can with this issue, so we pick up some stuff from her car, repark it behind the theatre, and depart.

11 miles before the Wyoming border, in the middle of nowhere, We Cellphoneless Fools are busy driving through the long BFE stretches, and it's gotten cold, then very cold. It's under -10 degrees, and there's wind and snow flurries and very limited visibility. The car lurches and grinds to a halt as I steer onto the shoulder. -14 degrees, 3 in the morning, we're ( stranded )

I finished my classes yesterday. 75% chance of a 4.0

... man, it's wierd to read that. It's so not me. Four point ohs were for crazy people who worked too hard and started having their hair fall out in clumps while I watched them pick nervously at their heads. While they sat in front of me in the language arts class at high school. The class I was sleeping through, like all the others.

I also played a lot of video games, then. Like I had been doing as early as third grade. The other kids had their mario and their zelda. I had Sonic. And oh what a game it was.

I've found out something wacky relating to this fact: I played sonic so much that I have an instant emotional reaction to hearing any of the music from the series. It's actually fairly ridiculous. I could dance to this. Or this. Each brings back a whole host of inter-related and seemingly trivial memories as clearly as if I were playing the game again. Such as the triple-robotnik pull on a casino pocket, or that one spike pit in the Mystic Caves which was impossible to escape from. This conjured memories of that one point where the liquid rose and as a little kid I would always die over and over again trying to get back to the surface before I drowned.

In addition to being a thorough waste of my brain cells, it sort of helps me understand some things. Like why some of my friends will to this day go instantly nostalgic over zelda music, or final fantasy music, or whatever. Yah, whatever. My game was tallest.

My god I'm an actor now I did wonderfully and it was all wonderful and great and jesus they bought me drinks and it was all adorable. Oh my god I'm so happy right now. They had to drive me home. My performance was flawless and I danced and danced and I spoke fluently and played the part of such a loveably lovestruck, patiently shy sap falling for the beautiful Belle. The end!

Today, dearest Tom is out on the job. It's about 8:30 A.M. I am asleep, comfortably.

Cut to about five or ten minutes later; Tom's cellphone rings. He picks up.

"Hello?"

He hears a very loud hissing sound and a lot of other strange spraying noises. Barely audible over this din is me, going

"BLAUGHB .. FRAAAUGH .. TOM? TOM TOMHEYHELP JESUS TOM QUICK IS THERE ANY OTHER WAY TO TURN OFF THE ..."

Sudden interference of some sort on the phone, followed by muted sound, a 'mmmbhlbghb,' an 'ack, aghgh,' and some coughing.

"The what? Sam? What? Turn off the what? What's going on?"

"ACKCKG .. THE .. HOWTHELLDYOU TURNOFFTHEWATER .." choking, more coughing. ".. THE WATER MAIN KNOB WON'T TURN, THERE'S WATER EVERYWHERE, THE WATER, IT'S POURING OUT OF THE CEILING DOWN HERE OHGOD SOMETHING BROKE AND I WOKE UP AND THERE'S WATER POURING OUT OF HEATING VENTS INTO THE DOWNSTAIRS AND I CAN'T SHUT IT OFF, I'M WALKING UPSTAIRS AND ... OHNO"

Thumping, crashing, me coughing, louder hissing.

"OHMYGOD THEBATHROOM OHMYGOD WHOA SHIT SHIT, I'M GOING IN" .. he loses me.

I'm right now huddled over my computer waiting for my hair to dry. I'm wrapped in blankets. Tom came back to find me soaking wet in long underwear and my robe, grinning, carrying out soaked hallway rugs to the kitchen. The water line leading into the toilet in the upstairs bathroom had snapped in two, and water gushed out of that bathroom into the hallway, then into heat vents, creating oh-so-lovely cascades of pretty water into the downstairs. The boiler room, where I was crouched atop the dryer furiously trying to work the water main, was like an indoor rainstorm. The bathroom itself was fully soaked, as the furious volume of the water pressure was distributing the water evenly at high speeds, since the valve was fully open and this was a full pipe burst as opposed to a mere leak.

When It first bust, the noise was so loud that I woke up instantly. I ran out of my room and was going "Hey? Hey! Hey, what's going on? AAH! Hey! TURN OFF THE WATER! HEY, HELP! IS ANYONE HERE? HELLO? SHIT!" Before struggling in a futile fashion under a torrent of water with a fully rigid water main cutoff.

Which makes it funny when, about ten minutes after Tom's arrived home and we're throwing towels everywhere and cutting off the gas to the soaked furnace? My brother, looking so tired he's probably practically sleepwalking, stumbles out of a room not more than ten inches from where the break was, where I was yelling over the phone, and says ".. what's with all the noise? Jesus."

Then shuts his door and goes back to sleep.

My first performance in front of an audience is tonight!

Suck.

I can't believe they are still around. I used to read this thing back in 1996, wasting time reading back issues in my multimedia class at VoTech, when I wasn't playing the Starcraft demo out of view of the teacher. I remember their epilogue for OK Soda.

This site is about as early as I can find into my e-past, aside from two other things:

1. The Vocal Point, available only in erratic chunks in Google's cache now. Set up by Mr. Dixon, was apparently the first world wide web publication by middle school students, in the entire world. I was part of the computer club there, but didn't ever get any articles into Vocal Point, probably because I couldn't write worth shit those days, plus I was too busy playing

2. Rivers of Mud.

My VoTech multimedia class had a teacher -- whose name I have long since forgotten -- with cerebral palsy. He knew nothing about computers and didn't even have a teacher's certificate, and couldn't teach me anything about multimedia at all. The cerebral palsy explains how I, and everyone else with screens facing away from where he sat, could just play games with impunity. Standing up was so hard for him, that he would sit at his computer all day and read e-mail.

I shouldn't have disliked him, but I did. And I just remembered why. He had a little guide dog named Pepper, and this was just the cutest dog anyone has ever seen ever. And he was a jerk to that dog. No, seriously. I've never seen a guide dog treated that way before, and it's not the way you are supposed to treat them. And since it was a guide dog, we were expressly forbidden to pet him.

So the whole class would so totally heap love on that dog when the teacher would hobble off for a bathroom break, sans-Pepper.

... then we'd tab Starcraft back on once he was planted back in his seat, reading mail from his "Cerebral Pals" newsgroup. Whoa, Cerebral Pals .. y. I just got that. Whoa.

Cerebral-palsy-teacher-man, late in the year, actually managed to redeem himself heroically before getting ousted by another, infinitely worse teacher. I have yet to find out how to contact him, so I can tell him 'sorry I gave you a bum rap, my bad.'

I've almost learned all of my lines. Occasionally, an actor I'm working with, (including the adorable Isabelle, who plays Belle) musses a line and it throws me for a loop, but I've almost gotten rid of the notes.

But the DANCING, the DANCING. There's STEPS and TWIRLS and I have to NOT look wooden and terse and it has to be FORMAL and I'm wearing these dance shoes which ironically I'm more clumsy in than I am in my work boots at rehersal.

There now exist roughly about 2,000,000,000 (ballpark figures) pictures of me being kissed on stage by Isabelle. I expect they look cute.