so i keep writing 1998 everywhere. big deal, checkuary happens every year.
it's not new year's day that drives me nuts. i'm already nuts. it's that i feel like writing and it's new year's day kinda fitting, because the new year starts with... strangeness... yes, strangeness. 'tis very likely that i will have a new nephew by the end of the day. it's snowing. it's 10pm and i still feel hung over. i've done little more all day than play rogue squadron and write stylesheets for the next generation of my ridiculous homepage. the plans to spend the day finishing the soundproofing job have gone unnoticed, which means no rock and roll will happen this evening.
incidentally, the soundproofing project seems larger than life. we used kristian and neal's house on journal avenue as our practice space for almost three years, in neal's completely un-soundproofed bedroom, and then later in the attic. this worked out well, since we had a deaf grandmother to the north, an eccentric bass-playing guy with a fondness for creating bizarre scenes with mannequins in his front yard to the south, student ghetto housing to the east, and railroad tracks in the backyard to the west. in the summer of 1997, when andy and i lived on waller avenue, we moved the recording enterprise to my house because it was larger and had even better built-in soundproofing: brick exterior, noisy street on two sides, large back yard on the third, and hippies who played their own music on the fourth. i used to play my beloved marshall jtm 45 combo on 10 in my bedroom, with complete impunity. however, that house was doomed because it was falling apart under our feet. and then kristian had to move away from lexington... so we moved out, and now there's me and neal and andy living together in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. we thought, we have an extra bedroom, so all we gotta do is soundproof it and we can practice there! turns out to be easier said than done. our neighbors are much closer, and much pickier about noise, and the house has really really thin walls. the solution i envisioned wasn't so compli-ma-cated: build some frames to hang carpet a few inches away from the walls. i imagined we could do this in a day. well, we moved in august 1st --- it's still not finished. only this week did we finally get one wall covered. guh. and it's all because of lethargy, the continual tiredness of people who work 60-hour weeks (i do, at least), and an overwhelming urge to do something else. so, we haven't played together since october, and we haven't rehearsed since june. i'm itching... argh!
and my mom called this morning... my sister's dog has a freshly broken leg, my sister is going into labor, but my parents can't be there because of coming bad weather, my grandfather is in the hospital again... all hell's breaking loose in the family.
you're thinking, "all of this bitching and moaning so far has included nothing about a female --- are you sick or something?" no, there's plenty of bitching and complaining to do there, most of it aimless...
yesterday a group of us went to ramsey's for dinner. i resolved to talk to this particular waitress at ramsey's on whom i've had a crush for about a year; of course, she got off work and left before i'd actually gotten the nerve to say something. this is how the story goes every time we go there for the last six months... but i made a significant step last night: i approached the bar, and asked the bartender, "you know the waitress who just left --- "; "annie," the bartender affirms. " ... yeah. that's what i wanted to know, her name." the bartender smiles, because she suspects what's coming: "i've had this crush on her for a really long time now, which sucks because i didn't know her name and never get the nerve to talk to her... is she available?" "actually," says she, pausing to think, "i think she's actually engaged! it's been for a while... she has this ring, but never mentioned it until we asked her about the ring. i'm sorry...." yes, the muppet's hopes are dashed yet again.
however, i'm not doing too badly with restaurant employees... andy, neal, and i went to the olive garden (i can't think of any appropriate or accurate way to transcribe our preferred pronunciation of the establishment's name, but it's very ghetto) earlier this week. there were two hostesses at the front, i guess about 17 or so. one of them led us to our table, and as we were sitting down, she says to me, "i have to tell you, you have awesome hair," smiles, and i turn red and say thanks and she walks away. there's a pregnant pause as andy and neal independently confirm that, yes, they are indeed awake, and yes, they did hear what they thought they heard, and then they both burst into uncontrollable laughter. "scorin' points wit' da' minors!" and other such comments come flying my way, but i am unfazed. i'm flashing through a sequence of memories triggered by this incident, and this interesting, trivial statistic pops into my head: it's been about three years since i've heard that. i used to get compliments and jealousy and all dat from the women in boyd hall over my hair. no less than four of my female friends (freshman year) had a fetish for braiding, brushing, and otherwise touching my hair. i had no problem with this. mary ann tells me that my hair was popular even in the days of gsp ("fresh for '92!!"). oddly, tho', the fuss dropped off after sophomore year, and all i've really heard about it since then is "when are you going to cut your hair?" (my dad and my oldest sister), "are they going to make you cut your hair?" (when i was interviewing last spring, a concern from my friends and a wishful suggestion from my parents), and the like. so this was kinda a nostalgic happening for me. and it gets better: tonight, since the wait at outback steakhouse was waaaaaay long (of course, everyone in kentucky has an unexplainable urge to go to the outback after watching UK lose the outback bowl --- who would've thought?) we went to the olive garden (wolliff gwar'en) for dinner, this time with craig. the other hostess from the previous week was there, and led us to our table. and, deja vu, she felt much the same way as her coworker did the other day: as soon as i'm seated, she turns straight to me, looks me dead in the eye and says, "i love your hair!"
so far, so good, right? well, no... we went to blockbuster after dinner, since absolutely everything in lexington is closed for new years, even lynagh's... of course, since everyone in this "we can't handle snow" town fears a 6-12" blizzard will snow them in this weekend, blockbuster was freakin' packed!. what sucks is that blockbuster had no movies left by the time we got there. while andy stood in the checkout line of ridiculous proportions, i stood idly by perusing the movies-for-sale rack, and natalie walks by. whoa, doubletake, natalie? i haven't seen her since early summer! make no mistake, she looked as ravishing as ever as she introduced me to her boyfriend... ouch. funny how my brain works... i'm over her, yeah, but there's still this part of me that says, "what's this guy got that i ain't got?" so, i said as little as possible, and tried not to think about it, for it will pass. never mind that i'm reminded of her every time i see calista flockhart (which is probably just me being insane. they're both skinny, kinda manic, and have a bunch of the same mannerisms. it's not a really strong resemblance -- in fact, natalie is prettier, and not as utterly insane as Ally McHeroin (which is neal's loving nickname for the emaciated actress...)).
and it doesn't stop... (this part will doubtless cause problems if anyone involved reads it, but, what the hell...) when we got home sarah called and started asking me questions about andy, apparently still oblivious to the crush i have not very subtly hinted about for, oh, a year now. i guess i'll never learn --- i only want women who have no interest in me. why is that?
and that rhetorical question brings to mind another nealism which has polluted my mind forever. i bought the who's big-ass box set, thirty years of maximum r&b, the other day, and we had it playing loud as we played rogue squadron with the sound down. in "pinball wizard", neal sang out a response line between two of the real lines... you can't really get the whole feel of it without hearing it, but here's how the exchange goes, with neal's line in brackets: "how do you think he does it? [fucked if i know!] what makes him so good?" okay, i lost it at this point, literally fell off the couch and rolled on the floor, laughing. he's kinda chuckling, himself, but still stares at the screen and shoots down tie fighters. it's sooooo catchy, so utterly stupid, but soooo catchy! i hear it in my head all the time now, and will never hear the song the same way, just like those toyota on nicholasville commercials on which it sounds for all the world like the guy sings "where christ sells cars!" (it's supposed to be "price", but it really doesn't sound like it...) we do lots of stuff like this... kristian has a nasty habit of tossing a few "muthafucka"'s into songs, any song, because, never mind how vile the word is, it's a great word for singin' in a groove. you can even do it to byrds songs, but you have to hear it...
and i just want to start all my paragraphs is "and"...
when i was home for christmas i got very stupid. i was feeling really bad about how big a jerk i was to shalom, and how big a jerk she was to me, and how much i miss having a best friend... then i very stupidly pulled out and read the letters susannah wrote to me six years ago, which simply made me really unhappy. over the holidays, everyone in my family asked me separately about how my love life is going, obviously not noticing that they were merely pouring salt in the wounds. come on... if i wanted to talk about it, you'd already know, eh? ...
okay, so i started writing at 10pm, and it's now 12:30am on jan 2nd, and i'm totally off topic. of course, there have been distractions from an intense mario cart tourney and jerry springer's too hot for tv going on behind me... i think i'm going to stop committing to the world wide web my deepest secrets that will cause me much trouble, and play guitar for a while (as tho' typing hasn't made my hands really sore already...).
if you thought this page's formatting made it a little hard to read, try reading the source...
"bret... fav... ruh?"
1 and 2 january 1999