craziness. neal is excited about how Quiet Riot (of "Cum On Feel the Noize" fame) are playing in richmond soon (but disappointed that it will be at the firehouse... andy is in his room, working out to the sounds of "Temples of Syrinx" (from Rush's 2112), and neal is complaining bitterly about it because he really really really hates Rush. i've always thought that was odd, since he loves Yes, and to me there's really not a lot of difference between the two... and of course, i pulled out Appetite for Destruction last night at about 1 am and played along with the whole album. partially for the nostalgia, i suppose (way back to 1987, boyeeeeeez), but mostly because i wanted to play along with something that was in E flat, since i didn't feel like re-tuning my strat that has been very uncharacteristically tuned down for several days. astonishing, really... even tho' my playing is really sloppy and my chops are very out of shape, and i haven't played any of those G'n'R songs in ages, i still managed to rip through all of rhythm tracks from memory and even got in the vicinity of most of the slash leads. hell, it may be cheesy now, but stuff like "my michelle" and "rocket queen" has some hardcore melody going on.
but that's not what prompted me to write today. just had to mention that since it was on my mind when i started typing. the real reason is that it's unseasonably warm for february. don't get me wrong, i absolutely love this kind of weather, but it is positively the wrong time of year! it's freakin' february! it's supposed to be COLD! around this time last year we had blizzard, with two feet of snow, and kristian, neal, andy and i had a series of snow-football deathmatches and snowball fights and such. friday i took the day off (to put an early end to the week before it killed me (more on that later), and it was warm enough for me to walking all over town in a t-shirt! i saw people in shorts --- andy went to play ultimate frisbee and was (grudgingly) on the skins team of a shirts and skins game! This is what is known as Not Right.
So i said i went walking, right? i use to go walking all the time. when i lived on campus, all i could do was walk, and i and my friends would walk for fun. several times i walked with janna houghland from boyd to the arboretum and back; the night i met kevin and travis and all those guys, we went walking out to the lexington cemetery and visited hank clay's tomb at about three in the morning. (this was a couple of years before the cemetery installed motion detectors to keep out people like us who would jump the stone walls in the middle of the night. it's a real shame, because that place is really awesome looking at night, with the lights bouncing thru the trees and all... we went basically because it looked cool.) that was also the night i was with some guys who pissed on a moving train from a trestle somewhere in the train yards west of downtown. i have no idea where we were.
anyway, the point is, i used to go walking all the time, and i was largely ignored by all motorists and other pedestrians. walkers were quite commonplace. well, these days i don't think i look too much different than i did in the old days... but people stare at me now.
i mean, they really stare. people drivin' by in cars stare at me like i have ten-foot-long purple and green tentacles sprouting from my forehead. it's very disconcerting. the best example is from this morning (actually around eleven or noon, but it was right after i got up); i walked from the house to the kroger by campus, a walk of three really long blocks, from a so-so neighborhood, thru a really nice neighborhood, to the student ghetto. twice on the way there and twice on the way back, the same little incident happened: as i walked down the sidewalk, with a line of stopped traffic about twenty feet to my right, i heard the sound of electric door locks. i've been in the car with people who realize, "oh, i'm in a bad part of town!" and say to the family, "lock the doors, kids, don't make eye contact!" when somebody walks down the sidewalk a few feet from the car... but this was a little weird. i mean, bright, sunny day, ritzy neighborhood (the houses in the Ashland/chevy chase area tend to start at about $150K for the smallest ones -- this particular block was in the $200K's, and very well kept), and i was a long way away on the sidewalk. are these people paranoid or something? do i look like a thug? i was carrying groceries, for cryin' out loud! later, i mentioned this occurrence to craig, who said his sociology class mentioned something about that once upon a time; if a person, anybody, walks near enough to a car to attract the attention of the driver, eight times out of ten that person will instinctively lock the doors or take some other kind of precautionary measure. i think that's completely deplorable! what's wrong with people?!??!
it must be this unseasonably warm weather going to people's heads...
well, we went to comp usa and saw some really crazy people. yikes. pardon me while i remember where i was...
guh. maybe i'm just crazy, but it disturbs me when i get so many odd responses from random people. this didn't used to happen. andy suggested that maybe people always stared at me this much, but i never noticed it before and it's been long enough since i've been around other humans that i'd forgotten how people react to me. maybe he's right. still, it drives me nuts.. almost as much as when my sister nags me to cut my hair.
and, of course, have to suspect that the hair is a large part of the reason people stare at me with such distrust. for some reason they see a man with long hair and think bad things. how silly. probably every woman that's turned me down in the last two years did so because she doesn't like long haired men. guess it's a good thing, because if she's that shallow, i don't want her anyway. if a company would turn me down for a job because of my hair or earrings (and i think at least one did), then i didn't want to work for them, anyway, eh? still, that drives me nuts, just the principle of the thing. fuck them.
"so why was this week so harrowing?" you may be wondering. i wish i could give you a good explanation, but the best is that i'm crazy and my mind tends to dwell on things it shouldn't... such as the rather large difference in the significance of february second between this year and the several preceeding... why should i get upset about her birthday when we don't even speak anymore, when i don't really even care anymore, eh? simple: 'cause i'm crazy --- completely and utterly daft. as i said in a previous insanity, "DUMM." i'd like to give props to craig for listening and taking my mind off of it...
Sun Feb 7 16:33:40 EST 1999