I created a command, “after month”, that would edit a text file; I then created calendar reminders to remind me to edit that every month. The result is that I now can look back in my life and have a textual sense of what each month was like. Pictures are great, but there are lapses in pictures, and I shall be keeping text summaries as well from now on.
In addition, so that the post is not “dry” and pictureless, I will include graphs of my music listening habits for the year as well.
ALSO: Summary of our yard sale stats for the year.
Crazy party 2 houses down from our house… But we lived on other side of street, in place of the school. This really should have clued me in that this was a dream!
Carolyn & I were exploring – We saw a 2-storey concrete stairwell behind a house, and were taking pictures.
We were tresspassing a bit — going into the stairwell of this house. I’d be freaking out if someone did that to me, but my attitude is most people wouldn’t react as badly as I would, so it’s okay. Plus it was a basement adjacent to a busy corner, so we were less likely to bother them more than the traffic and such already out there. The door to the basement was maybe 10 lateral feet away from the sidewalk — 3X as close as ours would be.
Music was playing, but I just assumed it was my music from my house — even though I was 2 houses away, and it’s pretty much impossible (in real life) to make my music hearable from other houses without creating excruciating pain at the origin.
But then we noticed the music playing was KMFDM and, while it was a song in our changer.m3u playlist, it was not the playlist we were playing in the dream. (Possible explanation: In dreamland, I knew we were listening to a mostly-Primus playlist in preparation for the upcoming Primus concert we’re seeing in real life. But in dreamland, I probably had forgotten that there’s ONE KMFDM song in our real-life playlist — along with the MANY Primus songs — so that created the dreamland confusion.)
Anyway, realizing that this song was not in our playlist (even though it probably was their Occupy Wall Street song playing on our bedroom stereo in real life), we realized this meant the music was coming from the house. Then carolyn realized the basement door was cracked open slightly. She started to walk towards it, then stick her hand in it to open it.
“No, don’t go in there!” … I realize it’s a bad idea to just walk into peoples’ houses, even if it seems like a party is going on.
But Carolyn goes in anyway. Okay. It’s a party. I better follow her a) for her own safety, and b) because I like parties.
The party-goers were a bit off-put by us just walking in, as we were older and a bit out of place from the prevailing crowd — but not taolly out of place. They were kinda gothy and we’re kinda don’t-care-y, and the two mesh together alright. Ultimately they didn’t care too much because no one was 100% sure that we were crashing the party anyway.
Carolyn needed peed, and went to the bathroom right there (abandoning me to deal with the party crowd alone *right away*!), but it turns out the bathroom’s door was glass, some creepy guy immediately started to stand at the door and watch her pee. But that’s not enough to make us leave a party. We accept creepiness better than most. It doesn’t totally roll off of us, but whatevs.
Around then I noticed all the rampant drug use at this party. People smoking pot (both real AND synthetic), people doing meth, even someone doing heroin. And of course plenty of alcohol. We were not put off.
I mingled, and then later found Carolyn kinda cornered in a bedroom behind another creepy guy who seemed to be all over her, almost boxing her in so she couldn’t leave, so I rescued her.
We had a good time, but it was time to go, as dawn was appraching, and it was a “school” (work) night.
While leaving, I saw a hot black chick with thin-build/slightly-too-thin-ass and slightly-too-thin legs dancing on a chair facing away.
Also, at some point during the mingling, it turned out we knew a roommate who had lived there, but had moved out, so we knew that meant we had an in with this crowd via the ex-roommate. So hopefully we’d be able to have some more parties to go to in the future.
On the way back, I walked through Woodbridge High School, because I decided that was a straighter path to my house. Which makes NO sense, because my house was only 2 houses away, and walking all the way through a high school is way farther than walking 2 houses. Why don’t I realize these are dreams?
One of the younger party girls who also went directly from party to school, but then gave me shit about it because I was too old to be there, so I gave her shit back. Fucking young agists. I wish I’d hung out with some more older people when I was young. Oh well. Me & the bitch split paths at a hall intersection, and I continued on until I went home.
For some reason, I wasn’t walking home with Carolyn, even though I had rescued her and we left together.
Maybe it morphed into a different dream at the point of me walking…
Weird stuff. Fun party. No hangover because it wasn’t real!
“Dreams… They’re the hurricanes that wash the soulfilth from the superdome of our nightminds.”
– Xavier:Renegade Angel(more…)
Today, 10 yrs ago, was an epic party at our house. Well, maybe not epic.. but more memorable than most! This was the party where John The Candien famously puked on our couch. He’s probably really tired of hearing about it, even 10 yrs later. But I wrote this post in 2009 so for me it’s only 7 yrs later. And he doesn’t do stuff like that these days. Anyway, here are some videos from the party 10 yrs ago today. They also show how our house looked before the addition; those rooms were small (not really; just small in comparison).
Here is a 10-minute montage of all our favorite slices of life from the party:
And here are the individual videos from the party:
#1: John’s first drink. Not much going on.
#2: John’s 4th drink.
#3: Various people talking about some fun New Orleans bar they couldn’t find their way back to. Listen for Dig-Dug in the background!
#4: People start noticing the camera. Wayne talks about a lost pack of cigarettes. The nature of the webcam is discussed (it’s record, not broadcasting). Becky suggests that we start playing Strip Poker soon:
#5: People play with our spinning-message-maker light/toy thingee:
#6-#7: Not much happens here, except for mingling. You can still hear Dig-Dug in the background:
#8-#10 are for friends only ;) Check my flickr if you’re a friend :)
#11: Various mingling. Clint explains to Britt that it’s recording, not broadcasting. Aaron starts playing with the camera around 2m50s. At 3m18s, you can see the software recording the party, and AE’s ex-girlfriend Tracy:
#12: At 2m10s, the camera gets shoved down somebody’s pants:
#13: John’s going dooowwwwn! Kipp, don’t encourage him! Things get interesting around 6m20s, when Jesse tells Carolyn, “John’s fucked up”, and Carolyn grabs his bottle, swigs it, then walks away with it. John The Candien looks disconcerted. “Noooo… Not the bottle!” Funny stuff :) But then look at 7m40s — Kipp picks John up and moves him to the couch that he later puked on. He got up, but for all I know he moved back to the couch at 11m30s because he didn’t want to be picked up again. And who picks somebody up anyway? Nice instincts (sarcasm) on everybody except Carolyn’s part:
#14: John is now out, and girls decide to put makeup on him:
#15: Finally, he pukes. But a cup was put in front of the camera, so you can really only see how people react to the whole thing:
#16: We all miss Samhain the cat, who made a brief 1-minute appearance before running away:
#17: Webcam voiceovers. Possibly the funniest on-camera moments:
#18: And then the webcam “optical illusion” of swallowing a huge cam (short):
I created a command, “after month”, that would edit a text file; I then created calendar reminders to remind me to edit that every month. The result is that I now can look back in my life and have a textual sense of what each month was like. Pictures are great, but there are lapses in pictures, and I shall be keeping text summaries as well from now on. Also included will be my graphs of music I listened to, because all text is kind of boring. (more…)
Cars sure are annoying! First, Carolyn gets pulled over after the last Voltaire concert, because she didn’t have her headlights on. The officer assumed she was drunk, made up that he smelled alcohol [she drank 1 beer during the whole concert!], and made her take a sobriety test. I of course used the Android Cop Recorder application to record audio, in case the officer tried to pull somebullshit:
So it turns out her headlights are broken somehow… We drove home from D.C. on her fog lights.
Well, last night, we went to Brad & Mandy’s 4th Annual Chili Cookoff… We had the heated chili in hand, and bam, I notice my car has a flat tire.
So we have a choice: Go with a car that has a flat tire, or go with Carolyn’s car. Which, as it turns out, only has ONE working fog light remaining.
Driving home at 2:30AM with one fog light is strange. You can see, but not nearly so much.
And since Farmers Declared my car a total loss, I can’t take advantage of their free towing anymore. Carolyn & I have both utterly failed at changing tires, multiple times in our past. I usually just get it towed to the tire store for free and let them do it; I never even see it happen. But not today. Today I have to try to change my spare tire onto the car. Having never successfully done this in the past — I have little faith in myself here. I even jumped on the wrench as hard as I could, and still, with my full body weight kicking, could not turn the wrench. But that was in 1994. Now we have wikihow.com and ehow.com, and they say to use penetrating oil if you can’t turn ’em. Maybe that tip will help.
Meanwhlie, Carolyn changed her headlight bulbs, but they still don’t work! Grr. Our next party next weekend is a significantly farther ride. I am either going to need my tire fixed, or she is going to need her headlights fixed. It’s probably gonna be my car….
Meanwhile, I’m debating buying some freon. I haven’t had air conditioning in 3 or 4 years, and the older I get, the worse I am at dealing with extreme heat (AND cold).
Everybody had so many stories about Dirk, but I didn’t know him as well as most of his friends. I went to a few of his parties in the early 2000s, and then didn’t really see him again until 2009.
But then Carolyn & I saw him every few weeks, for quite awhile. Especially during the 2009-2010 snows.
We did manage to get one good Dirk story, during the 2009 Snowpocalypse…
It was just last December, 2009, one party past the party where I totaled my car coming back from Dirk‘s.
[[[[[ As an aside, my insurance company paid me $3000 for a totaled car that I fixed for $200 (and $700 more a few weeks later). Basically, I got paid $2000 to party with Dirk. He not only enriched our lives, but our bank account as well. That extra money will equal more partying. Somehow, I like to think of that as his spirit living on in our bank account. ]]]]]
Anyway, that night, we sat in the very room Dirk was later shot in, smoking with him, and hearing him give the best recitation of “The Raven” that we’d ever heard.
Honestly, I wanted to escape. I’m not into poetry. I only really know and enjoy 3 poems: The Raven, The Road Less Traveled, and The Highwayman. Which coincidentally was something someone managed to record before Dirk was killed:
I’d been warned by others that he could hold you hostage with a poem — a friend of mine was stuck outside a club for 20 minutes once, and I didn’t want to be similarly stuck in one place. I’m kind of ADD when I’m in party-mode. Hard to listen and not talk. I like to keep moving, like a shark — Or I’ll end up melting into a couch. It’s happened way too many times.
And yet, despite my nature working against to me, I was transfixed. By the end of the reading, I had realized it was a good thing that I was being “subjected” to this: It was by far the best reading of The Raven that I’ve ever heard. James Earl Jones can go fuck himself. I also appreciated for the first time that The Raven takes place in December, as it was December when this happened.
Now this is where it gets funny — Everyone is constantly saying they’ve never seen Dirk mad, never seen him negative, or never seen him utter a bad thing to anyone. I understand that when we lose someone to a horrible violent tragedy (fuck you Cara), that there is an onus to try to idealize the person we lost, and view them through rose-tinted glasses. To say they were 100% positive, and 0% negative. To say that they never raised their voice of ever got mad. To say that nobody ever saw Dirk angry in their life. BUT WE DID!!! IT HAPPENED!! And it was quite funny.
Basically, many people were sledding in the snow. In fact, they convinced me to sled for the first time since college in the 1990s; I even managed to dent Scott Smith’s circular metal sled. That was a good thing — I would have most definitely lost my balls otherwise. That hidden sewer pipe at the bottom of the hill was not something to be trifled with.
ANYWAY — as Dirk was reading The Raven, someone came in and asked for their gloves, which had been misplaced. But Dirk basically waved them off, and refused to listen. But that person was like, “Wait. Wait. Stop. Dirk, stop. Pause. Pause, Dirk. Pause.” Yes! — They tried operating him like a verbal remote control, which seemed to imply that they’d had bad luck interrupting him during past poetry readings. This must be why Dirk was so legendary for poetry recitations. To us, it was very funny! It was hard to contain my laughter, but the awe I felt in listening to his recitation helped. Eventually Dirk had to accede — a word I learned at his funeral — to the “pause request”, and listen to the guy’s question. He had misplaced his gloves.
Dirk definitely got mad. “Why are you interrupting me for such TRIVIAL SHIT? Why?! Over TRIVIAL SHIT!!!!! WHY?!?!” I can’t remember the full rant, but Dirk made it known in the tone of his voice that he was the man of the house, and he was not happy.
At the same time, you could tell that he was only mad on an immediate and superficial level; this was not true anger of the soul, but EXTREME annoyance. Extreme annoyance, the likes of which I have not seen a host have since seeing myself get mad at my own party guests in the past. I definitely understood: A recitation is a performance, and anyone would be angry to be interrupted. Especially right as The Raven is climaxing.
We quaked in our seats and didn’t say a word or make eye contact with either Dirk or the interrupter. It was both maddening, terrifying, hilarious, and about as “goth pretentious” as you could get, all combined into one single moment of anecodotal hilarity.
Despite the fact that my first instinct was to run away from the poem as fast as my legs could carry me, I’m extremely glad Dirk had the commanding presence of personality to keep both of us sitting at that table, despite my flight instincts and general disdain for poetry… For this has now become my favorite personal anecdote about Dirk. “The time he got mad in a hilarious way.”
Then we went out sledding, had a great time, crashed, woke up, drove out of the snowed in church, drove over the concrete median which we couldn’t see in the snow, and were thankful we didn’t end up totaling Carolyn’s car as well as mine.
But it would have been worth it if we had.
R.I.P., Dirk. You have been–and will be–missed forever. (more…)
I’d been meaning to tell this story because it had come up in casual conversation. But seeing the “Stupid Monkey” logo from Robot Chickenreally made me remember that I had to blog about one of my greatest moments in stupidity: macing myself in the face.
Well, actually, it was tear gas. A yard sale near my house in Woodbridge was selling tons of tear gas self-defense canisters for a mere 25 to 50 cents each. I stupidly only bought one. Had I bought them all, I’d still have had them today, and Carolyn wouldn’t have had to spend $11 on pepper spray prior to her trip to Chicago. (I insisted she have something to protect herself with.)
I pretty much had the tear gas in my pocket at all times for protection, as I walked around Virginia Tech. Brass knuckles or a bb gun (loaded with a single, small dart) in my right pocket, and tear gas in my left pocket. I especially did this in D.C. Teargas someone first, and they wont be able to dodge the brass knuckles. A nice one-two set-up.
One time I really should have used both on this combative person, but … We let him steal my lighter and harass us. I did him a favor by not leaving him in a pile of his own blood as he called me chicken 1 inch from my face while my brass knuckles were slipped over right hand, ready to punch. What a dick. I regret not kicking his ass, but I suppose I took the high road. (Carolyn, Wayne, Shehab, and some others may remember that incident.)
So anyway, as I mentioned — I carried the tear gas with me everywhere. At some point, we discovered that if you sprayed it on a paper towel and inhaled it, that it would increase your buzz. It would also make me sneeze — exactly once. Which was kind of novel as well. This was definitely “college student thinking” at work. Who the hell wants to inhale tear gas? Apparently, me.
So I was really drunk at one party, sitting on the balcony outside. I noticed I had a paper towel in one hand, and the tear gas in another. What the hell — let’s have a whiff of the stuff since there were no cigarettes around. The problem was — as soon as I pulled the trigger of the tear gas, it ricocheted off the paper towel — directly into my eye!
At the time, I was drunk enough that my reactions were slowed down. But my mind hadn’t slowed down nearly as much — I remember thinking, “No. I’m spraying myself in the face. This sucks. Stop pushing the button. Stop. Now.” I remember it like it was yesterday.
And it hurt like hell.
But you know what? If you douse your tacos in Tabasco sauce, then eat them and let it drip on your hands, and then scratch an itch in your eye?
Throwing a party is a lot of work, so it’s a real disappointment when somebody you invited ruins it. Here’s 8 types of people to watch out for before you make your next invite list. (more…)
Okay, I came here to post the noodle fight, but here’s some other misc detritus laying around my YouTube account, which is of late mostly a cesspool of videos of Beavis the cat (R.I.P.):
2007-2008 New Year’s Countdown:
Holy shit. This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in awhile, but it’s geek humor, be forewarned. I get every joke (except Jeeves saying ‘gay’). I even knew what a blumpkin was… hahaha… I even knew that guy was going to say something along those lines. It was still freakin’ hilarious. Thanks Eve!
I’ve wanted to blog about a lot of crap, but I always have crap to do. Even with no job. So anyway, this is my new year’s catchup post. LOTS OF PARTY PICTURES INCLUDED!
Thanks to everyone who came out: AE, Ben, Bunnelanie & her horny-for-Mark sister, Carrie & husband, Chris Y, Christian & Shannon, Dan & Erin, Darren & Debbie, Eli, Evan, Gene & Heather, Greg & Nicole, Jason, Jason & Anna, Jay, Jeremy, Joe, John The Canadien, Jon B, Justin, Mandy M, Mark, Melanie S and her couple-friend, Parthena & Peter, Sammy, and Tabbitha, and a couple random people who’s names I don’t remember (that’s about 41 people, counting Carolyn & I). (more…)
Starscape was pretty cool, but also quite draining! It is basically a huge outdoor rave. It was quite the scene. Carolyn & I had never been to anything quite like it. Thanks for the invite, Sammy, and thanks for the company, Shannon & Christian! (Read on for full review, plus Sammy’s review.) (more…)
After working 12 days straight, I partied hard this weekend. Normally I might get two hangovers in a year, but this time I got two in a weekend. Special thanks to Angel for throwing the party; her blog post about it is here. Pictures will eventually be posted HERE, among other places.
The most interesting thing is the wrongful death lawsuit against this guy I kicked out of my party for being an asshole. You’ll have to click in to get to that.
Meanwhile, they found a they found a LOT of Water Ice at Mars’ South Pole.
This is GREAT news!!
And check out Netsukuku — it’s a computer network that no government can stop, and it requires no ISP, no money, no nothing except wifi access to other people. This is the best idea I’ve heard in awhile. You can do all the normal internet things on it, of course.
Bored? Want to catch up on Clint and Carolyn videos? I’ve sorted my YouTube videos (my own, and my favorites) into several categories for your perusing. About half are mine (all the “personal” playlists), and the other half are favorited videos I’ve found elsewhere. Check them out HERE.
Crazy party 2 houses down from our house… But we lived on other side of street, in place of the school. This really should have clued me in that this was a dream!
o that.
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