2509

new rules. (bukowski)

2010-10-13T17:01:00.002-06:00

1. if you spend your weekends at a bar that features three kind of fries (including sweetpotato and truffle oil) and a photobooth, you don't get to quote bukowski at me.

2 if you have never worked at or been inside a factory, you don't get to quote bukowski at me.

3. if you make your living as a videographer, photographer, painter, or sculptor, and do not work a day job (see rule 2), you don't get to quote bukowski at me.

4. if you cannot name at least five men over fifty that drink and smoke and do it in your presence from time to time, you don't get to quote bukowski at me.

5. if you've ever worn a hat that came from a department store, you don't get to quote bukowski at me.

6. if you use twitter/blogspot/livejournal/tumblr to quote bukowski at me, you are an idiot.

5. if you're in your early twenties and your failed relationships with women are based on drunken one-night stands with art institute and metro community college girls that wear fedoras, then wake up and realize you're a drunken idiot pretending to be romantic to hide your horrifying twenty-something insecurities, you don't get to quote bukowski at me.

quote ke$ha. that's what you are.
and meet me in the back with the jack at the jukebox.

seriously,
fuck you.

typetrigger serial 2: detective story.

2010-10-08T14:13:00.002-06:00

wish i had gone:

For Christmas she gave me a new hat, a dinosaur ornament, and a card filled with lies. I got her a .38 special.
When I woke up with the barrel of the .38 lodged in my right nostril I realized I pry shoulda taken that New Year's Cruise with Sally. She'd bought her boy an extra ticket anyhow, hadn't given mine away. Apparently that woulda been too much. Said she knew I needed a break and going on that cruise with 'em would prove we could still work together, we could still be friends. She said it'd mean the world to 'er Johnny.
Her and I made a decent team, but we sure in the hell don't make good friends, and the only thing I owe Johnny is precisely one cheap whiskey and one left hook, not in that order.
I ain't never been a very lucky guy anyhow.
Dad was a mean ol' lug liked to slap my mom around, and Mom liked taking it, 'til the day she didn't. She put five slugs into his brain and one into his balls. Then she reloaded and put five in his balls and one in his brain. Seems inefficient to me, but that's a thing I guess broads are known for. Kicked around foster homes 'fore endin' up with my uncle Sam, a hero cop turned two-bit hood turned cheap P.I. when he realized tailin' around rich wives of richer cuckolds could keep him in rye. I've never been a big drinker, so I can afford to be a little more discerning, thus my confusion at Sally's .38 makin' it's way from my nostril to my eye while I try blinkin' away my scotch hangover.

they improvised:

The hand holdin' the 38 was attached to the biggest lug I ever seen. Guy musta been Samoan or somethin'. Wasn't sure. So I asked him. "You Samoan?"
"Only sometimes," he said.
You're gonna wanna shut up," he said.
People are never up for a good conversation this early in the morning.
"You're crushin' my legs," I said.
"You're about to be dead," he replied, "so you just need to live with it for a bit."
"That ain't your .38."
I know Sally pretty well so I'm pretty sure this guy don't have her gun without being damn persuasive and I sure doubt she gave it to him for this.
Last New Years Day before she left with Johnny for good, Sally showed up drunk at the office. Collapsed at the doorway, crawled her way inside to my desk and before she passed out told me she I was all she thought about, that she was in love with me, that Johnny knew and couldn't handle it, but she was so in love with me that it scared her and she had to leave with Johnny to get away from it, to escape. A few months ago she came by to apologize, said she was mad I took her name down offa the office's masthead, said she wanted revenge and what she told me that day was the best she improvise with short notice.
Sally wants me dead the last thing she needs is to send a Samoan with her .38.
So color me worried 'bout 'er.
The Samoan could see my wheels turnin', I guess, so he whacked me once in the head.
"Easy," I said. "That's an expensive piece of hardware."

typetrigger serial 1: stars.

2010-10-08T14:09:00.006-06:00

if i had to:

"I'd prefer to go dancing," she says, twirling the finger on her right hand deep into her red hair, her left holding a half-eaten long john from Jimmy Oh's (where we first met), bavarian cream filling dripping onto her jeans. She looks down, squints, and grabs at napkins, picking at gobs of sugary goo.
"Dancing is generally my preference," she says.
"You never dance in your videos," I say.
"American Idols don't dance," she says, "'cept that one faggy one with the hair. I forgot his name."
When I got to JO's for my weekly bear claw I was surprised to see that it had been taken over by American Idols, but I was unaware of just how large the group was, having only watched pieces of seasons one and four. I mostly hurried to the counter, 'cause I was running late, and I was motherfuckin' jonesin' for a motherfuckin' bear claw, having given up most forms of sugar nearly two years ago after the girl I lived with told me I was so fat I should put out a craigslist ad looking for a girl that "didn't care about ever fucking someone attractive."
The only other sugar I consume is in the form of many many handles of gin.
I asked the girl at the counter why they were so crowded. I wasn't used to the place being so crowded. It's a pretty good place to have a cry in the parking lot after I'm done eating breakfast.
She told me the owner sent 'em an email letting 'em know of a new support group setting up shop at the long tall tables on the left side, near the "Jimmy Oh's! Fuck yeah, Donuts!" mural.

the ancients:

She said the end of the email was filled with hieroglyphics and the whole thing kept making references to a prophecy set forth by "the ancients," and it mostly gave her a "really weird feeling" in her "boobs and shit," like when her roommate left a copy of "Chariots of the Gods" sitting around and she read it while "totally blitzed, plus I'd eaten, like, mad fuckin' cruellers, so I was spun the fuck out on sugar. But if I don't eat 'em, Jimmy throws 'em away and then homeless people hang around the dumpster all night, and that's my thinking spot."
This was around the dozenth time I'd asked her, "A support group for what?" and she said, "American fucking Idols, dude," which was Morrisette-ironic, because right then Clay fucking Aiken tripped and threw his Orange Zest Mochachino directly onto my khakis, which I wear to try and look more professional than everyone else that works in my shitty office.

i know your secret:

He let loose with a "Oh my Stars!" alongside a perfectly pitched falsetto "I'm so sorry," elongating the so into sooooooooo like someone pulled back on his record, slowing time into nothing but Aiken. He started to say something else, but instead sniffed, like he was about to cry (I would've expected that).
"It's okay, Clay Aiken," I said. "These are just my work khakis."
But he kept sniffing, like my dog when he looks for the bones he hid in the couch, or me, when I come home and realize my dog has been stuffing bones with raw meat on them into the couch. And then he got closer, smelling faintly of hair product, bronzer, and Mango-Delicious gum.
"I can smell you," he said.
If I were to make a list of the things I'd expect Clay Aiken to say after spilling his drink on me, "I can smell you," would pry be number eight.
So likely, but not likely enough that it didn't weird me out.
"Excuse me, Clay Aiken?" I said.
"I can smell you," he said, sniffing. "You smell like one of them."
I looked at the clerk. "Do I smell?" I asked.
"Like Orange Zest Mochachino," she said.
"Is that what you're smelling, Clay Aiken?" I asked.
He stopped. Locked eyes with me. I realized I'd yet to see him blink. Like a snake. Or a robot that never blinks.
"The Stars," he says, "they know your secret."
"I do too," he says.
"Okay, seriously," I say. "Fuck you, Clay Aiken.

years from now.

2010-08-30T14:35:00.005-06:00

Years from now,
they will all say,
we should've seen this coming.
He was always so quiet.
He was always so intense.
Years from now,
you will all say,
we should've known.
We should've spoken up.
We could've warned people,
that this boy
this one, presumably ordinary person
this man
he keeps his pimp hand strong.

typetriggers, aug 22 - aug 29.

2010-08-30T14:33:00.004-06:00

while i was out:

When I ran out for dog food, per-her-request, she changed her hair, meaning to surprise me with the expensive red dye she'd found on sale at the corner salon, the day she had shaggy layers cut into her bangs. The goal was to wait for me to walk in and shout, "It's a whole new me for you!"
It took me longer than we expected.
So she re-did her makeup, heavier on the eyes, pulling back blacks from the blue-green pupil she turned brown with a colored lens she'd bought for Halloween two years ago, when she wanted to dress up as Jane Austin, and was obsessed with being 100 percent accurate, as though there were wandering Victorian-Figure-Costume judges giving out prizes downtown (when I made this joke, her eyes filled with tears).
She put on clothing she gathered from our neighbors, band t-shirts from the A&R girls that lived upstairs, had them give her a french manicure, wiping neon pink from her fingers and toes. She borrowed a razor blade and made her smile wider, bleached her teeth. Quit smoking, then started again, but this time menthols.
She changed her room and lowered her ears and threw out all her books and filled her shelves with new ones by authors I'd never heard of, even the ones her Dad gave her, just before he died and I had to drive her to the airport and hug her in smoky terminal bar. She reordered her Netflix queue and took up Cajun cooking and learned to laugh at all new kinds of jokes (the kinds I've never known how to tell).
When I got home, I was still me.
She was a whole new her for someone else.

false nostalgia:

the night air is warmer than it should be so i roll down the windows and as i drive by your apartment that old song clicks on the radio, and suddenly it’s years ago and she’s all i see, laughing, throwing her arms around my neck, kissing my cheek, and she whispers, and i say it’s not my fault, i loved her before i knew her, and upstairs in your bed she whispers, dreaming, and she rolls over and you wrap your arms around her but she does not say your name.

things i've learned recently, from hot chicks (and dudes, but mostly chicks) i know, and what my general opinion is, of the same subject:

2010-07-14T12:25:00.008-06:00

my hugs are pretty much an awesome turn-on.
my hugs are not unlike being grappled by a large and desperate teddy bear - as in a fat stuffed animal with dead eyes that lacks emotions, personality, and genitalia.
i smell good, like all the time.
i smell like a general combination of orange cheetoe powder and sadness.
i have "beautiful" teeth.
my teeth have slowly been going crooked over the last year, they're yellow as fuck from 19 cups of coffee a day, and i have halitosis.
my twitter game has been ON LOCK recently.
well, okay.
my consistent use of the word "darlin'" is "retro" and "neat."
i'm a condescending sexist prick, my "country" affectations are more retarded than taylor swift, and someone is going to punch my throat.
i'm super crazy awesome and it's weird that i haven't had more threesomes.
i'm a lame fat dude that finds it necessary to make jokes to cover the fact that no one likes me, and my only involvement in threesomes ever is when the girl i was in love with had really loud sex with a skinny douchier version of me near my general vicinity.
i get written about on blogs i don't follow or even know about, in a positive way.
i'm more used to "i have started a blog and it's sole purpose is to talk shit about tim fucking davids."
maybe none of y'all are out of my goddamn league.

they say tomorrow's your birthday, we're gonna have a good time.

2010-06-22T12:45:00.007-06:00

but we're celebrating today, and i am impatient.

here is something i have learned over my very short life thusfar -
the world is a mean and cruel place. people are ugly and usually sad. life is pretty hard.
but sometimes, if you're very, very lucky, right when you're about to give up on the whole thing, you can meet someone kind, and unnervingly intelligent, and unnecessarily funny, beautiful inside and out, and strong in the way you'd like to imagine all of our mothers, sisters, and daughters are. someone like becky.
she understands fully the nature of this world and chooses, quietly, to fight it the only way she knows how - she loves from her knees.
and, indeed, in case you didn't know, she's right - that's the only way to fight it.
so if you get a chance in the next few days, if you could do me a solid, and raise your glass for becky's birthday - whether you know her or not.
toast for her ('cause in a way, you'll be toasting for me, too).

on baseball caps.

2010-06-11T17:13:00.001-06:00

How They Found Heaven

2010-03-29T17:26:00.003-06:00

aka
You Told Your Story Because You Wanted Him, I Told Mine For You: A Story in (A LOT) of Text Messages.
aka
Rusty & Rusty

2:17 AM.
(the following has not been rewritten or edited, 'cept for typos)

SK: R u awake?
2509: I'm awake. What's up?
SK: I had coffee and now I can't sleep.
2509: You bored?
SK: Yes. Tell me a story?
2509: Ok.
2509: Well.

Once upon a time (a hundred or so years from now), in a far away land (just south of what used to be Tehran, then a bombed out crater, then "New Vegas," then another crater, this one packed with old neon and now-radioactive statues of Danny Gans the Third, and finally, "site 18," lived a small(ish) M47 Unit named Rusty (he could not rust.)
Rusty, once a top of the line, high class electronic butler (complete with spinning titanium bow tie and 12 different vacuum attachments), had been abandoned there some 80 years before by the Montgomery family, a group with nothing special to offer the world but their work copying, framing, and selling tattoo-inspired motel artwork. But they were long dead, and forgotten (life expectancy was a lot shorter then, or, should I say, will be), and Rusty lived inside the Mohammed Palace, once the greatest, most beautiful discotheque ever built, the kind of place Miles Davis would have hung out in but secretly despised (if anyone had a clue who Miles Davis was, and they didn't).
Rusty'd done his best to rebuild the place to its familiar standards (which means it looked better then when it was open), and Rusty would spend every evening eagerly sorting through data discs, a bot obsessed, searching for the perfect song.
Rusty, you see, knew that he didn't have a lot of time (he was built to last, but not forever), and despite being a perfectly rational little robot, Rusty one day realized that he'd come to believe in a kind and benign, though distant, God. After a momentary panic (in which he managed to grind his mechanical molars down to nubs), Rusty concluded that the very act of panic was an emotion he was not built for, as was happiness (like he felt when he danced to Snow's "Informer"), and pervasive loneliness (when he danced, alone, to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," by Ms. Whitney Houston), so, therefore, he must have a soul, and matter being neither created nor destroyed, it must have once been part of something bigger, and would have to go somewhere when his 75-year battery finally ran out. Rusty was no stranger to this type of sudden revelation, the last one being that he considered himself a boy, despite having no identifiable sexual characteristics (his owners once called him "Elizabeth," his voice was neither high nor deep, but he knew that when he gazed upon old pictures he'd once found of a woman called "Couric, Katie," it awakened something deep in his gears he was comfortable with calling "lust.")
Rusty was trying to prepare himself for the day when he would meet this benevolent watchmaker, and being more a consumer (he thought of himself as an "appreciator") than a creator, Rusty was worried he'd have nothing to say, no way to thank his God or summarize the things he'd learned (if indeed he'd learned anything at all - the M47 Butler/Maid Models came equipped to be humble, and the Montgomerys had made damn sure the dial was turned up all the way). So every night, lit by the green magnesium-fueled fire, aching to see the stars for himself beyond the deep gray fallout fog, Rusty searched for someone else's words and melody. Rusty looked for his message to God.
What Rusty found, however, was a frightened (and hungry) Lhasa Opso named Rusty (coincidentally).
K9 Rusty had been walking for weeks after his owner, Bill, had dropped him off at a diesel station just outside the hot zone while carrying a smuggled load of 5D TVs (the new dimensions were smell, and the actual perception of time moving outward as opposed to in a linear fashion, but the people all around the 66th state of Iraqran were generally more excited about the smells and rarely turned on the "time thing." It gave more people headaches, as well as presenting to them the idea that things were predetermined, which didn't so much frighten them as it made them feel sort of melancholy and listless, as though they should try harder. Mostly, though, the problem was the headaches.)
This idea was something Bill'd never had to face, as he didn't have the time to watch TV and even then was mostly comfortable in the sort of pleasant mediocrity he'd found himself in without having to do much in the way of anything like striving. This included the possibility that was a terrible dog owner - which he obviously was, given that Rusty the dog had suddenly found himself without a home, owner, friend, or a nice handful of dry puppy chow (secretly, Rusty the Lhasa Opso had always hated the condescending nature of puppy chow. He had not been a puppy for quite some time, and even then was always mature for his age).
Rusty had been strolling along, contemplating biting the bullet and eating a cockroach (he desperately craved the protein and once heard from a poodle that they were a delicacy in Tokyo), when he found himself wandering into a brightly lit building somewhere just south of Tehran (New Vegas, Site 18, etc). His first thought was that he'd never seen something so beautiful, his second was surprise that there seemed to be no smells but a faint trace of metal and industrial lubricant, and his third thought was never finished, as he'd passed out cold, from front to back, his tail going last, one last stubborn wag that later, in retrospect, he should have known was his tail telling him he was home.
The M47 knew what a dog was, but he'd never seen one before, not up close, and certainly not one so matted and skinny, passed out behind the velvet rope of the VIP room (the matted fur was a holdover from his life before. Brushing Rusty was one of the few things Bill did right, among feeding him and periodically throwing him a slice of processed meat and saying "Go for it, boy." Rusty, however, could not stand the brush or the way he ended up looking when Bill was done, and though he tried to bite and bark his way to a new style, Bill instead just stopped brushing him). His first thought was that the dog may be an emissary, something sent to test him or carry a message, and that familiar panic slowly crept back into his gears- he still hadn't found the right song, not even close, and how could it come to pass that his Reaper would show so early, at least three days before that blinking "low battery light" would finally slow to a dull beat, then a quiet throb, before blinking off into nothingness? Something wasn't right. But the M47 was always more a doer than a thinker, and set off to the back room in search of a 25 year old can of beef stew he'd stacked alongside all the others.
He returned with two cans, assuming the dog wouldn't want more than that - if even because of the lack of variety in flavor. They were stored nearly in his hollow legs, and his three digit hands held a 90000 dollar (not adjusted for inflation) velvet and down pillow he'd pilfered from the "dictator suite" in the hotel next door, a cheap emergency fire blanket from a glass case on the wall in the back office, and two bones he didn't know once belonged inside the legs of Virginia and David Woolace, of Houston. He turned the dog over, laying him on his back, and Rusty's tongue rolled out of his mouth, dry, and he gave out one hell of a doggy groan, a mix of relief, surprise, exhaustion, pain, and strangely, a sudden appreciation for squirrels and their plight (he'd been through a lot, and maybe wasn't thinking clearly). The M47 lifted Rusty's head with the utmost care, the way he'd been built to handle dusting underneath an expensive vase, and placed the pillow beneath it, then covered him with the blanket. He shook the beef stew without any reason, other than it couldn't hurt, and popped the top.
The dog wouldn't eat. He was conscious, now (mostly), and he'd drink, sure, but it seemed like he was being overridden by instinct, whereas the food, for the immediate moment, was less important. Rusty scanned his own files, searching for every trick he'd been programmed with to make something eat (the Montgomery boy had an aversion to any food that didn't taste like pomegranates or wasn't shaped like a ring, and his parents forbade Rusty from merely feeding him "Pomegranate O's!: The Cereal for Frisky Kids!" every night. The Montgomery boy also hated anything complex or quaint, and once fell asleep while Rusty was reading him Moby Dick 2.0 - Rusty's personal favorite). He tried the choo-choo, the magrail, the jetpack. He tried the SR171 missile, the genetically engineered horse, and the 1971 Turbo Charged Dodge Challenger (all with one-hundred percent accurate sound effects). The dog wouldn't eat.
Lightly, almost as an experiment, Rusty tried lightly scratching the dog's uptured stomach. The dog whined a bit, and his front right paw shook a bit, and Rusty, taking these as good signs, cycled right over into a full-on-tummy-scratching. Every few beats, he rubbed. This went on for nearly a full hour, and Rusty the dog tried to fight back his own panic as he slowly came to believe he'd died and gone to dog heaven (the pillow didn't help). As he finally relaxed, and the small robot began spoon feeding him beef stew, Rusty the dog became more and more sure, before falling back into a deep and comfortable (9 hour) nap. While the dog slept, Rusty the robot went back to his data discs. He listened to world music, dubstep, folk rock, and crunk. He listened to standards and showtunes and banjo-based blues (his favorite), and as he danced, the linkup cord that fed from the sound system directly to his head came unplugged (this happened all the time - Rusty did not believe in restrained dancing), and music flooded the Mohammed Palace, the artificially intelligent (but not very smart) lights turning on and spinning to the beat. Rusty did not stop dancing (he never did), and the dog woke up, having never heard anything so beautiful (Bill only listened to surf rock and even then, very quietly, so Rusty had to strain and stretch to hear a note here and there).
That night, the beef stew cans empty, the bones sitting mostly unchewed in the corner (they tasted too - familiar), the robot took the dog on a tour of his home. He showed him the VIP room with the holographic cage girls, and when he turned them on, the dog tried to nip at their heels, and when he couldn't, he went crazy, yipping and running, and to the robot it sounded just like laughing. He showed the dog every supply closet, all fifty, each filled with twenty years worth of cleaning supplies and canned food that the M47 had gathered over one long weekend, listening to a medley of gamelan tracks (he'd gone through a gamelan phase, but then decided something about them felt chaotic). The dog loved the minarets - the big ones outside, and the little ones inside that used to dispense apricot mead and expensive Malaysian champagne, but now just shot out water - the cleanest, coldest water the K9 had ever tasted. He taught the dog how to use the electric, automated kitchen, which hadn't been turned on in more than a century (it was ashamed to admit to itself that this made it feel a mix of happiness for the use and annoyance for the bother), to cook his canned meals. He showed the dog the sponges and the vacuum cleaners (not automated, after the Generation-16 Roomba Massacre), and walked him through a standard day of maintenance. The K9 didn't know why the M47 was showing him these things, but he watched, intently, barked to show he understood, performed when asked to demonstrate this understanding, and knew he loved this place more than anything in the world.
The robot saved his precious DJ booth for the end. He stepped through the back door into the record room, and the dog followed. There, rows upon rows, halls and halls and shelves and shelves of data discs, cassettes, and phonograph recordings - thousands of years of musical history, that, if listened to consecutively, would finish just as the red surface of the sun touched Earth. Rusty the dog could barely see, as the billions of gold cases were untouched by dust and decay and reflected the soft neon lights into his eyes with the kind of brilliance he thought only people could see, and only when they fell into that-forever-sleep he'd heard about. He could also barely breathe. One shelf, nearest to the door, was a mix of names, genres, formats. Engraved into the stainless steel, just above the barcodes, was one word "Favorites." It was from this shelf that the M47 picked up one disc, and stepping back into the booth, slid it into the receiver.
The dog followed, only somewhat confused (he'd learned to just roll with the behavior of this small metal man), and watched as the robot began to jerk his arms and legs rhythmically, spinning his head, leaping from one corner of the lit-up floor to the other, the spotlights following him no matter his rate of speed. The robot stopped, and looked at the dog. He waved his arms. The dog just watched, cocked his head. The robot started again. The dog stepped forward. The robot waved him on. The dog lifted one paw. He placed it onto the dance floor. The M47's bow tie started to spin. The dog lifted his other paw. It joined the first, almost of its own accord. The M47 nodded. The dog nodded. He nodded to the beat. He stepped forward again, his back paws on the dance floor, the pads nearly sliding across the slick surface, his nails making a clipping sound as he took two steps left, then two steps right, his head nodding, his tail wagging, his tongue hanging out, two steps forward, the robot going two steps back, then the robot advancing, him retreating, both go left, both go right, and the dog stands on his hind legs as the robot throws his arms up into the air and they both shake, shake, shake, shake like if they try hard enough they can make this last forever and for a second they know it already has.
That night, Rusty the dog tucks himself in, lapping at a can of cold cream of mushroom soup, and as he falls asleep, he thinks that smelling the 5D TV is the only thing he might ever miss. Rusty the robot stands alone on the dance floor, silent and quiet, his low battery light slowing, and just before dawn, Rusty's last thought is of dreams, and how in them, words are usually spelled backwards. The Lhasa Opso will find him in the morning. He will sit next to the M47 and whine for nearly an hour. He'll place the top of his head against the robot's chest and say goodbye. Then he'll set about the work of the day.
The M47 was not disappointed by the stars - they looked even better than he'd expected, and he was actually amazed by how many of them there were (he knew the number, in theory, but knowing and seeing are two very different things). Neither was he disappointed by the large golden gate, the bridges, the crosses and minarets and the trees - more than he'd ever even imagined, ten stories tall. He was not at all disappointed to find that all the roads led to one place, a small cottage in the middle of a modest but well-tended garden with a heavy red wooden door, the inside lit by candlelight, a kettle heating on the stove.
Rusty the dog walked the grounds. Some of the work took him a lot longer than it took the robot (no opposable thumbs, but Rusty really never considered it a weakness), but he made do.
In the small house on the hill, The M47 met God. He told him, trying not to go too fast and gloss over all the details (Rusty knew, inherently, that the truth was in the details), about the green fire, the Montgomeries, his soul, the club, the crater, and the skinny, matted Lhasa Opso. Through all of this, God listened politely, though there was the tiniest tinge of tension in the bot's idea that he probably had more important business to attend to. Finally, rocking his brandy snifter ever so slowly, settling back into the rich red leather recliner he'd been sitting in, God kicked off his slippers and asked Rusty what it is he'd come to say.
Rusty is ready. He'd held the record tight when the darkness came, so he could be sure he would have it in this place.
God listens. The needle touches the groove. The skies spin - the Earth turns. The puppy (he'd grown more comfortable with the term), paws through the data discs. And somewhere in the stars, far above the gray fog, the dog can almost swear he hears the long, deep echo of "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You."

SK: It's four thirty in the morning and I have trouble believing you just wrote that.
2509: It was all off of the top of my head.
SK: It's like MAGIC.

america.

2010-03-27T15:21:00.001-06:00

Today as I was driving to work I pulled up alongside a MASSIVE pickup truck, the kind you only find in America,or hauling moonrocks on the lunar surface. It was silver (chrome), with giant tires and a lift kit, as well as a fully extended cab, the kind that comfortably seats 4 people, 8 if they're Mexican, which means, basically, it was a monster truck. Today as I was driving to work I pulled up next to Bigfoot's older brother. On the back windshield, a single bumper sticker: "Visit Tiny Town."

There's a clerk at the 7-11 by my parents' house that weighs at least 400 pounds. She's British. I can tell she's British because of her bad teeth and thick British accent. Here's the question that runs through my head every time I see her: Did they kick her out of Britain and into America because of her size? Did she get that way after she came here of her own volition? Or does this woman have nothing better to do than sit at home and work on her fake British accent? (And watch Twilight.)

(The question that actually runs through my head: Let's fuck [not a question].)

I go to the 7-11 daily for "GoGo Taquitos" on the off-chance they'll dance in tall boots. I don't eat them, I just throw them away (into my mouth).

Whenever I go to the 7-11 and buy "GoGo Taquitos" I worry I'll end up on an episode of Laugh-In (same pun more obscure explanation).

the perils of possessing a faulty gaydar.

2010-03-23T14:19:00.002-06:00

On Saturday my best friend and I went to Jackson's Hole, in LoDo, because it was my friend Kell's birthday and it was my friendly duty to get him drunk and Jackson's has an allyoucandrink wristband for ten dollars. I don't really mind the crowd there, because I dislike all people equally, and Kell doesn't mind it because he sometimes combines striped buttondowns with sideways baseball caps and spends a lot of money ordering UFC payperview events. Standing at the bar I got into a conversation with just this type of gentleman, though he was a bit older than most of the men in that kinda place.

"Where are you from?" he asked.
"Here," I say. "Where?" "Here," I say. "Jackson's?" He asks. "Denver," I say. "Nice," he says, "where were you born?" "Rose Medical," I say. "I was born across the street," he yells. "From Jackson's?" I ask. "From Rose," he says. "Nice," I say. "You're the hottest stud in this bar," he says. "Excuse me?" I say.
"You're the HOTTEST FUCKING STUD IN THIS FUCKING BAR," he says.
I say, "Do you need glasses?" He shakes his head vigorously.
"Well," I say, "thank you!"

And then he asks for my number, and I have to give my (now fairly well rehearsed) sorry-I'm-not-gay-I-just-wear-ties-but-if-i-was-gay-you-seem-nice-enough-to-fuck speech.
I turn, handing two drinks to Kell, and wander away, getting sidetracked from my friends momentarily by a Chicana girl with thick framed glasses and a leather jacket who drinks Amaretto sours and punctuates every sentence with "Yeah! Right? I mean, Yeah! Like, 'Yeah,' right?" EVERY SENTENCE.
Kell is falling over on the dance floor while throwing his hands up because the taxi driver is playing Miley's song, and my best friend is standing next to him, holding Kell's puffy jacket, as one does for their drunk friends on their birthday in a warm bar on a cold night.
"What's your deal?" he asks. "You're all glowy like you got hit on by a gay guy again."
"I did," I say.
"At JACKSON'S?"
"Yep Yep," I say (TM @LexG_Rules).
"But," he continues, "there are no gay guys at Jackson's!"
"I know!" I say. "I'd be worried that all the other guys in the bar were gonna tie me to a fence post and kick my face until I was dead."
"Speaking of which," says Evan, "I met a homophobe."

Evan was at the bar, sometime just after I was, and got hisself in a conversation not unlike mine, with the "Heyhowsyournightwhereyoufrom," and the guy he was talking to mentioned he wanted to move to Cap Hill, then punctuated this thought with, "Are there a bunch of Gays there?" Evan, having little tolerance for homophobia, gritted his teeth and spat out a "I don't fucking know, man," before turning and walking away.

"Your story is boring," I say. "Someone thought I was worthy of a face-fucking tonight," I say. "There he is!" I say, and wave.
You'rethehotteststudinthisbar waves back.
"That guy is GAY?" says Evan.
You'rethehotteststudinthis bar sneers at Evan.
"But that guy is a HOMOPHOBE!" says Evan.
You'rethehotteststudinthisbar is less than enthused, and walks away.
"He was looking for a community on Cap Hill," I say to Evan, "and you SHUT HIM DOWN."
"But," says Evan, "but -"
"He wanted to belong, Evan, and you were DISGUSTED," I say.
"But," says Evan, "I -"
"Dude," I say. "Now you're NEVER gonna get face-fucked."

Later that night, drunk Kell tried to speak Spanish at a burrito seller until he was handed one for free, and then he wandered into an IHOP kitchen and threw up. Best Birthday Ever.

2010-03-18T13:19:00.001-06:00

man i'm huffing paint in oh shit its the mayor hide the shit dude fuck
here he comes what the fuck are the chances of the mayor choosing
this alley as a shortcut shutup dude well hello mr mayor the city sure
is nice today FUCK HE'S ARRESTING US i didn't even know he could do that

featured twit.

2009-12-15T14:43:00.002-07:00

i'm westword's featured twit.
i'll talk more about it later.

http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/2009/12/twitter_tuesday_tim_davids_our.php

but until then i'll leave you with this:

What if you did tank tonight? What do you think would happen?

Strangers wouldn't like me, friends wouldn't like me, the network wouldn't like me, the press wouldn't like me, women in general wouldn't like me, and Harriet wouldn't like me.

Is he in therapy?
Nah, he's got me.

the fleshlight.

2009-12-15T14:27:00.002-07:00

i’m obsessed with this thing.
for those of you that don’t know what it is, a fleshlight is a metal tube that looks like a flAshlight, but where the light comes out of, instead, you’ll find a molded latex vagina, mouth, or anus.
these are all fleshlight options.

this is the greatest invention EVER. when kennedy talked about the potential of man, he meant the goddamn fleshlight.
ask not what your penis can do for you, but what you can do for your penis.

i always think it’d be really funny to buy a bunch of them and then slowly switch out all the real flashlights in the house, then wait for a power outage.

the problem is, if i buy even one fleshlight, even if it’s for fun, i know, at some point - i’m gonna fuck it.

and maybe i’ll be drunk or really desperate or something. but it doesn’t matter. even if it only happens once, someone could easily notice that i broke the thing’s fake latex hymen (oh, it has one).

and then they’d know:

Tim Davids fucked a Fleshlight.

and if you don't know, now you know.

2009-12-01T19:01:00.000-07:00

weight loss, depression, and the influence of friends.

2009-11-30T19:02:00.005-07:00

so for those of you that don't know, i've lost a shitton of weight since march of 2009. it was my birthday, february 24th, and i was with my roommate. we'd had a few drinks, so i'm 100 percent sure she doesn't remember any of this, but, that night, she looked me in the eye and said, "i worry about you."
i assumed she meant my fractured psyche, like most people do, but, tearing up, she went on.
"i'm worried about your health and i'm worried about you and it's crass to say, but i wish you were skinnier."
i started to laugh.
"i wish you were healthier," she said, "because i don't want you to die before i'm ready. i want to be with you as long as i can, and i want them all to be good years. i love you. and i wish you were better."

no one's ever said that to me before. most people tended to just accept the idea that tim-is-fat, and move on. but she said something.
and people, let me say this - when someone actually says something, it matters.

and when that someone is the woman you've loved the most in your entire fucking life, in every conceivable fashion?
when she's the love of your life and your very best friend and your roommate and the most beautiful thing you know and your fucking hero?

motherfucker, you'd better pay attention.

backstory:

when i was in high school, i had a crush on a girl that i never talked to. i was too scared to. i made friends with all of her friends, i hovered around, but never said a word. college came, she split. a year passed, she came back, and she entered into my group of friends by starting to date one of them. i said nothing, like the coward and martyr that i am, and they fell into a heavy and serious relationship. so she started being around all the time. and that crush never went away.
and then she started being around me. all the time.
and that crush got worse.
so when i was 20 years old i fell in love with my best friend. bad love, too. that all encompassing, unhealthy, mania love. obsession. and when i was 21, i forced her to make a choice between me and him, and duh - obviously, she didn't choose me.
at the time i was probably a good 330-340. i mean far from skinny, anyway. but that "crisis" didn't bode well for me in any way. i fell apart. i failed all my classes, i stopped going to work, and i spent most days in my office, staring at the internet, or under my desk, staring at nothing. for about a year. i spent most of my time drinking beer and eating fast food. by the end of that year i weighed almost 400 pounds. and i stayed right about there.

the irony, of course being, that not long after that i met my roommate, who a) brought me out of it b) obviously eventually led to me getting healthier, and c) showed me what really loving someone really is (and, by extension, what pain really is. but that's a whole other thing).

so in march, right after my birthday, i made a change.
as of now, i'm somewhere just south of 300 pounds. i've gone down one or even two sizes in pretty much everything. i can walk like a normal person. i've lost 10 inches from my waist. i can see why i could like myself, even if i still don't - and maybe never will.

but i've seen some people i haven't seen in forever and they WHOA and WOW and HEY YOU LOOK GREAT and all of that is all fine and dandy.

i personally say the problem with weight loss is there's fat and there's skinny and that's kinda it - if i walk up to a girl at a bar who isn't into me because of my weight it's hard to convince her that she should go for it because "as disgusting as i am now, i was WAY MORE disgusting before."

(see? the like myself thing. disgusting is the real adjective i would use to describe myself, which i know, intellectually, is bad and wrong. but it still just fits for me. maybe if there's a pro cheerleader out there, reading this, feeling bad - fyi, one makeout session with you and my self-confidence will be just fine. @ reply me.)

anyway, i eventually got an email from a guy i haven't really seen since high school, but who i ran into at a wedding a few weeks ago, and he said that he's studying nutrition and exercise physiology, and people ask him all the time about losing weight, and if it's not a big deal or too personal, would i be willing to share with him what's been working for me?

so i sent a response. and he gave me a very positive reply, which ended with
"That shit you said was awesome man, I hope you don't mind if I pass on what you said, because I think that it could potentially help some other people out too."

so i figured hey, i'll post that email on my blog.
because it's the internet, there's gotta be some chubby motherfuckers reading this shit.

i've actually done some really, really simple stuff. i'm sure i'll have to get more complicated eventually, but i've been so overweight so far that simple changes have meant the world.

i realized that food is hard, or expensive. i ate a LOT of fast food, not because i liked it so much, but 'cause it was easy to get and really cheap. cooking is not as easy as a drive through, but it's better. going out and getting a kickass salad made for you is more expensive. (it's not actually harder - i subsist a lot on a SHITTON of boca burgers, and the way you make those is . . . microwave them for two minutes.)

i quit drinking alcohol a lot, and then when i do drink, i go for vodka soda, which is pretty much the best alcohol content/calorie ratio. but mostly - don't drink.

i eat little to no bread/pasta, but when i do, i've switched everything to whole grains. i eat a lot of fish and a lot of vegetables.
the truth is that i'm kinda eating the way i always wanted to anyway. one of my brothers talks about when we'd go out and have "hedonism days" all my friends would be like "FRIED CHEESE AND BEER!" and i'd be like "OMG SPINACH EGG WHITE OMELET MMMM. OMG CALIFORNIA BURGER WITH VEGGIE PATTY AND NO CHEESE MMMM"

lean proteins, fiber, and vegetables. no potatoes, ever.
i mostly cut juice outta my diet, which sucks - but it's my favorite thing, so i'd have no problem drinking like a gallon of oj or apple juice in a day, and that's just a SHITTON of sugar. all sodas are diet, which i was mostly already doing.

when it comes to eating, i mostly take it a day at a time. yeah, i could've lost weight a lot faster, but i'm not really interested in dieting as much as i am commiting a lifestyle change that'll lead to me being healthy. but when i cheat and eat a ton of pizza or stop for burger king of something, i really don't feel bad. i try to eat between 1100-1600 calories a day, but sometimes i go over. that day's a loss. i just try to have more wins than losses. (to be honest, even on a loss day i rarely go over 2000. i'll have a loss day like once every two months where i hit like 2300. at my weight in june, which was exactly 350, my basic metabolic rate was like 2600. i don't know how much i weight now, i'm worried i'll be disappointed if i weigh myself instead of just going by my pant size.)

this part is bad/cheating, but when i know i'm not gonna be able or don't want to eat a healthy amount of food during the day, 'cause i'm super busy, in order to keep my metabolism firin' on all cylinders i've made damn good friends of caffeine - energy drinks and black coffee are my diet cheat (i mean, really, any diet pill is just a legal form of speed). i try not to do this too often, 'cause i have a tendency to go overboard.

and none of this probably really did much of anything, but i combined it with being more active. i really don't work out, which again, would make me lose faster, but i'm tryin' for slow and steady wins the race. i walk the dog. short walks are 4-8 blocks, long walks are 14-24. i take him on more long walks than short ones. i try to walk everywhere i can in my neighborhood. we play basketball at least once a week, but usually two or three times. or i run around on the court alone. i take the stairs at work instead of the elevator, but not too often, 'cause it makes me outta breath and i don't like walking into the office that way. i do it if everyone's gone. i really sparingly do upper body stuff with a couple 15 pound dumbbells - i just started again and you can tell i ain't done it for a while because my. arms. hurt. i just added a couple really short sets of crunches. i do a "boot camp cardio" dvd i bought. surprisingly the hardest thing about that exercise stuff is that my feet hurt more than anything else. i need better shoe or something - they hurt the least in my boots, but sneakers and barefoot are worse.

i also burn a lot of calories with self-loathing.

so yeah, that's what i'm doing. that's what i did. hopefully it'll keep working. hopefully stuff is working for you.
shit happens, shit changes.

i think my roommate still doesn't know that i'm doing all this because of her.
the truth is she doesn't know much of anything about the way i feel about her. she doesn't much like me anymore. she's not a big fan of this blog.
she's not a very big fan of me.
the truth is that she's moved on. grown past me. she's looking for something real, and i've never been that answer. i was just a temporary solution, and shacking up with me was always her way of playing pretend until someone better noticed her. and it was only a matter of time, because, in case you haven't realized it yet, she's light years beyond me. i'm triple-a ball, and she's an all-star game.
and the only way i know how to react is to be funny.
and the only way i can compete is to bring her and her boys down.
and the only way i can find value is to sit here and entertain strangers.
people got it all wrong. life ain't fun when everything's a joke. it's a fucking nightmare.

put on your dancing shoes, fuckers.

the perfect wingman (a tribute, to @colinreynolds).

2009-11-24T16:45:00.005-07:00

a good wingman, in my opinion, is better looking than you but the same amount of interesting or charming and in no way douchey (unless you, yourself, are douchey. in fact, if you're douchey, and your wingman is not, that's a bad wingman). the perfect wingman is a good wingman who is happily in a relationship with a very nice girl waiting at home. the super perfect ideal wingman is one with whom you know you have perfect chemistry - you could both, say, slip into scottish accents for no good reason, except for the fact that you both KNOW THAT SHIT IS AWESOME.
my friend "fivethree" is the super perfect ideal wingman. (@colinreynolds)

why does this matter? i will tell you now:

here, i believe, are my problems:

a) a problem with introductions.
because i have no real personality, and am incapable of real human interaction, i perform. everything social is, to me, a performance.
some people, like say, my mom or my roommate, are lovely - and know that they're lovely. they expect other people to bring something to the table.
on the other hand, i assume that i am unworthy, and if given your attention, i need to quickly bring something to the table to make myself worthy of you. this is the case for nearly anyone, be it friends, family, or strangers.
so i perform. i stand on my metaphorical stage and i rip into myself and i give you everything i possibly can and at the end of it i'm exhausted and i'm vulnerable and i'm quite possibly wounded but goddamn it, I MADE YOU LIKE ME (hopefully).

however, despite that fact that i can perform, if no one is around to bring me on stage, i don't know how to do that myself.

i am easily the worst ever walk-up-and-talk-to-someone-i-dont-know-er in the history of the world.

b) i like the chase. and therefore have a lot of toruble making a step to anything remotely intimate/vulnerable (i will flirt with you BUT DO NOT ASK ME TO KISS YOU ON THE MOUTH OR TALK ABOUT MY FEELINGS).

yeah, so a wingman can't help with this one. it's just here in the interest of full disclosure.

so in the realm of my problems, i'll say a) is about 51 percent, and b) is about 49. meaning a good wingman solves a majority of my problems.

meaning merely the act of sitting with fivethree solves the majority of my problems.

so this is for you, @colinreynolds. a salute. you shall make it possible for me to make a good impression on people of all sorts through a liberal application of charm. you shall bring me confidence and just enough drinks to loosen up. you shall tell jokes at just the right time and enjoy all the same types of drinks and food that i enjoy.

and there will be times. oh yes, fivethree. there shall be times. and i shall buy you waffle fries from the waffle fry house. and if there isn't one of those, i'll become an entrepeneur and build one for you, especially if your help gets me the phone numbers of strippers.

signed with brotherly love, admiration, and all the gratitude in the world,

@2509.

don't you trust this man?

fiction (sorta): one in six.

2009-11-16T15:40:00.005-07:00

I manage to bum a cigarette offa someone with little in the way of drama or bluster, and holding my whiskey sour I step out onto the back patio of the half-empty bar, freezing cold, blowing out smoke without even lighting up. It's snowing so hard I can barely see the ball field two blocks away and even if someone had come through the back door the new flakes would cover their footprints in an instant with nary a hint there was ever anything soiling the perfect glimmering surface.

Everything remains intact.

There's a speaker hooked up outside that pumps out the sound of the shitty bar band playing just behind the door and, no kidding, just as I get acclimated to the cold and start to think that it's a pretty night they reroute their set into covers and start to play my favorite song.

I take a .38 snub nose police special out of my pocket and place my drink on a railing, loading in a single hollow-point bullet and spinning the chamber.

I check my watch and I have about thirty seconds 'til midnight, so I whistle along to my favorite song for a bit, then I step out into the snow so that I won't make a mess on the bar and I put the gun to my temple and I pull the trigger.

Everything remains intact.

I pull the trigger again.

facebook, in a nutshell.

2009-11-13T14:20:00.002-07:00

girl i went to high school with: ****** iz sayin dat i just saw my baby
presumably, her baby: soooo....lol j/p
giwthsw: lol....man stop hating
hb: neva dat lil mama

and the sequel:

giwthsw: ****** iz sayin dat i am happy dat i saw my baby 2day!!!
(honestly, this just seems like a rehash of the original)
friend: o he got a car now or he greyhound.......lol
giwthsw: Dnt do my bay
friend: MMMMMMMM

and the prequel, making this a TRILOGY:

giwthsw: ****** is sayin i cnt want 2 see my baby cakes [italics mine] (the fun is following this well-loved and well-known character while she makes the transformation into "iz.")
tim, her facebook friend (me): i find your use of the word "cunt" offensive.
giwthsw: wtf

alliteration.

2009-11-10T13:46:00.001-07:00

i have this friend, and she's like, a master of alliteration, but i'm not entirely sure she knows it.
like, i think it's all unintentional?

me: oh, hey kathy, what's up?
kathy: oh, nothing. nothing new. no news. not one noteworthy night.
me: oh, yeah? how was florida?
kathy: oh my god, so good. great. gobs and gobs of great, so gratifying.
me: what'd you do?
kathy: well, we went to the beach, which was just beautiful. me and bill, just basking in the beauty. almost blinded, really. we went out on the waves of the water in a little booey, a light little boat, and i can barely swim, so we blew a gasket and now we're baling with a bucket and i'm bawling and bill is so boorish, he's just bellowing, "calm down, bitch! calm down!" so that was shitty and strange but otherwise every event was excellent - but we were glad to be back in boulder before bill's brother's birthday.
me: i want to sleep with you so bad right now.

randoms!

2009-11-07T14:58:00.000-07:00

wisdom from the next table:

OH: the second you think you know something is the moment you know nothing about anything. me? i don’t know shit. so jeremy - i’m telling you, man. i didn’t fuck her. i’d tell you if i fucked her, and i didn’t fuck her.

yay self-confidence:

me: i had a strange night. i was like super hyper and on, but then i was exhausted, so it seems like it middled out at mediocre.
rm: how is that different from how you always are?

attraction:

the roommate plays mirror's edge. she easily disarms four super-armored cops in a row, dropping their guns before moving to the next one.
me: you are the sexiest woman that ever lived.
rm: i do try.

capitol hill.

2009-10-25T04:16:00.011-06:00

i've lived on cap hill for a couple of years now, first on eleventh and penn, in a hovel for art students with inordinately high ceilings and a stove that never worked, and now, in a giant bare apartment on fourteenth and penn with plumbing problems and a big black dog that came packaged with a beautiful but histrionic* blonde girl who uses my computer to e-stalk the standup comedian she's fucking.

you hear stories abut how crazy it is living here. people from the suburbs or boulder will often react to "i live on cap hill," with "REALLY? ISN'T IT CRAZY?"

and i'm like, "you know what? it might be, but it sure in the fuck ain't crazy like the neighborhood i grew up in, so i might be a little desensitized to the crazy or perceived dangerous (i do get it, though. there's a guy that hangs out on the side of my building and when i walk the dog at night he always quotes me a ridiculously low price for the crack he's slangin'. it keeps getting lower, and thus, harder and harder for me to refuse. between him and the hookers i stopped carrying cash while i walk the dog - it's all too tempting.)

my apartment on eleventh faced the alley, so i had some interesting bum interactions in the middle of the night - and there's been some interesting stuff happening just outside our windows, but sometimes, everything cap hill is just crystallizes into one perfect series of moments.

when people ask me what it's like to live on cap hill, i don't tell them about the hobos or the fights or the hookers or the shitty parking. i tell this story:

we had just moved into our new apartment, and having no furniture, fell asleep on the floor of the living room watching movies and drinking cheap red wine, using each other (and the dog) as pillows. he woke us up at three am, needing to go out, so i pulled on my shoes and threw on a chokechain (on the dog, not myself), and the two of us wandered outside into the summer night, my roommate perched in the windowsill like a house cat, smiling and smoking cigarettes, her bare feet curling around the brick walls of our building, hot ash spilling down onto her patchwork jeans. the dog pulled against the leash, dragging me back and forth along the sidewalk - still excited by his new experiences in the city. "nothing smells like patchouli here," is probably the thought echoing through his head, along with "food food food" and "squirrel squirrel squirrel" and "i have to pee on fucking everything."

as we walked, a group of 21 year-old hipsters slowly rode down the street on bikes, drunk, looking for pizza. they'd obviously just met, shouting basic information at each other -

"what's your name again?"

"rachel!"

"and you're from kansas city?"

"yeah!"

"do you like denver?"

"it's great!"

further down the street stands one of the other buildings i would've loved to live in, all balconies and rusted fire escapes, and as we walked by, screams and moans erupted from an open window. the dog's ears perked. so did mine.

somewhere in that building a girl was having one of the loudest, longest orgasms i've ever experienced in my life. strangely, there were no other sounds - a bed creaking, a dude breathin' or groanin', funk music - all missing. did her voice just drown it out? was it someone watching porn? was it an exhibitionist, masturbating at the open window, waiting for someone to walk by and hear her cries (lucky me)?***

while i wanted to stay and listen, the dog was bored by her, so we kept moving, two blocks from home now, my feet sliding in my untied boots, the laces fraying on the cement.

we passed by a tree and a small orange light caught my eye as it appeared and as my vision adjusted to the shade under the sodium streetlight i saw an overweight red-haired goth in a black suit and eyeliner, rings on every finger, carrying a thin glossy black cane, like a grim reapin' pimp. he smoked a clove cigarette, and i don't know if it's because he likes the taste or he just wants everything to be color coordinated (that's why i smoke 'em).

"good evening," he said to me.

"hi," i said, stumbling forward three steps as the dog pulled toward a lamppost.

"how has your evening been?" he asked, dragging on his cigarette.

"pretty good," i said. "how's yours?"

he exhaled with his answer, turning his words into smoke - "my evening has been excellent. thank you for inquiring."

they floated up into the night air, and i moved on, making a list in my head of everything i'd seen and heard, wishing my roommate had come with me, so she could see firsthand the neighborhood she moved into, this place i loved.

but i'd tell her.

i open the door, and there she is. babytalkin' the puppy, grinnin' from ear to ear, smellin' like perfume and chinese food and fresh cigarette smoke. hugging me, holding me, calling me home.

a real conversation between me and my mother:

mother: i'm really worried about you living in this neighborhood.

me: trust me, it'll be fine.

mother: it's not very safe.

me: it's perfectly safe.

mother: home is safe.

me: mom, i've literally had bullets fired at me three times in our neighborhood.

* i wanted to make sure that i was spelling "histrionic" right, so i ended up at the googles, which led me to wikipedia's "histrionic personality disorder," a disorder characterized by a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking, including an excessive need for approval. these individuals are lively, dramatic, enthusiastic, and flirtatious. they may be inappropriately sexually provocative, express strong emotions with an expressionistic style, and be easily influenced by others. associated features may include egocentricity, self-indulgence, continuous longing for appreciation, feelings that are easily hurt, and persistent manipulative behavior to achieve one's own needs.

dude. i have fuckin' histrionic personality disorder.

i'm gonna add it to my eharmony profile. **

** problem with the women on eharmony: not enough professional cheerleaders.

*** if that made her come, i'm so taking karmic responsibility for that orgasm.

ignitedenver 5

2009-10-15T08:36:00.003-06:00

i presented at ignitedenver 5.

i got some digits, but they belonged to a guy* (@hookedonwinter you'll always be my darlin' from now on).

here are some reactions, so i can easily click through to this post and whip up my ego into a frothy ego topping.

@edaehnick So far @2509 has been the killer show at #ignitedenver . . .

@gpelz @2509 Fun presentation last night at #ignitedenver! I just liked that you called @hookedonwinter "darlin." bwahahaha

@caligater @kristanichole @2509 Super bummed I missed your presos tonght, but from the looks of it you both RAWKED. Cheers!

@Morouxshi I am terrified now. I did not know bears were such a problem. Thanks to @2509 for the heads up! #ignitedenver

@hookedonwinter .@kristanichole and @2509 fucking rocked #ignitedenver

@kristanichole @2509 haha! Thanks! I did not want to have to follow you! You were great!

@joeykerch @2509 awesome job with your bear presentation

@eclewis Awesome! @2509 is rocking the house talking about avoiding and surviving bear attacks at #ignitedenver

@mardigrasinco I heard about the way you killed at ignite. I'm waiting at home for you with beer, cupcakes, and easy-tear lingerie and I kicked that goddamn less funny standup comedian straight to the curb.**

*AGAIN?!

**some of these might not be real.

fiction: man vs. nature

2009-10-14T16:18:00.000-06:00

i thought you igniters might like this short story i wrote a couple of years ago:

MAN VS. NATURE:

When I got home from work, there was a bear in my living room.

I started out this morning with flying colors - the perfect harbinger to a terrible day.
Nay, I say - perhaps the worst day of all.

The coffee machine was broken.
My coffee machine.
Well, I thought, no harm done. None at all. I’ll have to stop at a medium-priced coffee shop on my way to work and force myself to a non-fat latte. Or a café au lait. Or something else French-sounding.

But I got pulled over. That's right, by a cop. And yes, my wallet had slipped out of my pants at some point in the mad rush of the morning. And, you're correct, I was late to work.

At work I found out that the program I've been working on for the last six months failed at the last second because of some miniscule typo that I somehow let through. It destroyed everything.

And it crashed the entire office network. Made the lights flicker. Everyone has to start over their projects from scratch. Which means that Melissa, the too-hot-to-be-a-computer-programmer I've been wanting to ask out, but never had the courage to, of course, probably hates my guts. On the plus side, though, it did make all the coffee and soda machines spew free beverages.

My mind being on other things, I ran out of gas on the way home, and had to push my brown Volvo six blocks to my apartment building where the elevator is broken.
I walk up four flights of stairs, slip off my shoes, lose my tie, and find myself face-to-face with the North American Grizzly.

He is watching a rerun of Sanford and Son.

I was never a boy scout. Never much for the outdoors, at all. I’ve never even really been camping or anything, so I’m pretty uneducated in the area of bears. I don’t know if I’m supposed to run or play dead or try to fight or offer him a Hot Pocket. Which I’m out of, anyway.

I notice that the bear, which is definitely not at all like Pooh, has very nearly destroyed my arm chair. I say very nearly instead of completely only because I could still tell what it was. The fabric was strewn about the room, along with massive amounts of foam and stuffing. Wood splinters covered the floor, and a larger piece of wood was stuck into the wall a few feet away. I realize that I don’t want to know why the bear hates my chair so much.
Well, hated my chair.

I’m also aware that he’s staring at me. I’m not sure exactly when his attention shifted from the television to me, but his black eyes are looking right into mine. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to look into his eyes or not. Neither of us move. I don’t know if I should move. This is very awkward.

I decide reason is the best way out of the situation. After all, if he can watch Sanford and Son, he can understand when I tell him he’s not welcome.
Or, at the very least, when I tell him that the food is off limits. Maybe we can order a pizza or something, later. But only if he doesn’t destroy any more furniture.

I break from his gaze, and turn, opening the door.

“Well, bear. It seems as though your little breaking and entering jaunt is over. I’d appreciate it if you would leave. Overstayed your welcome a bit.”

I look back at him. Is he mad? I don’t know if he’s mad or not. I can’t read bears very well. He just looks at me, then down at the door. Back up to me.

“Okay? So, go on out, and I won’t have to call the police.”

My voice shook a bit there, but in all, I think I’m doing a good job of staying authoritative. The bear, which I have named Opposite Pooh, or Opooh, at this point (considering his lack of whimsy and a bright red shirt), stands.

Oh, good, I think. It worked. He’s leaving.

He roars.

Maybe not, I think.

For the first time, I get a really good look at him. Opooh’s about three feet taller than me, and I’m a tall guy. Still, his height isn’t so much imposing as his overall size. I’m pretty sure he has to weigh about 900 pounds. He raises his paws and roars again. I notice razor sharp claws, at least half a foot long. This will not be good.
Not at all.
His fur is dark. Almost black. I thought bears were brown. He opens his mouth to roar again and it vibrates through the entire apartment. I wonder if the person living below me can hear it.

Someone bangs on their ceiling beneath me. They’re yelling something. Yeah, they can hear it.

“Listen to me, Opooh. I am a very important person. If you hurt me, many men will come for you. With guns. Lots of big guns.”
I don’t know if this plan will work. It seems risky, but it’s all I can think of.

“Do you understand ‘gun,’ Opooh?”

I make my hand into a gun. Raise it at him.

“Bang,” I say. “Bang!”

It was about then when he charged.
Maybe I shouldn’t have threatened him.

He’s on me faster than I could ever imagine something that big could move in such a small space, and his claws have ripped into my abdomen and shredded away most of my skin up into my right shoulder. I drop to the floor. The bear’s weight comes down on me and I can’t breathe, and he manages to catch most of my head in his teeth. His huge, powerful jaws close on me in a death grip and I can hear cracks and pops, panic filling my lungs and vomit filling my throat as I realize it’s the sound of my skull breaking. Blood is flowing down my face and into my clean carpet and I manage to get my hands wrapped around his snout, fingers in his nostrils, and I’m pulling as hard as I can and he’s relenting somewhat, but only, I think, because he wants to get at something not as hard as my skull. I punch at his face wildly and my ring catches his eye, and I can hear something ripping. He bites down as I swing again and I can taste my blood and he crushes my right forearm in one bite, ripping away shreds of skin and leaving only bone and gristle and blood and muscle still attached. I keep fighting, and I realize that his eye is bleeding from my ring but I can’t swing again - I can’t even move my right arm. I tuck into myself and I can feel his claws ripping into my back, followed by an intense pain as he bites into my shoulder and a thousand tiny needle points pierce into my flesh. I’m screaming and choking on my own vomit and I can barely breathe and all I can smell or feel is his hot breath, disgusting, stinking breath on my face and it smells like death as he roars and grumbles and growls in my ears.

“No!” I scream, gargling through blood and guts and vomit, “No, Opooh!”

I find the strength and I start to kick into him, but I doubt he even feels it as he bats me from side to side, claws ripping into me over and over again. He throws me back and I hit a wall, lay on it, nearly blind with blood, sticky, my shirt sticking to the floor. My arm slams into the wall and the exposed nerves hit and it feels like my arm is on fire. I reach out to him with it and he catches it in his teeth one more time and pulls, and I can feel the flesh on my arm and hand pulling off like I’m wearing a long skin glove, exposing blood vessels and nerves and he’s coming again but I kick as hard as I can and hit him right in the snout, then once in his injured eye and he rears back and lets out a deafening howl.

“Jesus Christ, bear!!!!” I yell, “What the fuck is your problem?!?”

He leaps on me and bites down on my face, tearing away most of my cheek and breaking the bone that holds my eye in my head. My eye falls out of the socket and I can see myself, upside down, for a split second before darkness. I try to catch it but I’m rubbing my head and I can feel where my scalp is lifting off in back and I lose it and decide not to try touching my face again. I dry heave and realize that I’m very, very cold.

I pass out.

***

When I came to, the Sanford and Son episode had long been over, replaced with an episode of Judge Judy.
And Opooh was long gone.

I dragged myself to the phone.

It took 22 operations and the better part of two years, but the doctors got me looking like myself again. The bear had broken my ocular cavity and my right cheekbone, and ripped off the right side of my face. He had crushed my right forearm and skinned it, leaving permanent nerve damage. I can’t make much of a fist with my right hand anymore. It needed grafts and the bones had to be rebuilt. I had a punctured lung and a ruptured spleen, and most of my ribs were broken. The pops and cracks I heard while the bear bit my head were actually the sounds of his teeth penetrating my skull, leaving small cracks and holes all over. Stitches and plastic surgery fixed my nearly severed scalp. My face, on the other hand, needed to be rebuilt from scratch- metal and dead men’s skin, grafts from my thighs.
Sometimes I feel like a cyborg.
Which is pretty cool, actually.

I really don’t look all that different. My right eye is a little lazy. I have a mean scar down my face.

I didn’t make any of the national news outlets. No one believed it. Now I just tell people that I got into a bad car accident. Or a bad motorcycle accident, if a cute girl asks.

I’m back at work now. Same place. Not a programmer, anymore, though. Have trouble typing with my messed-up hand. They were pretty cool about the whole thing.

And I’m okay.

In fact, I think tomorrow I’m going to try and give Melissa a call. The too-hot-to-be-a-computer-programmer will probably say she’s busy. Or she has a boyfriend, or she doesn’t even know me, or whatever. But it doesn’t matter.

I’ll call.

fictional characters my roommate has decreed "you just are!" in ascending order of similiarity.

2009-10-14T13:49:00.002-06:00

5. dan rydell, from sports night.

4. drew baylor, from elizabethtown.

3. mr. brightside, from the killers song, mr. brightside.

2. ted mosby, from how i met your mother.

1. stephen bloom, from the brothers bloom.

this techno is amazing.

2009-10-12T15:53:00.003-06:00

mmCH mmCH mmCH mmCH mmCH mmCH mmCH mmCH mmCH mmCH mmCH mmCH mmCH

the hotel monaco.

2009-10-12T05:50:00.001-06:00

mottos.

2009-10-07T03:26:00.002-06:00

i had a professor named travis wilkerson, who was pretty much amazingly awesome (alliteration).

i don't think he knows it, but he taught me a ton. especially in a class he taught called "director's book," which, sadly, i rarely went to.
one of his lessons involved the idea that every artist should have a slogan, or motto, that runs throughout all their work - their entire aesthetic. we needed to figure out what ours was.
at the time, my motto was "hide in plain sight."
i would write these long analogous stories about things i was going through, the way i was feeling. and i thought they therefore inherently had power. i still do that, but slowly most of the analogous stuff is slipping away, most of the time.

so i'm here to present my new artistic motto.
"lay it all bare."
scrape yourself raw.
tell 'em everything.

and no, this is not all just an excuse to not feel weird that i wrote 10 minutes of standup material entirely about my penis.

jealousy and the awkward triangle.

2009-10-05T12:56:00.003-06:00

and we shall begin, as ever, with background:

my great unrequited high school love was a girl named julie. the only half-regrets i may have about things like, say, high school, generally revolve around her (shoulda gone to prom together).
when junior year hit, julie became one of my best friend's girlfriend. yeah, it was one of those situations. he was like her first love. when they broke up, i went for it. it all went south, and my buddy and i stopped talking. for like two years (if you're out there, by the by, and you're eighteen, and you're about to start fighting with your friend over a girl: don't).

he and i grew up. we're really close friends again.

i still talk to her. we hang out, periodically. we dance around shit and we flirt and when she breaks up with whatever boyfriend she's with i ask her out.
she's like my paean to rejection.
i'm that guy she calls in the middle of the night when she has a fight with her boyfriend. i'm the guy she gets drunk and tells, "you know we're gonna end up together, right?" (so what, am i just supposed to wait? how about instead i'm gonna find me a nice girl and not be crazy with her, how about that?) i'm also, apparently, still victim to jealousy (her impression of my roommate and i:
me: oh i just love you so muchhhhhh.
rm: oh i just loooooooovvvvve you.
me: i know its crazy how perfect we are together.
rm: i just love you so muchhhhhh but we can't be together because you are fat and i am shallow and i am insane and you are a hypocrite.
me: i know but it's so hard because i just love you and we're meant to be together!
rm: we're meant to be together but we can't be, let's do some mutual masturbation).

apparently my buddy only talks to her when she booty calls him, which is a whole other blog.

but the truth is, her and i have never actually dated. just "danced around shit," to quoth myself. she told me once that she was in love with me and still is (she just loves her recent boyfriend more).
i never know how to introduce her to people, but i eventually started going with "my ex," which still succinctly sums up our general relationship and my feelings toward her. she heard that and also went with it. so now we're each others exes (do you see why i don't understand relationships?) i've met her boyfriend a couple of times. he likes my music, so i like him (i don't like him at all).

me and a group of my friends went to zombieland. i've known most of these friends for years. most of them know pretty much everything there is to know about me, minus specific sexual fantasies i have about my roommate (what? no).* my old high school buddy was among them.

we stand outside the movie theater, talking excitedly, stuffing down popcorn from that massive american bucket of butter, and i hear him say, under his breath, "oh, shit."
i'm busy, right then, making fun of my friend archie for being asian. i'm somewhere on my third "small dick big math skills" joke when my buddy repeats, "oh, shit."
i am spurred on by his reactions - he must be really enjoying the good natured ribbing (for her pleasure) i'm giving our oriental comrade.
he waves.
i don't understand why he's waving. he must see someone he knows. that makes sense, he's a popular guy. he's skinny and he has a fauxhawk and he wears this cool hoodie with designs on it that -
oh, shit.

julie walks into the center of the group.

everyone freezes.

she hugs my friend. she turns to me.

"hi," she says.

and in an instant, we are standing in a circle of triangle of awkward. her current boyfriend, her past boyfriend, the never-was.

demonstration:

this is actually something nostradamus wrote about, fyi:

in the City of the Mile and High there will be a great thunder,
Two brothers once torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endured,
will stand hand in hand with the newest Foundation in hornrimmed glasses,
centered by the one who plays Roller Derby, God's game, and is both busty and asian.
it will be all Hella Weird.

my friend, with no idea of what to do, holds his hand out in the high-five position and nods slowly at current boyfriend. current boyfriend sighs and slaps his palm, lightly. they hold together for an instant, at the peak, like a gum commercial, and then slide slowly down.

"well," she says, "we gotta make the movie."

my friend and i meet eyes. our friends are still frozen.

she leaves, taking her boyfriend's hand.

archie looks at me and says, "see what happens when you make fun of asian people?"**

*just kidding, they know all of those. someone comment and tell them about the one in the wrestling ring with macho man doing play-by-play commentary.

**runner up:
chris (immediately after she leaves): do you guys need a hug? ***

a real exchange between my friends and i:
friend 1: who was that girl?
buddy and i: my ex-girlfriend.
buddy and i: no, your ex-girlfriend.
buddy and i: no, my ex-girlfriend.
buddy: jinx.
me: our ex-girlfriend.

a real exchange between me and my best friend, about a MYSTERY PERSON:

me: he's better than me. in every way.
him: i don't see how the two of you can even be compared.
me: me neither. 'cause he's better.
him: in what way is he better?
me: he got the girl, didn't he?
him: YOU WERE NEVER GOING FOR THE GIRL!
him: ARE YOU JUST CRAZY?!?!? IS THAT THE ANSWER??
him: DON'T EVEN TALK, I KNOW I'M RIGHT! THE ANSWER IS THAT YOU ARE FUCKING CRAZY.

harbinger of doom (patriotism).

2009-10-04T11:24:00.001-06:00

there's a neighborhood bar, which shall remain nameless (no, not charlie brown's, but nice job trying to detect, sherlock), that i frequent quite a bit because i've somehow managed to ingratiate myself into the bartender's good graces. meaning there's always conversation, usually entertaining, given that she's rather colorful, and no end to the possibilities of free drinks.

beggars can't be choosers.

it was this bar that i ended up in on sunday night due to my (sudden) desire to not be in my empty apartment, working on the variety of projects that need to be worked on (watching copious amounts of bizarre streaming porn is a project).*

i didn't even realize it was sunday.

sunday is an interesting time for me. on mondays i usually don't work, or go into the office fairly late, or recently i'm filming my feature, r & d, available soon for your emo kung fu lesbian pleasures (and hard earned dollars).
sunday still feels like the weekend to me, but it's not for anyone i know, like people with real jobs or careers or futures.

my roommate also lives on this "sunday is the weekend" schedule, 'cause sunday is usually her day off (see also: tuesday). but her recent and sudden search for meaning means sunday and tuesday are generally reserved for dates with exes (october), or old co-workers, or tall standup comedians that are funnier than me. **

meaning sundays i'm on my own.

so i go to the park and i work on my jump shot (3 for 25!) or take the dog on a four mile walk or hang out at my parents and watch their tivo or sit in diners writing things like this blog entry on a notebook with a red sharpie while wearing a vest and tie and wishing i lived in a film noir where i'm an intrepid reporter uncovering corruption and looking for the truth - and then i become a vigilante and then it's less noir, more green hornet.
for all of you thinking - tim, you're presenting an untrue image, you're not that hip and cool (WHICH I KNOW IS NONE OF YOU cause, duh, of course i am), i offer to you this photographic proof:

some sunday nights i go to this neightborhood bar, but, honestly, not that often, which is why this story works.

everytime i walk into this bar alone on a sunday night, some shit goes down, and the cops get called, and i have to shake my head slowly and knowingly while smirking wryly and thinking, "oh, you."

ohhhhhhhh youuuuuu.

really, though. not an hour ago i was in the bar with colfax five oh.
guess what i was thinking?

i was thinking, "i need to stop coming in here on sundays," DON'T EVEN TRY TO PREDICT ME PEOPLE I'M A GODDAMN WILDMAN.

unfortunately, tonight's events were rather lame and tame compared to events previous (people not payin' their tab), so i figured i'd share with you the most interesting (entertaining? horrifying? sexy?) experience i've had on a sunday night at the neighborhood bar.
it starts with a charming english bloke and ends with me scrubbing the hardwood floors with bleach before the blood stains set in.

sunday night. full moon. as i approach the bar, i notice a variety of police outside and a large amount of yellow caution tape. somebody shot and killed two people in the middle of the street. the front of my bar is part of a crime scene. this doesn't make me giddy, because i know that would mean i'm going to hell.***
i go through the back door. i can do that, you can't. i'm like ray liotta in goodfellas or the faces in saturday night fever, 'cept there's no hallways, just a backdoor, and there's puke in front of it, so i kinda have to hop over.
the bar is mildly crowded - though not with any customers, really. the waitstaff is sitting around and drinking, along with some off-duty waitstaff from their sister bar, down at the dtc. i say hi. hugs are exchanged, and right then a charming british fellow who looks just like a 70s haired huckleberry hound comes prancing his way through the front door. he doesn't look at all perturbed by the image of american violence he's just walked through (should i be ashamed of my country? fuck no, at least we shoot each other over something cool, like drugs. british people do that shit over soccer. also their food sucks and all their women are either the greatest lookin' broads ever or fuckin' hydra and shit and really who needs deep fried snickers bars?).

he's a drunk but 'appy bloke. he's tol' ye ol' sadness to bugger off, ol'l tell ya, 'is chap roight 'ere.

he comes into the bar and orders and begins to drink cheap red wine and talk about how's he's on this big american trip and he's never been to america before and he talks to some girl about her backpacking trip through london and he's drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking.

the bartender and i are talking about baseball. she is from new york, and thus a lifetime yankees fan. i can't really abide that, but i hate the red sox, and so does she, and thus we are best friends who really enjoy discussing the way the red sox:

1) are stupid.
2) are probably legally retarded.
3) are racist (we have no proof, we just KNOW).
4) deserve to be spit on, specifically by the two of us.
5) probably would be hitler's favorite team.

i didn't make this, i found it . . . from HISTORY.

skinnyuglynotcooljasonstaham hears us talking about baseball and says something like (slurred), "oi! are ye talkin' 'bout american baseball? game's for pussies."
the bartender responds, "it's not as cool as soccer, i'm sure. also, your country is for pussies."
we think, however, that we're still having fun.
but he's been drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking and drinking, at high altitude, no less.
so notcharmingnotattractivehughgrant stands up from his chair and says, "what the fuck is your problem?"
and we realize we have a problem.
"you fink you can stan' 'ere wif yore big american tits an' judge me?" he says.
"you 'on't know me," he says.
"calm down," says the bartender.
"you wif yo' big ol' rack," he says.
he's harping on the breasts.
he knocks his glass on the floor and it crashes and shatters, just like the british rule of our country.
"okay," she says, "you're out! you're done! cut off, kicked out, done!"
"you wif yore chest," he says, "frowin' me out."
"you gotta go, buddy, and if you come back in, that's trespassing. also i'm trying really, really hard not to jump over the bar and break the shit outta your limey ass, right now. ask him, i'll do it."
i have seen this.
"she'll do it," i say.
"fuck all ye," he says, throwing down a twenty. he walks out.

five minutes pass.

he walks back in.

"i wont me anova drink," he says.
"we're all outta ale," says the bartender.
"i won't be leavin' 'ere wifout anova drink," he says.

the bartender looks at him, then at me. she steps outside the front door. i hear her say, "excuse me!"
thirty seconds later a cop comes in. he's alone. i will learn later that he's handed her his flashlight and instructed her to go outside and direct traffic, in his place. i am neither kidding, nor exaggerating.

the bobby looks at the chap. the bloke looks at the constable.
"i'm gonna need you to put your hands behind you, sir."
"i jus' want a drink."
"well, you were told you had to leave. i need to you to put your hands behind you, and i need to search you."
the cop starts frisking the guy, takes out his passport. terrible photo.
"you understand that when you're told you have to leave, you have to leave, right?"
"i left," he says.
the cop looks at me.
"did he?"
"he came back," i say, snitching.****
"put your hands behind your back," the cops says, pulling out his handcuffs.
"now listen 'ere," says youngbritishdonrickles.
"put your hands behind your back," says the cop.

the brit throws an elbow.

the cop responds by hip checking him onto the ground, by way of slamming his head into a menu rack.

i have seen a british man's skull. blood starts pouring out.

"ah, fuck," says the cop. i will learn this later, but outside, the bartender has caused nearly four wrecks, and a car is squealing past her, right at this instant, yelling obscenities at the scantily clad cop with the great rack.

the cop calls an ambulance. he goes outside. the bartender comes back in.

the british guy says, "ohhhremmmeoh." (with an accent)

the ambulance comes. they ask him a variety of questions, like, what's your name? and where are you from? and how ya likin' america, chump?

he answers, respectively, "amurrph," and "durrrm," and "not very much at all."

they strap him to a big yellow board and walk out. they make us sign some papers. the bartender and i put on gloves and get rags and clean up the blood with bleach and rags.

i go home.

i go to sleep.

the story actually ends with me asleep.

JUST LIKE 1776, BITCHES!

*not really a project.

** of course that's gotta be the one that takes.

***i'm going to a special part of hell.

****i break the rules of the streets all the time and it adds to my self-loathing.

a guest post by pathetic fifty cent.

2009-10-02T23:57:00.002-06:00

go shorty, 'cause it's thursday. i have therapy every single thursday. here to work through issues at three pee em on thursday, and you know i give a fuck 'cause i have an inferiority complex!
you can find me in my home, no dom perignon, mama i got what you need if you need to feel alone - i'm into havin' sex but i sure ain't gettin' none, so come and give me some but i doubt that you'll have fun.

i don't know what you heard about me, but i'm pushin' at least three hundred fifty -
my shoes are cool but i can't see my feet
'cause i'm motherfuckin' eff aye and tee.

it's follow friday.

2009-10-02T19:50:00.003-06:00

on the twittererer, today is known as #followfriday, where you recommend to people a fellow twittererererr whose tweets you enjoy reading.

i figured it'd be cool with y'all if i presented my own version of followfriday, with twitterererreererrrss you should follow along with other people i know - like musicians you should listen to or filmmakers you should keep an eye on (the rule is i have to know them in some way, that's why you're not gonna get an entry reminding you that beyonce's "halo" is the new greatest sappy pop song ever recorded).

twitterers:
@fireland the funniest motherfucker in the mile high, and probably the funniest motherfucker on the internet (this is my one cheet - beyond him being a denverite, i don't know this dude at all).
@paulberluteshea a funny standup and all around good guy that i first met at a bachelor party, of all places.
@caligater remember that e-crush thing? (don't tell her, it's creepy).
@2509 ME!
@wired_writer chris daruns. whatever.

blogs:
my friend @philwrede has a kickass blog at http://mysteriousrantings.blogspot.com/
he's also the marvel comics examiner.
http://www.examiner.com/x-11376-Marvel-Comics-Examiner

music:
the swanks.
http://www.myspace.com/theswanks
my favorite band in all of denver, kickass songs, amazing live show, fun to hang around with - they were my senior thesis film, "lily and her pink guitar."

the forth yeer freshmen.
http://www.myspace.com/forthyeer
my other favorite band in denver - high voltage tongue in cheek rock. i almost did a video with them but it never came together. sad face emoticon.

jen korte and the loss.
http://www.myspace.com/jenkorteandtheloss
i've never been more in love with a woman's voice and songwriting as i am with jen korte's. she was wonderful enough to play on my webseries "bands my parents wouldn't like playing in my parents house," which is still sitting around unreleased (sorry again, everyone, SOON!)

mybodysingselectric
http://www.myspace.com/mybodysingselectric
so i don't actually know them. but it's twitter, everyone knows everyone.

film:
fernando huerto:

he's in san diego, he rocks, he's done some voice work with me and one day i'm gonna go out to san diego and we're gonna make a kickass short together.

he took a train out to denver two years ago and hung out in my apartment for two weeks to action direct my senior thesis.

misc:
want some cool photography?
http://http://www.csiphotography.carbonmade.com/
he took pictures of me and i was at his wedding and it was AWESOME. (congrats, enrique! @camerashyinc on twitter)

want some cool hip hop shit?
http://www.certifiedcustoms.net/
(@certifiedcustomsinc on twitter)

fiction: waterford crystal and space bullet trauma.

2009-10-02T16:00:00.000-06:00

Greg drinks a beer, then an Appletini, then an Irish Car Bomb.
“If you have sex with a model,” I say, “and then fuck a guy in the ass, and then have sex with another gorgeous model, I still have the right to give you shit about the sodomy.”
“Whatever,” he says. He shrugs and moves towards the pool table, on the other end of the bar.
He’s a fuckin' wanker anyway.
About then Sheila walks in. Stomps in, really.
My girlfriend is bi-polar, and not in the fun “I have two girlfriends in one” kinda way, but in the “kill you in your sleep” way. It seems to me that very obvious and rational concepts, things even autistic children can comprehend, continually elude her understanding.
Sometimes, after making a very basic statement, something short and lacking in superfluous adjectives, or when I say something simple and inarguable, like, “I like pie,” she’ll get this look on her face, her brows lifted, her lips tightly pursed, her jaw clenching as she breathes out, cheeks sucking in so subtly as she inhales. Eventually she’ll stop, moving her bottom lip sideways, generally to the right (my right), and say something like “No,” or, “That’s impossible.”
The idea then is to refuse to take the unintentional bait generated by her stupidity, to nod and say “I guess you’re right,” and then get her in the bedroom and fuck her so you can sorta remember why you keep her around - even though she has the tendency to steal your prescriptions (especially antibiotics, never pain killers), hog the TV remote (to watch shows about remodeling ugly rooms into uglier rooms), and continually sneak small bites out of expensive blocks of cheese.
I don’t hate women. Just Sheila.

Gunshot wounds to the head have become the leading cause of head injury in most U.S. cities. They’re the most lethal of all firearm injuries - only about five percent of people who get shot in the head live through it. Because of this high mortality rate, cranial gunshot wounds account for only about ten percent of all traumatic brain injury patients who survive. Two thirds of victims die before getting to a hospital. Doctors call it a “blown mind.”

I think she’s mad about something.
“How can you do this?” she’s asking, but I don’t know what in God’s name she’s going on about.
“What? What?” I say, straining to hear over the din of the bar. It’s getting close to midnight, and the place is about full to capacity. I notice that in her righteous fury, Sheila has taken the time to get two glasses of champagne. I don’t know if one is for me. It might be. It’s Sheila-logic.
I haven’t had champagne in a long time.
“You think you get away with everything, don’t you? You think you’re so much smarter than me!” she says.
“Well, I got news for you,” she yells, “you’re not.”
I still have no idea what the fuck she’s talking about. It’s still half an hour to midnight and the entire place has erupted into Auld Lang Syne. Fucking drunks.
Across the bar, Greg raises a pool cue in victory. I want to make my way over to him, but I’m pinned up in the corner, thigh pressing awkwardly into a stool. Periodically I get bumped and I can feel it digging in, the bruise getting bigger and bigger. Dick Clark yells at me from a hundred TV screens. Sheila’s talking again.
Turn your head and cough, New York City. Turn your head and cough. They say that the way you spend New Year’s Eve is a prediction for the entire year to follow.
I wonder if the fancier bars’ glassware is made by Waterford Crystal. I wonder if anyone, anywhere, at a fancy bar tonight thinks that’s interesting.
“I thought you were going to be with your girlfriends tonight,” I say to Sheila, and as I lean forward she winces ever so slightly. I don’t know why, because I didn’t mean anything by it, and it’s not like the move was sudden.
“You hurt me,” she says. “Don’t you get it? You fucking hurt me,” and while I do hate her, I don’t think she knows it for sure, and I haven’t done a goddamn thing to her lately, and some fucking asshole in a polo shirt is asking Sheila, “Hey, is this guy bothering you?”
The easiest thing to do would be to walk away, but of course there are people everywhere and it really just ends up being awkward for everyone involved. I say, “Whatever,“ and try to slide out of my prison and immediately receive an angry bump of retaliation. I push through, past the others, and make my way toward the pool table, leaving Sheila to wash down a bottle of roofies with a quart of vodka alongside polo shirt.

Virtually all cranial gunshot victims are aggressively resuscitated upon arrival at the hospital. If blood pressure and oxygenation can be regularly maintained, a CT scan of the brain is obtained. The decision to go in surgically is made based on the patient’s level of consciousness, the degree of brainstem neurological function, and the findings of a CT scan.
If you’re deeply comatose, based on the Glasgow scale, with minimal evidence of brainstem function, and there’s no intracranial hematoma,
they don’t even fuckin' bother.

“What’s up?” asks Greg. He just won twenty dollars from some idiot who’s actually wearing leather pants.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Sheila’s wiggin' the fuck out.”
“I saw her come in,” he says.
“Whatever,” I say.
He starts up another game with some dude named Wes, a regular we see every Friday night. He’s always yammering on about some new life philosophy he’s picked up. I decided I hated him when he introduced himself as “Wes, the existentialist absurdist.”
Now I think he’s “Wes, the daoist modernist.” His shirt has a large Asian symbol on it, and I’m sure he has no idea what it means. I’m going to translate it to “douchebag.”
“Hey, Wes,” I say. “How’s it hanging?”
“Everything just is, man,” he says, racking the balls. He’s drinking Tuaca. Tuaca.
I turn to Greg. “When’d we decide to pick up Dickface McGee, here?” I ask.
Greg sighs, rolls his eyes. He walks around the table, breaks. I didn’t notice it but he’s managed to take over one of those thin, tall bar tables against the wall. I sit down, look around. For a shitty bar in a shitty part of town, it’s amazing how crowded it is with young professionals. Everyone’s smiling, talking, laughing. I smile.
“Did you guys know,” I say, “for New Year’s Eve, in Flagstaff, they drop a big pine cone?”
Greg knocks the 9 into the corner pocket.
“In Tempe, Arizona, they drop a big tortilla chip into a giant jar of salsa.”
“In Brasstown, North Carolina, they drop a live possum in a cage.”
“In Knoxville, Tennessee, the ball rises, instead of falling.”
“Ignore him,” says Greg. “He thinks he’s smarter than everyone.”

Someone’s playing the jukebox. Love ya/ I need ya / I think I wanna squeeze ya/ Nightly so tightly, girl/ you know you really blow my mind.
Say it again/ Just one more time/ I've got to know/ How you came to blow my mind.

Greg’s somehow managed to sink everything, and now he’s going for the eight ball. He has a perfect shot. I stand up and walk around the table, getting in his way. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but I grab the cue ball and roll it into the eight, knocking it into the pocket.
“What the fuck, dude?” yells Greg.
“Fuck you,” I say. “You suck anyway.”
“You’re such an asshole,” says Wes.
“Fuck you too, Wes, you sanctimonious piece of shit.”
People are moving outside. There’s only a few minutes left in the year. In a few minutes people get their fresh starts. They kiss their sweethearts and feel all loved and shit.

I start to walk out and get halfway there when I hear a voice.
“Hey!”
Shiela’s managed to find me again, and she’s managed to get herself half-drunk in the twenty minutes since I’ve last seen her. She opens her mouth to say something else, but before she can I decide that it doesn’t really matter and I step forward, in close, grabbing her shoulder and ramming my fist into her stomach. She lets out a sound like she’s dry heaving and bends over, gasping. She drops to her knees and I adjust my collar and I turn around and walk outside, into the night air. Look up.

The sky is clearer than I could ever remember seeing it before. The stars seem to shimmer in the sky. Everyone smells like sweat and booze and cigarettes. The countdown starts. I breathe in and start to speak, my voice joining the crowd’s, in perfect unison. As we move on I get louder and louder with every number until I’m screaming at the top of my lungs and as we hit zero I’m screaming “Happy New Year!” and turning and hugging strangers and fireworks are going off everywhere and you can hear people screaming and cheering and firing guns into the air and blowing into party squeakers.

Someone fires in a perfect parabola a thousand feet away and the bullet rams into the top right side of my skull, spinning into the bone and inflating into a perfect hollow point mushroom. It tears through the lobes of my brain and rips its way into my ventricular, and I drop to the ground without a thought or a yell or a mumble or a well-timed sarcastic remark. No one notices. People walk back into the bar, smiling and laughing and talking. I lay on the pavement, cold.

Everything hurts. Nothing hurts. I slowly roll over, onto my back. I exhale smoke rings and cough, but I do my best to stop it, not move, fearful that something else will rip inside if I move my head around too much. I slowly raise my head, look down at my feet. Stop. Lay on my back. Ease my head back, look up again. The fireworks are still going, and I change color with the light, from blue to red, from red to green, from green to white, and then nothing. Smoke makes everything hazy. The clouds roll in.

I turn my head to the side and spit. “Fuck it,” I say.
I stand up, stare at the ground. Looks like I landed in a puddle of motor oil.
I pull off the jacket, look at the back - it’s covered in black fluid. I throw the motherfucker onto the pavement.
Perfect. Just perfect. Seems like a fitting end.

I touch my forehead, and my fingers come back sticky - blood runs down the right side of my face. I pick my jacket back up and wipe it away, trying to get as much as I can off. I manage to get as much as I can without any kind of mirror and throw the jacket back onto the ground, kicking it away. I roll my sleeves up and go back inside.

I walk back into the drunken din and immediately wish I had waited another minute, until someone had chosen another song on the jukebox. I look around for Sheila and Greg but I don’t see either of them - they’re probably comparing “he’s such a dick” stories. I push my way to the bar and order a vodka soda.
“Keep it coming,” I tell the bartender. He pours without looking at me. He’s avoiding my eyes. My head.
“Do you have a fucking problem?” I ask. I start to blink my right eye quickly and uncontrollably. Like the twitch you get when you haven’t slept.
“You don’t look so good,” he says. “There’s something wrong with your eye.”
“Well,” I say, finishing off the next drink, “there’s obviously many things wrong with both your eyes, asshole. Because I feel great.” My eye starts to water. I close it and turn around to stare at the bartender with my left.
“I just wink in slow-motion,” I say.

Less than five percent of people who get shot in the head live through it. Two thirds of victims die before reaching a hospital. Doctors call it a blown mind.
In ballistics, space bullet trauma occurs when a bullet is discharged into the air and falls onto a person. A recent study by the CDC found that eighty percent of celebratory gunfire-related injuries are to the feet, shoulders, and head. In Arizona it’s a criminal felony to discharge a firearm randomly into the air, but in all the other states, it’s a misdemeanor.

I finish another drink and while I’m standing there I feel a pain in the back of my mouth, on the right. I tongue at my gums, searching it out. Something crumbles. I reach into my morals with my index finger and thumb, push back until I can feel the powdery residue. I grab a hold of the tooth and pull, very gently, and it just slides ever so easily out of my gum, the root coming up, like I’m planning on replanting it in another place.
I turn to walk to the bathroom and bump into Wes, the “irritating megalomaniac,” and he spills both his beer and his Tuaca all over his asian character shirt.
“It looks like there’s something in your hair, dude,” he says, and I push past him, slapping the Waterford glassware down and out of his hands. The glasses hit the ground and shatter, spreading across the floor. I watch pieces of it spiral out and disseminate through the crowd, and I hit the bathroom door, accidentally dropping my tooth. It falls and I open the door and press inside into the cool florescent light. I bolt the door behind me.

The bathroom is unexpectedly spotless. It smells like bleach and pine cleaner. Everything is white. White tile on white grout. White toilet and white sink. Silver handles. I turn the one marked “hot” and let it run.
I still haven’t looked at myself in the mirror.

I start washing my hands, the hot water steaming and turning them bright red and raw. On the second or third round I look up, abruptly rather than gradually, and see that my right eye is overflowing with blood. I blink and little bits of coagulated blood stick to my eyelashes. I realize as I move my eye back and forth there’s the slightest bit of resistance, a thickness.
I try to wipe it with a paper towel but just end up sticking little bits of paper all over it, and I have to try to pull them off slowly and one by one, letting little droplets of water roll off my index finger and into my sclera, moistening the paper enough so it’ll stay together.
I’ve just pulled the last piece off of my eye, leaving it all marbled with blood, when someone starts pounding on the door. I ignore it.
The pounding comes again - “I know it’s you in there!” Greg. Jesus H. Christ.
“Of course it’s me, jackass!” I yell back. “Gimme a fucking second!”
He shuts up and stops pounding, probably just leans against the door, thinking I may open it and try to make a break for it. He should know better. As if I give a shit about him.
I lean forward as far as I can over the sink, into the mirror, pulling back my hair, parting it. The hole is big enough for me to stick my index finger into. The hair around it is singed and tangled, matted by dried blood, and the hole is nothing but black. It’s not how I thought it would be. It’s sloppy. The bullet must have slowed down some, because I can see little pieces of skull lurking underneath or around the skin, like it was cracked, hit - not penetrated. I do my best to pull hair back from around it, try to maneuver into a good position to see inside. I pick at the scab surrounding it with my fingernail, and pull part of it off, but there’s no blood. I lean forward more, peering into my head, standing on my toes. I stop. This is stupid. And wrong, probably. No telling how messed up I am. Things are ripped up in there. Might still be ripping.

I push my index finger into the hole, up to my knuckle, then as far as it will go. It goes in smooth, without too much force, without friction. I slowly start to wiggle my finger through the wetness, and I can just feel the spongy material that just might be what brain I have left. Either I’m very lucky, and this is all just brain matter that human’s don’t use, or I should be in a goddamn medical journal somewhere.
I should be a superhero. Bullet-in-the-head-man. Skullcap penetrator. I stretch, push as deep as I can, and my fingernail scrapes something hard. I pry at it but it’s deep, and it’s surrounded by meat. I try again and my fingernail catches instead on something soft, and it starts to come up until I shake it off. Greg pounds on the door again.
“Let me in, asshole, before I break this door down!”
He has a kind of flair for the dramatic.

I undo the bolt and the door flies open. Greg comes storming in.
“What the fuck is your problem, dude?” He says, gathering up my collar. He lifts and strains, and I think he’s trying to lift me up. He succeeds in stretching my shirt. I just look at him. Sheila bought me this shirt.
“I talked to Sheila,” he says. “She told me what you did.”
“Who gives a shit?” I say.
He just stares at me.
“You’re not even gonna do anything,” I say.
He looks at me. Glares, really. I can almost feel shit coming out of his eyes. He lets go. Takes two steps back, his toes dragging. On the second step he drags perfectly and there’s a long drawn out squeak from the sole of his shoe. I stifle a chuckle, but only enough to make sure he knows I’m stifling it. His head goes down, and he steps out of the room. Sheila comes in on fire.
“You fucking asshole,” she says. “Where the fuck do you get off?”
I lean forward, bowing, so she can see where the bullet entered my skull. The bruising, the burning, the blood. I wait for a gasp or a gag.
“You think you can just fucking do that to me?” she says.
“You think I’d just let you lay your hands on me like that?” she says.
I stand erect. She’s looking right at me, but she hasn’t. even. noticed.
“Greg and I are gonna kick your ass,” she says.
“Oh, fuck you,” I say. I push her to the side and slam the door, bolting it. Greg comes running up to stop me, but he’s slow and stupid and a fucking pansy and I’d love to see him try shit.
“You hurt me,” she says. “You really hurt me, you know that?”
I push her into the wall.
“You think you can get away with everything. But you can’t,” she says.
I grab her by the neck and shove my tongue down her throat, and there’s scarcely a “no” or a “don’t” outta her, and I realize there’s an obvious upside to having a bipolar girlfriend.
I push forward into the realm of uncomfortable - for the both of us, extending my tongue like an awkward fourteen year old, pushing my face into hers as hard as I can, pulling back and raking her top lip with my teeth. She gasps and pushes me back, and I’m off balance for a second, thinking she’s gonna swing or scream but instead she leaps at my belt buckle, pulling it loose. I find the passion of the moment inspiring, and attempt to tear her blouse, but just succeed in pulling her into a stumble, her high heels slipping across the tile.
She throws her hair back and turns around, sitting on the sink, hooking her hands under her knees and lifting her legs to her sides. I shove most of my hand into her mouth.

There is no loving contrition. I am not sorry. In fact, I feel better than I have in a long time.

Sheila reaches up and jams her middle finger as deep into the hole as it can go and I fucking scream because I can feel her Lee’s press-on nails sinking into something important and for an instant every thought I have is consumed by the word “poppycock.”
I smell eggs.

She starts screaming. I push her aside and hurl myself at the toilet.
I vomit.
I vomit until my throat burns and my voice comes out in rasps. Until I feel like I’m suffocating. It starts out a frothy brown and slowly makes its way to clear, pausing in the middle for a quick stop at pink, my mouth filling with the taste of rotten onion rings and orange juice, screwdrivers and scotch I didn’t like, gobs of yellow phlegm standing out against the thin viscosity of the contents of my stomach. I stop, start to dry heave, and gasping for air, double over in the stall - a perfect fold down my midsection.
The bullet clinks against the tile.

Both of us stop. We can’t even hear the bar outside. Everything is completely quiet. Everything slows. I can count the flicker of the florescent light. She looks at me and blinks, then starts to stammer. It’s either an insult or an apology. Anger or remorse. She adjusts her skirt, attempts to arrange her blouse. My ears are ringing. She slides open the bolt and runs out.

I stand watching.

I don’t know if I’m dying. If things are ripping apart on the inside. I don’t know if this hole will close and fill in and everything will be the same again. But it doesn’t really matter.

You can look into my eyes and see that they’re the same as they always were.
There’s simply nothing fucking there.

priorities.

2009-10-01T18:54:00.005-06:00

idioms are a recurring theme:

my dad has a variety of them that he made up, and says, and then i use them, and people around me don't know what i'm talking about, and i'm confused by that, because surely they all grew up with my english-as-a-second-language sixty year old father, so why do they not understand what i mean when i say, "i'll be there jolly on the spot," or "manana (tilde) eez gud enough fer me," or, the classic, and my segue (or segway, if you like scooters) into today's topic, "first comes first."

i'm not good at organizing and prioritizing. i'm not good at responsibility.

things i am also not good at:

- being a surrogate father for any girl with major daddy issues, which makes me think i'd probably also not be a very good real father, as my philosophy tends to be GO FOR IT DO WHAT YOU WANT (i don't want to overstep my bounds) oh christ i can't believe you got drunk and had sex with the census guy in my room and now you're upset and YOU WANTED ME TO STOP YOU?
(IT'S NOT EVEN A CENSUS YEAR!)

- grocery shopping. the stores depress me.

- croquet.

- love.

see what i mean? look up at the top of this entry. it's called priorities. how did we get to bulleted lists of my inadequacies (because every entry will get there eventually)?

i have 1000 dollars. should i
a) pay my rent and car payment
b) rent an expensive hotel room and film girls i know pretending to have sex with each other in it
c) buy three pairs of limited edition sneakers that i'll wear once or twice

a is responsible. b is something i used to throw you off, because it's responsible too, 'cause it's part of my work. c would be the bad one.

c is the one i generally go with.

and yet, i know for a fact that i am better at prioritizing than other people. like, say, if you're gonna go on a date with someone and haven't been on that date - you should go on the date before planning out your relationship with them. i am capable of putting those things in the correct order. you should eat when you're hungry, not eat and then justify it by saying you would eventually get hungry (i didn't really learn that until recently, though).

i was at charlie brown's (a bar near my apartment, for all you non-denver folk and peanuts fans) the other night with the roommate, a place i am prone to be with a person i am often prone to be with. we were sitting on the patio, engaging in idle chitchat, if you will, eavesdropping on others (turns out october is the "obsessed with having sex with exes month"*), and generally enjoying the new, plush cushions charlie brown's puts on the outside chairs in the fall/winter (summer is too hot for comfort).

i stood up and expressed my desire to use the restroom, while my roommate expressed a desire for a pack of cigarettes from her purse, which remained inside.
upon entering the bar and reaching our table, i felt a hand grab my ass with a great deal of force and slowly begin to knead.

in the instant before i was able to turn around, time slowed, and i quickly ran through a list in my head of who could be standing behind me. surely it ain't my roommate, who would cauterize her hand until it was a bloody stump upon even accidental contact with my ass
(don't even ask what she would do if we had sex)
(i'd just get tested for stds OH SHIT BURN ROOMMATE).
i didn't see any girls i knew while walking in, and to be honest, (sadly) i don't think i know any girls who are that specific type of frisky. i assumed it was my one close token gay friend (well, the only friend i have that admits it), who had somehow come down from boulder and was just lying in wait to surprise me (follow him on twitter @matraxis to hear all about his grabbed-tim's-ass-again or got-tim-drunk-and-tried-to-make-out-with-him-almost-successfully-because-tim-loves-anyone-who-loves-him exploits).

i turn around and look deep into the eyes of a man i've never seen before, who looks exactly like my high school math teacher, down to the plaid wardrobe, mustache, and pulled high khakis.

i look confused. he stands there for a second. weaves toward me, then back out. still kneading my ass.

"are you down with the homo?" he asks.**

i'm just sayin', if it were me? i'da switched the order of the two actions around.

*here's why this idea is strange to me - i once made a pie chart to explain how i spend all my time (for therapy):

** i responded, "i'm sorry, man. no," which is my standard response to the many, many people who find me super attractive but i have no interest in, due to them being the wrong sex,*** or having a lazy eye, or them being more than 5 pounds overweight, or really really liking bands like 311.

*** speaking of which, this is like the eighth time a dude has hit on me in the past couple of weeks. do i have really good hair recently or something? (@matraxis are we still going to tracks on saturday I NEED TO FEEL LOVED)****

**** my roommate, who doesn't get it because "i look at you and gay is the last thing i think" (same here, i'm fat and sloppy and believe only in stereotypes), said maybe it's because i have some sort of "feminine intuition" - as in (according to her) i understand women really well (i disagree with that statement. a lot.)

2009-09-30T22:53:00.001-06:00

http://www.philipkdick.com/new_letters-laddcompany.html

idiomatic dating.

2009-09-30T22:02:00.011-06:00

there are idioms my roommate doesn't seem to understand. one is "for all intents and purposes."
she corrects me to "for all intensive purposes," which is something a lot of people say, i know - but i'm not making that mistake. i'm saying the right one.

my purposes are generally not that intensive.

they're normal, they're just often paired with intents.

another idiom she doesn't understand: "it's a date."

don't get me wrong, my roommate isn't stupid - far from it. she's overtly intelligent and it bugs me. she's also super talented and generally interesting. so don't get mah shit twisted.

there's a girl who tweets on the twitter, and we've engaged in some 140 character conversation with her, individually, and at one point, she and my roommate made plans to get together (i am not a part of this occurance, as i have an e-crush on said twitterererererr and want her to continue thinking i'm cool, which will be ruined once she sees me in a real life setting).
then this conversation happened:

roommate: "do you think $$$$ is a lesbian?"
me, awesome: "not that i'm aware of. that wouldn't be cool, i have an e-crush on her."
roommate: "yeah, she's a girl that pays attention to you - anyway, you sure you haven't gotten any kind of lesbian vibe from her?"
me, coolasfuck: "yeah, i'm pretty sure. i mean, maybe. but it doesn't seem like it. did she hit on you or something?"
rm: "no. but read this:"
last tweet: okay, it's a date!
rm: "am i going on a date with her now?"
me, slick: "no (holding back laughter)."
rm: "because that happens to me a lot, i think i'm hanging out with someone and then it turns out that it's a date and then i'm on a date with them and i didn't even know it."
me - just bein' me, and that's good enough: "it's just a phrase. people use it. i use it."
rm: "are you sure?"
me, runnin' a comb through my coal black hair: "yeah."

this happened again last night when some guy she knows from a previous job asked her to lunch today. they made plans, he ended with "it's a date!"
this is, apparently, presenting her with problems - she was already going on a psuedo date tonight, with the tall standup comedian who's friends with our downstairs neighbor, who invited her to come and see his standup at old chicago (jajajaja spanish laugh),* and she doesn't like to "double book."
(fyi, the lunch thing probably is an actual date)

i personally don't think it's a problem, considering she asked me to go with her to the old chicago, which would make that an awkward date as is - not to mention one is during the day, the other, at night.
"i still don't like to do that."

this would be a prime example of the ways i do not understand women. going on a lunch date, then a dinner date with two different people is morally gray. going on a date on monday with a guy, and on tuesday with the other guy, is all hunky dory.

also you have vaginas instead of penises and WTF

*a real exchange between me and my roommate:
"you want me to go on your date?"
"i figured you liked comedy shows."
"i like movies and dinner and dancing too - are you gonna start making me come on all your dates?"**

**OMG JUST KIDDING GUYS IN ED HARDY SHIRTS DONT TAKE GIRLS OUT FOR DINNER AND DANCING

advertising slogans.

2009-09-29T22:24:00.001-06:00

tim davids:
he'll do anything for a cute girl.

bring you up to speed:

i wasn't the happiest guy when i was eighteen. i had just moved away from home - to boulder, a girl i was really into had just broken my teenage heart, and i was living in the dorms - specifically, in the rejects dorm where they threw everyone they couldn't fit anywhere else. i was with my best friend, but he was getting super into "the college experience," and spending a lot of time hanging out with his girlfriend's friends, and i was just lonely.

enter the adorable emo girl from across the hall, b (no not some blog thing where i'm trying for anonymity, i call her b). when i was 18 i had a giant crush on her, mostly based on the said adorableness mixed with the fact that, for whatever reason, she took it upon herself to be nice to me and knock on my door to hang out and stay up all night sitting in the hall talking to me about horror films and shit.

years pass, crushes fade, people get better hair and more self-confidence.

i really like hanging out with b to this day, which doesn't really happen all that often, but often enough. she's still adorable and funny and fun and we still get along, and it's really nice to have a regular friend who has no other real connection to the bullshit in your life. i can just hang out and perform and talk and there's no consequence in any of it.

end backstory.

you ever have a drunken idea that seems like just a fun idea but then you really, really follow through?

went to the fainting goat for lunch with b and ate a mediocre chicken sandwish that was made better by a lot of vodka-sodas. she had the blarney sliders, which i really want now. they're corned beef with horsey havarti cheese and scallions, served on warm soft pretzel buns.
i want it so much i memorized that, word for word, from the menu.
it's like how i know all the lyrics to ever song zooey deschanel has ever even thought about singing.

fat guys always have tangents where they describe food.

while we were having lunch a really sad looking guy came into the bar and sat down and ordered - what else? the fucking blarney sliders (fuck that chicken sandwich). he then went to the jukebox, put in fifteen bucks and stood there choosing the perfect pearl jam playlist. after he sat down, as each song came on, he'd have a very strong emotional reaction, including:
laughter. big smiles. a wistful expression. and my favorite - burying his face in his hands while sighing and breathing hard and rocking back and forth, hitting his handcoveredhead on the bar.
i have that reaction whenever someone plays lady gaga, maybe it's the same thing.

we started talking basketball (b and i, not pearl jam sobber and i), and how i play it, and i went into how fun it would be to do something with more people - not join a league or anything too hipstery - but to do a pickup kickball game.
b: "let's do it!"
me, wishing i was eating off her plate (literally - not sexual): "yeah, it'd be fun."
b: "no, i mean tonight. at nine. i'm texting."
me, drinking vodka: "who?"
b: "everyone i know."

problems that came up: where? (a park in littleton) lights? (lights'll get us arrested) how do we see? (make everything glow in the dark) who? (all our friends!) i only have like five friends (i have tons!) you think people will come for kickball? (if there's 90 cans of beer there!)

this is the story of how tim spent his afternoon buying a kickball and bases and painting them with a coat of white, then florescent green, then glow-in-the-dark paint.

tim davids:
he'll do anything for a cute girl.

we roll out at nine, and low and behold - like twenty people show up. i get up, i kick - boom, double. next kicker - i make it to third. b is up next. bring me home, baby, bring me home.
i lead off. the pitcher doesn't know what that means and probably doesn't remember i'm on her team, so i take a big lead.
the pitch. b kicks the ball directly at me. the third baseman grabs it. i'm out.
getting stuck on third and not being able to score is horrible. i have kickblueballs (GROAN i wrote this whole thing to use that joke i'll be here all week).

kickblueballs. take that the two actual standup comedians i am somewhat acquainted with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_pass_accident

2009-09-29T11:14:00.001-06:00

my song of the moment:

something no one tells you about moving in with your female best friend: even if the two of you have absolutely no sexual or romantic inclinations toward one another, you will, periodically, act exactly as though you are married.

case in point, i periodically get text messages that feel rather domestic - "on your way back from the office can you pick up milk and paper towels and i need cigarettes."
what this really means, considering my schedule is later than most normal people's, is that i am now going to end up in a walmart in the middle of the night (we're poor as shit, i ain't got no principles - i need me some cheap ass paper towels and as long as they're cheap enough i hope they never let you fuckers unionize).

walmart in the middle of the night is a desperate, desolate place. it's like the concrete version of the abstract idea of isolation and punishment.

seen on a t-shirt at walmart in the middle of the night: "music is the art of thinking . . . with sounds."
it's the ellipses that make that work.
you think, "what? music isn't the art of thinking! i think all the time, that shit ain't music. right now i'm thinking that popcorn is sometimes overrated and sometimes underrated but never appreciated the correct amount. and that ain't music."
but then it hits you after the delay, it comes at you from the side like the attacking velociraptor - thinking with sounds.
and you go, "ohhhhhh."

there's an interesting hooker/angel complex going on at walmart recently. walking by the "young miss" section on my ware to the kitchen supplies (we needed a cutting board. i don't understand why, i just cut things. i told my roommate i could get a piece of scrap wood and thus save a few precious dollars, and she countered with "then the avocados will have splinters in them." there's no joke after that, i just like the phrase), i noticed that the two choices of styles offered to young women at the walmart are fake prep school uniforms, including blazers with fake prep school logos on them, and tiny ripped up union jack tanktops with tiny plaid skirts and pre-worn (p)leather jackets.
i didn't think you'd believe me, so i whipped out that modern marvel artifact of the future - the picture phone.

there's no picture.

imagine this scenario:

your best friend is pregnant, but single. dad's outta the picture. you're an intelligent, single girl, and you've known this girl your whole life, so you think, 'hey, i can move in and give her a hand around the house until the fetus drops out of her.' because you're an intelligent, single, nice girl. it's late in the pregnancy, and the weird cravings hit. your best friend just NEEDS chocolate syrup and hominy - but there's none left in the house. you throw on your pajama pants and victoria secret pink line hoodie and shuffle out, half-asleep, and drive your saturn to the local mom-and-pop grocery store. but it's late, and they're closed.
you have to brave the walmart.
you walk in, realizing that an old woman greeting you is way creepier at 1 in the morning, and face the pungent mcdonalds fry air, the harsh green florescence, the lacquered white tile.
the deli meats next to you seem like they're rotting. you make for the canned goods.
as you turn the corner, you walk into the "young miss" section.

there stands a fat, unshaven hipster in a shirt and tie. he is taking pictures of the young miss clothing with his cell phone and licking his lips lavaciously.
he turns and looks you deep in the eyes.
he can see your soul.

something else about walmart - the displays at the registers while you're waiting in line are really effective.
you actually start to think to yourself "do i own an uno deck? i could probably use one. it would go well with this discount chocolate bar and the economy pack of disposible lighters.
one day we could be sitting around, completely bored, and i'd be like the savior of the night with my surprise uno deck."

cute but selfish and narcissistic to the point of near delusion

2009-09-28T19:37:00.006-06:00

i woke up pretty late today and my roommate woke up right after me and she was sleeping damn hard 'cause she had sheet wrinkle lines pressed into like every part of her skin that i could see, like she was wearing old people makeup from a community theater.

a real exchange my roommate and i had last night:
"what's your least favorite fish?"
"halibut."
"mine is corn."
"corn isn't a fish."
"exactly."

today i ran out of the office real fast to grab food but then i came right back, the idea being that i could sit at my desk and eat tacos while simultaneously continuing to prepare files for archiving (this means i am unstapling pages of papers).
this meant that it took me a half an hour to eat my fish tacos with pineapple pico de gallo (authentic!), which is longer than usual. because i did it while working, that means i made six dollars while eating a lunch that cost me eleven.

when i pulled out of the parking lot of the restaurant, i let two women with a stroller walk across the street while i waited awkwardly behind the crosswalk. one waved a thank you at me. moments passed and the other waved as well. i got two thank you waves for the price of one. i think this adds karmic points that i don't deserve, and if i don't balance the equation before the universe notices, it will overreact and kick me harder than i need to be kicked.
i slammed my hand in the car door and then i sneered at a baby. i feel like everything's gonna be okay.

also my first thought when the second one waved was "all right, threesome chances going up EXPONENTIALLY."

two things i said last night that i thought were hilarious and wanted to add to my "standup act," but in retrospect weren't the funniest things in the world:

"i'll bet that if there's a hooker out there that works for cookies, instead of money, she's a very fat hooker."
which of course brings to mind the idea of a never-ending cycle - a woman works for cookies, she eats the cookies, she gets fat, men stop paying her for sex (no fatties), she starves, she slims down, men notice her, it all starts again.
or a philosophical paradox
(no offense to fat hookers i'm sure you make plenty of money).

"i hate when people don't respect the code of joke telling. when you allow me to tell you a joke, you're entering into a social contract to respect the structure. i say 'knock knock,' you say 'who's there', and so on. i ask a seemingly strange or obvious question, you say 'i don't know.' i hate when people try to answer.
'hey, bill, wanna hear a joke?'
'sure, tim.'
'what did the caterpillar say to the ant?'
'let's get fuzzy?'
FUCK YOU BILL YOU IMPOTENT SWINE"

whenever i make an impotence joke i will use the name bill.

guess why, dude.

this week's girls i would like to marry:

HOLY SHIT:

and the ever present maria bamford, who talked to me once:

one day we can all hope to be this good

2009-01-13T17:50:00.002-07:00

2009-01-08T15:19:00.001-07:00

this is how it's been here

2008-10-23T15:11:00.001-06:00

"(Oct. 23) - Katy Perry has upset anti-knife activists by brandishing a blade in a promotional photo for her album, The Sun reports.
"This woman's behavior is unacceptable. She must be out of her mind to pose for a picture like this," Richard Taylor, a father of a stab victim, says."

anti-knife activists!

my hair is getting long enough for the emo bangs

2008-03-19T03:28:00.001-06:00

some things have happened

2008-03-19T03:27:00.001-06:00

mile high stand up!

2008-03-19T03:25:00.001-06:00

2008-02-18T19:50:00.000-07:00

timd (1:32:12 PM): if you havin' girl problems, i feel bad for you son, i got 99 problems and . . . bitches are most of them . . . so i can relate.
evan (1:32:25 PM): yeah!
timd (1:32:46 PM): i pronounce all b2tch3s str8 to teh hellzf1rez.
evan (1:32:57 PM): oh fuck dude
evan (1:33:18 PM): no1 d3s3rvz teh hellzf1rez!
timd (1:33:51 PM): every1 d3s3rvz teh hellzf1rez!!1!1! MOAR exp3cia11y teh b1tchz!11!!
evan (1:34:18 PM): fuk b1tchz!!!1!
timd (1:34:22 PM): th3y hAz N0 s0u1Z!!!
evan (1:34:28 PM): truf.
evan (1:34:58 PM): kk, ur rite, b1tchz r 4 hellzf1rez.
timd (1:35:00 PM): i r judgm3nt3r.

lily and her pink guitar - sex, skin and violence teaser

2008-01-30T18:15:00.001-07:00

atlas screening

2007-12-21T01:37:00.000-07:00

if you're with your very young children, at a film screening, and you look on the program, and it says "exploitation?"

you should leave with your kids before that movie starts.

because it may just have a long scene of rough lesbian sex.

and your kid may just turn to you, while the girls onscreen are eating each other out, and say, "daddy, what are they doing?"

and then, you're fucked.

just a piece of advice for all you parents out there.

vlog 3: tim writes. (the process).

2007-12-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

i'm hungry.

2007-12-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

2007-12-04T01:32:00.000-07:00

2007-11-28T17:15:00.000-07:00

2007-11-27T01:41:00.001-07:00

dun dun duh duh

2007-11-12T18:28:00.001-07:00

lily and her pink guitar starts sunday . . .

2007-11-08T23:23:00.000-07:00

AIM IM with andy:
11:03 PM
tim: so i got lily's skirt in the mail today
andy: yeah?
tim: yeah, even for my sick purposes
tim: it's amazingly too short
andy: hahaha
tim: it is for strippers to take off
andy: words i never thought i'd hear you say
tim: yeah
tim: luckily if she wears it unbelievably low
tim: it's just about perfect, though still a little short
tim: but you should see how short that perfect is
tim: and then realize that the skirt is actually supposed to be like six inches up
andy: haha
tim: i opened the package and i was like OH FUCK
tim: it is shorter than this : http://www.abstracthiphop.com/hip-hop-honeys/absolutely_amber_mini_skirt.jpg
tim: it is SHORTER THAN THIS
tim: i've never seen a girl in my life wear a skirt that short who isn't a stripper/lingerie model
tim: in a shoot/on a stage
tim: hip hop vixens are like "i ain't fuckin' wearin' that"
tim: "that's for slutty girls"
tim: "i'll put on a bikini and grind on that car"
tim: "but i ain't wearin that tiny ass skirt"
tim: "let those crazy little wig girls wear that shit for their bff"
tim: " i ain't stupid, i don't have no bff makin' me wear hooker skirts, that little wig bitch crazy"

this hasn't been on the site yet either

2007-11-06T01:48:00.001-07:00

i made this movie because then i can hang around with and complain to a bunch of super attractive women and call them up in the middle of the night and buy them clothes and not have to actually find a girlfriend.

well,

this is a trailer for a flick i wrote and worked on all summer called "angels as hard as they come."

it's my michael-mann-meet-jack-hill sexploitation flick.

projects from the art of indie cinema.

2007-11-06T01:42:00.000-07:00

i'm in a class at cu with an instructor named patty bruck. hopefully she's okay with me saying her name on teh interwebs. i hope she's not in the witness protection program.

we've had two assignments in her class, the first was a self-portrait. we couldn't show our faces, or talk.

also, everyones was way experimental. and serious. one girl had a flying bird and a crucifix through all of hers.

i don't know her name so now i just call her "jesus bird" girl.

one girl went to a creek and cried colors.

and then patty gave us footage.
of buildings.

and said edit this into something.

most people did

"rhythm exercises"

i made that.

with evan.

we're weird, and i get that.

power rangers.

2007-11-06T01:38:00.001-07:00

i've always loved power rangers.

pr0n.

2007-11-06T01:36:00.000-07:00

we made this back in february.

a youtube user commented we shouldn't have bleeped the word "vagina" and i'm inclined to agree.

there are some more things this one is about my hair.

2007-11-06T01:35:00.000-07:00

there is a bunch of other things that we put up on youtube but not the site because evan is a slacker and you should all yell at him in many ways okay?

call him a n00b!

andy and lily

2007-11-06T01:32:00.000-07:00

there is another vlog up. it is about lily and andy.

they can't write in teh 2509 blog.

so i can say what i want about how lame they are.

well, andy.

well, replace lame with pretty, and then lily, too.

but not andy.

just kidding she has a fat head and a worse personality ok thanks bye

vlog 1 is up

2007-10-03T17:49:00.000-06:00

we made a vlog.

it's our first one.

here it is.

movin on up...

2007-10-03T13:58:00.000-06:00

oh yeah, now we're gettin somewhere.

w00t

2007-08-01T11:41:00.001-06:00

Let's start this shit!