alright kids, i finally got my tickets for the hey mercedes / vagrant tour, which means tuesday will rock. will the new album be available at the show? i’m assuming (and hoping) so. wanna go? wanna hang out? me too. email me. i know scott and jesse are going, so you should join us! our entourage will take over! it’ll be better that way, i swear.

we walked through the toll booth in the ferry terminal, filled with dozens of people just getting out of the mariner game. judging from the vibe from the crowd, they had won. on the other side of the booth. there was a sign, and an arrow pointed left, and “bremerton” written under it. under that was an arrow pointing right labeled “bainbridge island.” we took a right, and went through the hallway.

i took off for the restroom, and when i came back, she had taken a seat on the bench. i sat next to her, and tried to ignore the smell of dirty diapers in the trash can. it was hot, stinky, and crowded in the terminal. i was comfortable, nonetheless.

we boarded the ferry shortly thereafter, and instead of heading inside, where it was warm, we opted to stay outside and brave the rain and wind.

the ride there and back was like driving to the airport, it had that feeling that you were being filmed, or that you’d want to put the scene into a film, because that’s what it felt like it should be. but the best part about it was during the layover. we had an hour stop in bainbridge, before riding back towards seattle, and the entire boat was empty, save for a few worker here or there cleaning up patron’s messes. we sat at a table, inside, under near flourescent lighting in an empty room, and made jokes, looked at a cheese brochure that she had picked up. it was an amazing 45 minutes, sitting there, stopped on the water in the darkness of the island. there was very little lighting, so if it weren’t cloudy, we would be able to see the stars. seeing seattle at night from the water is a nice view, though.

it’s almost as if that 115 minutes was separate from the rest of my life, but at the same time, it fit so perfectly. i’m not sure, but i think i’m the only one that would want to see a movie of my life.

i’m sorry. i work now, see? i don’t have access to a computer with the internet (but i do have access to a computer with excel on it, and the screen is about as big as my fist and the red is all burnt out of the crt, so everythging looks blue), and i have to talk to the dumbest 5% of the seattle’s population all day long. sometimes, i have to do it for 12 hours a day. although i keep complaining about how much i get paid, that complaint is rather unfounded, because i don’t really know how much i’m getting paid.

so consider this a formal apology. i swear, if i had a keyboard at my fingertips, i would update every time i ran into a moronic theater-goer (which is more often than not), and you fellow compatriots of the workforce, equally bored (albeit better equipped) could read about every rude ave rat that walks in and thinks he owns the place, mouths off to the ushers and walks like he’s got crabs.

last night i was there late, and i was “the count”. “the count”, is basically end of night inventory, and i haven’t done this in roughly 2 years since i’ve been back. i felt like leonard, just like rick did right after he saw the movie. i started writing things on my hands to remember. it didn’t help.

needless to say, i enjoyed the film, i like the zhang yimou flick we caught quite a bit, too. it was virtually plotless, which was amazing, considering it covered so much time, but still it seemed like nothing really happened. it portrayed this life of two people in love without ever even showing them hold hands. they probably spent less the 10 minutes in the same scene together, but it worked well.

on another note, i saw planet of the apes last night, during a late-night screening, after going to flowers and running into a couple of old metroids. it was okay, nothing special, and didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. the ending, i mean. maybe it’s because i read the stranger beforehand, and one of the writers is offering $100 bucks for a good explanation of the ending. i just couldn’t make it work out in my head, though. perhaps i missed something in the beginning.

speaking of the stranger, kevin jones’s apartment is featured on the cover story. was strange to see his face (and apartment) gracing the inside of it. i went to high school with this kid, and i see him around all the time, and now he (and his apartment) are famous for acne and wall safes (respectively). check it out.

today’s my day off, which constitutes the long and innocuous update. i hope you enjoyed it. toodles.

i know, i know, it’s been a while. i went to lake wenatchee this weekend, and played with the woodland animals and ate food and played guitar and slept in the sand and it was awesome. i’ve been working, too. if i were getting paid more, the metro would be a great job, because all i do is sit around, watch parts of movies, and see the previews. it’s good. i wish they didn’t pay me peanuts, though.

tonight, though, i finally see memento, and i will also see the road home. i am excited.

i pose a question. is love infallible?

on the same note, is the pope infallible?

i miss my friends. by the way, anyone who gets the obscure pun in the “is love infallible?” question, i’ll fall in love with you. -bmp

per an email from brandon (this was the actual email, in its entirety):

ultra-high vacuums, the marvelous fruit! the more you’re in one, the more likely you are to fly apart into tiny bits of matter, a cold cold bitter wind, emoting dust motes of eternity, spinning, spinning, into a burning cosmos of decadent light, and THE FUTURE! – how inescable our fate, how inescapable the profundity of light and darkness, of netherworlds and nether-regions and nether-fate, NEVER FATE! – NO! – but inevitable and escalating is our view of the world, a vacuum that slowly encompasses the world, and sucks as if at a giant teat, sucks at our growing ineptitude and inexperience and the terrible albatross that hangs around our collective neck and collectively sigh…

-MICHAEL JACKSON
P.S. I love you.

how ironic that i spell automatons wrong in the last post. automons isn’t even a word, for cryin’ out loud.

it’s been a while since i stayed up late surfing the internet. actually, i didn’t do too much mindless “surfing,” but i did research some stuff about our cross country trip later this summer. it looks like it’s gonna run roughly around 9000 miles, going down the west coast, across the southern part of the US, up the east coast, and back across the northern part, through chicago and yellowstone. i’m excited, a bit anxious.

i worked tonight, and i feel greasy and stinky, like i smell like vinegar. i’m sure i do, actually, because we clean things with vinegar. it was weird to be working, and i already found myself getting kind of annoyed with some of the customers. chances are, i’m justified in being perturbed, because it mostly happened when approached by rude and inept punk suburban kids, that are surprisingly stupider than they look.

but enough of that. it’s late, i’m up late, and i’m really, unbelievably thirsty. i could drink a gallon of water. or maybe two.

broke down, got my job back at the metro. at least i can see more movies now. i should see more movies now. i have to get ready for work (how weird does that sound). tomorrow, headed to lake wenatchee for some r&r&otherstuff. yep. more later.

it’s been raining again here in seattle. i took off for leavenworth the other day, to go camping and to catch the fiddler on the roof at the leavenworth summer theater. on highway two, via 522, via lake city way, via i-5, and i imagined the crippling rain bearing down on us slowing us down to a stop, glueing us to the pavement. but it wasn’t the rain, it was the traffic. it took us quite a while to get to leavenworth, but arriving, i recognized the town, full of strange looking signs and curly fonts for burger king and starbucks.

yeah, i’d been through there before, probably something like 3 years ago, on my way to lake chelan with others looking to go there, in the beating down heat (tee-hee) and drink beer and eat psilocybin. i didn’t, because i wasn’t in to that, instead i sat around in the heat, fell asleep a lot, and got sick. i went swimming, got bored with it, then got out and went back to sleep. i also ended up playing basketball and getting my ass kicked. it was interesting (read: stupid). that was 3 years ago. i’d like to think things have changed drastically since then.

and they have. i’ve been thinking lately as to what kinds of changes i’ve been through since i was a child. i used to make movies with my friends and roll down the driveway in a makeshift go-kart (comprised of wheeled items from our neighbors backyard). that was roughly around 4 grade, i think. how old are you in 4th grade? i’m not sure myself. the only thing i remember in 6th grade is that we studied about egypt a lot. all i remember from that are the names osiris and anubis. anubis was the one with the dog head.

in 7th through 9th grade, i played dungeons and dragons, only it wasn’t dungeons and dragons, it was a game that i made up, which was a blatant rip off of a game a friend of mine made up (which was a blatant rip off of a dozen other games, which were all thrown together to make one uber-game). i didn’t drink, smoke, or talk to people out of my clique (which was comprised of two distinct cliques, one school one, and one neighborhood one). i suppose that’s not drinking or smoking is pretty normal for some 7th graders though, huh? i was straight edge until the summer before my senior year in high school (i think).

that last year i spent in california was weird, it was my freshmen year at high school (catholic high school, mind you). what i remember from that is my cousin picking me up from school (some 15 minutes away from home), and us going to jack in the box for some super greasy tacos (they were cheap), then returning to my mostly empty house and alternating between playing dune 2 and civilization for hours on the computer. i pretty much lived by myself at 15, technically i lived with my grandma, but she didn’t tell me when to go to sleep (because she fell asleep around 7 or 8 anyway), and she didn’t wake me up for school. she didn’t really make me any food (i would usually traverse the few blocks to my aunt’s house for dinner, or she would bring something for me to eat, or i would eat jack in the box), and she didn’t really speak english. which isn’t to say i couldn’t communicate with her, i spoke relatively decent tagalog then (i’m rather ashamed of my inability to do so now). the thing is, i don’t recall much of the way i felt back then. i suppose it’s something that’s not prevalent at that age, maybe i was wholly concerned with other matters so that whatever i was thinking about living alone has been erased from my memory.

when i moved to richland, wa, i lived in the basement of our house. it was basically like living alone again. my dad kept pushing to get me to move upstairs, but i wasn’t having that. i got a drumset, my mom got it for me. i still have it, and it’s a generic set, probably not worth what we had paid for it, but i think my mom got it for me because she thought i would hate her forever for making me move to richland and leave all my friends in california. i hung out with my brother a lot that first year there, and it was weird to do so, because i hadn’t hung out with him for a while because i was in california and he was in washington. i’m still puzzled as to why he moved to richland a year earlier than i did.

i guess you could say that my memory is fuzzy about everything as of late. it feels weird, like i’ve been on autopilot for the past 21 years, and everything i remember now is twisted and convoluted to the point where i don’t know whether or not something really happened the way i remember it did. i’m telling stories that may or may not have happened – like those stories you start telling when you’re around 18 years old, about how you were a kid once and you did this or that. every time you tell a story, if you’re a good story teller, you’ll embellish here or there, to make the story a bit more interesting than before. you keep doing this until one point, where you’re telling the story to some people, and there’s someone around that is directly involved in the story, and they start correcting you on this or that point, and you can’t remember what parts of the story you had made up, and what parts of the story are real. i think there’s something about this in the book of laughter and forgetting.

i’d like to think i pay attention to detail, but goddamn if i can’t remember what’s real and what’s not.

it’s enough to drive you crazy.

movies watched this weekend: adventures in babysitting, grosse pointe blank, bottle rocket, almost famous, and good will hunting. went looking for a new place to live. ended up at candice’s old house, with sorority girls and fraternity boys. 3 people short of the recommended minimum (unless one of the 3 hit the lotto and decided to take the rent for the other 3), we put our name in the running for the house. it’s an uphill battle, and the gods are frowning on us.

friday the 13th was terrible, but maybe it’s because it was friday the 13th, and i noticed it more. i was wondering, did jason really kill people on friday the 13th? or was that just a random date? my memory is a bit fuzzy on that one.

jason bought me a sonics hat for 50 cents. it’s bright green and corduroy. no one except me and my brother like it.

it is certainly friday the 13th. boo again.

um, things turned out to be much more stressful than i ever could have imagined. dealing with dealings today, including landlord and city light. boo.

whew! finally caught up on my email (after 2 hours). i did a lot of things today, including going to bellevue to interview at a dumb temp agency. when i was done, i walked out the high rise, and felt like george clooney in out of sight, and i wanted to throw my tie on the ground, and take my collared shirt off and walk across the street and rob a bank. i almost did, too.

instead, i walked back to my car and had lunch with ben. i feel good about the day, though, as i got that accomplished, i handed in a bunch of applications at the U, for various menial jobs (including monkey feeding and window washing), and i got a new brake light for my car (only $2.00!). my girlfriend bought me some groceries (i’m such a deadbeat), so i’m going to go bring her brownies at work now.

wipe that smirk off your face.

and here are the lucksmiths dates:

july 25th at the baltic room, w/ kissing book
july 27th in bellingham at the showoff (i think)
july 28th in store at sonic boom records

make sure to check your local listings to make sure…