When last we saw our hero, he clung by bruised fingertips from a dangling participle over a roiling, steaming cauldron of ego and molten oddity. The soles of his beat-up Skechers smoked from the perilous heat of the Modern Age; in close-up his fingers slipped, flexed, and caught (“Damn,” he muttered, “I knew I should lose some weight”), and if I’m not mistaken theme music swelled up to a shrieking pitch and broke abruptly for commercial. SEE our blogger deftly skirt the perils of late-night tomfoolery! FEEL the rage of his urban angst! TUNE IN next week for more exotic adventures (imagine Don LaFontaine saying this) at Pepper … of the Earth! And … what about Naomi?
See that word “clung” up there? Wouldn’t it be fun if it were “clang” instead?
So the clinging and whatnot was back on Secretary’s Day Administrative Professionals Day, when I got a little box of chocolates from The Firm — beats the hell out of flowers, y’ask me — and was dutifully headed home to make an early night of it. Just past the turnstiles at the 2nd Avenue station I crossed paths with C. of A Picture of Me and shanghaied off for a listening party (13th Floor Elevators), back in the direction I had just come from.
The doubling-back thing apparently spun up some kind of temporal loop thing which must have interfered with the blog thing, because I was just sitting here minding my own business and all of a sudden it’s the May thing. (You can substitute 2005 for May without any real change in meaning, if you’re old enough. Matter of fact, 21st Century will do as well.) Roky Erickson has that effect on a body.
Things have been mighty busy at work; on-the-Day-Job blogging time has been problematic, and home time has been late and distracted and often caught up in my new obsession with Flickr, where you can now see scores of my photos of scantily-clad burlesque dancers, occasional musicians, and the interesting corners and twists of the city. The home computer is dying under my very fingertips, but the new beast is scheduled to arrive on Wednesday. Can we give a techie-yay for a Pentium 4 3.2 GHz XPS Gen 4 with a gig of fast RAM, 160 gigs of free-upgrade hard drive space and a GeForce 6800 video card with 256MB on board? I know I can. I’m officially poor now, so if any of you out there owe me money, this would be an excellent time to cough up.
I’m not sure which makes me more envious - the chocolates or the computer :-)
I’m pretty excited about the computer: I don’t think I’ve ever had this much zip in the box. Dell had a hell of a sale on when I wandered by the site: free shipping, a free 80-gig upgrade on the drive (Seagate, 7200), and 30% off on the system. Overall it was about $2,300 worth of system, including the shipping, for about $1,500. Now I can play Doom 3 at last!
Which makes it a pretty expensive game, if you think about it.
Linus - Seriously, I feel your pain. I also bought my system specifically to play Doom 3. Spent a LOT less than $1500, but still, the purpose was strictly recreational.
By the way, I *strongly* encourage you to download the mod for Doom 3 that puts the flashlight on most of your weapons. Doesn’t reduce the creepiness of the game (might even make it worse, actually), and it gives you a fighting chance against suprise attacks:
http://www.gamershell.com/download_6669.shtml
If you use Flickr a bunch, I suggest giving geobloggers a look see (http://www.geobloggers.com/). It is a neat little add-on thingy.