Still Alive

"There are no guarantees in life. Not for the present, nor for the future." It's the first lyric in the song Unlike Me by Kate Havnevik. It's true, there aren't. I've been running on the assumption the universe owes me one lately and while it might be true from a certain perspective, it's also more than a little conceited. I have to keep moving. Not in the literal sense, but in a more general one. Set my sights on some point on the horizon and just keep going.

I'm going to see Casino Royale on opening night this Friday. That should be fun.

My sims game continues to frustrate. I think the problem is a bug in the Pets expansion pack and not me. Hopefully Maxis will get off it's ass and release a patch soon.

It's still gray and crappy here and I know it's affecting my mood. I guess it's a good thing I don't live in Seattle :)

Later.

Temporal Loop

I wish I had something to write, but I really don't. I haven't left this building in three or four days. I'm losing track of what day it is and often times even what time of day it is.

It's been raining for almost a week.

I need to do laundry. I need to get milk.

O'Dark Thirty

It's almost 3am and tonight I actually wish I'd gone to bed earlier. Alas Bob is having a party. I think I've told you this before, but he's a musician. I think he's a guitarist. And he plays what I can only describe as "hippie music". You know, stuff that belongs in the sixties. I might not mind it as much if the soundproofing didn't cut out all of it except the bass.

What the hell am I saying??? Yeah. I'd mind it.

And so I'm trapped in "whiny bitch mode" because I can't go to bed. That is not my only concern however.

Sims 2 will no longer run on my system. I have no idea what the hell happened or why. It just loads and crashes, or fails to load at all. Whatever. I'm tired of trying to figure it out. Tomorrow I'll attempt to reinstall the stupid thing (again) and see if I can gat my "fixed" downloads ported over from the Dell. If that doesn't work, then I'm going to get a life and never play the stupid game again. It's all bullshit and pixels and I'm sick of it.

The silver lining to my forced consciousness is that I found yet another cool thing on Youtube. This time it's the Mountain Dew commercial that made me fall in love with Channing Tatum.



Oh Jesus Christ you frigging stoner fuck! Go to bed already!

See, the problem is that he isn't always living here. I guess he splits his time between Portland and someplace in Massachusetts. He wasn't here last month and so, coupled with the mysterious absence of "Thumper", it made me feel like I was living alone in this building. It was that quiet.

Sigh...

3:17. I'm going to bed. If he doesn't cut the shit soon I'm going to go take a dump in front of his door. That'll teach him.

Stupid hippies.

Paul Walker's Butt

It's 4:05 on Saturday. Nothing is going on. I am bored.



I discovered something kind of cool about the new computer the other day. It shipped with the latest version of Cyberlink Power DVD and this new version has screen capture capability.



So I decided to sit here and share the only reason to watch the movie Joyride with you. Paul Walker's ass (the other guy is Steve Zahn).



If you've never seen Joyride, I can sum it up in two words, "psychotic trucker". In this scene the guys are forced to enter a diner naked as payback for humiliating said psycho trucker earlier in the film.



Personally I think the human backside is a humorous body part. I mean, think about it. It's just a connection point between the torso and the legs. it's just there to help us walk. And yet straight guys and lesbians check out women's asses, and gay guys and straight women check out guys. And a good ass can totally turn us on. I wonder if it's an instictive thing? Maybe a nice ass makes us think the person is physically fit, thus a good choice for mating?



Personally I think Paul has a great ass. It's pretty obvious that his workout targets his upper body and not his lower body as much. then again, I suppose some of his proportions are just genetic.



Oh well. In any event, since I'm having a hard time coming up with posts lately, I figured throwing a little eye-candy your way might make you forgive me.

FYI, you can see the scene here and here on Youtube (you can find anything on Youtube, trust me).

Everybody Must Get Stoned

What happens when Bob Dylan has a concert three streets from my house? Every parking spot in the city of Portland disappears. In fact, there is a Buick from New Hampshire outside my bedroom window in our ultra-special over-policed parking lot. I'm curious if the tow goons will give everyone amnesty tonight or if they will be relentless in their pursuit of illegally parked vehicles. I bet there's a fleet of flatbed towtrucks scooping unsuspecting cars off the street as we speak.

Why aren't I at the concert? I don't like Bob Dylan. I'm not dissing him or his impact on music. I simply don't care for his music.

Alex came over tonight and we ended up walking all over the place and talking for about three hours (I'm stuffing potato chips into my mouth right now to offset the extra exercise). Alex is an interesting guy. I met him when he was 13 and I was 17. He lived about a mile away on my road. He was a very sheltered kid and I don't think he ever fought with his parents even once growing up. We were both into comics back in the day, and I remember the first time I went over to his house. The livingroom was covered in the thickest carpet I had ever seen. The funniest thing of course was the life-sized inflatable Spiderman hanging from his ceiling. I wonder if he still has it?

Is it even possible for someone to get laid while in possession of such a thing?

Like I said, we just walked around basically. The Old Port was hopping. Girls and guys and some creatures in between all living their lives. A couple girls were skateboarding in an intersection. Another group of guys were checking out a Neon's engine on another street. I gave my change to a guy who made a lame excuse about needing it for a friend. Ten seconds later a kid asked me for change and I had none to give. It was good to feel life around me. I guess I've been holed up in my nest lately refusing to go outside because I was feeling a little sorry for myself. But I didn't feel like I was on the outside tonight, I guess I just felt like another random component of a complex nocturnal society.

Carbon and Tahmoh

I didn't actually get up until 1:30 this afternoon. By the time I went to Best Buy and stopped for lunch the sun was starting to go down. maybe I'm turning into a vampire? I was up until 3:30 this morning.

Nothing is going on. I didn't vote, and yes I deserve lots of shit for that. I suppose there's still time now, but I just don't really care. I mean, the only thing worth voting for this year is to upset the balance of republicans and democrats in Congress. like it really makes any difference. The political machine in this country is so frigged up and corrupted that it's really just two faces of evil. Take your pick-- the one that will club you over the head, or the one that will con you out of your tax dollars. Or some mixture thereof.

Bleh. At least the frequent pre-recorded "vote for ______" calls will stop now.

I picked up Need For Speed Carbon today. It's the latest game in the series. I still miss the old days of having 10 or so cars to choose from and just racing arcade-style. Nowadays it's all about street racing. I mean, that's rad and all, but they're always set in a city environment and sometimes I want to race in the desert or along the coast. Women are always objectified, and the stories are all based on the player being a straight male. And then there's the music. Why does every modern racing game feature never-ending rap music??? Dude, I'd almost rather race to Willy Nelson than "Lil Hip-Hop and the Dawgs". As it says at Brendan's blog "I'm not old, your music really does suck". Ugh.

Now that I've slammed the game though, I must say that it's a very pretty. Even with the graphics all the way up, the framerate never dipped a bit. The cars are nice. There are still cops that like to chase you (and I like being chased). There is also one extra little perk to the game. One of the main characters--Darius-- is played by none other than Tahmoh Penikett (Helo from BSG). Here are a couple screen caps from the bonus disc that came with the game...



This is him with the dreaded "balls" that they use for motion capture. During the movies in the game, it's the real actor and a computer rendered background, but in the game itself, it's a 3-D Darius you see (for example, when he's in a car).



Tahmoh rigged up as Darius. Funny, I've never seen anyone dressed in an outfit like this. Then again, street racing in Maine usually consists of the family station wagon taking on Uncle Digger's tractor :)

"Hang on Peggy-Sue!! We're goin' down the hill and we're pickin' up speed!"

OK, off I go.

Pot, Politics, and Photos

If I had to describe the last two weeks in terms of the seven deadly sins, it would be "sloth". I have been one lazy lemming. I haven't been working out. I haven't been going out. In fact, yesterday I declined an invitation to go out for drinks because I looked worse than a road-kill skunk. I didn't want to bother to get ready.

It's a funk of sorts. The kind that happens when you finally have a bunch of stuff resolved, but aren't quite sure what to do now that all the previous issues are (at least in theory) behind you. I'll snap out of it. I'm not fishing for advice.

It was 45 degrees today, yet when I went out to get a sub I noticed that nobody was wearing anything warm. Kids still had T-shirts. Soccer moms had their thin little sweaters, and guys still had sweat shirts at the most. Maybe city folk are different than yokels from the sticks. Where I come from, people are probably wearing winter coats and boots by now. It seemed impractical to me. What if you break down? What if a rampaging pack of polar bears charges down from the north?

I opted to be tough like everyone else and wear a flimsy windbreaker when I went for a walk this afternoon. The sun was setting, and the steam was shooting out of the pipe at the laundromat and blowing away quickly in the wind. As I crossed High Street I noticed a guy on the other side of the street. His pace matched my own and it made me uncomfortable so I decided to detour up and walk on a parallel street after I got past Victoria Mansion.


Victoria mansion.

I was raised in homes with wood heat most of my life. I know what wood smoke smells like. But that wasn't what I was smelling as I walked today. Petuli... incense... all the obvious cover smells that go with pot. It was everywhere. I'm no prude when it comes to marijuana. I've never tried it, but I've been around it before. Given that I hate cigarette smoke, it goes without saying that I hate pot smoke. It's a preference thing, not an example of high-minded snobbery. I detoured back down to my street and started thinking about the logistics of drugs in a small city like Portland. Where does it come from? How does distribution work? Is there organized crime here, or is it just locals? How rampant is it really?

My street has three basic zones in my opinion. There's the Old Port end where I live, then there's the low income housing that starts up beyond Brackett Street, and then it magically transforms into brownstones and brick homes at Emery Street.



Here's the first house at the intersection. I think it's really cool, but if you look closely you'll see that it needs some repair work.



This isn't a good picture, but I wanted to show you this brownstone house. Do you remember the red vines from War Of The Worlds? That's all I can think of when I look at this :)



I think this porch is really cool.

Eventually I made my way down to the intersection where my road branches up to the West Prom. There are a bunch of political signs there, but there was one I simply had to get a picture of...



Dude... I bet that guy got some serious razzing growing up! Don't vote for him though, he's not only a Republican, he's a former Baptist minister. Probably not a good use of a vote for any "alternative lifestyle" types. You can read about the 2006 Maine gubernatorial race at Wikipedia, here.

Right now it's 4:30. Time for me to get out my bow and shoot some goblins. Hope you're all doing well.

p.s. Dave, I'll post a picture of the ram tomorrow to show you what I was talking about :)