I've been listening to the great Gobos mp3s that Billy has just posted to his brand new website. I'm quite fond of the sleek design, particularly the image rollovers.

After three months of publishing only an ongoing experiment, and exactly one year after he first hit the web, Andrew has added Awolog, built out of charcoal and 100% standard html. You'll notice my silly face peeking out from behind his large, ripe head in the graphic at right. Welcome back, brother, even though you never really left.

I spent the part of the day today redesigning Equitone.com, the web site for my friends' band, in honor of their new CD. Design-related comments, anyone?

Usually we talk about weather in terms of comparisons:

"It was hot as hell in Phoenix, but it was a dry heat. This humidity blows."
"I'm so glad I'm not cooped up inside today."
"I miss all the warm weather we had last week."
"It's really crummy outside."

The latter of which clearly refers to the present conditions outside my bedroom window. When it's raining outside, I usually like to grab a sweatshirt and go for a damp stroll, do a little puddle hopping. That way I feel all warm and cushy once I'm back at my computer with a cup of tea, working hard, glad to be dry. It's stark contrast that makes an evening walk so satisfying after a day in the cubicle. Or a day in the pharmaceuticals.

If that's your bag, I mean.
No? Then would you mind if I took it? I could go for some medication.

I stayed up wicked late on Wednesday night, posting new photos to the Southers Marsh Golf Club site. "What a fine and helpful employee I am," I thought to myself, "working until dawn for the good of the business." I passed out around 4:30 in the morning, proud and exhausted.

At approximately 7:30 am, the phone rang. At the other end, a stranger with a funny voice started asking me questions about Southers Marsh Golf Course. After some confusion, I finally understood. It seems that when I recently submitted our course to be listed in Boston Globe's pre-season golf club listings, (published every year on the last Thursday in March), I included my HOME PHONE NUMBER as the number to get information and make tee times. People apparently save these listings and hang them in their offices.

So as spring approaches, my family will be receiving hundreds of phone calls every week from funny-voiced men asking questions. Why? Because I am fine and helpful.

Today the swell mail-lady brought me my fourth Muppet Show videotape. Peter Sellers, John Cleese and Dudley Moore guest star on these episodes. How rad is that? Is Dudley Moore the greatest actor of his generation? Is Crazy People the finest film of the 20th century?

This afternoon I was wearing my peacoat, drinking Ovaltine, driving my two-ton 1979 Ford Granada down snowy, sunlit streets while singing along to Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' (and passionately, I might add), heading toward the clubhouse I'm helping to build with a family cranberry growers who are getting into the golf biz. It was a doubly surreal moment: on the one hand, my life felt like a wonderful silly joke, as it sometimes does. And simultaneously, I felt caught out of time: there was no sight or sound present to suggest the year 2001. I was caught in some kind of early 80s media-prompted backstory, a world that never really existed for me the first time around, when I was 5.

These moments overtake me from time to time. And I usually remember them. I have a very visual memory. When I remember a mood or a mix of emotions that characterized a whole period of my life, these memories are grounded in one or two specific visual images, either moving or still, that are connected to geographical places and positions. Today's dual-themed moment of unclarity reminded me of two other anecdotes.

1) The first moment when I knew my life was a silly joke occurred during the summer of 1996. I was cruising around my neighborhood in the 1973 Chevy Stepvan ice cream truck, ringing the bell, hoping for a few early afternoon customers. My best friend Josh was heading out to run some errands, and he pulled along side me in his monkey-shit brown '79 Subaru GL Wagon. He looked up at me from his little Jap car, and I looked down at him from my giant American vending truck, and we proceeded to have a normal casual conversation about what we're up to and what's happening later. I passed him a couple packs of Smack Tarts. We said goodbyes and each proceeded to drive on through the neighborhood where we'd both grown up as if nothing unusual had happened.

A silly, silly joke.

2) One day during the early summer of 1993, at the age of 15, I found myself caught out of time. Joshua and I had joined our friend Justin for a drive to nearby Eliis Haven Campgrounds, to go swimming. Justin picked us up in Betty, his low-riding, baby-blue, Ford Fairmont wagon from the early 80s. We were wearing jean cut-offs, and had brought some ghetto-ass bath towels for a trip down to the old swimming hole. I think we were listening to a classic rock station. In a moment of peculiar discomfort, I wondered if the whole summer would be characterized by this kind of Breaking Away-esque vibe: diving in the quarry, running shorts, coke in glass bottles, Journey and Rush, weird singer/songwriters, checkerboard countertops, wood paneling. I suddenly felt worried that circumstances might ensnarl me in the strange world of 1976-1983 that I have since become increasingly afraid of, even though I lived through most of it. Simple, raggy haircuts. No sense of style. Poorly-lit smokey rooms. Strange programs on giant console TVs. Tacky suburban kitch. And nobody was a go-getter.

Elements of those two memories were wrapped up in that surreal moment during my drive this afternoon. Sometimes, I need media or technology to hold me fast to the present. Usually, I'd rather be living a silly joke of a life than any other kind, because stories never quit. And always, I wonder why it is that cars affect my moods and stick in my memories the way that they do. Funny, that.

While making the coffee run to Dunkies during work this morning, I was reminded of a feeling my body experienced a few weeks back and the sentence I meant to post about it: After 2 hours of sleep, 3 cups of coffee, 5 donuts and 4 hours of heavy lifting, nothing hits the spot like a pint of cheesy macaroni, a quart of Mountain Dew, and a bucket extra tangy crispy chicken.

I am never treating my body so poorly again.

In a related story, you know what I don't want? A Dunkin' Donuts Breakfast Pizza Omwich. Egg and pizza on a bagel? MMMMMM. The company's recent radio campaign to ironically market this culinary monstrosity to the umber-working man is completely lost on me. Somewhere, apparently, hard-working blue-collared fellas are saying, "Yes. Hells yes. This is the combination of Hebrew, Italian-American, and cholesterolic breakfast foods that I've been waiting for my whole life. Look, I can hold it in my fist and munch on it like it's a ball of beef!"

In a related story, I purchased my first box of garden burgers today. I'm going to try eating healthier. And I'm scared of getting a hoof caught in my mouth.

Mom's homemade stew, cornbread, and a glass of merlot. The perfect late supper.

Three times today I found myself feeling very strange. Not woozy, exactly. Not dizzy, exactly. Not like a mariijuana-induced cloudiness or hallucinogenic disjointedness. Not quite like an alcohol-related moment of confusion. I was eating breakfast with my family at Percy's, and slowly my vision grew crisp. There was a surreal vibrance to the light, and I couldn't quite place why I felt out of place. No pain, just a visual and mental buzzing. It happened later, while walking in downtown Plymouth, and again just now. Unexpected moments of subtle other-worldliness that aren't brought on by thoughts or feelings, as far as I can tell. It's a phisiological-related something.

Yesterday morning I drove to Boston on two hours of sleep, two cups of coffee, and one greasy veggie omlete from the Hearth and Kettle. It was a day well spent, roaming the city with friends visiting from out of state. We ate Tex-Mex at the Border Cafe and drank Red Bull and vodkas at Charlie's Saloon. I spent an hour walking around Back Bay with them in the 38 degree wind, wearing only my baby-blue Old Navy tee-shirt. I actually shop at Old Fucking Navy.

After goodbyes at 8:30 pm, I hop into the old Land Shark and manage to navigate my way southbound. I bounce to the South Shore Plaza in Braintree, to get measured for a tuxedo. My friends Virgil and Kathy will be married in May, and I'm ushering at the wedding. They've been together for eight and a half years, since the days when all three of us attended the same high school. The South Shore Plaza is a big, shiny mall. I arrive just before closing time.

The tux fitting goes smoothly. As usual, my long arms will require special alterations. Afterwards, I hit the Star Coffee Bean Express Perky Something-Or-Other kiosk to buy a cup of coffee for the drive home. I wait in line for a few minutes. There are two short men in front of me talking about business and chicks. When it's his turn, the bearded one orders a large iced coffee.

"That'll be... $1.40," says the girl, pushing buttons on the register.

"Hey, is there a discount for mall employees?", asks the bearded one.

"Yup," replies girly. "Are you a mall employee?"

"Mmm-hmm," he mumbles.

After he pays for his drink with a one dollar bill, Beardo glances over at his buddy with a smarmy look on his face. I watch them laughing while they stand waiting for the girl to mix a fresh batch of iced coffee. "You asshole," I think to myself, "You don't work in the mall, you moron. What a ghetto-rebellious way to save a few dimes." Finally, the boys wander off with their drinks, and I step up to the counter. I smile at girly, and order a large black coffee.

"One large coffee?", she confirms. I nod, and pull my wallet out of my back pocket. She presses a button or two on the register. According to its display, the total is $1.40. As I open my wallet, counter-girly asks, "Do you work in the mall or anything?"

I look down into the big billfold pocket of my wallet. It contains three crumpled reciepts, two business cards, one free-movie pass, and a single dollar bill. I hesitate for a very short moment.

"Uhh... yes," I say without looking up. "I do."

A couple of rainy days have left the golf course soaked, hills and fairways eroding away as usual. I spent a few hours this afternoon with Ted, Mike and Will, sweeping water out of the basement in the clubhouse we're building. We succeeded. The basement has a garage door-entrance, intended for golf carts. We swept the water out through this opening. For months, just outside this entrance, a big mound of hardened cement has been taunting us with its heavy-ass immobility. The guys who poured the foundation decided to dump excess crete onto a pile of dirt next to whit is now the garage door. We've been deliberately not paying attention to it all winter.

Today we chained it to the Back-Hoe and towed the sucker out of there. It took four guys and one metal machine to move this large man-made rock. On a construction site, everyone stays happy as long as people, tools, and inanimate objects behave properly.

It's all about sitting and talking, then driving and talking, then walking and talking, then driving and talking. Last night brother Jeremy and I hopped into Matt's Pathfinder and bounced downtown for a beer at RipTide's sleek-but-ghetto-ass bar and grill. They didn't even card young Jeremy, home this week for spring break, who looks about 38 with his wooly-wooly Franklin beard.

We drove the Pathfinder out along the rugged two-mile penninsula that is Plymouth beach, bouncing (literally bouncing) to Built To Spill and Modest Mouse. The beach is a long, thin, natural wonder. We strode a mile or so, on the sand sloping beside the soft sound of salty sea, under starry skies, speaking. Matt's leather jacket had a little jingle-jangle-jingle to it.

Walking and talking about movies, militarly, music, men.

Sometimes I wonder how much of my life during the past two years has been absorbed by loading time. I want DSL. My soul needs a faster connection. I bet it would speed up my overall information metabolism considerably.

On Friday I started gettting excessive amounts of email from our Mostly Ruthless Destruction of the 1981 Dodge Omni site. I usually only get two emails a day from readers who want to tell me their peculiar car-bashing stories. On Friday I received fifty. It seems that Cruel.com, a very popular site I'd never heard of, featured our little foray into auto-science as Site O' the Day. Very Nice. Hurrah. Thanks. But they call the site Cruel because once your meek little humorous pages chock fulla images start getting five thousand hits per day, the 2 gig per month bandwidth cap specified in your hosting plan gets blown by nearly 900%. I now have quite a hefty balance to settle with Dreamhost. They're Dreaming of breaking my legs.

And as the Host of these legs, I'm not having it. So I've sold out. I plastered the Project Omni site with links to the Amazon Honor System Donation page I set up moments ago. All donations made there will help me keep Project Omni and the rest of Sixfoot6.com up and running. If you can throw in a buck or two, I'll be your best friend. This site has been important to me for the last two years, and I'd rather beg for Benjamins than take it down.

And when I'm sippin' on g-juice in my shiny new ride, frontin' that I'm frontin' on a cellular, you'll know you done a good thing, baby-cakes.

My career with DinoTech is through.
Those bastards fired me on my first day back from Texas.
I'm going to go Paleozoic on their asses.

Actually, I'm letting DinoTech go. I don't work in archeology or technology. I don't even know how to dig, let alone use a computer. Everything I posted here between February 1st and March 1st was semi-fictional. Most of the posts were written several days after the described events, filtered through a slight alter-ego, and back-dated. I've been wanting to fiddle around with different kinds of narrative for a while now, but this wasn't the best way to get started. The voice lost my interest, and I haven't had the time to conjure up imaginative plots. Blame it all on February, perhaps. It was kinda cool, though, to write about people, events and ideas that happened one or two weeks earlier.

If I continue dabbling in fictional narratives, it will be somewhere else, in some other fashion. I'll keep it real here, for now. I was too close to the elephant, anyway.

Stories go forward and stories go backward.

When I was nine years old, during the summer before 5th grade, I went to camp for one week. I had been a Cub Scout since I was five. I had previously spent two weekends at Camp Child with my dad, shooting targets with rifles and bows, cooking tin-foil stew, tying knots, eating square meals and telling campfire stories. Father-Son weekends were so much fun, because each day seemed so long: we could tackle five different activities before noon. Hmm. No pun intended on "tackle". Camp Child, by the way, resides on a lake in Plymouth, MA, several miles from the house where I grew up Several miles from the house where I currently live.

My parents brought me at Camp Child in August of 1987, just before their 15th wedding anniversary. I was assigned a campsite full of scouts I had never seen, and a tent to share with a boy named Kyle I had never met. As my parents began to walk back towards their car I started to cry, and I ran after them in a confused, bawling mess, pleading with them not to leave, or to take me with them. They smiled, and I didn't quite understand why I couldn't stop crying. They left me, and I blubbered back to the campsite. After a few minutes I chilled out and joined the other scouts. After a few days I didn't want to ever go home again. We all talked about hanging out later, in the real world.

In sixth grade, I actually went the Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. This time I flew to camp, travelling by airplane for the first time. I travelled, talked, played, worked, ate, and solved problems with Smart Kids, male and female. Every night, we got to watch an OMNIMAX movie on a giant screen. Learning had never been so fun, and seemed so cool. If we the term had been around back then, everyone I met at Space Camp would have called it The Bomb. The week seemed to end too soon. I exchanged addresses with Brian, from California, who I never heard from. As far as I can remember, anyway. I rode the plane back home, loaded with new experiences, excited to talk to kids and teachers about all of the cool stuff I learned. But that stuff was hard to explain. It's hard to explain exactly why something is The Bomb to people who aren't right there inside it all with you.

I spent most of the day today flying home from Texas, where I spent a punk-rock few days in Houston following the whirlwind that was SXSW in Austin. The panels, parties, people, stories, conversations, ideas and walks left me excited and inspired to try new designs, attempt new projects, consider new careers. Mostly, I miss that feeling of being home in a new place, meeting new people who aren't strangers.

And I miss Alison, who is still in Texas. I am not in Texas.

i'm very much enjoying myself, warmth, walking, food, sound, these people, learning, panels, design, enthusiasm, peers, candy, empanadas, coffee, smoke, hotel, fray, changes, laughing, sitting, listening, friends, watching, drinks, parties, faces to names, names to URLs, mindlinking, commas, solid mattress, late conversations, bouncing ideas, shooting film, the mess we're in and oh...

Stories go backward and stories go forward.

A busy week and now I'm outta here...
so many webby people to meet.

I saw Traffic, alone in the theatre. I cried at the end, as Benicio Del Toro watches the baseball game. I don't cry very often. Only overwhelming simultaneity and moments of insense selflessness make me cry.

After seeing this new design (and a few complaints), management wants to transfer me to Dinotech.com web site development. Thank the Lord. AND they wanna send my to SXSW next week. In Austin, Texas. Not far from a nice young hitchhicker I've been emailing.