n2+6=n8

11:08am: It's getting hot in here
Does anyone from these parts ever remember it being this hot in October before? The only days I’ve worn a jacket in the last month are when it was full force tsunami weather. What’s going on? Not that I’m complaining, it just seems to be a little creepy. Global Warming is just some myth created by liberals because they hate our freedom right?

8:39am: Faking a broke neck
I want Tea to come home and snuggle with me. I found a neck brace at my parents apartment when we helped them move. If I wear it to work you think they'll let me go home?

12:10pm: strangers love the well dressed clean guy
Anyone that knows me is aware of the fact that most of the time I look like a complete slob. Not a fat filthy slob, just a thin dirty dude. Thinking about the past I realize that I went through different stages of scrubiness.

First there was the dirty little boy stage that is undeniably charming in a Pigpen/Oliver Twist/Huck Finn way. From the age 7 on I was aware that my home hair styling ala mom and mud stained toughskin jeans set me apart from those children in better socio-economic bracket.

Then there was the awkward pre-pubescent conformity stage. I began bathing on a more regular basis back then, and I saved what little money I had in order to buy the horrendous late eighties fashions that would allow me to camouflage myself in OP and IOU amongst my peers. Under the veneer of mall garb my scrub still shown through.

Fortunately for me my teen years coincided with the golden age of Grunge. This seemed to be a blessing at the time, due to what I felt was the heightened social acceptability of my true scrub nature. During that period from 1992-1996 I truly thought I was some kind of greasy long haired flanneled-out corduroy-clad teen rocker. In reality I looked more like a malnourished homeless illegal alien. One of my strongest memories form that dope hazy time was when a very popular girl said to me "you were never cool until it was cool to be dirty". Damn, if she weren't right.

On to young adulthood: At this time,the anti-fashion junky look was no longer chic. So, I searched for historical role models that justified my lack of personal hygiene. History is populated with many men that spent their teens and twenties in a state of unkempt bodily filth and soul searching, most notably to me were; Jesus, St Francis of Assisi, Rimbaud, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, Kurt Cobain and all of the sweat hogs from Welcome Back Cotter. I had a vast array of cliched dirtballs to draw inspiration from.
I was that dirty corduroy clad know-it-all intellectual guy that sits at the front of all his college classes and wastes everyone's time by constantly interrupting and testing the professor's knowledge of the subject at hand. I was the guy that had five pairs of used black mens dress shoes that were in various states of decomposition, short greasy hair, almost a beard most of the time, totally a beard the rest of the time... "EMO SCRUB"

This brings me to my present state. I am a self aware dirty adult. I want to reform. I'm trying. Sometimes that shower just feels like selling out,so bourgeois. I've always associated being a scrub with being a rebel. Fuck you if you hate me because I'm dirty. Well, I try to stay clean for my grifriend's sake. Now when I'm completely sweaty, unshaven and stinky we refer to me as French Guy. Sounds sexy doesn't it? I really like the idea of a whole culture being ostracized because of a poor hygiene stereotype. Viva la dirt!

Because of my job, at least once a week I not only have to make myself look presentable, I have to dress up. I have found that this profoundly changes the way that strangers interact with me. It's like a crazy sociological experiment. People refer to my as sir. Women all tricked out in business garb turn their heads towards me. Strangers don't ignore me at the grocery store. Even small children seem to be calmer in my presence when I'm showered, shaven and wearing my shirt tucked in and a pair of polished wing tips. It's not as if I've never donned clean "nice" clothes before, I just never realized how drastically it changes peoples first impressions of you. I for one, am always suspicious of men in suits. Me default feeling is one of class consciousness. Maybe I simply associate those of a clean and well dressed appearance as just to serious. That shit makes me nervous. I actually don't enjoy the positive attention the "dressed up" me gets. It feels fake. I think I've always felt this way, it just wasn't until recently that my mind was able to put it into specific words.

9:38am: October Fest, Octoberfest or Oktoberfest?
I've been summoned to write an article about October fest beers pro bono. While this intrigues me and I feel that there are many interesting tidbits to offer regarding such a heralded beverage, I'm reluctant to light a fire under my own ass and get crackin' at the work I will not be monetarily compensated for. My question to all of you out there in digital dork land is this: what would you like to know about the Oktoberfest brews?

1:26pm: confuser blues
After finally getting my dial-up connection running, I am graced with the reminder of how much I fucking hate computers. The home office that Tea and I share is a post-modern hell hole for recently outdated technology to rest in hope of resurection. Beside me is a scanner we got for free. It is the size of a wheelbarrow. I don't know how to stop my printer. I may have just signed my life away to aol. I have about twelve programs that are involved with my digital camera, but I have no idea how to get pictures to go from one to another. The sbc people won't stop pushing their dsl on me. All the microsoft office programs seem to have been created by some Japanesse architect on mushrooms..... Why does this shit stress me out so bad? Is it because my mind refuses to work in a linear manner? Is this all just so obvious and I'm just blowing it out of proportion? Maybe it like when I first started to learn how to play the guitar and I learned all kinds of crazy jazz chords that I could barely play, subsequently all the easy chords then just confused me.

8:49am: My no good lying boss
Last week I caught my boss lying to me. At first I shrugged it off, but now it has sunk in to this place that is deep inside of me that forces me to ponder my relationship with him. I had been nagging him to finish the program for a wine tasting we we're going to do the next day. He had to fax it to some woman that was going to actually print the program so we wouldn't have to eat the printing costs. The wine tasting was a fund raiser and in instances such as this, having the charity do the printing greatly cuts down on some of our overhead. I'd offered to do the work at home but he declined. He sat on it, and then the night before the tasting he told me he'd sent it out. Well, while he was at a meeting, the person who should have received the fax called me and said that they never got it. The intended recipient then told me that he would just stop by the store and pick it up. By this time it was 8pm Wednesday and the tasting was at 6pm Thursday. No problem, I thought my boss probably just fucked up sending the thing somehow. When I went down to his desk to get the copy he'd told me that he had faxed I looked at it only to see that it hadn't been completed.

He fucking never finished it and lied to me about sending it out and then had me cover his lie. To say the least I feel used. I'm always trying to find the fine line between being humble and just letting people use me as a sidewalk. Well now I wonder how long he's been using me as a sidewalk. I get job offers that I turn down all the time, mostly because they would force me to buy a car and by no means do I have the financial ability or credit to do so. So I stay at my 11 dollar an hour job and bartend one night a week for extra money. For the longest time I felt like leaving would drastically change my life.

I thought that if I took another job I would be thrown into the corporate world of wine and making numbers and having to sell second rate grape booze that I didn't give a shit about. I'm just wondering if I leave, will i just have to deal with another more malicious asshole who's intent is to put a different set of wool lensed glasses over my eyes. I feel so stupid. The shitty thing is that I really like my boss and consider him a great friend and mentor. I know that he views me as something more than just a cog. He would literally be fucked without me. That's on e of the other reasons I put up with the shit. I don't want to screw him over, but my trust has been greatly shaken. What should I do?

9:31am: fucking fuck fuck work fuckstick
Fuck I'm going into work early. I should have just told my boss to fuck it. I've got to do the three S's before 11 now. I hate shaving. If I were a Quaker, Muslim, a fucking hippy, Orthodox Jew, lumberjack, bearded lady, crazy homeless guy or Castro I wouldn't have to fucking shave.

P.S. I think Tea and I are going to Trocadero at about 10pm tonight. 1/2 off bottles of wine! Our freelance drinking friends Stephanie and Jason will be there. Since neither of them seem to ever work, Tea and I go out with them solely to try and find out how they've procured their mysterious funds. Jeez, must be nice. (How's that for a cranky old man kind of statement)

10:47am: Last night I went out for a very good friend's birthday. He and I didn't get to talk much. In fact, he and I haven't been talking much. I know this is inevitable, some friendships just drift apart and then drift back like a comet making it's slow eliptical orbit around a star. Right now I feel that I can only see this friend with the aid of giant convex lenses.

I tend to justify people drinking too much when they are in bars. To me it has always seemed like a form of quasi-safe joyous revelry in a social setting. Going out drinking with friends is much better for one's mental health than staying at home and drinking alone. As a kid my parents never took me to bars, occasionally we'd eat at some pub and grill and each of my parents would have one beer. My mom went through a spell of having matinis by herself at home when I was in grade school, but if she was sad and angry she did a good job of hiding it in the way that the burden of motherhood and marriage teaches most women. The only time I saw down and out people drowning their sorrows was on TV.

Once I started going to bars, I found that male clubhouse comradery that I never quite had as a kid. A bunch of bros broing down with no curfew. Just as Brian Adams wished the summer of 69 could have lasted forever, I wished my life of noctural happy party bartime could be infinetly looped so I would never have to go to college or work again. All bars all the time, well maybe the occasional afterbar. At this time in my life it wouldn't be a stretch to say that I liked bars more than sex. My bros and bars were more reliable than any relationship I had as a young adult. Sure, once in a while somebody would go overboard and get into a fight with some steroid fueled meatheads, or drunkenly blow up at their girlfriend in public, but that was just part of the bar's beautiful mystique. I said the bar was reliable, not predictable.

I have been torn from the pull of the bar over the last fifteen months. Some bar loyalists would call this being pussy whipped. Responsible adults refer to this as growing up. I think it is simply the logical progression of someone wanting to take more control of their life and finances. I now endulge in many more childish activities than during my bar tenure. I tickle and laugh and soberly cry. I chase a girl all over my house. I walk outside and wake up early. I smell flowers and spend what little money I have on treats. I forget about the future for long stretches, because I'm so engrossed with how great right now is. Sure, I get sad but I don't try to self-medicate my sadness with bar. I'm alot better at allowing the sadness to make its arc and go through all the fellings associated with it. I used to just slam the sad right into the bar.

Last night I saw my very good friend slamming his sad into the bar. Fuck it was ugly. It reminded me of the Degas painting "Absinthe". In the painting a middle aged women is sitting at a table by herself wearing her Sunday's best beautiful giant 19th century dress. There is a small pale green cocktail in front of her. Her eyes are blank screens hoisted above dark circles. The feeling of loniliness is chilling. I saw my friend in this same scene and part of larger "scene". I felt hopeless. There was nothing I could do, the damage of drink could only pass with time. There was no happy birthday, and a goodbye would have been forgotten, so I went home hours before bartime.

3:10pm: I think I owe Haven a drink.

10:14am: The Panic
I need to find some info on the local group the panic. Rumor has it that they broke up. Does anyone know if this is true?

10:35am: Recovering Metalhead in track pants
I have to write about this because it's been in the back of my head since Tuesday afternoon. I was walking west on Brady street when this guy popped out of the laundrymat. He was wearing track pants and carrying clean laundry bundled up in a giant sheet. The guy was kind of chunky with about five days of facial hair. He caught my eye and stopped me, asking if I used to live in Racine. Immediatly I was hit with that hot flash of recognition. This guy used to bark-scream-sing in some forgetable metal band form Racine. He's a few years older than me. Back in the day he had the scary metal dude hair down to his ass and vacant freaky drug haze stare going on, now he looks like some pudgy unshaven suburbanite who just lost his job. The guy was fucking wearing those satiny track pants. This is someone who used appear in public with fake blood coming out of his mouth, he was once bone thin. His name is Kelly, and in high school I was petrified by the guy. He hated my friends and I for being "fake punk faggots", now he's greeting me on Brady St. with a fresh load of clean laundry all glad to see a familiar face. I don't know which version of this man is more horrifying. what happened? He said he lives on the eastside. Like the lame ass I am, I gave him my business card, those old scary metalhead eyes lit up once he realized I managed a liquor store. It was like I'd seen Osama Bin Laden sans beard eating a pork chop at a church festival. The wierd thing is I'd have a lot more respect for the guy if was stagnant and hadn't changed. He was probably on his way to Wal-Mart to buy diapers for his kid. Sometimes I'm sentimental and nostalgic for even the creapy things in life.

9:10am: Great Sidney Hih fire of 2005
Who knows about the fire at Sidney Hih that happened sometime last week? I saw some crazy flames coming out of the building on the news, I think on a ten pm broadcast a week ago. It looked like it was the room that my bandmates and I had once shared with Temper Temper. Maybe those Temper Temper guys really are evil and it was some kind of curse.

9:12am: haters
Maybe I'm stupid, but when I first started doing this LJ shit, I was hoping to be stunned by all the beautiful stories I would read from friends and strangers. Instead, most of what I read is second rate finger pointing hipster gossip. Thank you to all those who actually do contribute some writing with insight and humor. A big middle finger to all those that are turning this into the myspace for evil dorks with a penchant for writing about themselves.

I'm going to Chicago with my boss for a wine tasting today. Sounds like hard work. Well it is. For those that doubt, imagine trying to comprehend half-drunk Frenchmen babbling in Frenchlish about their passion for their own homemade boozey grape juice. I'll be tasting wines from the Loire valley in France. This area produces an astonishing array of wines that are bottled under the names of over 50 different sub-regions and villages. I cannot get faded. I have to take legible notes. The hardest part of the whole thing is the more you taste, the less apt you are at tasting. It's like eating a whole bag of doritos in one sitting, after chip 413, you don't even taste the putrid skim milk based nacho cheese flavor anymore. Your stoned mind only gets higher and more lethargic from the massive dose of dorito carbs and preservatives. Yum.

10:59am: Pimples, Matzoh and Banjos
I ate like I was a hyperactive twelve year old boy at Great America this weekend. Chocolate cake, ice cream, pizza, snickers bar.... now I have a giant zit. I think my body is over the hump though. I have some energy. I never eat sweets, when I do I feel completely sick.

Tea and I had an awesome time at Little Rock's passover dinner. Much wine drinking went down, as tradition. Belly aching laughter and real conversation about things besides rock and getting faded. As adult as all of this sounds, there were hours of childish revelry. Paul Finger was the oldest atendee, yet the most fervent intstigator of grown-up playtime. He told crazy stories about estate sales and and was swinging kids around by their legs dangerously close to open bottles of wine. I'm so glad we participated in this most wondreous of Jewish ceremonies. Maybe we will convert. My name is Nathan.

Today I'm getting together with george500 and some other friends to play some old timey music. I can't wait. I love playing the banjo, but never get to incorporate into any kind of colaboration. So, here is my chance. Dr. Nick is bringing over his violin. Hopefully he's brushed up a little. I have giant faith in the man's ability.

10:58am: Fuck, I'm angry for no good reason
Somedays I feel like I will become fat, bald and old all at once overnight.

10:45am: Can't cope with the pope shit
First and for fucking most I couldn't give a wilted communion wafer about the new pope. I am rather shocked at how ignorant and angry all these posts about it have been. All most of you people know about the Catholic church is little boys gettin touched and people getting killed hundreds of years ago. Well people did that shit, and poeple within the church are always trying to cover it up. The only news anybody seems to pay attention to is the bad news. The church still does shitty things, but they are also one of the leading proponents of peace and social justice through out the world. In the past they admittedly did horibble shit. They even killed people they latter declared as saints. Without the church nowadays, South America would be one steaming pile of Guerilla Wars and cheap oil for the US. If you don't know who Oscar Romero, or Cesar Chavez are, you have no right to go on these apathetic diatribes. This is coming from a self proclaimed uberliberal.

12:51pm: time, muse and music
There aren't enough hours already, and I had one stolen from me this weekend. Seems I can't get out of bed until 11am, when I used to rise at 10. I try to relax and I get anxious. This is the list of things i'd like to be doing but have been neglecting due to work and writing obligations.

1. Snuggling with my lady
2. Playing more music
3. Taxes
4. Cleaning
5. Writing to my brother
6. Visiting my brother
7. Visiting Mike Siedel
8. Getting along with my roommates
9. Writing songs

Here is the list of horrible things I've been doing instead of things on the first list.

1. Drinkin at the bar
2. Smokin hella cigarettes
3. Drinkin at home
4. Watching Charlie Rose
5. Reading about wine
6. Sleeping in
7. Worrying
8. Hating on my roommates in my mind
9. Spending 45 minutes at the grocery store to get two things

I'd did have a great time with Dr. nick last night, just playing guitar and piano. He and I need to do that more. I'm feeling better about his situation. Sometimes I worry that he just isn't giving it his all. The man is seriously talented. If he's happy with what he's got, I shouldn't imagine that he doesn't have what he wants. I can not wait until Tea I and I move in together. Some nights I feel lost withiut her. Like a fish that has been turned into a clam, never to explore the wide open sea again. I love people, but lately I find more solace in writing about them than hanging out with them.
At 26, I finally realize bars aren't a great setting for meaningful conversation.

11:07pm: Easter with the folks
My parents are fucking crazy. My dad never stops talking about sports and other related nonsense, though he is a saint and very cute and kind, it is beyond annoying. Plus, he has never cooked a meal in his entire life. What kind of fucked up 20th century luxury is that. Can you imagine being a grown man and the best you can possibly do for sustenance is heating up a microwave dinner? The guy can't even make a fucking grilled cheese sandwich. Because of his self-induced lethargic eating habits he has had open heart surgery and is diabetic. Fortunately my parents are still married. So, this means that the burden of feeding my father in a quasi-normal manner falls solely on my mother's shoulders. She is outraged by this. If it where up to him, he would be eating a one pound bag of m&m peanuts for breakfast. Under my mother's watchful eye he has lost 30 pounds since January 2002. He now weighs 180. Not bad, but it is a constant struggle.

He does slip up. Once, about a year ago, I got into his car only to see four empty Reese's peanut butter cup wrappers on the passenger side seat. I equated it to a crime scene. No 63 year old diabetic man should be eating these yummy chocolate peanut butter treats. What a fucked up childish endulgance. He's like a crack head for sweets. Yesterday he admitted to me that he drank a 20 ounce bottle of the new lime coke. Smiling and shaking his head in the yes manner he said, "oh it's good!" On top of him behaving like an 8 year old, he has a fey girly high pitched voice that raises an octave when he gets excited, which is almost constant. When he calls me at work co-workers say that there is some old woman on the phone for me.

Because of his inabilty to cook even the most basic of meals for himself, the concept of grocery shopping is beyind him. I doubt he knows the difference between cheddar and American cheese. My mother has to be completely explicit when creating grocery lists for him. He is frugal beyond belief, so she must write in bold, not the cheap kind. My mother feels defeated, his child like manner and general simple-mindedness have rendered him unable to complete even the most basic tasks that don't involve cars or sports in my mothers eye's. She wants him to grow up, but he is stubborn, and she is stubborn, and she has no faith in him. They both vie for my favor, bitching about each other to me as soon as I'm am alone with either of them. I am grateful that the two of them are still married. I'm one of the few people my age that I know who still has parents that are together, but it doesn't mean they are happily together.

10:38am: I'm back on top after two whole days of some mystery illness. I still went to work through all of it, which may cause an epidemic. I never get sick. The wierd thing was that my illness actually calmed me down. Because all I could think about was how achy and shitty I felt, I stopped cycling through the flash cards of worries in my head. All I did was drink orange juice, sleep and take tylenol cold, ok I had some straight whisky for antiseptic purposes. Work was hell, for those of you that don't know, I have to do some serious heavy lifting and that just wasn't floating. My muscles felt like dry fibers that would snap under the slightest pressure. The state of consciousness I was in reminded me of how I felt when I smoked weed 9 times a day everyday my sophmore year of high school. I didn't give a fuck. I left a bunch of shit unfinished and just didn't care. I had a valid excuse. I was high on my illness.

I simply can't call in to work. There are only seven employees, one of whom is the owner. I've had the same job for 6 years and only went home once. That was because I ate a cabagge roll from Sendik's deli and got a case of food poisining and Montezuma's revenge simutaneously. Does anyone work at another totalitarian hell hole like this? I felt too guilty not to go. I even woked through a case of mono once. They just cut my hours a little.

8:42am: Snowflake catcher
Last night I saw a woman silouetted in purple street light catch the first snowflake falling out of the evening sky. The singular snowflake lazily floated from the heavens and placed itself in her outstretched hand. She calmly caught it, as if these tiny miracles happen to her on an hourly basis. I thought my heart would burst. I thought of how much better it would have been if I had never seen such a thing rendered in the fiction of film.

That spoiled it for me. Maybe not spoiled, because the image is still emblazoned in my minds eye. But it definitly made me sad to think of how I've seen such beautiful things in movies and TV and such. That pesky, "it was like a movie" phrase popped into my head. When I was a kid, seeing those celluloid miracles on screen was life affirming. Remember what it was like feeling like you were the hero of the movie you just saw? How fucking mindblowingly excited you could get over an episode of Wonder Woman, and I don't mean the way I get excited over TV shows like Arrested Development now. I'm talking about the you almost shit your pants kind of junk food fueled child anxiety shitty shows and movies had. It seems that the superhero empathy fantasies gave way to the love and beauty fantasies sometime when I was about eleven or twelve. I fucking hate Steven Spielberg for this. I single-handedly blame him. That god damn girl in the pink dress in Schindler's List made me burst into blaring early adolescent full force firehose tears. When we watched the movie Glory in middle school Social Studies I got so choked up that I thought I was going to have to get a trecheotomy.

This rarely happens to me now, I want to blame this disappearance of wonder-lust on over exposure to fictional depictions of visual beauty, but that sounds like a cop out. I think I just developed some semblance of how adults should react to the pretty pretty. Sometimes a song or a book still do it for me, and I feel those things can never be spoiled. I still wish I could untaintedly bask in snowflakes being caught.

12:49pm: I've been fanning my balls all day. I interviewed Temper Temper on Wednesday, only to find out that they had already been interviewed for MKE, and it just came out. No love for the dude who wrote that. This sentence for instance,"The album is 11 tracks of synthesizer-laden, rhythm heavy rock that will give music critics trying to label Temper Temper major headaches." Contextually does this imply that upon listening to the album rock critics will get headaches? Hmm.. Is that a favorable review? The whole thing is very sassy as in Sassy magazine. I think the phrase ROCKER HUNK is in there subliminally somewhere. The picture MKE used is incredible. It's a stock shot from some band photo shoot. Glam vampires = glampires,I think someone else many of us know is a glampire. Maybe he should be Temper Temper's night time road manager. Sleep in a coffin in the back of the van during the day, prey on the blood of rock hungry teenage nymphs...

11:25pm: My girlfriend is slowly trying to integrate me into life in the 21st century, thus she created this live journal account for me. Hopefully I'll write with some frequency. It feels like all I ever do is work. Some of that work involves writing, which I thought we be fun in the beginning, but has just reared it's hot garbage breathed head to reveal itself as more work. I feel it would only be sensible for me to use this first entry as a vehicle to express just how awesome my girlfriend Tea is. Here is my list of Tea's virtues.

1. She likes cheese almost as much as I do.
2. She has combined her nerd power of writing with my nerd power of wine knowledge to create a wine
journal that in turn will be a keepsake and a document of our love.
3. She has yet to murder her roommate/grandmother.
4. She is sassy in the smart and funny way, not the angry and bitchy way.
5. She participates in the sensual and intellectually challenging game for couples called Word Court.
6. She rarely protests my stink.
7. Orange
8. Her idea of accessorizing is wearing two pairs of socks.
9. It takes her less time to get ready than me.
10. she makes cool stuff, like teddy bears with gaping bloody mouths for stomachs.
11. She comes up with projects like a school teacher would, except they are really just art projects for herself that are a cross between crafts and and soul bearing grown up stuff.
12. She allows me to act like a child that gets to drink.
13. She is so pretty, but maybe I just really like red hair.

This list will be augmented in the future.

10:53am: Tea just set this up for me without my knowing. But as soon as I look at Jon's computer (because my own computer consists of an abacus and yellow lined notepad), I will find out. Then I will make changes to my liking.

Also, I will add more friends because I know everybody and Tea is an elitest snob who was only able to figure out who four of my friends are. (Most of which, coincidentally, happen to be hers, including herself).

I've always wanted to be a drummer. I have no rhythm, but just look how closely I resemble Animal from the Muppets.

Also: I need a haircut. I look like a crazy person.