Oh 2009, how very unaware I was of you, until it was too late. And then I didn't care anymore.

New Years and my birthday are the two holidays I love the most. I think they hold for me the same sort of religious significance other people attach to Christmas or Easter. They mark the passage of time, which to me is this fucking miracle, that our planet is revolving and the solar system is moving and the joints of the universe continue to work in still mysterious harmony.



When I turned 30 this year, I had the pangs. They were there. They were mostly associated with the slow and tortuous death of a relationship which I had really loved and depended on, despite it's resemblance to an after school special at points. But even when you feel time starting to flex it's icy fingers, its still pretty cool to realize you've been alive for 30 years. 30 years. The 80s, the 90s, now the Aughts or whatever it is we're going to name them. And when I turn 31, it will be cooler. And 41, cooler still. Because I'm alive and not broken down and the apocalypse hasn't happened, and we are reminded every New Years that we are living human history.



I also had my camera this year, and Jere, and old buildings. How secure going to these places made me feel. Like an individual again. Like a thinker. Like someone capable of creating good things.



2009 was the year the internet and I got married. It was a long courtship. I've had a blog since November 3rd 2001. Here's my very first entry, my first imprint online, like a baby step:

The day I finally fell permanently out of the nest
Time: 8:23 pm.
Excepting of course unforeseen circumstances like bankruptcy, mutilation, running from the cops, ect...
I finally got my own apartment. It only took me twenty two years of being strangled by an umbilical cord to get it through my thick skull that I don't want to live with anyone else. So it's tiny, and...tiny, but its mine all mine and I can walk around naked as much as I want. After I get curtains. Okay, I know a first entry is supposed to be long and all, but I have to go unpack, so we'll talk later.

Funny how I had to relearn that particular epiphany like three more times. So this decade is when I started dating the internet, and then finally last year it proposed to me with a camera and a new site called Facebook and here we are. Ta da.

Fuck facebook, the really influential site of the decade was Livejournal. I mean, it's dead now, we all know that. But it was it, when it was the thing to be.



So now it's 2010 and I blog, twitter, and check my facebook page twenty times daily. My presence is seeded through out the regional webs like a small field weed. You are all there too, in little hidden spots. It is completely normal and natural for us all to type our daily feelings into mechanical windmills and scatter it for whoever will listen. And all those old arguments have been voided. It will shorten our attention spans - Not mine. I write and read more now than I ever did. It will ruin our relationships - I have more real life friends now than before, I'm more open and comfortable with people because I feel like the expectations are easily set. It is creepy to get with someone online - whatever.

I also like the fact that I think my digital world holds me to a more honest standard. It motivates me to actually be more interesting and do more interesting things. It encourages me to tell the truth, which means I should make a truth I'm willing to tell. Say whatever you want about assholes and liars online, in the future Your Online Morality is going to be a real, teachable thing. And we are caught in the birth of it now. That transition from creepy quirky geeky Web to shiny smooth social media digital community, that happened in the last decade. It should be what we all remember about the Aughts. Fuck, I hate that word.



I'm still fat. I'm still dirty. I'm still drinking more than I should, and overdrafting my bank account, and not being the most reliable friend when it comes to plans. I have a car, but it's so filthy, it doesn't really count as an accomplishment.



I have another fucking cat. God.



But I'm not as slutty, and I wear more appropriate clothes, and I don't slather 5 pounds of makeup on ever day. I've gotten really good at not crying. I don't get a crush on EVERYONE.



I'm not pregnant. I'm not desperate. I don't live in Phoenix. I find time to write. I get really interested in things, lots of things.



So these are all improvements. It's all one can ask for.



I think it is a successful year when you are so engrossed in it, that it goes really really slowly. I barely remember 2008, it feels like 2009 has been happening forever. I feel good about this.

I promise, as soon as this gets old, we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming...

If you could go anywhere on a big map of the United States made out of bricks and rocks in the landscaping of a park, where would you go?

I would lie down right in the middle of the Plains and warm myself like a lizard.

I would then go to Florida and kick the shit out of it.

How will the world end?

Well, one day I will find myself 30, and in the insurance field, in a relationship I've been in forever that causes me no great happiness. But I'll have a routine. Then one day something odd will fall out of the sky, and Philip Glass music will start playing all the time. I'll start to see signs that maybe my world isn't what I thought it was. Everyone is following me, everyone is watching me. I'll have paranoid thoughts, and lose my trust in everyone around me. It will seem like the entire world is trying to keep me in one spot, I will never be able to leave. I try to make plans, to focus on my desires, but I am foiled at every turn. Finally, one day, I will make a daring break for it, and slip away on a boat. I will sail to the end of the horizon. It will storm and fury, but I'll know that it's just the world I grew up in trying to keep me there, and I'll tie myself to my boat and sail onwards, until one day I hit a wall. And it's the wall of the world, where the sea ends. I'll walk along the edge, running my hands along painted clouds, until I come to some steps and a door. Then Christof will try and talk me out of it in a large very scary voice from the sky. But I know, waiting on the other side of that door is the real world, and somewhere in the real world is my one true love, and I'll walk through the hole in the sky and away.

The End.

Ask me anything

I love you people asking me questions.

is there anyway we county residents can whack every shitbum politician in this town and their puppet precinct bosses? Okay. Sure, there are some who do good for us serfs, but could it be like a combined hit and no one gets caught?

By "whacked" and "hit", I assume that you are referring to the time honored Welsh tradition of pummeling public servants with large salmon every spring. It's an oldie but a goodie. I think the execution of it should be simple. We just need to start a grassroots campaign online, storm a meeting or two, and get everyone a very large fish.

We'll need cabbage to make the traditional fermented celebratory drink, and you should probably get started on that now, it takes a few months.

Do you like me yes or no.

I like this question for sure. I've always like this question. I think there's this great, completely unique, unable to be fabricated sincerely, makes the inside of you smile no matter what the source feeling that comes when someone asks you that question.

So yes, I like you, because you asked me that question.

However.

There are lots of ways I could like or dislike you, seeing as I don't know who you are at all. I could think you're really cute. Or I could think your face is kinda weird. I could maybe have no idea of your existence at all, and you just submitted this random question cause you thought it was funny, without knowing at all what's going on in my inner or outer life, and anticipating it might mean anything at all. You could be an ex. I could be waiting by the phone for you to call, or I could be refreshing your FB page while not writing you anything, or I could be actively trying to forget meeting you that one time cause it made me really uncomfortable.

I'll tell you what. 1000 dollars, I like you.

When was the last time you really wanted to punch someone's lights out, and why?

Look, I don't punch things, I throw things. And it's a terrible trait, and something I hate and try to control, because I break shit. Some people just break shit. So I don't like to talk about it, because it's part of the very large dark side of me I try really hard to keep from anyone.

My lighter side also headbutts people a lot, like a baby dinosaur. Someone used to call me a turtle.

Ask me anything

formspring.me

What are you most excited about right now?

Right now, I am not extremely excited about anything. I mean, I just got through setting up one more way for me to interact meaninglessly with the online world, so there's that. I have a decent Gruyere in the fridge, so that's good, however it also reminds me I have to do my dishes so I'll actually have a knife to cut it with. And while I could be doing my dishes now, it's actually preferable to me if I sit here typing out some bullshit than to actually have any clean silverware. I would say I'm excited to be thirty and to like myself, but clearly that's a doubtful truth.

Ask me anything

High Treason (for reasons it's better not to know, it was either this or INXS greatest hits, sorry)

High Treason: the act of betraying your king or state.

Selling secrets, planning coups, attempting or succeeding at assassination, giving information to the enemy during a time of war, spying, poisoning the queen, kidnapping and replacing the president with a robot, not pinning the white queen's scarf down properly so that it keeps blowing away, dancing too close with a person of the opposite or equal sex, also perhaps if that person is being pursued by the FBI for involvement in a cover-up of real data on algae swarms off the coast of North Carolina, handing a nuclear ballistic sub over to Alec Baldwin, conspiring with Austria while teaching your son the prince how to masturbate, opposing Canada's expansion into the West, fighting on the side of Italy, supporting Jacobites, playing with puppet regimes, being on the losing side. Carrying the Hive Queen's last remaining egg around the universe.

Petty Treason: the act of killing your superior.

A servant killing their master, a clerk killing their boss, a sailor killing his ship captain, a slave killing her field boss, an astronaut killing the head of the mission, anytime you kill a police officer ever, a princess killing the evil wizard, killing angels, killing Buddhist monks, killing whales, killing judges, killing polar bears, killing anything and all things that don't seek to kill you.

Moral Treason: committing an intentionally moral or immoral act in an attempt to disturb the balance of our morally ambiguous universe.

See: everything you do on a day to day basis that you think is leading you to hell or heaven. See: love, hate, anger, sin, charity, adultery, teaching, corrupting, feeding, starving, kissing, punching, stabbing, fucking, drinking, smoking, cutting, spending, saving, preaching, singing, recording, typing, dancing, beating the crap out of, also humiliating, shaming, praising, adoring, gentleness and violence.

"Robbie! I want Robbie!"

Christmas Eve is the official dinner day at my parent's house. So Christmas Day tends to be a little more slack. This year was the ultimate slack, with my parent's opting to go see Avatar instead of do dinner, which left me with nothing to do all day. I could have been productive, but instead I went and drank 1.50 Dortmunders at the vegan bar.

There was this whole billing of bands, which turned out to be mostly drunk boys shouting things over presampled music. Punks of the world apparently can't be bothered to even play the guitar badly anymore. The bartender did the same thing, but he was hilarious and good at it. The other guy ended up sitting on the floor of the stage making pussy references in a mumbled desperate broken voice. It was like watching your asshole friends do karoake, where they get up there and just talk over Mariah Carey. Oh the rush of the don't care didn't care.

I met the guy who's been growing out his beard for charity. I lost three dollars to some other guy because the Cavs actually won. I thought about Peter a little bit, because Christmas Day is the day I miss him most. The rest of the year, its like, he's just this dead person, like everyone else who's dead. But the anniversary of the actual event seems an okay time to think about him, and that stupid bar is probably the best place in Cleveland to do it. Other people might argue that he would like the Spitfire more, but they're wrong. Peter liked stupid drunk young punks more than anything else, and couldn't stand bitter old punks who thought too highly of themselves. Almost everyone in there was ugly, he would have liked that.

Someone stole my copy of Asimov short stories while I was watching some guy play pinball. I suspect it was the guy who slurred something about fucking him, and then also threw the chairs down later, one of which had my coat on it, and thats just the sort of thing that happens. I would be angrier about it, but I'm the one who left it by my beer on the bar. I just want to think about it being read, and not tossed in a parking lot somewhere, or torn into scraps. Who knows, maybe he just threw it across the room and no one noticed. I didn't.

Another guy made fun of me for having a blog and calling it that. What else am I supposed to call it? A journal? A website? I don't understand the revolutionaries who don't want to use the internet. I mean, being a luddite doesn't make you cooler. It just makes you less connected. But you don't want connections to people really, you just want to be left alone to drink and scream and feel superior, which is fine. I get that. It's your bar, not mine.

Later driving home, I had to stop at a Dairy Mart and buy overpriced cereal to eat, because nothing is open Christmas and even though I know this, I never plan for it and always end up with nothing to eat at home.

Edit: In thinking about, the reason I like the vegan bar over the aging punks bar is that at the vegan bar people throw things and are violent, but not towards anyone in particular. They're just being destructive because they can. Which I like. Aging punks will talk your ear off about honor and loyalty, and how they want to beat the shit out of this guy because he did this or that douchebag thing. But they lack the energy to just be rambunctious without fear or anger fueling their motions. If someone throws a chair, it's good fun. If someone throws a chair at you, it kinda sucks.

December is the only month when January is not as far away as it sounds

Hey Mom, this is me drunk at 3am Loving Loving my new awesome giant panda bear of a red fluffy bathrobe, with matching slippers. That's what you bought it for, right? Also, I will coming over late-er it turns out. Because that picture was actually taken at 3am.

I had an allergic reaction to the Motrin I took after dinner, which made my lips get all Zsa Zsa Gabor swelled (also every cat scratch on my body, of which there are a lot). So I had to take some pictures, to remind myself to get collagen sometime. They were the hottest lips ever. Seriously, my lips are thin little slivers in real life, they do not look like this. Rabbit Hole of plastic surgery here I come.

Plastic surgery would appeal to me more if I could get horns. Or something.



Note: Aleve makes my eyes swell up like Quasimodo. Motrin makes my lips swell like water balloons and also maybe go a little numb. I wonder if I've become allergic to all pain killers, or just the cheap ones. Maybe my body has decided to get all quality not quantity. Snob.

Famous Santas Through the Ages

Holy Santa Claus. Loves you and gives you presents. Unless you are one of his serfs. Or an infidel. Wants you to go to Midnight Mass with your mother, you ungrateful churl.


Natural Selection Santa Claus. Invented the popular "coal for the weak" practice.



Jolly Santa Claus. Made drinking with your mom and telling really exaggerated stories to punks at bars that you later may or may not sleep with a holiday tradition. Can turn from jolly to mean in 12 seconds flat.


Sentimental Santa Claus. The reason Christmas albums exist and why you can't stand to go the grocery stores on holidays. Just as much of a drunk as Jolly Santa, but cries more.

My Dad Santa. Does the dishes like a fucking champ, and always get the movies from Blockbuster. Will never ever tell you what he would actually like for Christmas, which means he gets lots of books, CDs, and socks.

Apparently I am an Expert at Getting Rid of the Aftertaste

So here. I will share my wisdom. All of the following things will clear your innocent little mouth of whatever travesty you've ingested. However, not every one clears everything. It's like a puzzle! A cruel life affirming puzzle that probably won't help you at all! Fun!

Aftertaste Killers

1. Peppermint Schnapps

2. piss colored Listerine (the other stuff is useless)

3. Cigarettes

4. Wet Paper Towels

5. Hard Liquor

6. Kissing

7. Expensive ice cream

8. Charity work

9. Hitting someone in the face

10. Painting something

11. Wearing makeup

12. Being really cruel to someone online

13. A salad

14. Edgewater Park

15. saying I'm sorry

16. pickles

17. peppermint bark

18. a rural roadtrip

19. the Concert for Bangladesh

20. fucking

21. fucking the wrong person

22. talking to your mom

23. going to an art gallery by yourself

24. Moving out of Tremont

25. blocking their emails

26. illegal substances

27. reading some political blogs

28. making your own hummus

29. adopting a cat

30. A shovel and some lime

31. nailpolish

32. blind adoration

33. bloody marys

34. yakuza movies

35. throwing your cell phone out the window

Edit: 36. Marines

Avatar: The Rise of the Blue People who conveniently bear a resemblance to your cat

*Note, there may be spoilers in here. If you're the kind of person who is going to this movie for the stellar plot, you should probably go elsewhere. Or get a clue.*

First of all, here is my prediction, or rather a weak hope. Avatar will be the last movie to get away with a really crappy script, but get critical acclaim anyway because of the CGI effects.

When I saw Coraline, I thought to myself that 3D had finally come into its own as a special effect. The way that Tim Burton used it, it became part of the picture, not the point of the picture. It was, for lack of a less banal word, artistic.

Then James Cameron came along and bludgeoned it to death.

I don't think I really expected anything else. After all, Titanic took awesome scale ship shit and beat it up until it was lying bloody on the basement floor gasping for life. And don't get me wrong, I am a sucker for visual awesomeness. The first half of Avatar was well worth the price of admission. It was beautiful and grandiose and cute. I loved the drops of water when he woke up from Cryo, and the fluorescent gay club vibe of Pandora after dark is like walking into your favorite segment of Fantasia. There were dragons, who doesn't love dragons? Also, and this is key, there was not much talking. There was random crap dialogue, but you could safely ignore it and get involved in the movie.

The exact line where the dialogue became unbearable is, as my viewing companion put it, where the alien sex happens. Alien sex ruins everything. Always. That's when the Blue Braveheart Revolution really gets going, and if I was writing this movie, everyone would have died and the Corporation would have gotten its "unobtainium" (what the fuck?), and a real moral lesson would have been taught.

Instead, the movie quickly goes the route of every indigenous versus civilization movie ever made, and blah blah blah heart is everything and if you're good you win and Mother Earth and all that crap. You know, they didn't really win children. They just beat off one part of a giant army that now is going to come to that planet and nuke them all. Or give them small pox. Or syphilis from all the alien sex.

Also, I am sick of the word Pandora. Can we just officially enter the modern usage as "decent internet radio station" and be done with it?

The best part of my movie going experience was finally going to the Capitol Theater on W. 65th, which apparently I'm supposed to call Gordon Square now. Theater 1 is huge. We were the first ones in there, and we spent twenty minutes discussing how the hell they change the lights on the chandelier. It wasn't a movie theater, it was a bonafide auditorium, and easily my favorite theater now, closely beating out the Shaker Square one that looks like you could rollerskate in front of the screen.