I don't want to go.

There's nothing forcing me there. I could just stay home tonight, the way I stayed home today despite all of my grandiose plans for a road trip to Cincinnati.

A long time ago, over two thousand miles away, I did stop going. Sure, it felt weird for a while, like I was just wasting my free time by just hanging around my home. But after a while, after a while I noticed that I didn't miss going at all. In fact, it got to where when I did go I felt like I was wasting my valuable home time by going out to be surrounded by idiots.

Back then, nobody even noticed that I wasn't going anymore. Back then I was able to quietly slip away and just not come back for a week. Or a month. Or six months.

These days, I don't have the ability to just quietly slip away. These days, people would notice. And people would think they knew why I was gone. They'd start assigning blame. They'd sit there with their knowing nods and their gossip and their "poor Dave" and they'd all feel glad that it wasn't them that was staying away. That was such a pussy.

If I didn't go tonight, people would think they knew why. They'd be wrong, but I wouldn't be there to tell them that. They'd all enjoy their gossip and maybe even get a good laugh out of everything.

I'm not going to try to bullshit myself or anyone else by saying that their opinions would be completely unfounded. It just that, to paraphrase something I read recently - They can't see the forest because they're in love with the trees. One certain tree, in fact.

So I don't want to go tonight, but I'm going anyway. I'm going to show them all that I have not been defeated.

Yet.

This guy at work was kind enough to burn every episode of Lost to DVD for me. I know that the official DVD pack of season one is due out in the Fall, but this way I don't have to wait.

The first 15 minutes of the first episode was some of the most intense television I've ever seen. Can't wait to see it, and 24 episodes of Evangeline Lilly in all her beauty, again and again.

Also, the other day on the radio they kept yakking about this show Hit Me Baby One More Time and how it was a hit. I never even heard of the show (haven't watched hardly any television in several weeks) but I was looking through my TiVo's recordings, and it had recorded three episodes for me!

What a cool show! Even though I never heard of several of the performers, I still like it. The bands that I have heard of are there too.

I can't get Greg Kihn's The Breakup Song out of my head. He's right - they don't write 'em like that any more.

Rich O's is having this event, called Belgian Lambic By The Glass II, this weekend. Pretty descriptive, albeit uncreative, name. C'mon Roger, you can do better than that! I'd suggest FunkFest 2005.

I arrived a little late. VigilanteGirl was busily trying to pick a fight at work so I had to stick around and be her bodyguard for a while.

Rich O's was pretty crowded. This had been fairly typical for Fridays, but tonight's Friday crowd was not made up of the amateurs usually seen. Tonight the place was full of PBDs.

I've never had any lambic beer. I wanted to find something funky. Something musty. Something weird. It took me a while, but I was eventually successful.

Cantillon Bruocsella 1900 Grand Cru

(bottle) Don't know what vintage this was. Incredibly sour taste. Like sucking on lemon rinds. Not musty or funky at all. Drinkable, but not noteworthy.

Drie Fonteinen Oude Geuze

(bottle, 1999 vintage) Less sour than other lambics, but much more of a dry finish. A subtle hint of funkiness in both the aroma and flavor. Pretty damn good.

Cantillon Organic Gueuze

(bottle) Funky and Musty. Very dry finish. Hard to pin down exactly what this tasted like. I liked it.

Cantillon Lou Pepe Gueuze

(bottle, 2002 vintage) Like a regular, somewhat mild, Belgian strained through dirty sweat socks. This is what I was expecting from a lambic festival! A little sour, a little drying, a lot tasty.

Hanssens Mead the Gueuze

(bottle) I kind of expected that this mead/lambic blend would be disgusting. I was right. Probably the nastiest thing that's touched my tongue in years.

I spent most of the night standing up. When I finally did grab a seat at the bar some shithead came in. I really didn't want to deal with him so I moved over to the annex area and stood while I had a Stone Smoked Porter. Yummy.

Tonight, everybody thought I was in a bad mood. They were all wrong at first, but their suspicions became self-fulfilling after a while.

They can get their *own* damn brains to eat!

What pisses you off?

Created by ptocheia

Today, I actually accomplished two things.

Not much in the grand scheme of things, to be sure, but two things nevertheless.

There have been, for quite some time now, two glaring problems with this site.

1. You couldn't select text when using the Internet Explorer browser.
2. If you made your browser very wide the text just kept on getting wider with it.

Neither of these is a problem anymore.

The first problem was quite aggravating for me. It ended up being caused by a bug in Internet Explorer that only came up when "position:absolute" was used for layer positioning. I removed all such declarations from my stylesheets and html files and the problem went away.

While I was messing with my stylesheets anyway, I assigned a maximum width to the "body" element so that there's essentially a maximum width for the site - no matter how wide you want to make your browser window. This has been something that's annoyed me for a long time, but it obviously wasn't as serious as the text selection bug.

Oh yeah, I also moved the side panel to the right side of the screen. Looks pretty different over there, doesn't it?

Backwoods Brown Ale

(bottle) Given to me by a homebrewing friend. No description or name given, it was all up to me. Pours a nice amber/honey color with lots of foam. The aroma is very sweet - almost too sweet - and that sweetness is quite evident in the taste as well. A good brown ale, but perhaps a little too cloying for me to ever spend an evening drinking it. Much better, of course, than anything I've ever made.

Okay, here's the latest from Free Will Astrology:

I've known more than a few people who have slept with things they consider power objects: a teenager who liked to cuddle with the trophy he won for bowling a perfect game, for example, and a macho dude who was never without his stuffed turtle from childhood, and a woman who worshiped a special rock she had been sitting next to when she had the revelation that changed her life. I mention these precedents, Pisces, in the hope that it will help you feel utterly uninhibited about going to bed with a certain good luck charm or mojo-drenched fetish. I assure you there will be some magic in doing so.

So, if I understand this correctly, I'm supposed to (a) pick a favorite object, then (b) sleep with it.

Since my favorite object would probably have to be my pool cue, I'm more than a little hesitant to follow this advice.

The mechanics of me taking a long and hard object to bed just don't seem very appealing to me.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not for me.

Got a couple more trips coming up for work.

In early August I'll be going to Chicago for a few days, then the next week I'll be in Boston for two nights.

Looking forward to the Boston trip much more than the Chicago one. Nothing against Chicago though - it just doesn't seem like it'll be as much fun. I could be wrong though. I guess we'll be taking in a White Sox game. That'll be cool.

In Boston we'll be going to a Red Sox game. Going to Fenway Park is something I've wanted to do for a long time.

And sometime this Summer there's the possibility of a short trip to Philadelphia.

My insomnia is coming back. Yippie!

Inspiration is a funny thing. When I look for it, it's nowhere to be found.

Inspiration? Let's see, inspiration. Nope, don't think I've seen anything like that 'round these parts for quite a spell.

When I'm not looking for it, it sets up camp inside my skull, just behind my slowly expanding forehead, and begins pounding on drums while its companions, creativity and imagination, dance furiously to the jungle beat.

Right now, for example, inspiration is nothing but a faint memory.

I want to write something about something.

I want to write about natives living on a volcanic island.

When that volcano starts to rumble, and they know that they're going to die, do you suppose that some of them just wish it'd hurry up and erupt already?

Not because they're anxious to die, but because they just want to get it the fuck over with. So they can stop trembling with every belch of smoke or vibration of the earth. So they can stop wondering Is this it? Is this the end?

Living in fear is no way to live.

I've known for several weeks now that something horrible is going to happen to me.

Somewhere in the depths of space, a chunk of rock has been diverted from its orbit. It's begun a long slow spiral inward that will eventually cause it to land right on top of me.

There's no escape for me. I know that even if I should somehow survive the impact, I won't be the same. I'll have to rebuild myself. Again.

I don't know when this is going to happen. I'm certainly not looking forward to it. But a part of me, realizing the inevitability of it all, a part of me really wants to just get it the fuck over with.