It is now thirty-six hours since I have last slung a drink. I feel like I may recover from the weekend eventually, but here's hoping that at least I won't have a repeat anytime soon. Twenty-five cent drinks can't get over the bar fast enough. That was Thursday night. Animals in suburban camoflauge (kakhis and polo shirts and those shirts that make all the college girls look knocked up).
Friday was fine, I guess, but I was too tired from Thursday to really enjoy it. Saturday I was apparently so rude to a girl (I took away a beer that she brought in to the bar - a beer we don't serve) that she decided to write about it on her credit card slip. Bitch tipped us less than ten percent anyway, and had the nerve to designate it specifically to J in her note because I was so awful. Oooooh, thanks. We'll make sure he doesn't spend all of that in one place.
Other than that I spent a bunch of time in the yard again. Still don't have the veggies in the ground, but I'm hoping to deal with that this week.
Looks like the b.h. and I might head up to TwangFest in St. Louis in June. Blue Mountain is supposed to reunite for a show there, and even if they don't I want to see Centro-matic and Tim Easton. That weekend happens to be T's birthday, too, if I'm not mistaken. He's going to meet us there.
I am looking into the Organic Farming prograqm that they're starting at UGA this year. Not sure if I need to be a full-time UGA student in order to participate, or if there is a non-student program. Either way I'm interested. Seems like a logical step.
I know this is another boring post, but honestly, the weather is too nice for me to hang out and be clever indoors.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
Heh Heh Heh.
Either this thing is skewed, or the b.h. is totally gay. I cut and pasted several random entries into this thing and I came up solidly male every time. Maybe this is why I hate "chick-lit" so much.
http://bookblog.net/gender/analysis.php
http://bookblog.net/gender/analysis.php
Hubbub.
So I'm standing in the walk-in cooler, sending A.J. a text message about the lovely crowd of mouth-breathing frat kids who are drinking 25 cent well drinks. I do this because I know he will find the humor in it, and because I miss him and I want him to know that we are thinking of him (and his lovely wife, who I never see). Suddenly, I hear a loud crash and the light inside the cooler goes out. It seems that the cheap liquor has finally done its work, and there is a bit of a brawl outside the door. After groping my way to the door, I managed to shove it open and grabbed the first guy I saw (happened to be D, one of my favorite co-workers). Then I grabbed the next guy I saw around the waist, dragging him from a pile of sweaty, meaty drunks and shouting "Whoa! Whoa!" to very little effect. Thankfully, we had a crack door staff tonight, with our old door guy T making a brief return and D back from a "professional bike tour" (I can't write that without quotes because it's just too silly), as well as the best of our current lineup. So they got it taken care of right away. Nobody had any idea what started the whole thing (except those of us who knew how much liquor had gone across the bar), but it didn't slow things down for long.
I am completely losing my train of thought right now. Guess I should try to eat and sleep. More later, I suppose.
I am completely losing my train of thought right now. Guess I should try to eat and sleep. More later, I suppose.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Fancy.
See? I can find endless ways to avoid actual posting! Had a lot of trouble putting up a pic- couldn't get one to fit where I wanted it, so I skipped it. DO check out the video to the left, though. The band is The Glands, who are possibly the best thing ever to come out of Athens, and it was made by my friend J, who is a bit of a genius.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Copout.
I just want to say that I am feeling quite guilty about my utter lack of posting. I blame A.J. because he was in town and therefore I went out every night. It was fun. I also got a lot of gardening done. There will be photos. Jamie's first farmer's market finally happened last Wednesday, too. I was there. I think I accidentally erased the only photo I took of it. Crap. Well, there's another one tomorrow, so we'll see. And I promise I will get around to updating and uploading and whatnot. Eventually.
Baggage.
After reading both the new issue of Vanity Fair (the annual green issue) and the new Wired, as well as a couple of back issues of Dwell, all of which touched on the environment and how we're mucking it up right now, i was pleased to find that our best local grocery store has finally come out with reusable shopping bags.
I realize that there was never a law against bringing your own bags to the store, but these are specifically made for groceries, and I now have absolutely no excuse* for using plastic bags. In our defense, the b.h. and I do manage to recycle most of our grocery bags anyway- we use them to line our bathroom and bedroom trash cans, and for dog walking purposes, but now we don't have to. Check this thing out:
It holds a lot of canned goods, as well as a large bag of coffee, potato chips, and a pint of half and half, with no sign of struggle (the bottom is slightly reinforced) and room to spare. Kick ass. I hope all stores start doing this.
*Except for my terrible memory, which I will attempt to circumvent by simply keeping the bags in the car at all times.
I realize that there was never a law against bringing your own bags to the store, but these are specifically made for groceries, and I now have absolutely no excuse* for using plastic bags. In our defense, the b.h. and I do manage to recycle most of our grocery bags anyway- we use them to line our bathroom and bedroom trash cans, and for dog walking purposes, but now we don't have to. Check this thing out:
It holds a lot of canned goods, as well as a large bag of coffee, potato chips, and a pint of half and half, with no sign of struggle (the bottom is slightly reinforced) and room to spare. Kick ass. I hope all stores start doing this.
*Except for my terrible memory, which I will attempt to circumvent by simply keeping the bags in the car at all times.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Satisfaction.
There's just something about a good heavy rain* falling on a freshly planted flower bed.
*This photo is pre-rain, and a bit old actually. And you can't see anything, so it's relatively pointless. But uploading it and adding it to this old post made me feel like I was doing something, as opposed to fucking off, like I have been. Ah well. The bed is even more full now. I'll get back to taking photos soon now that I have finally uploaded all the ones that have been in the camera for ages.
Well Said.
"No matter how corrupt, greedy and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC"
-Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD WAS MUSIC"
-Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Devastated.
There are no other words, really. First Hunter Thompson, then Molly Ivins, and now this:
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84
POSTED: 1:46 a.m. EDT, April 12, 2007
By CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 8 minutes ago
Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. Indianapolis, his hometown, declared 2007 as "The Year of Vonnegut" — an announcement he said left him "thunderstruck."
He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
"I think he was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.
His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated tens of thousands of people.
"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.
The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.
"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.
"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."
Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a "fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker," and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army.
When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan," "Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.
Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union. The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.
His characters tended to be miserable anti-heros with little control over their fate. Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap," he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.
He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction work, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain future of the planet.
He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."
In recent years, Vonnegut worked as a senior editor and columnist at In These Times. Bleifuss said he had been trying to get Vonnegut to write something more for the magazine, but was unsuccessful.
"He would just say he's too old and that he had nothing more to say. He realized, I think, he was at the end of his life," Bleifuss said.
Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz.
Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told The Associated Press in 2005.
"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."
___
Associated Press writers Michael Warren, Hillel Italie and Chelsea Carter contributed to this report.
I have to go now.
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84
POSTED: 1:46 a.m. EDT, April 12, 2007
By CRISTIAN SALAZAR, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 8 minutes ago
Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. Indianapolis, his hometown, declared 2007 as "The Year of Vonnegut" — an announcement he said left him "thunderstruck."
He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
"I think he was a man who combined a wicked sense of humor and sort of steady moral compass, who was always sort of looking at the big picture of the things that were most important," said Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times, a liberal magazine based in Chicago that featured Vonnegut articles.
His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated tens of thousands of people.
"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.
The novel, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.
"He was sort of like nobody else," said Gore Vidal, who noted that he, Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were among the last writers around who served in World War II.
"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull."
Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, a "fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker," and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army.
When he returned, he reported for Chicago's City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, "Player Piano," in 1951, followed by "The Sirens of Titan," "Canary in a Cat House" and "Mother Night," making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.
Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.
Many of his novels were best-sellers. Some also were banned and burned for suspected obscenity. Vonnegut took on censorship as an active member of the PEN writers' aid group and the American Civil Liberties Union. The American Humanist Association, which promotes individual freedom, rational thought and scientific skepticism, made him its honorary president.
His characters tended to be miserable anti-heros with little control over their fate. Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard... and too damn cheap," he once suggested carving into a wall on the Grand Canyon, as a message for flying-saucer creatures.
He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with "A Man Without a Country," a collection of his nonfiction work, including jabs at the Bush administration ("upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography") and the uncertain future of the planet.
He called the book's success "a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life."
In recent years, Vonnegut worked as a senior editor and columnist at In These Times. Bleifuss said he had been trying to get Vonnegut to write something more for the magazine, but was unsuccessful.
"He would just say he's too old and that he had nothing more to say. He realized, I think, he was at the end of his life," Bleifuss said.
Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister's three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Ann Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, the noted photographer Jill Krementz.
Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he'd prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.
"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut told The Associated Press in 2005.
"My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."
___
Associated Press writers Michael Warren, Hillel Italie and Chelsea Carter contributed to this report.
I have to go now.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Reading Roundup.
I have spent a whole lot of time recently reading newspapers and political websites, which I realized is causing me to fall way behind in my book reading. Infinite Jest has once again proved incredibly thick and slow-going. I love it, but I tend to do my book reading right before I fall asleep, and that book is too much work (both mentally and physically). I really need a vacation in order to get serious about it.
On a recommendation from my friend K, I picked up a couple of Carl Hiassen books at a rummage sale recently. I am reading one, but I'm too lazy to go upstairs and check the title right now. It's about a murdered musician and a reporter who is kind of a fuckup. It's funny, and pretty smart, and in general a good, easy wind down at the end of a day. Thumbs up.
I still have the Shakespeare book on my night stand, but I haven't made any progress. Like the DFW book, it is really large and cumbersome, and I will need more time in larger chunks to get through it.
I have also been reading a lot of magazines, the best of which is a literary mag called The Believer (www.believermag.com), brought to us by the wonderful people at McSweeneys. The Believer is as close to being in a literature class as my brain has come for over ten years. I love it. I have been reading it monthly for over a year, and recently grabbed a stack of back issues on ebay for next to nothing. I love it.
Honestly, my heart isn't really in this post, but I am trying very hard to post more often. Sorry it's not that fun. I really have to go read now.
On a recommendation from my friend K, I picked up a couple of Carl Hiassen books at a rummage sale recently. I am reading one, but I'm too lazy to go upstairs and check the title right now. It's about a murdered musician and a reporter who is kind of a fuckup. It's funny, and pretty smart, and in general a good, easy wind down at the end of a day. Thumbs up.
I still have the Shakespeare book on my night stand, but I haven't made any progress. Like the DFW book, it is really large and cumbersome, and I will need more time in larger chunks to get through it.
I have also been reading a lot of magazines, the best of which is a literary mag called The Believer (www.believermag.com), brought to us by the wonderful people at McSweeneys. The Believer is as close to being in a literature class as my brain has come for over ten years. I love it. I have been reading it monthly for over a year, and recently grabbed a stack of back issues on ebay for next to nothing. I love it.
Honestly, my heart isn't really in this post, but I am trying very hard to post more often. Sorry it's not that fun. I really have to go read now.
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Chilling Out.
Literally, I mean. The temperature is dropping quickly, which means I only have time for a quick catchup. Gotta walk the hounds before it gets too cold.
Have finished bringing in the seedlings and covering the plants that are already in the ground. Waiting on a batch of organic pomegranate jelly to finish processing. Last night I made some fizzing bath bombs and lavender soap. Tomorrow I hope to bake some cookies and dog biscuits, and maybe, just maybe, make some ancho chile hot chocolate. Hell, if my first farmer's market is gonna be in the cold, I might as well make the best of it.
Here's a nice shot of the very weird sunset we had last night.
Have finished bringing in the seedlings and covering the plants that are already in the ground. Waiting on a batch of organic pomegranate jelly to finish processing. Last night I made some fizzing bath bombs and lavender soap. Tomorrow I hope to bake some cookies and dog biscuits, and maybe, just maybe, make some ancho chile hot chocolate. Hell, if my first farmer's market is gonna be in the cold, I might as well make the best of it.
Here's a nice shot of the very weird sunset we had last night.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Pollen Panic.
It's that time of year again. Birds chirp, bees buzz, and my formerly forest green car is now a mucky shade of yellow.
(That line is where I rubbed off the pollen with my finger so you can see the difference in color.)
Are you sneezing yet?
I hope not, because if your nose gets too stuffy, you won't be able to smell this:
I appreciate wisteria more with each passing year. It's stay is far too brief, but will be followed, I know, by honeysuckle, and then giant magnolias. All of these things are lovely and have an intoxicating smell that I never got in the north (Though the lilacs up there are pretty amazing as well).
So anyway, everybody i know seems to be coming down with a "Spring cold", while I am getting started on what promises to be a hellacious allergy season.
By the by, there is a payoff for all the pollen:
These guys are gonna be huge.
(That line is where I rubbed off the pollen with my finger so you can see the difference in color.)
Are you sneezing yet?
I hope not, because if your nose gets too stuffy, you won't be able to smell this:
I appreciate wisteria more with each passing year. It's stay is far too brief, but will be followed, I know, by honeysuckle, and then giant magnolias. All of these things are lovely and have an intoxicating smell that I never got in the north (Though the lilacs up there are pretty amazing as well).
So anyway, everybody i know seems to be coming down with a "Spring cold", while I am getting started on what promises to be a hellacious allergy season.
By the by, there is a payoff for all the pollen:
These guys are gonna be huge.
Monday, April 02, 2007
FYI
I got tagged by Z. The results are (finally) a couple posts down. I forgot that it would post in the order that I started it, not in the order I finished it.
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