And what is up with this all this shit on my desk and how the fuck did I end up with two Japanese horror movies that are both almost three hours long from Netflix at the same damn time on a Friday. Not that I’m done with all my usual Friday nonsense, but the idea of being able to sit down and unwind (ha ha ha) and watch a movie on a Friday is at least something I like to have hanging around like a sad ghost in my imagination as I rush around not getting enough shit done and mentally beating my own ass for not working harder and more consistently throughout the week. I’m looking forward to watching both of these movies, but … it’s like six hours of Japanese horror. And I should be in bed in about (fffffffff—) two and a half hours. Yeah, we all know it’s not gonna happen, but that doesn’t make it any better.

I have started to dread the weekends (the culmination of my work week) because there are far too many things out of my direct control and I feel like I’m riding the same stretch of white water over and over and every week, come Monday, I say “fuck it, that’s it, I’m done” and then during the week someone manages to convince me to ride it one more time until we get the opportunity to go down to the river with some dynamite and blasting caps and move the big rocks so the ride’s a lot smoother. Every week.

My last post was probably DANGEROUSLY MISLEADING. It’s nothing about my personal life at all, it’s professional life related stuff, and it’s boring and it’s still in flux. That is all.

Case is sitting on the couch watching the weather channel and bursts out with “WHAT? How can it be FIFTY?” (which would be 10 for my centigrade friends). She misses last week, which was 80ish (26.6ish). Also, expected to be windy today. Trading sunburn for windburn in less than six days. Peanut butter, motherfucker, indeed.

In other news, I’ve been hammering the shit out of facebook the past couple of days, just clicking ALL the damn buttons I could see. I discovered that some of you are on facebook using your real email address but aliases (lol whut?). Cue Hank Williams, faintly in the background, singing “Your Cheating Heart.” Shame on you fuckers (alright, so you’re probably just avoiding students or coworkers, that’s fine).

And now, for breakfast beer and pills. Shit, I’m almost out of both. This is an emergency. Send St. Bernards and Paris Hilton, immediately. And have the dogs bring a gun and some ammo (Paris won’t be coming back).

I read a book about how to attract people to your blog. Headlines that belittle and offend them was hint #3.

Quite a fucking lot is going on lately, but there’s a fair amount I can’t write about openly because of pending uh … man, I can’t even describe it adequately without risking someone finding it and complicating matters by spreading it around. That sounds really bad, probably. Nothing major, everyone in the inner circle is healthy, reasonably happy (or reasonably unhappy, for the Freudians in the audience), no one’s getting married, divorced, killed (yet) or anything “status changing.” Email me if you’re really interested, or call, I’m trying to be better about answering the phone. I know where it is right now, for instance.

Couple more cryptic notes on the off chance that those they’re intended for check in (very fucking doubtful).

J., I owe you many calls back, I hope you’re not taking it personally, I’m just flaky on a level that adderall can’t seem to touch. I’ve got a huge collection of CDs to send you, you come up in conversation almost daily, all the usual much love shit.

K., sorry to hear about your loss. I never know if it’s best to call with belated condolences or if it’s just opening fresh wounds, so I tend not to mention it when I find out later. I know it was a long struggle, and I know how close you were, and I’m just … so sorry.

T., how’s the kid? I owe you email, I have video of some really interesting lectures to send you, I instantly thought of you, your work, and your new mom status when I saw these.

L., I really owe you a call, and we really need to clear time to hang out and just chat. Every time I think “I should be writing” I hear you berating me for not doing it on any of the numerous occasions you’ve done it, and I’m grateful to you for that.

I’m forgetting people and leaving some out because a) as is usual on a Friday, I should have been in bed several hours ago and b) I really don’t think too many people read this.

General thought of the day. The market changed complexion four weeks ago when the Sunday market split—the old location opened, and most of the “old location” regulars went back there, leaving the “new location” regulars and people who think it’s the better geographical choice (and really, is just fucking is) behind. There are a lot of other issues involved in the market, which I won’t go into, but just the change, not seeing some of the same people every Sunday—and these are years-long relationships at this point—has changed the entire “feel” of both days. And I suppose it’s inevitable, but a certain amount of eye-opening has occured, and it’s just all a bit sad. Both days are less enjoyable now. Maybe it’s just the weather, but we’ve discussed it and we feel a palpable “and that was the end of a golden age” sort of moment. Though golden age is stretching it—more like brass.

We’ll be at the annual street fair down the block tomorrow, by the way—in what looks to be constant rain all day. We are driven more and more toward brick-and-mortar.

Thirty-nine today. I don’t celebrate it, but other people do, so thanks to those of you who somehow found out and remember what day it is, and to those of you who didn’t know: keep on not knowing, it’s totally cool.

It’s sweet to be remembered, but I neither deserve it nor expect it. I did get this awesome print from a friend at the market that I will post in this space as soon as I show it to my photographer friend at the market (the one who sets up and sells—you still count, Jane, but you don’t set up yet).

Anticipating some questions: I don’t feel older. I don’t care about the number, it’s just an imaginary concept used to measure a non-linear progression. Not dreading forty (couldn’t give a fuck). What else … I didn’t do anything special today (work day, so I worked). No, I really don’t mind. Honest. I had cake on Thursday (mom and dad).

That’s probably all for now. Watch for the awesome print.

The word is derived from “Frigg’s Day” in the Anglo-Saxon and “Freya’s Day” in the Germanic, but Freya and Frigg were often associated with each other (maybe not quite as closely as, say, Venus and Aphrodite, but still). The start of most people’s weekend, and the start of my working week. Happy Frigging Friday (long way for a bad joke).

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This is news to me. Ok, it isn’t, but it might be, considering.

I’m updating because Case is in NYC visiting family and I have, for company, a deaf cat (who is also cranky) and some coffee and beer and I think there’s some bacon and possibly yogurt around here somewhere. I figure Case might stumble on this and read it and see what I’ve been up to. Ordinarily, I would think “no one could possibly ever be interested in this stuff,” but Casey actually might be.

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Though it only made #16 on the charts in 1958, Link Wray’s “Rumble“ holds a special place in my heart (and not just for its iconic status). I was born in DC, and grew up in Maryland, close by. When I was between the ages of about four and ten, my barber was a gentle, unassuming man named Doug, who owned Doug’s Barbershop in Waldorf. His last name was Wray, he was Link’s brother, and the drummer on Rumble (and most of Link Wray’s music for most of his career). I only discovered this fact a few years ago when I brought up the song at a holiday dinner only to hear my dad say, “Yeah, and the guy who cut your hair when you were a little boy was the drummer on that track.”

After the band’s halcyon days, Doug “retired” from music (do you ever really retire from music?) and opened the barbershop, which he ran pretty much right up until his death in 1985. Doug was a hell of a drummer—they once played a show at a used car lot in Waldorf and people could hear the drums three miles away (apparently someone reported “gun shots” to the police, who tracked the sound to the used car lot, and Doug Wray’s drumming).

By the way, the Wikipedia article linked above is a little inaccurate. The song was performed in Fredericksburg, VA for the first time, but “hot-miked” (Ray Vernon Wray, Link’s other brother, jammed the microphone he’d been singing into right into one of the amps), which produced that really loud, distorted, buzzy sound that hadn’t been heard outside of basements and bedrooms with busted, cheap ass amplifiers of a certain vintage.

Link had a practice “studio” (usually called “The Three Track Shack”) in Accokeek, MD., where I grew up (about five miles south of DC). The studio didn’t have the best equipment, so when they later practiced Rumble, as it came to be called (the song was originally called Oddball), that trademark proto-grunge sound was still there, a result of some pretty blown high-end response. When they went to record it at Cameo Records in Philadelphia, (the song was eventually picked up by Cadence, in NYC, release number 1347), they couldn’t quite get the sound right. Link solved the problem by walking around the studio with a pen, stabbing holes in tweeters (but leaving the woofers unmolested) until the guitar sounded about right.

Link would have been seventy-nine today.

I’m watching the editor’s commentary track for the The Conversation and it’s shit like this that will make me spend six hours getting through the latest installment of my netflix queue. Hackman’s character, Harry Caul, is based on a real guy, Hal Lipset, who was brought in as technical adviser. He explained that people at the top of their craft often made their own equipment with whatever they had lying around—not relying on commercially available products, even those catering to their specific trade, because they were often too coarse or didn’t precisely do exactly what they wanted them to do.

As someone who’s always been fascinated by surveillance and intelligence, this is a good flick. Obvious nod (or rip off) to Antonioni, and would make a good “double-feature.” Maybe. Blow Up might be one of those things you need to see and then go do something else for a while.

Conversation’s great, though. I’m not sure if I’ll listen to the Coppola track, I just can’t stand him sometimes.

I was just chatting with my friend Stephan about social networking sites, blogs, etc., and he said he’d noticed that I had a blog and that I hardly ever update it. I said, “Well, the shit I think about is generally stuff that no one would want to read.” He said, “It depends.” I took that as a challenge.
Here’s a “pssible blog entry” (it must have been late) I had scribbled on a notepad that’s been sitting in a desk drawer for a couple of months.

Whenever I’m around family, what I call “the casualty list”, a roll call of the dead and wounded, eventually makes its way to the top of the agenda and names and ailments are called out in a ritual of commiseration and warding. My cousin (once removed, elder generation) Louis is suffering the later stages of Alzheimer’s, and doesn’t know his friends or his children or how to do things like tie his shoes or drink from a glass. He occasionally looks at his wife of fifty-plus years and asks her, “Where’s Mary?” to which she can only reply, “Louis, I am Mary.” He’s prone to fits of rage, he is sometimes found standing in the kitchen in the middle of the night, nude, eating raw food with his hands. He shouts. He pounds on walls and doors until he bruises his hands. He can’t stand to let Mary, who I think he must recognize on some level, out of his sight for even a moment. She must serve as some kind of landmark, something familiar in a totally unfamiliar landscape.

So I think of this man, a former bank president, banging around the darkened, damaged labyrinth of who he used to be like a wounded minotaur bellowing at shadows and listening for changes in the echo, and I think almost any other end would be better. I’m hard-pressed to think of anything much worse.

Who wants to read shit like that? That’s why I don’t post more often.

(I’ve changed their names, by the way)

Text message acronyms ftw (for the win). I just checked my phone and see a whole bunch of people have called, and I’m sure I have email, and they’re probably all thinking the same thing. “Man, fuck Kris.” Either that or “what the hell, he’s like living on the moon anymore.”

The excuse this week (it’s a good one) is that we’ve got this annual fair thing Saturday that is probably our biggest selling day of the year (maybe second biggest, counting some day around Xmas, but it’s debatable). We’ve been getting ready for it. Poorly, so we’re rushing around and etc. at the moment. Two AM, I should have been in bed at ten. Ugh.

Anyway, patience is a virtue, and you guys will all be getting calls, emails, and in the case of mah boi who hasn’t been to the East coast in … too long, a big sloppy bear hug and one of those “I LOVE YOU, MAN!” moments. Looking forward to it–I’ll call uh Sunday night, probably, if I don’t keel the fuck over first.