Buddyhead will get you free shit

i learned this morning that this shirt will get you free coffee and a dozen Dunkin Donuts for the price of 6 at the kw hwy DD, compliments of your friendly hardcore counter help. (the tall skinny guy with all the piercings. whist!)

i am in a shitty mood because rudy informed me yesterday afternoon that i've torn my hamstring again -- not as bad as the first time -- and i didn't get much sleep because i started reading The Raw Shark Texts last night and could not stop.

so i'm sleepy and i hate the world, and then some guy gives me a break cos he likes my shirt. here's where i could be all blog-closurely and claim i feel so much better but even with that act of kindness my shit's still torn, my head still throbs and and i still want to be the fuck alone.

The Raw Shark Texts is really good, though: well-written, unusual plotline and unputdownable. recommended by mark danielewski and rightfully so.

cure for draggy booty

the aftermath of the hubbubed memorial day weekend finally hit, and the alarm rang far too early this morning. christ, i could have slept until... 6:30, i'm sure.

drove to the Y listening to off-mixes of Hurt because anything more upbeat would have, well, hurt. shuffled sleepily into the locker room. ann, one of the pool faithful, cocked an eyebrow.

- somebody got a draggy booty?
- nnrrrr draggy bootyyyyyyy.
- so get into the pool. that'll set you right.

ann works with retarded juvees, so i should know fishing for sympathy gets me nowhere, but i still test her now & then.

took a quick birdbath in the shower because there's no way i can corral my hair into a swimcap dry, then stumble through the outer doors to the pool. holy mother of fuck. they've taken the bubble off and our indoor pool is now outdoors. steam rises off the water's surface because as the goosepimples all over my body will attest, the air is a lot colder than the water.

i whinny plaintively as i truck toward my lane. ann is already in the water, doing her lazy long stroke and probably clearing her head in preparation for another 10-hour day at ferris. bernie, another pool regular, slips into the water and commences his sculling backstroke. he winks at me and i bare my teeth in something like a smile. the lifeguard is bundled up in a chunky sweatshirt; she looks tiny inside it. she hunches over a cup of coffee like it's a hot brick.

i sit down on the lane wall, stuff my hair into my cap and situate my goggles, then slide off the wall. i've been out of the water for over a week and it feels wonderful to be back. after a long warmup and some kick and pull, my booty feels less draggy; then alex shows and we do a set of 4x400 free, changing up the pace every 100. that ginormous bowl of haagen dazs i downed last night in FMC's honor last night provides good fuel.

while we swim, the sky lightens. birds sing, and the scent of honeysuckle wafts across the water. ann was right: swimming is such a good way to wake up. it's a right cure for draggy booty.

not convinced? well, check out this collection of Things you CAN'T Do When You're NOT in a Pool.

ADD: Another Damn Du

this weekend i did my 3rd duathlon of the season and although i arrived at the race prepared, felt good, raced smart and had my transitions down pat, i still finished behind a bunch of women who were just stronger, fitter and more talented. i can't compete with women in their twenties anymore. i feel old and slow.

heehee. i won!! again! the "arrived at the race prepared" should have clued you -- please. a minute before the start, i was hustling to re-rack my bike and transition gear, having set up with the tri-geeks (who did the same bike and 2nd run legs, but started with a quarter-mile swim) instead of the duathletes. in my rush to move, my bike and i got tangled up in the caution tape marking the transition zone's perimeter and i thrashed about helplessly while the race director droned unintelligible instructions through a bullhorn. the more i struggled, the more entangled i got, and i felt like a mouse on one of those sticky traps. a hairy-chested grandpa in a speedo finally rescued me.

- oh no – adjured maggie, my closest competition, as i dragged my crap toward the du area – you just stay over there, finn.

i arrived at the start line with enough time to find my teammate flashmeister scandlethigh, he of the legs nicer than mine, and confirm the run and ride distances: SHORT! - 2-mile run, 12-mile bike, 5K run.

- do you ever read the race info before you show up for a race? - hotminster wondercalves asked.

- i read it, but i don't remember it. just like i can't remember your name – i think but don't say.

the field was twice as big as last weekend's – about 55 total – and my competition was slightly stronger, but only somewhat. the heavy hitters must still be recovering from short-course worlds.

i didn't dog the runs like i did last weekend so going into T1 i was approx top-10 overall and the first woman. the triathletes were already on the road, so i had plenty of people to catch. during the bike and 2nd run i passed all the tri women except for louise, who won, but that's no indication of how i'd have fared in the tri because the swim would have set me back about twelve billion years.

my bike leg literally rocked: the moderate crosswind buffeting my ears conjured the thunderolling drumline of tool's Ticks & Leeches, and if you know the song you can appreciate how easy it is to peg out a hard effort when you've got that rumbling in your head & gut.

the second run felt tougher than the first. the day was heating up and my hamstring was beginning to complain; so i ran a comfortably hard pace off the bike, then eased up when i thought my gap would hold. i ended up 7th overall. scarpfenster fleetinghorse was 2nd.

the bonus? -winning in front of your sponsor. i was wiping accelerade and snot off my top tube when roy, the local fuji rep, introduced himself. he congratulated me and asked me how i liked my bike. i love it - i gushed - i love the geometry and the feel of the carbon fiber, and i love fuji for sponsoring us and for unquestioningly replacing the 4-year-old road frame that i tore apart. i was a total whore for roy. i was so stoked on winning that if he'd asked me to plait flowers around my bike and pull it up on the podium to sing You Decorated My Life i would have done it in a heartbeat.

when i was packing up the car, some poor dude made the mistake of asking me how i liked my bike because his wife was trying to decide between fuji and quintana roo, and half an hour later he told me he really had to go because his mom was calling. see, roy? maybe you should consider paying my race entry fees. i'm easy.

cien cervezas por favor

FRIDAY.... the end to a long shit week of 11-hour days with a minimum of sleep and training. no morning swims with alex, no tues nite track, and strictly solo rides. solo rides lack the excitement induced by the group-ride fred who, finding himself ludicrously overgeared on a climb, suddenly crosses over your front wheel and nearly takes you down. solo rides lack the influence of E, who temporarily mutes the soundtrack in my head and wakes me to the things i normally tune out on a ride –- like housing tracts that spring up overnight or the fucktardery of asshole drivers.

case in point: a couple weeks ago E and i were approaching a busy 3-way stop. WE'D stopped, signaled and begun a left-hand turn when an SUV to our right rolled through the stop and turned left directly into us. ranking discretion over valor, i yielded but E neither slowed nor flinched as the SUV's side mirror whickered past his shoulder. as it did, he scolded the driver through the open window.

- you're supposed to STOP! - he barked at the woman inside. i caught a glimpse of a 40-year-old becoming a truculent teenager.

- i did stop!! - she squalled defensively, fully aware that we and the cars stacked behind her would testify otherwise. and E wasn't letting her off easy.

- no you DIDN'T! - he reprimanded her loud and clear. i expected him to whip out a ruler and rap her knuckles.

alone, i would have been satisfied throwing the driver a scathing glance which, along with the possible repercussions of her dumbfuck maneuver, wouldn't have registered at all. but because of E maybe next time through that intersection she'll stop.

tomorrow is another jersey duathlon; competition will be much tougher than last week. i'm putting my faith in rudy and trusting that my medial hamstring will NOT give way like an old frayed rope because the few workouts that i've shoe-horned in this week have been the only things keeping me from combusting before another “ambitious” deadline for a client deliverable. fuck “ambitious.” just be honest and say “impossible, unless you do a shit job, or give up the rest of your life for a while.”

at least there is music.
and Lapples.
Renholders.
E's, D's and F's.
and 3-day weekends. back tues. maybe.

May 24th is....

today is Talk Like Bob Dylan day, or so proclaimeth this website, where you can check out submissions from people who have a whole lot more free time than i do, or maybe they're professional bob dylan imitators.

anyway, this one's snarf-worthy:

the REAL icky thump vid

mmmmmmore mmmmmeatyness and mmmmeg on drummms.

Quite an earwormm too.

Sam Millar has discriminating taste

if you're a fan of crime-noire novels you should check out declan burke's blog, Crime Always Pays. ken bruen gets constant ink there, for one thing. and burke regularly throws a standard question set to oirish noire luminaries and posts their responses to questions like What crime novel would you most like to have written? and Why does John Banville use a pseudonym for writing crime? the answers are sometimes illuminating and many times sardonic (those snarky crime writers you know...)

this week he interviews Sam Millar:

Q - The best Irish crime novel is …?
A - Anything by Maeve Binchy. I think all her books are a crime.

HA!
stick a "cunt" in there and he could be Twenty Major.

take a guess...

... who this is. teho will prob nail it straightaway, but i was still clewless even after dudes kick it in at the 2min mark.



mmmmmeaty bass and guitar. hope this is truly representative of the new album (due next mo) cos it's tasty stuff.

reasons number 10-12 for Why I Love Mac

12. because i love the touch, response and sound of the keyboard.

11. because yesterday i trucked the Lapple^TM between desk and conference rooms all day and where there was ethernet, i wired in and where there wasn't, the Lapple auto-reverted to backup wireless. it figured this out on its own because it knows i don't want to dick away my time configuring location-dependent net access.

i had been with windoze for so long i forgot that a good OS makes your life easier without demanding an arcane intimacy with its anatomy. that said, when the moment's right, i should still be able to dim the lights, pour a double jameson, load up some Broken and stick my hands thru the cage of this endless routine. which brings me to #10.

10. OSX i love your sleek and swooshy interface (like the transition between Preview's index sheet and individual shot views; jesus give me a cigarette right now) but i adore your unix brain even more. i love the fact that i can bypass your GUI and root through your innards with a “cd ..” here and an “ls -al” there, grep-ing and pipe-ing and man-ing [because i'm hazy on the “chmod” options and don't want to de-access my drive (more on this shortly)].

- what are you up to?? - D asked bewilderedly as he came down the stairs i was galloping up with splitting smile and lolling tongue like J-dog when he's chasing the B-A-L-L.

- i'm fetching my Unix in a Nutshell book! - i sang happily as i skipped into my office.

i am transported back to nights in grad school, when instead of gathering with my department to engage in FUN i'd spend hours huddled in front of my Mac Classic, dialed into the university's Solaris composer machines and up to my ears in C shell prompts. this is when D flashes me the L-sign because he Loves me so much.

but i digress. the point is that i can't do shit with a c-prompt but a bash shell makes me schoolgirl giggly. thank you OSX.

finally, i can't resist a big fuckyou to windoze, who's rendered most of a 250G hard drive read-only. congratulations – i can't chmod my way out of this one. and unchecking the “read only” option in windoze-properties only has me sit and wait as it chugs through each gig “resetting” permissions that are never truly reset and yet i continue unchecking the box and dumbly waiting like a lobotomised monkey pushing the shock button expecting a banana.
push push push. pzzzzt. pzzzzt. pzzzzt.

there's life beyond vista peeps. can i have a witness...

you make this all go away...

if i can't have nails i shall settle for tool, BRMC and BLB. bring in da joon.

[i find it ridiculous, btw, that the ticketmaster "convenience" charges nearly conveniently exceeded the base price of the black light burns ticket.]

meanwhile please to cross your fingers that this afternoon rudy finds only tight bits in my hamstring, and no tears. xxxNOTEARSxxx.

loucypher on the approaching conclusion of The Sopranos

it's like a super-size soda that's now warm and flat, but you feel like you should finish it because you did pay for it afterall...

delaware rox the barrens

so there ya go. but before you begin formin' misconceived ideas about my studliness, consider that the du field stood at about 20 before we First State people showed. at packet pickup i found hen, looking totally pimp in our new kit and conversing with a similarly-pimped dude.

- hey – i greeted hen.
- 'sup.
- who's he? - i gestured at pimp no.2
- that's [spoonmaster foreigncups]. you met him before, remember? at e-town's? - forkmeister scandleflash didn't seem to mind being discussed in third-person.
- oh. hmm. he has nice legs.
- yes – hen agreed magnanimously. i pursed my lips and thought for a couple long seconds.
- you do too – i finally admitted.
- thank you.

there is no “i” in “team,” you see. and The Team ended up with 3 spots in the top 5 overall: flashmonster boodlesnatch and his carved, shaven legs won, hen took 3rd and i popped in at 5th.

this race was a world of difference from last week's. there was no suffering, i rocked solid on the bike, and running and i got back together after being on a break for a week and a half. i held back on the runs, though, because the hamstring is querulous and i'm not challenging it before i see sir rudy tomorrow. expect bruiseporn, friends.

the soundtrack? the doobie brothers' "black water" and kenny rogers' “she believes in me.” i don't know where this shit comes from, but there have got to be corporeal synapses and once i find them i'm gonna open my skull and carve them out with a melon scooper. replace 'em with a GPS unit so i don't end up in lost in south jersey ever again.

pix from the Griffith Park fire

colin brown's posted on flickr a set of photos that vividly shows the destruction wreaked by the fire in LA's Griffith Park. it's powerful stuff. sorry kids, not all the animals outran the fire.

here're some pics travis keller took before everything went black.

brazenly false advertising

dear columbia tristar,

the DVD cover of your movie The Mother starring daniel craig promotes it as "A Brazenly Sexual Film."

it is not.

there is one scene that is a little hot but that is all. the rest was very mike leigh.

i like mike leigh but that is like giving someone melba toast when they asked for a brownie sundae.

i suggest you speak with your marketing agency about setting false expectations. without Fight Club, my saturday night would have been a total wash.

sincerely,
F

it's thong friday!!

fatcat i see your knob-breasted relic and raise you an ex-NIN bassist, with gimp hood.


hooray for thongs!!
i don't feel like working any more today!!!

pine barrens

tomorrow hen and i represent at a sprint du in the jersey pine barrens, 18,00 acres of which have burned since an air force flare hit the ground still burning during a training exercise on tuesday. ooopsie.

my legs are have been pretty chummed all week, because sometimes i train like a total 'tard. but if Dr M invited you to run with him at tues nite track, i bet you would, even if he was running a 1600m -> 400m ladder at sub-6min mile pace that made your heavy legs even heavier. you would do it because you finally had someone to run with, someone with infectious optimism (not to mention total sponge-worthiness). training, for as much as we do it, is more than training -- it's also life, and it'd be shame to let your vision narrow too much, unless you're training for something huge. and even then you would reconsider your singular focus once M stripped off his shirt.

so hen and i are returning to the site of my very first triathlon (for there's a tri that runs concurrently). 4 years ago, when i was dumb and stubborn, i blithely ignored the fact that it was raining and about 40F; i ignored the woman racking her bike next to mine when she looked up at the dark sky and commented, the people who know how to dress will be the ones who do well today.

i don't know if she dressed and finished well, because i pulled out of the race midway through the bike leg with hypothermia. i sat in a course marshal's lincoln continental with the heat blasting, waiting for all cyclists to clear the course so i could be driven back to the parking lot, where i snuck out with my tail between my legs and my jaw still aching from trying to keep my teeth from chattering too violently.

can't wait to return to the barrens -- that is, if the barrens are still there and not burnt to a cinder.

britney spears is blessed

praying pays off, bitches. look -- britney says i truly helped her. i'm living in some "brighter state" by her side, bein a "light of the world" lookin to that "higher power."

i prayed for paris and jerry falwell too.

want me to pray for you? do you want a pony?

norman mailer is boring

blow up the balloons and load the confetti, champs: after six long weeks i finally finished The Executioner's Song, a "real life novel" about gary gilmore, executed by firing squad in 1977. why would someone commit to this 1000+ page tome of mediocre prose?

i submit these excuses:
-- you should probably read mailer before you die. this goes for stendahl, mann, proust and erica jong.
-- the Song is an example of how an author assembles a cohesive story from hundreds of hours of exhaustive interviews and background research
-- there's some sex, and some violence, for about 6 pages. not the best salacious ratio, but it's something.
-- ummmm, sometimes your library gets shut down for renovation so you feel obliged to address your overflowing “to read” shelves?
-- maybe you're an insomniac??

i know norman mailer can write: dude won a pulitzer prize, and his 3-page afterward to the The Executioner's Song is concise but deft – so why is the bulk of the Song written like this:

Gary was kind of quiet. There was one good reason they got along. Brenda was always gabbing and he was a good listener. They had a lot of fun. Even at that age he was real polite. If you got into trouble, he'd come back and help you out.

bleeeah. for a Song, nothing sings. and most of the book is short paragraphs like the one above, which makes it difficult to develop any complex thought. did mailer consciously choose to write what he heard in the interviews and not what he heard in his head? did he fear that transcribing the head voices would drop the telling of gary's love, murders and execution into melodrama?

whatever. i soldiered through to witness gary's execution and have now moved on to arlene hunt's False Intentions, where the writing is more fun & rewarding.

any mailer apologists out there? did i just pick a misrepresentative work?

possible hire @ quasar's desk

[GAD] he's hired
[GAD] i don’t care what his skills are.. the more eye candy around here, the better
[finn] well so far he doesn't seem fazed by my tourettes or belching, so that's a good thing.
[GAD] he thinks the test is the stuff quasar gave him on the computer, but the real test is sitting next to you for 20 mins.
[finn] just wait 'til the general tso's starts rollin thru ma bowelz...

[stomped by work, part deux]

you know what?? fuck it. i'm just going with chickens.