“And you, you will come too, young brother; for the days pass, and never return, and the South still waits for you. Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes!’ ‘Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new! Then some day, some day long hence, jog home here if you will, when the cup has been drained and the play has been played, and sit down by your quiet river with a store of goodly memories for company.”

Blog is fixed. I had a problem with my login not working right after I performed an upgrade on WordPress… turned out to just be one of those trial-and-error type problems. Lots of other people have had them, it seems… there just hasn’t been one clear solution.

I am a solidly-busy person, it seems. I work… I go home. I work again, I go home again. I’m not so much busy as I have my energy being all used up. I find myself going to bed at 6, 5, 4pm. It’s kind of pitiful. But I am making really good money lately. Still…

Oh, and check it out! Bree’s design is up for scoring (only one more day to go, though!): SAD SACK SUNDAE

Stockholm wakes up slowly
on drugs and mourning grief
the pure snow is for rent now
to all of Kungsholms square
It feels like when I came
here
way back in 93

Kent’s LP from last year, Tillbaka Till Samtiden (translation: Back To The Present) is pretty darn good. I find that this band never quite ever slips away from my consciousness… even when I haven’t listened to any of their songs in a long time. Another band that haunts my brain constantly is Grandaddy, though I rarely, if ever, listen to any of their stuff. Weird.

Well, the money is not back in my bank account just yet. I have received credit for it through PayPal, and all that is left is to transfer the funds. It’s an effing miserable annoyance, though. To think that these things just ‘happen’ electronically. It just makes me that much more wary of doing any kind of business through the wires. But it’s convenient and almost necessary for certain things, now. I keep thinking about how much control we’ve surrenderd from our daily lives to technology… all in the name of ‘convenience’.

I went waterskiing over the weekend, and also wake-boarding. It was quite a lot of fun.

I must work a hell hell hell of a lot in the next few days. I get up earlier than ever (awake by 3:30am, clocking in at 4:30am) and I’m making more food for more people in one day than I have in recent memory (something on the order of 300 people). These are the days that are rewarding (monetarily) but which also have the effect of draining away my happiness quite completely. I don’t want to be a dried prune… but if I am… then I am.

I should probably get a normal job. I should try try try really hard to get one. Harder than ever.

I should leave this with an Ode To Joy:

I've been had. And I don't even know HOW.

I can now count myself among the 65% of people under the age of thirty who have been the victim of identity theft. I have no clue how it happened. I have no idea how these miscreants in Vietnam got a hold of my financial information. The way it stands now, there are two possibilities: it was somehow phished/pharmed by a malicious piece of software directly from my computer as I browsed the web, OR, it was stolen from eBay or PayPal through an independent hack of their own systems (one that would be not yet publicized, if this is indeed the case).

In any case, pending an investigation by PayPal and eBay, I shall be refunded my $598.00 shortly.

I can only hope that it won’t happen again. Time to beef up the security!

So captain please consider me
let the boats deliver me
when I close my eyes
drive captain, drive
it’s time

Jets to Brazil put out their last album 6 years ago… and then moved on to greater things. I don’t know what those greater things were… but they probably had a lot to do with raising families and such and whatnot.

Well, it is the end of my third full week living and working here in Toledo. I have basically had to go into work every day, with the exception of the first weekend I was here. Things are good. I slept in past my alarm twice, though. Bad. Don’t like to do that when I should be at work making food for special orders. The NASCAR thing went over nicely, and, up next: Extreme Makeover - Home Edition needs food catered to their Toledo project in the near, near future. Wow. Everybody is pretty jazzed about that one… by which I mean, all of the girls I work with. They all weep when they watch that show. They all want to meet Ty Pennington. I’d like to meet him, too, and hand him my resume and beg him to hire me on to do something-anything.

Sunday. Sunday is a good day to rest.

Michael Waltrip

I made 85 Italian Combos for this guy’s racing team on Sunday. They were flying from Toledo Airport to MIS (The Michigan International Speedway) for a race… then after that, off to Bristol!

It consumed a good 6 hours of my day of rest. Rest. Yes… and then I wound up winding down and taking a ‘nap’ which lasted for 4 hours. Yep. Let it never be said that I am not usually in some kind of transitional/abnormal sleep schedule… hard as I try to be normal and all that.

I need to swim again.

I hope Michael’s team enjoyed their sandwiches. Hand-crafted, each and every bit, by myself… and a couple of other people I got to help me out. Okay, okay, I’ll give credit where credit is due:

Mike - thanks for slicing the tops off of all those peppers.
Amanda - thanks for sticking a bazillion cookies into bags.
Maureen- thanks for giving me the haircut venue tips and for slicing extra turkey butt up.
Kelly - thanks for calling people on the phone because I don’t like phones. And you have a great phone voice.

I’m going to bed.

the posthumous album

I was up really early for work today. It was a beautiful morning.

I thought of the song New Dawn Fades by Joy Division. It’s actually from their ‘debut’ album, Unknown Pleasures.

The new dawn was breaking over the trees and I took a stroll in the Swan Creek Metropark, going along the 0.6 mile flood plains loop. The woods are pretty and silent. The actual creek is kind of muddy and putrid… there are warning signs posted around telling me not to let my body come into contact with the water.

I drank coffee and walked the boardwalks. I mused about nothing in particular. New Dawn Fades is a desperately sad song. But, then again, so are all of Joy Division’s songs.

A change of speed, a change of style.
A change of scene, with no regrets,
A chance to watch, admire the distance,
Still occupied, though you forget.
Different colours, different shades,
Over each mistakes were made.

Now I am preparing to attend Audrey Mattingly’s wedding in Anderson, IN. She won’t be a Mattingly for much longer! I think I shall take a little, small nap on the ride down.

I have returned to the blog.

It’s been a long, long time since I wrote much of anything.

Whatever. Stating the obvious isn’t very worthy material to read.

I now live in Toledo, OH. I have a new(er) computer, which is really quite nice. I still work at Panera Bread. I still have daydreams and aspirations galore besides that

I am working on a new photoblog: The Photon Diet, check it out! There are precious few photos on it, right now. But I aspire to add more with each passing day.

Alopecia is like a whole album filled with songs like Buck 65’s self-destruction dirge “Out of Focus”. I’m so into it. This one is called Brook & Waxing:

pray hard like a pious pope
but hope for no diamonds
if some divine simon spoke
or came down to find us
caught here in our lab coats
but without a science
would we see light
oh i might decide

while i’m alive i’ll feel alive
and what’s next i guess i’ll know when i’ve
gotten there

am i careful til past dull
will be is or has been
hope i’m waxing as in half full
lit wick candles lasting
born lonesome bald and bashful
with a nastinatti accent
on the east side
oh i can decide

while i’m alive i’ll feel alive
and what’s next i guess i’ll know when i’ve
gotten there

My review of The Notwist’s new album, The Devil, You + Me is up at The Pseudobook Review. Let’s just say I’m pretty into it.