January 5 , 2003
10:50pm Sunday

PALACES AND SHANTY, WASTELAND AND GHOST TOWN

It's been so long since I updated I don't remember how to do it anymore. I'm so confused in fact that I just imported Nelly "Nellyville" into iTunes. Damn the person who played "It's Getting Hot In Herrrre" on new year's eve and made me fall in love with it all over again. I'm helpless for bassy R&B, that's my secret. It's my anti-super power. Use it on me like kryptonite.

I can't help it. Powerless, I'm powerless to all things dogs and R&B in 2003.

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This title lyric is, I think, the first un-googleable title lyric I've used. Can anybody guess it? I'll send you a dollar if you can.

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In my absence I've been all up and down this varied and glorious state of California and actually went eleven days without internet access, which I think is a record. We went from LA to the Central Valley to Ukiah, then Eureka, back down to Davis and ultimately to San Carlos for new year's. Miraculously no moulding flew off my car during the driving, although a fat rock did bash my windshield and leave a quarter-sized pit just literally two seconds after we dipped in and out of a pothole on the northern CA 101 and Gray said, "I wish we could mount little lasers on the outside of the car in case a rock ever flew up and then the lasers could zap it before it hit." Either he is a psychic or he is a curse.

It rained literally non-stop from Ukiah to Eureka for many days in a row and it was rad. We're so deprived of rain here in Southern California and it's a shame because I love it and if I could snap my fingers and listen to rain falling outside my window in the middle of the night whenever I wanted I would do it nightly. The Eel River washed out the 101 the day before we were leaving Eureka, just south of it, kinda by where that town sold on ebay for $1.7 million, and we thought were were going to get stuck there with the smell-challenged hippies. But no, the rain had receeded to house-basement flooding levels and cleared the freeway by the time we departed.

Things I liked about our holiday trip, in no particular order:

(self-explanatory, although I had one frightening over-indulgenced hour around midnight where I drank four bottles of water so I could see straight again. Sad, sad, pickled liver.)

(Cheddarwurst in the frying pan at 3am New Year's Day)

(discovering my digital camera has macro capabilities and finding a willing subject in Milo)

(Paul's little cousin Zack)

It was a very doggy vacation (if you can call such a thing a vacation, because Gray's family is very loud), but that's just the way I like it.

Depending on how you read that sentence it's not insulting to anybody!

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When I got back to town I was immediately summoned into work the next morning, which I'm still not ready to talk about except to say that I had a conversation with my new boss about how the slang "alright" is spelled when it's spoken ethnically by a black person. Is it spelled "Aight"? Or more whitey-fied "All right"? It turns out that at this job, even when DMX is clearly yelling to his homies, "AIGHT, let's do it!" it is spelled, in fact, "all right."

But I left in the middle of the day for an extended break this past Friday to have lunch at Musso & Frank in Hollywood with Tamar and Kymm. They're both journalling rock stars so I was honored they wanted to hang out and spend a couple hours in a corner booth surrounded by an octogenarian waitstaff and large plates of interesting foods. Alas I have no pictures, even though I had my camera in my bag but forgot all about it, so I can't share with you Kymm's glorious pink hair. It's definitely cool to meet people in person who you've been reading for years and years.

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Tonight on Alias when Marshall was doing a denial of service attack on SD-6 so they'd be able to find him, he typed in an IP number which I wrote down and just looked up (128.13.8.4). The ARIN directory lists it as belonging to some guy in the 617 area code who registered the domain numbers in 1983! This must be a JJ Abrams inside joke, and I'm just super nerdy enough to try to find out what it means. Stay tuned.