I got my ticket to see the Hold Steady.
My heart starts racing just thinking about it.

"May the souls of the children
You failed to conceive
Never cross your path
On a dark night"

Paul Pope does Bugs Bunny (who interestingly enough also says wow).

I can't decided if I should start by saying "I can't believe January is almost over" or "I'm happy January is almost over". I'm not sure either statment is true. Anyway, it's been a strange month, or I've been strange this month, or something.

Here's what I did this weekend. AIR on Friday. I sorted the last of the Hawaii prints from this summer into sets. Then I walked into town for the Gallery Crawl, but I wasn't able to hook up with my people so I wandered aimlessly alone. That's not really true. I saw a bunch of people I know. I even talked to some of them (sorry people I know but didn't talk to. It's not you. It's me). My favorite piece was Morgan Cahn's Untitled at Future Tenants. It's a drawing she made when she was six that had the caption, "One day i was walking in the park and I saw a box. I said wow". There was a bunch of good stuff out there but that was the one that put the biggest smile on my face. There's a lot of really cool and creepy stuff at Space. It's definitely something to check out.

Saturday was another installment of AIR at the Children's Museum. We were doing our famous screenprinted portraits with under painting. We are a well oiled machine.

Today I made myself a really good egg sandwich on rye bread.

Has Pittsburgh ever experienced a night like what we're going to get on March 19th? Justin Timberlake and Pink are at the arena and The Hold Steady are at The Rex. I can't believe I have to choose!
Guess which one I'm going to.

Here we go, Steelers. Here we go. Mr. and Mrs. Tomlin looked very stylish at the press conference. I'm glad the Rooney's decided to hire a young coach. He seems like a smart guy. The only dumb thing he said was something about Pittsburgh having great fans. My brother said that Kordell Stewart should call him up and set him straight. I really hope Pittsburgh can keep its racist tendencies under control.
Good luck, coach.

I want to open a restaurant that only serves egg sandwiches.

My brother got sworn in to argue cases before the Supreme Court.
So don't mess with me.

Way to go, Colts. It's really good to see Tony Dungy going to the Super Bowl (it's also good not to see the Patriots going to the Super Bowl. Sorry, Patriots fans). My only kvetch would be that if it had been switched around and the Patriots had scored the late touchdown to win it everyone would be calling it a major choke by the Colts, so, in the name of fairness, I give you a catty headline for tomorrow's newspaper: Beli-CHOKE. Please forgive me. I really hate the Patriots.

My parents and I have gone to the Pitt women's basketball game the last two Saturdays. My mother bought a pair of season tickets as a joke and I can get in for free with my still valid until May Pitt ID. Last week was the first time I've ever been in the Pete to watch a game (until then I'd only been in it to buy football tickets and use the bathroom). Last week's game was a pretty sorry display but they impressively blew out South Florida today. The high point of today's game was the jump rope team at halftime. It's a pretty cute experience. Last week was Pack The Pete and today was Girl Scout day so there were decent crowds both time. The next home game is the 31st against Notre Dame.

A: I wonder which British queen Helen Mirren is going to play next.
B: I hope it's Elton John.

Here's something to look forward to. The people behind National Novel Writing Month are doing a similar thing in June with screenplays. I've signed up to write a novel the last couple years but I just can't write that much prose. I've managed half a page both times. Although, when I stopped writing last time it was because I realized I had no chance of finishing a novel and decided to switch over to writing a screenplay. I managed to write three pages of that before I gave up. It's not the same when everyone else is writing novels and you're writing a screenplay, but, since that won't be the case in June, I'd say my chance of finishing this new challenge is "fair".

I have this reoccurring fantasy about emptying my bank account and disappearing into the world. Usually the fantasy consists of a clean and permanent break from everyone I know, but sometimes I send a single snapshot of my newborn daughter back home to my parents.

"POE theoretically had no leader. It was an anarcho-Marxist collective.

The real leader was, or course, an alpha male. His name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart, and he was one of the smartest men in Unistat at that time. Unfortunately, his reptile biosurvival circuit was imprinted with chronic anxiety, his mammalian emotional-territorial circuit was imprinted with defensive aggression, his hominid semantic circuit was imprinted with an explosive blend of Black street cynicism and New Left ideology, and his domesticated sociosexual circuit was from Kinksville.

F.D.R. Stuart claimed that the purpose of Poe was to accelerate the dialectical process of evolution towards the classless society where all would live in peace, prosperity, and socialist solidarity, and there would be no cops.

The real purpose of Stuart’s activates was to get even. The other primates in Unistat had raped his mother and jailed his father and driven his brothers and sisters into street crime and junk and generally maltreated him all his life. In addition they called him by an insulting name, which was nigger.

Second in command in POE was Sylvia Goldfarb, a refugee from God’s Lighting, NOW, the Radical Lesbians, and Weather Underground. She was even smarter than F.D.R. Stuart, but she deferred to him despite her feminist orientation, because he was a true alpha male who was a Mean Motherfucker When Crossed and had even more rage in him than she did.

To Sylvia, the purpose of POE, she said, was to create a world where all men and women, all races and all classes, all humanity, lived in loving harmony and ate uncooked fruits and vegetables.

Her Real motive was also to get even. The other primates discriminated against her for being female, for being Jewish, for being highly verbal and a Teacher’s Pet, for wearing glasses, for being an atheist, and for several dozen other reasons at least. They also called her by an insulting name, which was dyke.

The third founding member of Poe was Mountbatten Babbit, who was a cyclical schizophrenic. He wigged out once a year, on the average, and had learned how to medicate himself with phenothyazines to keep those periods of Bizarresville down to a few weeks each, but during those dilations of ego he was likely to be anybody from Napoleon to a Vietnamese Buddhist. The rest of the year he was a brilliant research chemist and computer expert, but it was hard for him to get a good job because of his several incarcerations in mental hospitals.

Babbit said he was in POE to create a rational world guided by sound scientific and libertarian-socialist principles. Yeah, he wanted to get even too. The other primates called him a nut or a fruitcake.

The other members of POE were equally brilliant and equally desperate."

The Universe Next Door - Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson died.

This commercial would totally get me to run out and buy some Old Spice if, you know, it didn't make my armpits bleed.

I’ve had unsettling dreams the last two nights. I’m being chased by mobs or brushed off by cripples. I’m telling people things they already know. I experience moments from my waking life, but the details are different. What was night while awake is day in the dream. I visit places that no longer exist. When we return to the car, the parking meter has expired. Sometimes it’s a moot point because the car’s been stolen or replaced by something small, old, and European. When I wake up I have the love theme from Superman stuck in my head.

Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen died. That's got to be right up there with the top inventions of the 20th century.

We're going to miss you, William Laird Cowher.

I was out in Arizona playing golf with Prince Charles.
We finished the round and he let me keep his ball as a souvenir.

I guess it's alright that they don't show videos on teevee anymore since you can watch 'em online, but it's just not the same. I mean, doesn't the video for Chips Ahoy! deserve Billie Jean-like airtime?

We'd moved into an old house. It was only one story but it was very long because the previous owners had added addition after addition to the back of the house. There was only electricity in the back room, so that's where we set up the drums and the electric guitars. We jammed for awhile. We weren't totally happy with the setup so we started searching for other working outlets. We went through the house testing outlets by plugging a night light shaped like Brigitte Nielsen into them.

My siblings and I decided that we're each going to memorize a book this year. Don't ask me how we came to that decision. I chose Michael Ventura's The Zoo Where You're Fed To God.

I was at an elementary school open house. The orchestra and the chorus were putting on a show in the basement. They performed a censored version of Common People by Pulp. When they'd get around to the line about "dance and drink and screw" they wouldn't sing the word "screw". This upset me, so I started singing along. Soon everyone was singing along. This made the music teacher very unhappy.

Happy New Year! My brothers and I rang in the New Year watching the ball rise, in the rain, in downtown Pittsburgh. It would've been really nice if it hadn't been raining, or if it had been colder so it had been snowing, or we'd had an umbrella, but the weather couldn't damper our high spirits. Everyone, except the T driver on the ride home, was feeling the holiday spirit. May 2007 bring you joy and magic. Happy New Year!