Is this me from another universe?
This is Andrew Mukamal, Kelly Cutrone’s assistant from the show Kell On Earth. As Andrea pointed out, we kind of look a lot alike. I mean, he’s a lot skinner and gayer than I am, but beside that, yeah. We like a lot of the same labels, too. Like I wouldn’t rock Dick Owens boots, but I would wear one of his fencing jackets or something. I would go out in a Prada cape if I had one. Props to Andrea for monitoring basic cable and discovering the resemblance.
For reference, this is me from a while back when I was thinner and had longer hair.
This ‘n this
I’ve been going to the gym (I am gonna look SO CUTE for the spring prom) and afterwards, every time, I really want a cigarette. The depressing thing about the gym is seemingly little dudes who sidle up next to you when you’re chosing hand weights and one-up you by thirty pounds.
So this morning I read Andreaa’s new blog entry on memory and babysitting, and I assembled the knowledge that I have been in the position she describes a potential for her client/Baby – forgetting the babysitter. My first babysitter, Hilary Harp, became a sculptor who
[is] interested in creating objects and installations that explore the anxiety and absurdity of human embodiment. [ref.]
I don’t remember Hilary at all, but maybe we influenced each other. After all, I was an anxious kid, and twenty years on, the protagonist of my novel is named Hilary.
Halloween 2005; have you seen our masks?
This is me
and here’s George as a member of Kraftwerk on his way to a Halloween party
aaaaand John as the Scarecrow:
now I’m going to listen to DJ Shadow as is my tradition. See you in November!
I regret nothing except the following
I need to get this out of my system before National Geoffrey Month. I can’t afford any negativity during my month – don’t want to throw off my cupcake intake.
I regret:
Not buying $1 Fort Thunder comics when I was in school.
Not seeing Lightening Bolt at Fort Thunder, for that matter.
Blowing off Ben Marcus for Meredith Steinbach (although her fourth novel looks interesting).
Not asking out Malena, even though she had a boyfriend.
Not buying AOL in 1991. Seriously – I was buying stocks then; you know how they encourage parents to help their kids with this so they develop fiscal responsibility and understanding at an early age, right? I remember reading an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about how AOL would never, ever crack a million users and I was using AOL at that point and I remember thinking, that’s wrong, this is so much better than BBSes. Pre-web, remember.
That’s it. Everything else has been perfect, in its own way.
The square is complete!
The broken window theory in action. George, welcome!
Trigger points
If you direct your eyes to the left, you will see that a new peep has joined my [bird joke]: Dr. Luis Ripoll. He’s been keeping a blog for a while on MySpace and I convinced him to transition it to a more public forum where his writing will get an audience that isn’t all scared freshman girls.
Unfun
Posting and reply to email is going to be slow for a bit – my iBook hard drive blew up (SMART errors and bad blocks all of the sudden) and needs love.
Statistically-outlying girls I have found attractive in select cases
Bald girls
Blind girls with seeing-eye dogs
Courtney Peldon
Girls in wheelchairs
Girls with a gimpy leg
Girls with amputated limbs
Girls with eyes of different colors
Girls with fathers in jail for murder
Girls with giant tattoos of infants riding honeybees with honey dripping from the bee’s fangs
Girls with hysterical pregnancies
Girls with lazy eyes
Girls with white vertical scars on their left wrists
Pyromaniacs
Many who know me well have accused me of having a ‘beauty problem,’ but it’s more like the girl needs to BE BEAUTIFUL TO ME.
All updated; I’m glad you made it
Little disasters
Yesterday, returning to the garage at UCLA where I had parked my car, I was stopped by an officer of the peace and told I couldn’t go to level B, because an SUV had caught fire. So I waited there for the Fire Dept. to do their thing, etc. Then, just now, the power went out in my apartment. These things come in threes. What’s next?
Interesting problem with LED car headlights
Unlike conventional bulbs and xenons, they don’t produce enough heat to melt lens-obscuring snow.
Paper Mario
I can’t help it.
Paul Frank
It’s an ad, but you can be struck by an ad: “If you really want to meet a girl you don’t throw a basketball at her, you make her something…like a purse or something cute.”
Our cat
Has started sleeping in a barrel. Like, eighteen hours a day. She emerges to eat, defecate privatly, and prowl the neighborhood in the small hours. So cute.
The Situation
Ashcroft leaves, Arafat’s brain dies, pharmacists begin to refuse birth control prescriptions.
My two favorite street signs
1. The Historic Tree sign on City Line Avenue in Philadelphia, near Friends Central. Where and what is the historic tree? No one knows.
2. The Beverly Hills is the Sister City of Cannes, France sign on Coldwater. Cheesy, old fashioned, and actually means something – people from both cities actually go between the two every year. Love it.
Uh-oh
I’ve started taking cameraphone pictures in my dreams.
Oh, total excitement
It looks like I’m going to the premiere of the new Hilary Duff movie.
In other music news, the new Hot Snakes record is hot (punk rock about getting audited – fuck yes 2004), I’m waiting for the new Burning Brides (now with the Hot Snakes’ drummer, I think), I suddenly want a copy of Matthew Sweet “Girlfriend,” I got a copy of “The Winding Sheet,” the Mark Lanegan album w/ Kurt that’s the original source of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” c. 1989, I’m waiting on the new Delgados, waiting on Morelenbaum2+Sakamoto “A Day In New York.” Also, I’m thinking of signing up for freeipods.com, not because I need to, but because I can. Stupid greed.
Here’s that fucking flyer
You tell me what I should make of this. Is it some kind of a threat? How the fuck would the average man-around-town know who I am? I feel like three people know me in LA, tops.
This flyer I found in a different place, and it seems to be more up-to-date – they changed that construction thing to a correct criticism of how I’d lower fluoridation levels in the drinking water.
Weird
I found this bizarre flyer stapled to a tree in front of my apartment building. The fucked up thing is, they’re everywhere. I just copied what the thing said, but you kind of have to see it for yourself. It has my face – I don’t know where they got the photo – Friendster? – and the head of this goat demon thing, like from a Slayer poster or something. I’m a little stressed out about this. Who the fuck is going to all this trouble to libel me? I can scan the thing later, I guess. It’s printed on pink fucking neon paper. I don’t even know where to start, in terms of a rebuttal. Some of it is true, but I never said the Al-Aqsa Brigade was an important cultural group. Their fucking webpage isn’t up, and when I DNSed them it doesn’t even look like they have it registered yet. Maybe I should just buy it before they do. Bastards.
—-
Geoffrey Litwack LIED about his involvement in Enron and Worldcom!
Geoffrey Litwack called the Al-Aqsa Brigades “an important cultural group.”
Help send Geoffrey Litwack a message that the Al-Aqsa Brigades are NOT “an important cultural group!”
Geoffrey Litwack can’t seem to make up his mind about the FACTS.
Are new construction projects “good for the local economy” or “bad for the common taxpayer?” He’s gone on the record saying both!
YOU CAN’T HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO, MR. LITWACK.
Do YOU want people like Litwack controling the water supply in Beverly Hills?
Do you think somebody like LITWACK has the best interests of your children in mind?
If you’re tired of fatcats like Litwack working the political machine for their own ends, see our web-site for more information and a petition you can sign to HELP GET LITWACK OUT OF OFFICE NOW. Visit www.thetruthaboutgeoffreylitwack.com and get the FACTS for yourself.
—
At the bottom it says the message is endorsed by Perfection, Inc., which is somehow a 501(c)(3) and gives an address which Mapquest tells me is in the Valley somewhere. I’m seriously thinking of driving out there tomorrow or the day after to see what’s up.
The future of litwack.org
Tiresome, I know. I’ve posted a couple of times about my weariness with the blog format and my interest in some new web technologies – Nokia’s Lifeblog, the forthcoming Ftrain Sitekit, Flickr, and del.icio.us – but Rudy Rucker, in his most recent Boing Boing guestbar entry (scroll down to the cellphone) articulates what I’ve been wanting: a lifebox.
“[You tell a lifebox] your life story. It prompts you with questions and organizes the information you give it. As well as words, you can feed in digital images, videos, sound recordings and the like. [...] Once you get enough information into your lifebox, it becomes something like a simulation of you. Your audience can interact with the stories in the lifebox, interrupting and asking questions. [...] You might leave a lifebox behind so your grandchildren and great-grandchildren can know what you were like, you might use your lifebox as a way to introduce yourself to large numbers of people, or you might let your lifebox take over some of your less interesting duties in your daily routine, such as answering routine phone calls and email.”
I know it sounds a little kooky, but that’s what I’m shooting at, minus the taking over the daily routine bit.
ps: there’s a lifebox in I, Robot.
UPDATE: Kottke’s got the vision of this for the short term.
Transparent
After reading about lucid dreaming and taking .25mg alprazolam (old tricks), I had an optimistic dream of my future, which I greedily wrote down, as if transcription might encourage the flesh. The artist’s colony element comes straight from Wake Up, Sir!, which I finished last night, and there’s a little sex, which I have placed in the extended entry, in case there are precocious children reading. Away with you, precocious children!
—-
My novel is finished, and has been sold. I have a little money—not like my dreams at the outset, but enough to pay my debts, bills, and embolden me. It’s ten months until my book comes out and I have to start giving readings.
I have found an artist’s colony by the seashore in a state I’d never considered. I apply, sort of forget about it, and then am accepted. I regretfully give notice on my apartment, say goodbye to Andreaa and my family, and set off, with stuff in a backpack and clothes in my rolling bag. It’s frightening to take this step, but I feel like it will work, so I do.
I arrive at the colony and meet the people there. Most are older than me, but there are a few my age, and we form a club that meets at night. I become good friends with the boys and intimate with one of the girls—the most talented and beautiful of the bunch. We sleep together at night.
I stay for three months. After the first month, I am working every day, producing my second novel. The characters live, are like people I know. I figure out the ending, and it makes me sick, at first, until I reconcile myself to it.
I go back to Los Angeles, leaving the beautiful girl behind, and move to a new place. It’s high up, with wood floors and a balcony. I finish my novel and take two weeks off. I sit on the sofa, listen to a lot of music, and allow the cool breeze to blow in through my windows. I also smear on sunscreen and go to the beach every other day. I meet a girl there, a girl who is different from me. She is confident, kind. We start seeing each other. When we do things together I feel protected by her warmth instead of weakened by her strength. She likes to come over to my apartment and listen to music with me, especially the Velvet Underground. Sometimes we walk to the movies, or go out to eat. My ball rolls and I start getting more work. She too is doing well, and we have time together.
We decide to go on a two week trip to the east coast. I take her to meet friends and relations, and back to the Main Line. We rent a car, and I show her where I grew up, exactly the important places. She loves it. I tell her I want to move back, and she knows why. The trip is anxiety-free. “You’re cured!” she says, teasingly, when I bring this up back at home, but I actually feel so. “The last four years of my life were not so good,” I tell her. My head is in her lap. She strokes my hair and scratches my scalp. “Poor old lover-boy,” she says. Those words and others pour over my face like syrup and shellac my eyelids shut. When I wake up in the morning I feel wildly alive, like a man saved from the firing squad. She’s sitting down, reading the paper, and looks up at me with her big, unworried eyes. I see a house, parties, friends, children playing under the tables and in the garden at night, being old and shopping for records with my teenagers. “You’ve saved me,” I say.
(more…)
Q*bert
I’m trying to finish my novel. It’s not easy. Whispering in my left ear is the voice of Russian Formalism. In the right: McLusky. In some of the long, uneasy moments of silence, I play Q*bert. In the game, a stage is made up of four levels. The rules of the game are altered with every passing stage, making progress more difficult.
I will say this: purported internet hi-score records to the contrary, it is not possible to progress beyond stage 3, level 2. I have tried. I am like Ixion, bound to the wheel, and the wheel is Q*bert.
I regret nothing, motherfuckers.
Wow, Chuck
This is the best thing Chuck Klostermann has ever written, and that’s saying a lot. [God I miss typing this: link via Fimoculous.] By his standards, I don’t think I have a nemesis (I keep my friends pretty close), but I do have an archenemy: Calvin. I don’t know where you are, and I don’t even know your last name, but one of these days I’m going to break your fucking neck.
Notes
Went back to the gym and got my ass handed to me – my godbrother is preparing to climb mount McKinley; I could barely make it up the landing.
I went to the Westwood Borders and saw DMX with his crew. You only regret what you don’t do, it’s really true. I wanted to give him and pound and say, “respect to Yonkers from Philly.”
This is a really graphic link, so watch out. The message board for men who sleep with prostitutes in Los Angeles. My interest is in the language: they refer to their activities as a “hobby,” the girls as “providers,” and payments made as “donations.” And providers are everywhere in this town, it turns out.
I write 