Color · me · Fucked

Hey folks! Good to see y'all again. I hope you have all been well. Looks like it has been a bit long since my last post so let me bring you up to speed.

I stopped living over at St. Johns and moved in with my friend, Malina, and that has pretty much been where I have been for the past year. Sorry about not posting, but I didn't have any furniture and you would be suprised at how little time you wish to spend writing a blog (or email or anything) when your ass is on the floor.

So why post now, you ask? Well, first off, lemme mention what a nosy prick you've become since last we spoke. The main reason is over the past weekend, I have moved in with my girlfriend and that has allowed me to use things that have been in storage for the past year. Like chairs. For sitting.

Really, sitting and typing go hand in hand like Laurel and Hardy, smoking and drinking, smoking and sitting, drinking and Laurel and hot, gay couples.

So, now that I've reacquainted my ass with a chair and my fingers with a keyboard, I can assure you of at least a half dozen posts before I forget about the blog again.

Wish me well on my new life at Jen's. We would invite you over for some kind of house-party celebration (God knows, I long to bust out my Kid-And-Play moves!) but we are too concerned that you would steal stuff. You know how you are.

I'm having a problem with identity, lately. Not in the "am I a good-natured but foppish dandy or a tasteless, rambling dimfuck?" kinda way but in governmental, legalistic, "I don't have a proof that I am who I say I am with the exception of this out-of-state driver's license that expired almost a year ago" kinda way.

Unless, you got lost in my labyrinthine wordplay, above, then you realize that I have been driving for the past nigh-year with an expired drivers license. That has pretty much made the sight of any cop car an extremely hard blow to my smoke-weakened, exercise-free heart.

Add in that I lost my passport, a month ago (which is quite the worry, not least of which because Jen and I are planning a trip out of country for my birthday, next month), and I'm completely lacking any official form of picture identification. Fortunately, the fact that I look my age (plus ten years) keeps me from being thrown out of bars and away from high schools in a bid to relieve and repair my glory years by pretending to be 16 a la John Cryer in that John Cryer movie that I went to directed by the guy who did Hall & Oates 'Possession Obsession' video (ya' know, that one !?!?)

I'm heading to the DMV, later today, to try and get my Oregon driver's license. Wish me luck.

** UPDATE **
I just got my license! Woo hoo! I got two questions wrong on the test. According to me, you can turn your headlights off an hour after sunset and you don't have to turn them on until an hour before sunrise. Whoops! Sadly, I had to part with my old California license with its rugged, badass picture that makes me look like a young ex-con. My new license picture makes me look fat, blotchy and quite possibly drunk (like an old ex-con!)

** UPDATE II **
That John Cryer movie was 'Hiding Out' and directed by Bob Giraldi. He also directed the videos to 'Beat It', 'Love is a Battlefield' and any video that had ambient sound effects and dialogue.

The summer is winding down and I just have to say what a disappointing season of movies it has been. I can usually count on Hollywood giving me at least one blockbuster that I unequivocally enjoyed and possibly two or three that I found fun. This summer has been a drag, though.

Firstly, most of the movies in the theaters, I didn't even want to go to. MI III? No thanks. I still regret see in the Brian DePalma incoherent wankfest that was the first and the John Woo nervous breakdown that was the second. So what else was there? The were about a half dozen CGI animated movies of varying quality that I had no desire to go to - including Cars which is the first Pixar film that I don't have the slightest desire to see.

Which brings us to Little Man, a movie that I have practically been waiting my entire life not to see. There was a nice piece of dialog in the TV series Action where a film producer was yelling at a subordinate that was thinking of taking a job at UPN:

"See that's the difference between movies and television...talent! Movies have Sean Penn. Television has Shawn Wayans. Movies have Marlon Brando. Television has Marlon WAYANS! Movies have Alec Baldwin. Television has Alec...Wayans...I don't know...I'm sure there is one running around somewhere"

Oh, if only that were the case. Little Man has the distinction of being one of those movies that I was glad to see finally make it into the screens, if only so I would never have to see the trailer again. Now, if they would only stop running the ads on television.

So, what did I actually see? I saw several comic book movies like Xmen 3 and Superman Returns which I didn't hate but I didn't really love. Superman, in particular, I enjoyed and yet was bitterly (and rather profoundly) disappointed with at the same time. It was such an intelligent, heart-felt film with several incredibly well-done sequences and yet the choice to make it a sequel to the Donner films made me rather sad and uncomfortable (and I'm not even gonna start in about the kid!)

What makes me really sad and uncomfortable, though, is that Pirates of the Caribbean was the only movie this summer that I flat out enjoyed and, as a film, it was a mess. It was a shapeless movie stringing along almost random scenes, sequences, characters and jokes into a ill-defined plot. It completely lacked a proper climax and it was 30-45 minutes too long but I was still able to laugh, enjoy it and, most importantly, turn my brain off for a couple of hours and, really, that is what I want from my summer movie and, with my brain, it shouldn't be that hard.

Hey folks! Sorry for the long delay between posts but things have been pretty busy in TimTown (population: me) this year. Heck, there have been so many changes, you might worried that you've gotten the wrong blog!

First off, I've moved out from John's house. After spending the past, what, two and half years (and my entirety in Portland) living in the house on N. Macrum, it was time for me to move on. John was getting tired of hanging around me and I was getting tired of him still supporting Spongewhore Fatass (my stalker, Susan) and shoving her into my life. So, I loaded up the truck and moved in with my friend, Malina, and the living conditions have been great. John and I are getting along really well and Susan's pathetic, childlike and tiresome annoyances are limited to the easily ignored email and blog responses.

I'm still working providing network support and monitoring for a financial services company. I just have been promoted from worthless corporate cannon fodder to slightly less worthless cannon fodder. Whoopee!

To cap all it off, I'm in a very happy relationship with my completely out-of-my-league girlfriend, Jen.

In other words, folks, the peach trees are in full bloom and things have gotten pretty peachy in TimTown. Don't worry, though, as this blog will still be a reliable source of bitterness, self-pity and navel-gazing. Thanks for checking back...be sure to buy something from the gift shop!

Well, John returned home from the hospital to take my room and while it has been pretty crappy, it hasn't been as bad as I had thought it was going to be. See folks, that is the great benefit of always expecting the worst and refusing to see the possibility of good, you occasionally find yourself only 94% fucked and thus somewhat pleased.

Instead of moving into John's stench pit, I moved into the downstairs storage room. It is a big, ugly room meant to be a den or exercise room that John partially tore up for some reason and never put back together. So it's got all of this paneling and crap lying around, along with all of our stuff that we don't feel like dealing with and it also has...oh yeah...the furnace. So all of the shit has been pushed to one side of the room and my bed is on the other next to...the furnace.

So the room has some flaws: there is no door, it is right under 'my' room and I can hear John's every fart but the main problem is that...furnace. It starts up two to three times a night - right next to my motherfucking head - and it sounds like the engine of a '74 motherfucking Chevette. I wake up each time as if the sirens of the motherfucking Blitz are going off. Once I even woke up muttering, "don't kill me."

But, really, if that is the worst of my problems with the whole move, then I'm doing fine. Thanks for asking.

Sorry that I've been absent for the month of January. 2006 has started out badly for an amiable, little fuckup like myself and it seems to be getting worse as it gets along. I understand that the bad things that happen in one's life should be viewed as learning experiences and whatnot and - to illustrate that very point - let me describe the events of last week and the the Life Lessons that they have imparted.

I started off the weekend sick with a very bad flu that inflicted, among other things, a sore throat that made it hard to speak. I ended up taking a couple of days off (I haven't accumulated any sick days, so these were not those wonderful days where no matter how painful and rotting you feel, you still smile because you're getting paid to lie in bed and scratch your nuts (or Vag' or what have you)) I took Sunday and Monday off and on Monday evening, I got the call.

Some guy named Rob or Ron or Rog or whatever was calling up to tell me that my roommate, John, had just had an accident. John had hit a rock or stick or whatever while cycling, went over an embankment and broke the shit out of his right leg. The guy, Rod or whatever, had just taken him to the hospital. I was immediately pretty worried for John because despite whatever differences John and I have about life, each other or anything else, Truth #1 is that John is a pretty good guy.

So, anyhoo, this guy goes on to describe how John went over the embankment and broke the shit of his leg to the point where his foot is practically pointing in the other fucking direction. While I was lying around with my pissass flu thinking that I am about to die, John hopped up the embankment (carrying his bike, mind you), got back on his bike and started peddling with ONE MOTHERFUCKING FOOT to the nearest major road. John was thinking of riding all the way home but fell over with his bike - onto his broken leg - before deciding to just flag down a car to take him to the hospital. While this guy, Ross or whatever, was telling me this, I realize Truth #2 which is that I'm a big, fucking pussy.

It was later that night as I was running around trying to find John relatives' phone numbers, that I realize that I'm gonna get kicked out of my beloved room. You see, I live upstairs with my loverly bedroom, convenient bathroom and dandy, little study while John lives downstairs in his fucking dungeon. It has low ceilings, no light outside of his scattered fluorescent bulbs and stinks from dirty clothes and body odor to smell like a combo of nut sweat and ass juice. It smells like his fucking taint. Well, John with his broken leg won't be bouncing up and down his stairs. He is going to have to move upstairs into my rooms and I would have to move down into his Taint Pit. Over the next week, John acted like this thought was as repulsive to him as it was to me. He assured me day after day that he was staying downstairs but, the day before he moved back from the hospital, he had to admit that we were going to have to switch and I had to admit to Truth # 3 - I am fucked.

More of this ongoing story later, hmmm? Thanks to everybody who has been checking this space for updates, this past month. I love you all with the exception of the ones I really,really fucking hate.

I managed to see King Kong last week and it was good. I think most critics have done an effective job at nailing the problems with the movie while still overrating it. It is too long due mostly to a dragging first act that wallows in too many shallow and uninteresting characters. It's like going to a party where there is only one person you like there and you spend over an hour listening to Hipsters and Dullards drone on, occasionally interupting them by asking "where's Kong? Has Kong showed up yet?" Alot of the problems of the first act lie firmly on something which I have always maintained but nobody has ever agreed with me on, namely that Peter Jackson is not - and never has been - funny.

Then Kong shows up and Kong is really fucking great. Maybe I'm biased, because if anybody can identify with a tall, sensitive, hairy guy with a bit of gut, it's me (yeah?) but Kong fucking rocks every fucking scene he is in. I honestly could watch three hours of just Kong picking giant ticks out of his ass and sure enough, when the big guy gets it in the end, I fucking sobbed like a little baby. It is a shame because Jackson knows that Kong is great and wonderful and that Kong dying is the saddest fucking thing in the whole wide world but he can't realize that you could line up the rest of the characters, shoot 'em in the back of the head - execution style - and nobody would give a single crap.

After I left the theater, I was struck by how much the movie reminded me of Capote (another flick I've seen in the past couple weeks). Unlike Kong, the filmmakers know that Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote is simply staggering and try to shove him into every frame of the film and Hoffman is so damn good that you can't look at anything on the screen when he is on. They could've had him spend the film sitting next to Angelina Jole and Charlize Theron making out and you still wouldn't take your eyes off of him.

Part of me wishes they had combined the two films and saved three hours of my life. Kongpote if you will. The movie about a twenty five foot, martini-swilling ape with a lisp who spends the entire film either beating the shit out of dinosaurs or insincerely befriending them only to dish nastily about them behind their back. Hell, I would dare anyone to argue that it would be a worse film than Kong Lives.

I have to apologize for not getting in touch with alot of you people, this last week. The new job has been kicking my ass. Admittedly, I have become a big pussy after being unemployed for so long and doing anything that doesn't involve me lying in bed, scratching my testicles, is pretty tiring. But what has really been canning my ass like a giant ass canning machine has been my commute. I spend 3-4 hours every day either on the bus or waiting for the bus. So, after twelve hours of working, sitting on a bus or freezing while waiting for a bus, I have naught a thought in my pretty, little head outside of "guh?"

The job itself is okay. The crux of my job is running a variety of programs and commands to monitor and troubleshoot thousands of ATMs throughout the States. Sometimes there is a problem with an ATM that I can fix by myself and that is when the job is most rewarding. I like the idea of entering the router of an ATM located outside of a rest stop on a forgotten highway in North Dakota or wherever, booting the port, marking it up and getting the machine running without anybody else on God's green Earth knowing that I was there. I feel like the ATM Fairy or one of those elves that cobbled shoes while the cobbler was passed out drunk or that leprechaun that milked goats while the...goat milking guy was...doing something else.

The worst part of the job has been the need to call people to deal with the problems themselves. I can only fix about a tenth of ATM problems by myself, the rest of the time I have to either arrange techs to come out (which isn't so bad) or bother the bank people into going out and fixing the ATM. That is the worst because the majority of my shift lies after hours and I have to bother these people whose banks have volunteered that we can contact day or night. "Yes sir, I'm sorry that it is midnight, your wife is giving birth and there is snowstorm but could you run over to ATM 37894 and power-fail the machine. Thanks!"

I'm getting into the swing of things, folks, and I will get started on the flurry of emails and phone calls in a few days. I appreciate your patience and please don't feel bad because I'm doing something that is a million times more important than you. Sure, if you were cooler then I would value you far more and shower you with far more attention but it's probably for the best. I assure there will always be room in life for all of you people with such limited charms.

I spent so many posts talking about being unemployed that I am probably overdue in announcing on this blog that it is no longer the case. I have been employed as a monitor/tech of independent ATMs for a financial services company. Not sexy by any means, sure, but it beats the ass off staring at Craigslist wondering if I have the education/background to fake my way through an interview as an anesthesiologist. Throw in that I've stopped weeping my way through ATT Tech commercials and having a job is pretty nice.

While having a job is nice, I can't really tell you how my specific job is. I'm still in training. Until they pick up my contract (and I'm assured that they eventually will), I get none of the bennies. No medical, no dental, no bus subsidy (which really smarts!) and while I RSVP'd for the Xmas party, I don't think that I'm actually invited (they would be wise not to, as I plan on getting shit-in-my-pants-and-piss-on-the-floor drunk.)

The only thing about my job that I can really comment on with any authority is the vending machines. My new company has very nice vending machines. Beyond the standard coke, chips and candy bars that one expects, they have sandwiches, ice cream, burritos, microwave meals, skim milk, jerky, cereal and quite possibly whippets. All for prices that are actually lower than what one could find in a downtown mini mart.

In my opinion, this bodes well for a continuing relationship between the company and myself. If there is anything that I learned when I was very young, it is that I can put up with alot of shit as long as I keep shoving salted meat down my jerky hole.

Under an article originally titled "List of Historical Monkeys":

Jack - Baboon (species not recorded). South African. During the late 19th century, worked as an ox-driver, disabled person's assistent, janitor, guard, and train signal operator. According to the account, skeptical railroad authorities tested and approved Jack's signalling skills, and he thereafter received an official employment number and a monthly stipend.

Tim says, "awesome"

An unidentified monkey was hanged in Hartlepool during the Napoleonic wars after it had washed ashore from a shipwrecked French warship. It is unclear if the people of Hartlepool knew that it was monkey or were merely confused as to what Frenchmen looked like.

Tim says, "they hanged a monkey because they thought it was a Frenchman? Double awesome"

The other week, I saw a poster for the new 50 Cent film, Get Rich or Die Tryin’. I’m not a big fan of 50 Cent. I think his raps are lazy, his flow is weak and his story is overplayed. Yeah, yeah…so he got shot nine times. Big whoop. I once had mono.

Anyhoo, the poster had 50 Cent cradling a baby as if it was going to suckle from his teat. Besides thinking about how big of a bullet that baby was going to suck out of 50 Cent’s nipple, I wondered, “why did rappers stop hating Hollywood?”

‘Bout eleven years ago, there was a track on Public Enemy’s last great album, Fear of a Black Planet, called "Burn, Hollywood, Burn". In it, Chuck D, Ice Cube, and Big Daddy Kane gave a scathing attack on Hollywood’s poor record of portraying black people in movies (well, Ice Cube was less scathing and more lame) Big Daddy Kane had the best line:

"As I walk the streets of Hollywood boulevard,
thinkin’ how hard it was to those that starred
in the movies portrayin’ the roles
of butlers and maids,
slaves and hoes."

Hollywood, clever little monkeys that they are, decided to insure nobody will ever rap badly about them again by hiring all the goddamn rappers. Ice Cube, Ice T, Heavy D, LL Cool J, Queen Latifah, Eve, Snoop, Dr. Dre, P. Diddy, and on and on.

Enough, folks, really.

There is no reason to give 50 Cent a movie or Method Man a TV show or Biz Markee a play or whatever. Are you making a movie about Harriet Tubman? Don’t cast Pepa. Are you doing a remake of Raisin in the Sun? Forget about Nelly.

It’s not like all these rappers suck as actors but if we are headed for a day where movies don’t have actors anymore but rappers, polka players and mariachi guitarists (depending on whatever ethnicity) then we heading in the wrong direction.

And rappers? If your time in the limelight is ending and you need to sell out, take a lesson from MC Hammer and just do ads for car dealerships and loan shops.

Ok? Thanks.

Love,

Tim

Regarding the last post, I guess Susan has made a couple entries and the post that I quoted is not on the front page of her blog anymore. You can check it out here. (August 19th)

Oddly enough, another post about me from that same day has disappeared alltogether. Huh.

Hmm…I guess there was more in Susan’s actions than just selfishness and crazy.

Last night, John mentioned that she had a blog (she said something along the lines of “I wrote about you and Tim in my blog so you’re famous now! You should be happy!”) Working on the assumption that most people that have blogs also have corresponding email names, I decided to pump the names from her various emails to me into google and see what I could find.

This is Susan’s blog and it appears she thought about me quite a bit (I’m the subject of her first two posts, at the bottom, and appear sporadically in later posts)

The first post is kinda sweet (if a bit unsettling). Maybe because it is about me and I know what she is referring too, but it isn’t quite as obtuse as the rest. This is quite a nice, little paragraph:

I like how you smoke. I like how you walk, and how you come in when it's almost dark in the warm summer air, next to the lighted garage. I like how you waved, briefly like a diplomat ducking into a plane, standing by the glass door.

And this:

The signs of California are all over you, especially in the way you say 'peachy'. Especially in how you are faster than me. Your critiques: confused like a child. Tourists in cargo pants. Burning the temple of Solomon. Your phone manner: excellent. You are spot on. I don't lose you. I'd never lose my wit.

It reads like a love letter (and it just might be that) and, while I’m more than a little creeped out, I’m flattered, as well.

Ps. Please don't leave any comments to her. I'd rather she didn't know that I was aware of the existence of her blog or that I have one of my own. Thanks!

I’ve actually tried to write this post several times and I keep scratching it. How does one go about describing Susan?

Susan dated my roommate, John, a couple of times. He gave her a place to stay before she left for Las Vegas and after returned. After she came back, she had money problems and John gave her money (quite a bit of it).

Now, let me interrupt the story to describe Susan. Wild haired, overweight and slobbily dressed, Susan speaks French, is well read and supposedly a talented muli-instrumentalist. Though she tends to be withdrawn, she can be a decent conversationalist though she tends to repeat things that she finds particularly funny or deep.

Ok, with the description out of the way, lets get back to the story. Susan would come over often to sleep in John’s room or use his computer. We were relatively amicable though we rarely talked to each other. After a few weeks, I started getting annoyed at how capriciously she was using the house and I asked her to wash the dishes she used. She threw a tantrum and we had an argument. We both apologized and promised we would be more considerate of each other in the future.

A month passes and Susan is borrowing more and more money from John and, despite securing a residence of her own, she continued to come over to the house to use the resources and stay the night. Late September, she gets angry about something I said (I asked her if she was staying the night, that's all!) and throws another tantrum and we get into another argument. She ends up physically attacking me, calling the cops on me (saying that I was verbally abusing her) and running off before the cops show up. I vow never to deal with her again. She sends me email and voice messages that are, at first, apologetic but then increasingly angry and bitter in a style that I’m sure she thinks is poetic and deep, but I find unbalanced and obtuse.

As the weeks pass by, John shifts from my side to hers and back to mine. First, she’s crazy then she’s all right then she’s annoying and then she is not so bad. Finally, she brings up the fact that he offered to let her live here until she found a new place to live (she hates where she lives) and he repeated his offer to let her stay in our house.

For the past three weeks she has been living sporadically in our house. John says she constantly brings up paranoid (and occasionally homosexual) fantasies about me and him and often tries to convince him to kick me out. She stays for increasingly short periods of time, first a week, then a few days. Last time is for about 24 hours. Sometimes John kicks her out, sometimes she leaves because he is not catering to her desires well enough. Every time he swears that it is the last he’ll ever deal with him and, every time, she convinces him to let her back.

Me? I put locks on my doors and refuse to deal with her. She’ll keep coming back and John will always relent and I’ll keep on having to deal with Susan as long as I live here.

She is anthropomorphic herpes, folks.

I just changed my Blog theme. The removing of extra spaces and automatic indenting of new paragraphs kinda fucks up the structure of my posts, but I like it.

It's kinda tough. It says "I'm gonna HAMMER your fucking EYEBALLS out of your fucking HEAD with my DICK if you don't shut your fucking PIE HOLE!"

And that is what I want my blog to say without, you know, actually saying it.

Outside of paralyzing myself with fear, I have been up to other things, as well. Definitely, finding a job has been on the top of my list. The past month was going pretty swell for a bit. My resume was getting a lot of hits, there were plenty of positions spilling out of Craigslist and I have gone on many an interview.

A few weeks ago, a potential employer set up an interview at a coffee shop in the area where he was going to be (the company is in sales). After we exchanged information about what we looked like and what we would be wearing so as to identify each other, I remarked that it was like we were going on a blind date. He chuckled and observed on how it's good that we were meeting in a public place.

Interviews are like blind dates. You clean yourself up a bit, put on some good clothes and do your damndest to both make as good of an impression as you can while, at the same time, trying to figure out whether you could see yourself with the other person. Each person has a little bit of information of what the other is like but you're sitting at that table or desk or whatever, sweating and wondering if you're coming off as desperate, realizing that maybe you don't even like the position offered but, goddamnit, you'll settle!

As of last week, the dust settled and after several weeks of feeling like the prettiest belle at the ball, I'm left with very little. A couple temp agencies signed me up but haven't sent anything my way. Several good interviews resulted in little more than a signed form letter that I'm not what they are looking for and most companies didn't even send that. The ads for jobs that I would be perfect for didn't respond to my resume.

I've had one real opportunity: a Manufacturing Representative company that needs a bookkeeper and all-around computer guy to deal with a list of things both concrete and abstract. It is an uninspiring job for middling pay but good lord do I need it. I went to my third interview last week and was informed that they would probably make me an offer on Monday.

Monday was yesterday. I haven't heard a thing.

Once again, I feel the need to return to my blog and post yet another excuse on why I haven't touched it in a while. Actually, the reason is the same as usual - I'm a neurotic mess saddled with far greater ambition than motivation and I think that I'm gonna post several entries on what I have been doing despite writing in my blog.

I wish I could say that I've been getting fit and learning French cuisine.

What I have been doing, first and foremost, is worrying. I think some of you who know me know that I'm the worrying sort. Hell, there should be a good half-dozen of you that have gone through at least an hour of concentrated spiel about my fears about my hair loss.

Fear is something that I have in such abundance that - despite it being redundant - I find it frightening.

I don't have fears about spiders or dying or clowns in my closet or terrorists or getting arrested or waking up in high school naked (well...) but I have a healthy load of fears, nonetheless. Some are so trite that I talk about them incessantly, worrying about them loudly to fulfill my need to talk about my darker fears (see above hair) while others I have had to bring up because they affect how I deal with others.

Some of you know that I have problems making contact with even my closest friends and family due to a fear that I'm interrupting something or that they don't want to hear from. It's fucked, I know, but it's true. I didn't even contact my brother John for six or seven years. I wanted to but I didn't.

And then he died (a couple years ago, thank you)

Now, I'm not writing this for any real response or affirmation. Some highly trained professionals and a lot of personal time has been spent on the as-of-yet task of getting over my fears, regrets, pains and other demons that I have so don't feel the need to offer up anything yourself. This is my burden. I offer this only as a subtext for future posts. Whatever I have done or been going through over the course of the past month or so (hell, for the past thirty four years!)

Above all, what I have been doing is thrashing, sweating, gnashing, moaning and shaking in fear.

And watching reality television.

That too.

Guh. The days drag on. Not much new has happened. No new interviews and I haven't gotten any callbacks (I had been hoping for something from Kaiser Permanente, but I haven't heard shit)

Television has been halfway decent. I have been catching up on reruns of House and Veronica Mars. The former is a gleefully sadistic update of Sherlock Holmes that has a hilarious formula: 1) create mystery ailment, 2) misdiagnose several times, 3) treat each misdiagnosis with an increasingly painful treatment and 4) figure it out correctly in the last ten minutes. The latter is an excellent, intelligent update of Nancy Drew that is somehow on UPN. I know! UPN! It is like seeing a one-legged retarded guy date far out of his league. The new season of Battlestar Galactica has been a bit of a letdown from last season's brilliance but I still wouldn’t kick it out of bed.

Poor ratings seem to be dooming what was this season's most interesting and ghoulish trends - reality shows that seek to replace dead people (I call them 'Darren Shows') Rock Star: INXS tries to find someone to fill Michael Hutchence's autoerotic asphyxiated shoes, while RU The Girl with TLC looks for a young girl that can sing, dance, and drive a little better than Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopez (one of the trials should be who can set fire to Andre Rison's house the fastest!) The INXS show is actually quite good and the TLC show is pretty bad. I'm sure part of the problem with these shows, besides the rehashed American Idol rehash quality that rarely works, is that that the prizes are less than they seem. INXS offers only a year of being lead singer of the band (one album, one tour) while TLC offers a cameo on one song and a walk-on on a single concert.

Again, poor ratings are killing both shows and I'm a little saddened by that. I'm attracted to the rather morbid idea of using reality television to replace a deceased human being. ABC could have a news reality show with local anchormen and women from across the globe competing for the chance to be the next Peter Jennings. Tabloids like US or People could put on a search of pretty couples to find the next John Kennedy Jr. and that blonde chick he was married to.

If this trend continues, we could have shows where people compete for the chance to compete for dead abstract concepts like Modesty, Phrenology and the careers of any Baldwin that isn't Alec.

Maybe it is for the best that the Darren Shows aren't thriving. I don't think that Rock Star: The Grateful Dead was really too far behind.

While my last post is certainly true - that I abhor the thought of moving back to the Bay Area - upon further reflection I have to admit that would be good things about going back there.

I would get to see my brother Jeff. The guy is one of the funniest, most intelligent people I have ever known and I miss the ability to see him on a somewhat regular basis (though I do get to talk to him more, now that I live in Portland) Plus, when his general happiness has taken some getting used to, it can be heartening and infectious (when it is not entirely irritating)

It would be great to see the Giants again. I don't think John would kick me out until the beginning of October, which would allow me only the chance to see the last couple of weeks (even though they probably won't contend for the playoffs, it would be great if they had the opportunity to spoil it for the Dodgers!) I have heard that the population of Portland is generally split between fans of the SF Giants and the Seattle Mariners, but TV and radio only offers Mariners games, so it would be lovely to once again nestle in the bosom of the Black and Orange.

I have been surprised at how much I miss the San Francisco Opera. One of my little secrets of living in SF was that the Opera was a really cheap night out. You just show up before a show and that would always be someone selling an extra ticket, for next to nothing. Sure, the productions are always hit and miss but it is always nice to have a reason to dress up and step out.

Lastly, I miss the Hockey Haven which was my bar. It was a great divey bar stocked with swell bartenders, interesting regulars, a minority of yuppies and hipsters and it was just a block and a half from my home. I probably might put a post on just the Haven because it deserves it and I miss it so. Everybody knew me, everybody liked me and if someone came in new, they often would be introduced to me quick ("Have you met Tim yet? He's bitter and angry!") It was a quick-bake social life

I know that if I go back to the Bay Area that nothing would be the same but it does lessen the sting somewhat off of my inevitable, shame-filled return.

I'm in the middle of my third month of joblessness and I have to start considering the very real possibility of John, my roommate, kicking me out it a month or so. There are limits to anybody's generosity - even somebody as genuinely giving as John - and even though I know that he appreciates me as good friend, he is probably going to have to consider booting me out on my kiester.

Which would force me to take the one option that I dread...moving in with my mom. My mother owns a large houseboat in Sausalito and I think she is kinda lonely as she has flat-out stated that she would like me to move in with her.

Honestly, it sounds terrible.

Outside of just being 34 years old (birthday next month!) and living with my mom - and that is a pretty crushing humiliation - I truly learned to detest the Bay Area when I lived down there and the exorbitant rents would keep me with my mom for a good long time. Fake people, bad traffic, no parking, terrible commutes, fake people, a dearth of available straight women, no PBR on tap, an inescapable club scene, shitty radio, overpriced restaurants and an overwhelming mass of fake-ass people create one truly, shitty place.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the safety net but it sure makes falling to the ground and breaking every bone in my face seem somewhat enviable.