Dammit. Looking closer at my Buy.com order of the Sony Vaio S170B14 (my Wife's proposed name for the laptop: "Maui"), it's listed as "On Order," which translates to, "we don't have any, but we'll take your money, and let you know if/when it comes in."

Crap. In the meantime, I'll look around and see if I can find it even cheaper... and in-stock.

What is it about phlegm that just makes it impossible to swallow? I mean, you would think it would just slide right down, but instead it always seems to stick in the throat, only to get horked back up for eventual expectoration.

Obviously, I'm sick.

Not sure what happened or how I got this way, since I have little contact with the outside world in my protective, IP-based bubble here in what I call the "Fort o' Seclusion," but which my Wife calls the basement. Still, over the last 36 hours I've started to generate mucus on a scale unprecedented in my sinuses.

To fight it, today I'm going all liquid diet for the first time since the ColonBlow experiment of January. At the time I deemed the ingestion of grape flavored sawdust a dismal failure since it didn't product black sludge feces, but I have to admit, it shed a couple of pounds. Per hour. (Amazing how that works when you don't have a donut or candy-bar or brownie every few hours.) I hope that along with flushing out the bad germs, I can flush out some fat cells as well.

I'm also sucking down Zinc tablets (Cherry-flavored my ass... they taste like Elmer's wood glue) and taking Dimetapp or Comtrex or something like that. All I know is, it says "non-drowsy" on the box, which I find disappointing, as I'd like to take a nap.

It's only money. So I made the purchase. The laptop is in the process of being pulled off a shelf, slapped with a label, and being sent to me (hopefully) ASAP.

My wife likes to bitch that I can go out and just automatically buy whatever I want without any thought. Need a gift for someone? I pick up the first thing off the shelf and it's a good fit. It's a gift I picked up from my father, the world's greatest casual impulse shopper. He can find gum in the aisle of the grocery store and turn it into a treat for the ages with 75 cents and an Xmas stocking.

The only time I can't pull this off is when I'm buying myself shoes. I'm such a fucking baby about what kind of sneakers I'll wear, because of my strict criteria of no vinyl, no zippers, no Velcro -- that eliminates 95% of the sneaker inventory in the world today.

The fact that this weekend I got myself a nice set of hiking boots (pre-Maui shopping trip!) for 30% off does nothing to assuage my continued horror to find that I'm having the same problem buying a laptop.

Yes, I'm still on the same kick I was over a month ago, agonizing over what type of portable computer to get for myself, my first actual computer that is personal (as opposed to a personal computer) since college. I've slowly let my budget go up, and up and up as I investigate models I'd consider.

My criteria here: wireless capability (duh), a screen I can read indoors and out, light weight (less than 4.5 pounds), and it's got to look so frickin' cool that when I take it out people will shudder and small children will weep and dogs will howl with jealousy.

So I decided about three weeks ago on the Sony VAIO (pronounced "vi? oh!) S Series. It's slim, silver, and sexy. It's just about everything but affordable, but damn it, I deserve to treat myself because... well, just because, all right, leave me the hell alone.

But I couldn't bring myself to buy it.

Doubts flooded my brain. First I was worried about the wide screen size... was 13.3 inches enough? But it's high resolution with some fancy brightness technology -- I could handle it.

Weight, not a problem -- at 4.2 pounds, it's almost half the wait of our current luggable Toshiba. Even if that's probably without the battery inserted. Finally, I had to see one.

I went and looked at the S150 version they sell at Best Buy. It was black though. I wanted silver. Again, I waited.

I went back, this time with the Wife in tow. I was thrilled to see it had the higher end video (an ATI Mobility 9200 chip with 32MB of video RAM) than the base system. She just looked at me in front of the sales dork and said, "Will you just buy it already?"

I told her I'm waffling, in support of our next president.

Then I went and made a huge mistake: I looked up the specifications for playing DOOM 3 on a computer. I'd need to spend another $90 to get the ATI 9700 chip at the high end to play. I bet the case gets hot enough to make fire on Vanuatu pumping out pixesl at 30fps with that game, but totally worth it. However, the 9700 chip is not an option on the version at Best Buy.

I found through a Sony S Series online forum that there are a number of preconfigured versions of the S170 model (the one you can custom configure at SonyStyle.com if you so desire) sold through online retailers. I found one today that is pretty close to what I was hoping to custom through Sony, but about $100 less (and at Buy.com, I have a $50 coupon I can use! Weee!).

Just as I was about to do it. I was ready to make the purchase.

Then, once again, I panicked and started looking around to confirm that the model I was about to buy (S170B14) actually had the 9700 chipset. I posted a note in the online forum and have waited all day long to get someone, anyone, a real person out there in the ether, to confirm this truth for me that I can't find posted anywhere. I must have hit refresh on that page every five minutes.

And lo, there came a reply. And the reply was: yes. It comes with the 9700. Huzzah!

But I still haven't placed the order.

I ask myself, What am I missing by making this purchase? I get XP Home instead of professional-- but that doesn't matter. It's not the highest end Pentium M chip, but at least it's not a Celeron. Probably no Bluetooth, which I was looking forward to using with a Bluetooth mouse, but hell, I've got enough USB mice sitting around here it won't hurt me to have one lousy cable.

Oh, and I'll be missing all that lovely money I have stored away.

Luckily, the gravity switch in my stalwart toaster has started to work again -- after two mornings of standing next to it, hold the bread down manually with my hand on the plunger, staring out the window waiting for it to turn brown -- so I'm feeling good about my chances here. And I'm reasonably sure that the wife won't have any problem with my taking a laptop with DOOM 3 loaded on it to Maui to pass my time. What's she expect me to do, sit at the beach all day? In the sun? That dog don't hunt -- I would get extra freckles.

But before I hit "purchase" I uh, need to update Quicken and make sure. Yes. Oh yes. That first.

Yesterday, for perhaps the first time since I moved into this house two years ago, I cleaned the crumbs out of the toaster. This involved much twisting and turning and shaking over the sink and I'm sure I still didn't get all the dead bread all out.

Today the gravity switch is broken. Imagine holding down the plunger on a toaster for 4 to 5 minutes, waiting for the bread to turn brown, and you'll see what a horror this is. I can't live like this. I might as well be in a third-world country filled with car bombs and blood-sucking ticks the size of cats and without a comfy cushioned toilet seat. It's insanity.

For the last several Xmases I've asked my family to buy me this toaster, but they always make fun of me and balk at the price. I mean, look at that... it's like a toaster FDR would have used, yet it's futuristic enough to be suitable for the Borg. It doesn't even need a gravity switch -- it just shuts off when done, and keeps things warm. For the love of Dog people, it's cheaper than an iPod and at least four times as big, so it's got to be a bargain! What's the problem? Don't you know I've got a certain lifestyle to maintain?

I might be forced to buy it for myself now, as the likelihood of my going without toast for more than two days is right up there with the chances Trent Lott might switch to the Democratic Party. Though spending that much on a toaster at this stage could put a crimp in our finances for our upcoming trip to Hawaii (Oct. 17-29).... I might have to eat a little less roast Kalua pig at the luau. Or drink fewer mai tais brought to me by my personal "beach butler" (that's a real job!).

Damn. So many decisions.

Since the wife wasn't home last night, I didn't see the big wrap up of The Amazing Race -- I told her I'd wait and watch it with her. (Totally deserves the Emmy, tho hard to fathom it beating out two seasons of Survivor in a row with Rupert.) So now I can't ready any Internet news today for fear of learning the outcome ahead of time. I must encase myself in a news-less bubble. Time to turn off the RSS Reader and limit the browsing to work.

This is never going to work.

Bonny was away for about 36 hours through Tuesday night. She was in Chicago for a quick 1.5 day trip to a seminar on how to do better propaganda to trick wayward youths with excessive means into going to our old alma mater.

Monday, that was fine with the dogs --- they probably just thought she was still at work. And Tuesday, well the two bitches (not a bad word!) didn’t have much problem.

But our little boy, Caper -- he gave a new definition to the term ‘momma’s boy.’

The sulking. The forlorn looks. That morning at breakfast for the first time in his life, he actually refused to eat. At first I was worried -- I palpated his stomach looking for bloat or tumors or stones or whatever, I checked his ears and nose and throat. Finally, I lead him back to his dish and he ate a mouthful, and then walked away. I brought him back five more time and he ate most of it.

He had no problem playing when distracted but I could tell when it clicked in his brain: “Mommy still no home,” his little brain would say. Then he’d go sulk. So it’s all drama. Angst of the canine. It’s not like we don’t leave him behind other times, such as at my parent’s house when we go out of town. The difference is, this time he was stuck with me and not his precious lady-human. I try not to take it personally. After all, I have a great loving relationship with our youngest, Kylie, though in my heart I know she’s a slut and would go off with any human that paid attention to her.

I think the psychic link between lady and beast is strong, as she got sick on the plane back home and yacked into a barf bag at the same time Caper was staring through the cyclone fence in the backyard, waiting for a car to pull into the driveway.

"When it came to your writing," he said, "you blew it."

This was said to me in the early hours of this morning by my oldest friend in the world, Mark, who I have known since the seventh grade. It was nearly 4am and we and a gaggle of people had been drinking since around 8:30pm the night before, at a bachelor celebration for our mutual friend, Brett, who's giving up his legal ability to sleep around next month.

I'm so out of practice for nights like this. I'm a practiced homebody. Having usually lived far from friends and co-workers, getting together for debauchery and vomiting in smoke filled rooms (some of it was even from regular tobacco!) where beers are shoved at me like cattle prods are shoved at Abu Gharib prisoners and the most off-hand comment can contain a reference to a person's mother's sexual proclivities, it is all so far from my second nature.

Nevertheless, I had an incredibly good night right along, meeting new people (the names of almost all I promptly forgot... I need to buy a book on remembering... bur remembering what again?), reminiscing with guys from high school, talking diverse topics such as Strong Bad e-mails to acting in local theater to wireless networking (ugh), and laughing like I haven't laughed in a long time without the help of Steven Colbert.

Discussion at one point centered on my recent fiction entry here on the blog, with some impromptu psychoanalysis of me by all at the table. I think it ended with the conclusion that I'm fucking nuttier than a can from Planters. I'm sure all the great writers of psycho characters get that all the time ("Oh, Mr. Harris! Your writing makes me think that perhaps you are a cannibal! Who likes fava beans, no less!") Perhaps I need to balance my crazies with some upstanding moral heroes... or not.

The occasional female wandered into the basement room we used, though none to remove a stitch of clothing, much to everyone's consternation (we even scared one girl away with a giant woop-holler as she entered looking for a bathroom).

After we got done at the bar some of us traveled over to Sean's apartment. There was more beer there and someone dialed-up some pay-per-view porn on his TimeWarner cable account to serve as soothing background ambience for the gathering.

Sean, for those not in the know, is perhaps the most likable person on earth. Even when performing acts of pure evil—despicable acts with innocent youngsters, mind you—people want to be his friend. He told me numerous times that he's enjoyed reading my blog, especially the occasional mention of The Girl I was Obsessed With™ (or TGIWOW) in high school. He would find it funny, because he was dating TGIWOW at the time, which back then made me insane with jealousy. But dammit, I still wanted to be his bestest friend. Everyone did, though he claims not to see it.

So why did Mark disparage my writing? Travel to the past with me for no good reason other than to show how good the memory on my friends is:

In the summer of 1986, after a couple years of traveling down to Myrtle Beach for a few weeks of the summer with Mark and his family, in 1986 Mark's family took Sean. However, that same year, my parent's decided we should go to Myrtle Beach as a family as well. So the two families were there at the same time, and did many things together.

One of those things was to go see the film Howard the Duck. And I hated it. Suck fest. It's a film universally derided and condemned as one of the worst ever made in Hollywood, and at the time I hated it even more because I had read a couple of the classic Steve Gerber comics it was based on. Not that I really understood them... I think Howard was a bit beyond me. Still, my mistake was in articulating my dislike of the film by mentioning how small the eyes were on the Howard puppet/suit (looking nothing like he was drawn in the comic, as if that mattered), which those two fuckers never let me forget. I would never have made it on a debate team with that keen insight.

Still: Howard's a suck fest. I'll let the NYTimes review of August 1, 1986 back me up.

This point (being brought up again at 3:30 in the morning, mind you) came amid a furious argument between the three of us that consisted essentially of compliments that we denied were true. For example, Mark tried to tell Sean that he was universally loved and could run for mayor of Hornell and probably win, a premise at which Sean scoffs. Meanwhile, Sean said to me many times in the night how much he enjoys reading my hilarious and gut busting and Pulitzer worthy entries in this blog. (I'm sure those were his exact words). He said this again as Mark and I were preparing to leave, and that's when Mark said that, as for my writing career, I had blown it.

This is an insight he delivered with a drunken stagger, a smile trying to show bravado in the face of probably not even being sure if he'd said aloud what he was thinking.

Still, it was a simple, straight-forward articulation of every doubt I have about my career path of the last 16 years.

Maybe he realized the harshness of the statement—or maybe he had to pause and turn 360 degrees to the door and back again while the alcohol cleared a new neuron to finish his thought—but he turned back and told me how he came to this feeling, saying that at one time, he and Brett had discussed taking my resume and submitting it to TSR (the former publishers of the Dungeons & Dragons games).

This goes back, apparently, to our affection for our D&D games in high school, where I was the dungeon master who treated a campaign like a writer who know the beginning and the end of the story, but not any of the middle—and I let my friends in their guises of barbarians and Halflings figure that out with dice rolls and funny accents and lots of cola.

Mark thought I should have been a great writer of fantasy and science fiction (or at the very least should have made kick-ass modules for role-playing).

I worked with a guy once who freelanced for TSR, and I don't think it was pretty, so I'm kinda glad that wasn't my path.

Still, this was a compliment in the long run, delivered ( as is a tradition with my high school friends) by first being torn down before one can be built up.

I realized long ago that when it comes to creative work, you can't really trust the opinions of family and friends. Everyone who's written a story and showed it to their mom is told how great they are, unless their mom is an evil, honest shrew-lady. Friends and family are (supposed to be) biased in your favor.

Many times some people are going to be impressed by your works even when it's utter shite because it's not something they think they could do.

The only opinions that matter in the long run are those who are going to get you published/produced/hired. And once you get past the initial hurdle, the important opinions are those of the people who pay the checks. Maybe even more important are the people you work with. (I'm sure to this day my college sophomore year roommate only thinks of me with derisive disgust that I didn't keep writing comedy with him instead of spending all my time in the dining hall and sleeping with that girl I hooked up with the same year. He went on to write for Conan O'Brien and just produced a pilot for UPN. But I married that girl. )

After that, what matters is the opinion of the consumers of said "artistic product". However, getting to them is damn near impossible, and even if you do, we all know the general public is a bunch of moronic sheep anyway, so who cares what they think? (Unless they have money. Or connections. Then you'll care.)

Still, it was a great compliment to get, and one of many I recieved that night, which was nice since I've been so absent for so many years. I was telling the Wife the other night, in discussing her giving a call to a friend she's also out of touch with, that I'm realizing that after you go a while not calling someone, you start to think, "wow, they must hate my guts for not calling in so long" and then you just keep putting it off and putting it off. I'm finding that sometimes the people on the other end feel the same way, and when you finally come together, it's just a big relief for all involved.

And it's especially fun when doing Kamikaze shots and/or watching pay-per-view porn.

Besides the evils of cake, the other thing I can't shake is my need for more damn books. I'm still reading my way through the $150 shopping spree I got on BarnesandNoble.com a few months ago, have yet to read any of the books I bought at the Friends of the Library sale last summer (because I got caught up in some books I just had to get off Amazon) -- and then today, weakened by a review in USA Today, I just had to make another quick Amazon purchase (which ballooned into $43 bucks for four books in no time). (The books in question: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Hark!: A Novel of the 87th Precinct, Murder of Angels, and The Last Coyote —I need that last one before I can read any of the FotL Sale books, as I got the entire series of Harry Bosch novels except that one, the fourth in the series.)

That's not even counting the audibooks on the iPod.

This is all easily blamed on my parents, who never saw a murder mystery novel they didn't like. As a kid, one of the great things my mother and I shared was working our way through all the exisiting 87th Precinct Novels by Ed McBain, by taking them out of the library. Before that, the year after I was in 5th grade, I won an airplane ride over the Canisteo Valley through the Hornell Public Library by being one of the three kids in town to read the most books. I ostensibly read one book every day that summer, and reported on them to the librarian, who's name was Terry Howard, and even back then I knew she was one incredibly hot babe. I'd have given her a book report on anything.

As it was, to meet my personal quota of one book a day, some of those books including things like collections of Peanuts comic strips that took about an half hour to get through. At the same time, I was reading Encyclopedia Brown, books about werewolves and Bigfoot, and lots of comics (but they didn't have comics in the library then, so I couldn't give reports on them).

Every day, I rode my bike with the banana seat (colored to look like it had blue glitter sparkling under the vinyl) back and forth to the library, about 10 blocks away. To do this, I had to either go through the underpass -- which meant going about 30 miles and hour down a cement hill into a tunnel -- or crossing the railroad tracks along the abandoned depot. I usually went the latter. It's where I encountered my first homeless person, when I hit the sleeping drifter in the legs with my bike. It never occured to me then that people would sleep against the depot. He gave me a dirty look and I moved on, my backpack loaded with books. I don't think anyone can go that route anymore, as there's a grocery store and a shopping plaza where I used to ride through on my bike, even up to the time I was in high school. Hell, the trail I used to walk in that same empty stretch of land across the tracks from the depot is now being turned into an Eckerds drugs. It's depressing.

Anyway, books: my mom told me the other night that once they reclaim their dining room (now filled with all the overflow from the kitchen that's under renovation) they're giving away every book on the homemade shelves in there. She told me to take what I want, as the rest would go to the hospital, Salvation Army, whatever.

Just what I need. More books.

If only there was a hot librarian around to give my book reports. I guess I'll have to settle for just the private joy of reading them.

(Oh, an a quick mention by the way, because it's been bugging me: There's a reason why movies based on Dennis Lehane novels win Oscars, and why movies based on James Patterson novels seem to have killed Morgan "Easy Reader" Freeman's career. As the kids say, Lehane rAWks.)

I'm sitting in a hotspot (others might call it a cyber cafe) in downtown Ithaca right now, waiting for the garage to throw a new tire on Matilda. I had lunch here, and I couldn't resist, I just ponied up also for a piece of their "ultimate chocolate cake." Which was very very good. But eating it made me feel dirty. Weak. Out of control.

All good signs.

It's amazing what a false sense of security can do.

I had to change a tire again today. It's the same tire that went flat before and that two different garages could find no problem with in the past. Well, now consider that shoddy rubber ready for the fire in Springfield, USA.

Since I just changed a tire on Matilda, the mini-van, less than two weeks ago, I skipped all the things I would usually do: didn't read the manual, didn't get flustered trying to figure out how to extricate the jack, didn't spend 20 minutes trying to get the donut spare off the stupid cable mount under the vehicle. (Though I did grab the phone to take out with me like last time.)

I was flying along, changing that sucker like I knew what I was doing. Spare ready. Lugnuts loosen. Jack in place. I had the vehicle raised up into the air at about the right altitude to get the flat off, took a step back to make sure, and watched as, in slow motion, the vehicle rolled backwards just enough to fall off the jack. Said jack was left laying sideways under the side panel.

I hadn't put a chuck behind the wheels. I hadn't engaged the parking break. I had not followed the instructions. That apparently only works for other people.

I engaged the break and stuck four different pieces of 2x4 under other tires to get Matilda locked down, and started to lower the jack into place so I could use it again... and it wouldn't turn. The entire jack got bent at enough of an angle as the 2000 pound vehicle rolled it that the foot long screw that lowers and raises it was now angled and thus useless.

Christ.

Thank god I'm in my own driveway and not on the side of an Interstate.

So now, AAA has a driver on the way to come and jack me up so I can get the donut on. Instead of buying just a new tire, I need to buy a whole new jack.

There was little question that the seminal moment of her life was finding the body in the small bathroom of the trailer she was raised in.

Her knocks unanswered, she'd opened the door, which had a broken lock, and found her father. He was not prostrate on the floor, but kneeling, with his torso held aloft at an angle by a length of cloth. It was the belt from his bathrobe, looped around his neck on one end, the other tied to a hook he'd placed on the wall. The hook was ostensibly for holding the green terrycloth robe. When she found him, the robe was bunched under his knees to keep them off the cold linoleum.

He seemed to be leaning toward her, with his mouth open as if he would say something.

His left hand dangled to the floor. His face had turn a mottled color of blue/purple, matching the head of his rigid penis, still gripped violently in even in the stillness of death. The rest of his body was a pale color, like curdled mayonnaise.

She pretended his image did not come to her in the future, and perhaps it didn't for several months at a time. But father was there with her when she first kissed a boy, as their heat grew and his tongue flashed in and out of her mouth like a pink lizard, and she slowly entwined her hands around the boy's throat, her nails already long then, scratching him, and he pushed her away.

Later still, she lost her virginity in the bedroom of a boy who's last name she could not remember. She was astride him and as the pain started to subside, she began to think maybe there was some pleasure to be hand, she'd gripped his neck and watched him smile, and she took this as a sign. So she squeezed.

But he was stronger than her, and easily tossed her to the floor when it became too much. She left, bloodied and bruised, but without humiliation. She felt Father was with her.

It took a few more years. There were more men, but father didn't visit her with all of them. Not at first. That came later.

On the night she found the man who would later be called her first victim -- the one who wore the dog's choke collar as part of his own private fetish, making it all the easier for her -- she remembered clearly for the first time in 20 years what it had been like that that last time she'd seen her father.

Without a word, she'd touched his discolored cheek above where the terrycloth strip has bunched up his skin. She lifted her hand rather than slide it down his shoulder and arm, and watched carefully has she caressed the taut skin on the head of his penis. His dry tongue was swelling in his mouth, so she'd kissed him on the eyes. As she did, his head shifted slightly and what little air he had trapped in his lungs escaped his throat in a death rattle that she thought sounded, in retrospect, like shuddering joy.

A fatal orgasm.

It was something she wanted to share.

I'm truly the most unoriginal procrastinator that's ever lived. I seriously want to just do some writing but instead stare at my RSS reader like a zombie, or surf around, or whatever else... I'm sitting here on my ass, why not do what I want to do? Pathetic.

I'm not sure if it’s the weather (two solid days of drizzly rain, remnants of Hurricane Frances, probably) or the knowledge that I'm firmly entrenched in September (traditionally a month of mixed anticipation and horror when I was in school... there's little to anticipate about a September now), but I'm feeling like I want to claw my eyes out and just feel the vitreous humor drip down my cheeks. I don't want to look at the walls, I don't want to smell the air freshener in the toilets, I'm sick of Siren looking at me like it's my frickin' fault that when I take them out to play the grass is so high and wet and oh, daddy, please, I'm a delicate Labrador, I can't work in these conditions! Jesus Christ, you dogs eat your own feces! Wet grass shouldn't be a hardship!

Sigh.

Okay, so I've also got a bit of freelancing I'm doing, tech editing a book on home media networks. It's not exactly the most stimulating thing in the world. And it doesn't pay much. So I've turned in almost every chapter late so far... maybe they won't pay me at all.

I should have just left the house two hours ago, gone for a walk in the rain, maybe even taken one of the idiots with me for a walk, but I'm almost physically incapable of leaving my desk before 5pm on a work day sometimes, just in case someone should call, or some "news" should break that I need to cover. This makes me a good company boy, and it's why I'm still employed as a work from home stooge. So I tell myself.

So now it's almost 6pm, the wife's still not home. I wouldn't leave before she got home either, since if I was gone and so was one dog, she'd probably freak out thinking something's wrong, and I wouldn't be smart enough to have left a message or a note to assuage her panic. Another reason to sit and stare at these hateful walls, this stupid screen, and put up with the hopeful, optimistic looks of ignored canines.

Despite the fact that I moved back to Ithaca exactly two years ago this week, I have not done a good job getting back in touch, or staying in touch, with old friends still in central New York. Considering that I don't meet many (okay, any) new people in my current job, this is a considerable lapse. So, it was good that I got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago from my friend Mark, who's taking on the mantle of a social studies teacher at HHS this year.

(Aside: Mark's stepping into the shoes of one of the all time great HHS teachers, a guy who died young while we were still students there, Mr. Billy Schu.

That guy could tell a good story. He once shared with the class tales of going into old tenement buildings in the city to talk to people -- he was an alderman -- and finding rooms stacked so high with trash bag that he could hear the thousands of rats scurrying over the tops of the refuse. Another time, he told us about how he went hunting with some friends and they all stopped to drink out of a stream, then walked around a bend up the stream to find a dead deer's carcass, bloated and rotten and filled with the stuff of an entomologist's dreams, right in the water that was flowing down to the spot where they drank. They all vomited profusely after that.

Now that's teaching. Of course, I couldn't tell you jack-shit about Afro-Asian culture, which was ostensibly Mr. Schu's course topic. It's interesting what sticks with you from a public school education.)

Yesterday while in Hornell, I dropped in on Mark and his new girl-friend, Megan (I think she's a girl-friend... Mark said she lives in the attic, but I didn't follow up... maybe that's for his kid's sake? Does she go to Hogwarts? I'm easily confused) and we fell right into reminiscing, skipped through our embarrassing yearbook (we have only ourselves to blame, we were on the yearbook staff) and talked about where all our old friends have ended up. As different as the world and all is now, Mark is very much the same as he was 16 years ago (16!), or at least enough to be comforting to me. Admittedly, he didn't have two kids and an ex-wife back then. And he didn't hold LAN parties back then either, though we would have if we'd had computers instead of dice and D&D manuals.

After taking up three hours of their time, I headed back home. On my way out, though, I did manage to steal one thing from him -- a VHS video tape of our Junior year production of "Dracula: The Musical" shot by my Mom, who always was the one with the video cameras back then. (I wrote out my full dramatic history here, for more details on that.)

The various video recordings Mom made of our plays have been scattered around, some with my family, some with Mark's, some probably lost, so it was nice to see this one again after 17 years (17!). I watched it today, in fact. Mostly in fast forward. It was too painful to experience.

I'd blogged before that I had "the lead" in this play, but I realize after watching it just how short my role was. It was like one of those monster movies where the monster barely appears. And when he does, he can't sing and is very stiff. Well, at least in my case. Not to mention, there's no blocking, no choreography, no microphones -- it was just awful.

I want to publicly apologize to the citizens of Hornell who, on the evening of April 11, 1987, went to the Hornell High auditorium to suffer through what must have been the longest hour and 36 minutes of their lives. Your poor, poor bastards.

The tape, of course, is fascinating to me personally on a historical and anthropological level. But not for the performance so much as the half hour or so of footage taken after the play, at a party up at my friend Brian's house, where the cast got together to watch said video footage.

It hit me hard seeing all my friends again at that age, frozen in time. The voices, the mannerisms -- the fashions. Was someone wearing legwarmers?! I felt like there was an overall feeling of tension with some of the people, though many were oblivious to it.

Maybe it was all just my tension of the time. My high-school girlfriend was there -- we'd likely just started dating around that point -- and she was actually sitting next to The Girl I was Obsessed With™. I think I realize now just how much my girl-friend of the time knew about that, too, while back then I told myself that my feelings weren't obvious. Christ, what a nimrod.

Mark was there with his then girlfriend who later went on to marry one of our friends, Keith, who I haven't talked to since 1988, which bums me out. Future Army captain Bill Kays, also a founding member of Squished Frog Productions was also there (he was the "F" in our "F/X" crew of three guys setting of smoke bombs and dropping rubber bats on the floor). Bill, however, looks the same now as he did back then. He's a bastard.

Even stranger, my mom and my brother Paul were both there at the party -- Mom, I almost didn't recognized, I had to back the tape up to be sure it was her. And Paul, he's now a cop with no hair, but back then he had shoulder-length blond locks that women used to offer him money for if he'd cut it off and make them a wig. He also got laid a lot because of it.

Me, I was probably 80 pounds lighter and had on glasses that could be used to refract enough light to kill an entire ant hill. My hair... the less said about it the better. Overall, I looked almost exactly like the taller of the Geeks from the TV show Freaks & Geeks. The fact that I had a gorgeous girl-friend at all back then is a testament only to my winning personality.

Luckily, that kid on the show grew up and got better, and so did I. So much so that years later, when I was on a TV guest spot on TechTV, I actually got a fan letter from a gay man, telling me how attractive I am. Apparently, I'm considered a 'bear' in the homosexual male sub-culture -- big and hairy.

Had he come to see me in Dracula though, he probably would have been scared straight.

I spent the day Saturday the fourth in Hornell -- it was my Mom's birthday. Here's some snippets:

My wife (known to me only as... Squanto!) , despite several years working in technology journalism, really has absolutely no patience for computers. If they don't do what they're supposed to, and I mean right god-damn now!, then things will be slammed, curses will be hurled, and husband's had best make sure the dishes are done or there will be more hell to pay.

Thus it is that this weekend, while she's away in Massachusetts playing with her former CDL* cohorts, I will be fixing her computer. Not just running a couple of utilities and simple diagnostics though. Her PC has been running for about three years now and has kludged itself up enough that it's time to go tabula rasa on it's ass. Always scary, but so worth it in the end. The most time consuming part will be doing all the backups of data, trying desperately not to forget any documents, bookmarks, ledgers, etc.

So. I'm off for an exciting Friday night. Tomorrow a trip to Hornell for my mom's b-day (and some more kitchen remodeling work) and then hopefully by Sunday night I'll have her PC running like new again. We'll see.

*Crazy Dog Ladies

Bravest thing I did today: I installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 on my main work computer after doing very minimal data backups. Foolishness really. And this was after four days of trying to get the update to download. But I did it, it took an hour to install, and it works like a charm. First thing I did with it: turn off Microsoft's crappy built in firewall. But I like the new Internet Explorer pop-up blocker. Kinda stupid that it's not available for IE on other versions of Windows, but that's how you sell.

Most Cowardly thing I did today: I had to change a tire on our mini-van (we call her Matilda). The driver's side rear tire was flat as Ally McBeal, which the Wife found out when she drove down our driveway this morning on the rim. So, I pulled out the manual (to see what I was doing), the jack (that took 20 minutes to extricate by itself), pulled out the donut spare, and loosened some lug-nuts in preparation for jacking the vehicle up.

It was about this time I got this vision: my leg pinned under the van, crushed when the jack failed, and the car has severed my femoral artery and I bleed out on my own driveway, despite my hideously girlish screams for help that would go unheard because I have no neighbors near by. Bonny would find me about eight hours later when she got home from work, and she'd see the van in the same spot, and be royally pissed that I hadn't changed the tire, spoiling for a fight after a heard day of work, and then she'd find my pale corpse, showing remarkably little lividity underneath since all my blood flowed down the driveway into the street, but rigor mortis has begun to set in, sped along by my laying in the sun upon the clean blacktop of my driveway.

When I got that stuck in my head, I went and got the phone out of the house and put it close by the van so when-- I mean, if -- the van slipped onto me, I could at least make a call to 9/11. Assuming the pain of having my tibia and fibula crushed to power doesn't make me pass out instantly.

Somehow... I got the tire changed without incident. Matilda can be driven off to get a new boot.

It was almost disappointing, really.

Just goes to show, there's probably no such thing as a AAA guy with an active imagination.