You know what I like? Getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Sure, it is kind of a pain, and you stumble around in the dark and then blind yourself with the light and you inevitably stub your toe. But. When you come back, the spot you were laying on has cooled off, as has your pillow. And you lay down, and you’re still all dozey sleepy, and you don’t have to pee anymore and that feels delightful, and your bed and your pillow is cool, and that’s all just great.

I also love getting stones in my shoes because it feels so good after you take them out.

When I was a kid, I used to keep my pillows in the freezer so they’d be nice and cold when I went to bed. They wouldn’t stay cold for as long as you’d think. One time I poured a little water on a pillow before putting it in the freezer in hopes it would freeze solid and stay cold longer. At 33, the many flaws in this plan are readily apparent. At 14, they were not.

A nice thing about not having an audience is that I don’t feel bad when I don’t update for a week.

Post-by-email works well, though it ignored my paragraph break and I had to put one in manually. I may play around with that sometime soon.

Posting the slideshow by email also worked quite well, though it’s a bit hard to see what the pictures are supposed to be. I don’t think there’s a way to click and enlarge the pictures. I’ll have to mess with that as well.

In other news, I got preapproved for a mortgage this week. Bring on the lifetime of crippling debt!

And now I have to go not eat.

Danko Jones: Below the Belt

About two years ago, I picked up Danko Jones’ Never Too Loud and, well, I didn’t care for it. I don’t think I’ve listened to it since then. Since then, I ordered his b-sides collection (named, creatively, B-Sides) and enjoyed it, but I still wasn’t holding out a lot of hope. And yet, when I was surprised to find Below The Belt at the record store – seriously, I need to start paying more attention to release dates – I decided I’d give it a chance. I never learn.

Sometimes, it’s good to not learn from past mistakes.

Danko Jones is one of those acts that does one thing really well – in his case, it’s loud driving rock songs about sex, rock, personal awesomeness, and the non-awesomeness of others – and Below The Belt is a return to form. Really, I could go through the whole album and assign each song to one of those categories, and I am perfectly fine with that. Before the first song is over, Jones is threatening to “fuck you up.” On lead-off single Full Of Regret, Danko doesn’t bother mourning lost love, so much as a lost evening. Although… I can’t quite figure out the symbolism behind the song Magic Snake – whatever could that mean?

The highlight might be the album’s closer, I Wanna Break Up With You. If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d draw a pie chart showing that this song was 10% about sex, 25% about personal awesomeness, and 65% about the non-awesomeness of others. What starts as a spirited list of grievances leads into the chorus, a lilting choir of Dankos declaring their intentions of moving on. The happy Danko choir also sings “I hate you” at one point, which I shouldn’t find as funny as I do. There’s no self-pity here and this is is not Song For The Dumped – this is Song For The Dumper Who Has Been Waiting A Bit Too Long For This Moment And Is Going To Make It Count. Eventually, the song breaks down (breaks up?) into an army of Dankos leading a chant of “break up, break up, everybody break up.” This should be a single.

I love you, Danko Jones. Let’s never fight again.

(P.S. I totally gave in and I’m listening to Never Too Loud now, and, yeah, it’s still nothing special. Sorry, dude. We cool?)

Found during a lunchtime walk to and from the health food store on a quest for raspberry chocolate:

I kinda like this Tumblr idea. It all seems so simple and customizable. Maybe in a few months, if there’s anything here worth sharing, I’ll change the name and link it up to my Facebook and Twitter. At least, that was my thought while walking to work this morning. One day in, and I’m already ready to give up on my pretend anonymity.

Blog #2 was under a nickname and I enjoyed its pretend anonymity for several years. Eventually, though, three things happened:

1)- The blogging site I was on was going downhill and many of my friends were leaving it.

2)- I had a falling out with some other friends, and we all went our separate ways, both in real life and in blog life.

3)- I started to notice real-life people bringing up topics that I’d blogged about – only, I’d never told them about my blog. To this day, I’m not sure if they found my blog and just never specifically said so, or if it was just a couple coincidences.

Oh, netbook keyboard, you’ll be the death of me.

Anyway, I moved from Blog #2 to Blog #4. Blog #1 was on my own personal website. This was back in the day before there was such a word as blogging, which is starting to seem like a pretty great time to be alive. I have typed the word “blog” way too many times tonight and it is starting to feel pretty obnoxious. Anyway, back then, I had to create and upload each individual journal page, which was just too much of a hassle. Blog #1 died after two entries. I eventually ported them over to Blog #2.

Blog #3 was on the same site as Blog #4, but I never really posted there – I just filled out surveys and quizzes and things of that nature. It was under the same fake name as Blog #2.

Blog #4 was under my real name, because I decided that if I couldn’t really be anonymous on the internet, I might as well go all the way. It’s now several years later and I still have that blog, and I might continue to post there, but I really like the potential here. Plus, it’s always inspiring to scrap everything and start anew. You get that brief period of hope before everything eventually sinks back into the same ol’ rut.

I signed up for Blog #5 in hopes that it would have more features than Blog #4, but I never got around to doing anything with it. It never got so much as one post.

And this is Blog #6. And I might have to implement a ban on the word “blog” now that I’m done my backstory.

I feel like I owe you a good story after all that, but I can’t think of one at the moment. So instead I’ll sleep.

I’ve always wondered what would happen, blog-wise, if I started anew somewhere without using my real name or telling friends to visit. Would anyone bother reading it?

It’s kind of like a best-selling author releasing a book under a fake name… well, except for that part about having any previous success.

Ever since going online over 15 years ago, I’ve been a very open person on the internet. I’m starting to wish I’d kept more things to myself. I don’t think there’s anything really terrible out there, but there’s definitely some stuff that doesn’t represent who I am now.

Clearly, the answer is to start another blog.

I don’t live a very exciting life. I work in an office, I live in an apartment, I have a girlfriend, and everything is mostly okay. It doesn’t give me much to talk about.

But here’s a story. This evening, I was helping my girlfriend load some stuff into her car. As we’re loading up, some dude comes walking down the alley. I look over at him. Early 20s, maybe. Wearing a football jersey – the same one I was wearing at the time.

“Hey, where’d you get that?” he says.

“Get what?” I ask.

“That stupid look on your face. HAW HAW HAW – just kidding, man, I love you.”

And he walks off.

This kind of thing happens more often than you might think. Earlier in the day, we were greeted by a homeless man and his talking dog puppet show.