This Polish brew packs quite a wallop. I had 3 pints.

Savage drunk last night, and reason escapes me. I was about ready to call it a night at 8, but I had to wish J-Mo a happy birthday, and I got started in on some hearty Polish beer. This precipitated an adrenaline-soaked ramble through the midnight streets. The pavement is choppy these days after so much snow and ice and salt, and I'm still a little gun-shy from last weeks accident. Still, this didn't prevent me from simultaniously weaving through traffic, eating a slice of pizza and nodding my head in time to Grisman and Garcia, a new addition to my mellow weekend music mix. Clearly my fear of death has dissapated.

Spinning back down to earth in Brooklyn with a dizzy head, I took a relic of the holiday season -- a charmingly anachronistic Santa -- down off a telephone poll, scribbled what I'm sure was a barely intelligable note and delivered both to the doorstep of a girl. In my impared state, this seemed like my best woo to pitch. To be honest, I'm a little out of my element, up against a challange. I'm also divided as to how and what to chronicle here in public. Romance is sometimes well served by enigmatic behavior. For the first time in a long time, I'm excited, nervous as to how to proceed.

However, the Santa gambit was a success and I have a date for Tuesday. I feel quite high. "...and I stumbled to safety."

I took some ok photos yesterday in the sunshine.

I'm on the mend!

On the mend here, though a little psychically disturbed from a morning of watching c-span, but there's not a lot more to say about the situation that hasn't already been said, words spilling forth in accent or crisp translaton and overfilling our minds with senseless and meaningless datum. I'll be personal for a bit.

I feel a shift coming on, though into what I do not know. February was a month of high velocity, something I relish and desire, yet that led to a crash, as life's highs tend to do. The bike thing was a pretty good metaphor for it all; moments of hubris, lapses in judgement, dangers unseen, these things can align in deadly calculus, their formation escaping our notice until we are beyond the point of no return. But the damage is imperminant. I will have no scars, though I might have a slightly crooked tooth for some time. I think it gives my mouth a little more character, to be honest.

Yet I'm plagued with doubts about what is to be next. I'm in hot pursuit of more work for the months of March and April, clawing my way back to fiscal solvancy and aiming for a summer of freewheeling times in the west (Berkeley, Eugene, Black Rock City). It's good for me to have these goals, and yet on some level they fail to obliviate my sense of responsibility toward the world. They fail to address the desire to build "a career" to gain recognition, standing, esteem, to slake my thirst for power in an orgy of revolutionary change. I lust for significance, partly for egotistical ends and partly because of my utter contempt for the people running the show at the moment, but mostly because I want the world to be a better place than it is. It's a mood I've been in for quite some time.

I've been working on a lenthy document that I call "Praxis." It encapsulates some of my ideas about where this wild torpedo is headed and what I might do to ride it the best I can. I've latched on to the word praxis because my life is full of theory but not so full of practice: a little less conversation and a lot more action please. Actually, I'll take conversation -- real conversation, meaning communication about life and souls and meaning and other real things -- over inaction and small talk. Communication is where things start. The document is my strategy, my business plan, my mission statement and my manifesto. I need to put it through another round of addition/revision/reduction and then I need to start sharing it with people. This will be the likely locale for a first premire.

Stand Down turned me on to The Mabablog which features an insightful look into the American Imperial incusion into the Philippines as part of the Spanish American war more than a century ago. This is a great antidote to the "Saddam is like Hitler and peace is appeasement" meme that's been going around.

Though the rhetoric is different and we've learned the full use of DoubleSpeak, I have to say this is a better analogy for current events than WWII. By the way, for any of my readers who don't do newtechspeak, a meme is a mind virus (ala Burroughs's "word is virus).

Spent last night in a pleasent post-workout, whisky-slicked nirvana at Pete's Candy Store, joining the Be Somebody crew mid-way through for trivia, staying on for music and then a meeting with Julia about an upcoming art project. Motivated by the sparking half-mad Captain Capodice, Be Somebody has been dominating the quizz-off in 2003. They even have a cheer for when they win. It's all in good fun, but sometimes I wonder if they're not headed down the road of becoming the ugly americans of this Wednesday evening contest.

After that Matty Charles and the Valientines took to the stage. I met the Bass player (another Josh, though not quite as outlandish as I) via a QuickFix gig back in the fall. Turns out he's a good friend of the mind-numbingly attractive Cynthia Hopkins, who wrote all our music for that show. It's a small world. The Valentines are good, but a few songs in to the set -- just as I started to nurse my sweet sweet Knob Creek -- Josh's double bass broke. There was sadness and confusion, but then Matty did two positively transcendent solos. It was like watching the American West and Nick Drake combine. Quite great.

And perplexing. The first time I encountered Matty was at the end of another trivia night. I was retelling a story to some friends, the climax of which is "Oregon! Not much is known about Oregon!" Immediately, I was shoved from behind and this guy setting up on stage advises me, "don't talk shit about what you don't know." Matty's from Portland, it turns out, and thought I was some dumbshit hipster bagging on his home state. Once we cleared up my origins, everything was cool, but it was interesting watching this delecate and beautiful music come out of someone who I still associate with a violent and aggressive event; got me going on all sorts of half-drunk thoughts about the tenuous nature of manhood and the playground politics we seem unable to escape.

Finally, Kate (from who's relatives the afformentioned Oregon story comes) and Frank have turned me on to the latest run in Doonsbury. Start here and just keep clicking 'next comic.' Got a few guffaws from me.