Thanks to all and sundry who came out for me and the Slarz's birthday. A good time was allegedly had by all. The final chapter remains a mistery to me, but that's kind of fun. Considering that I woke up at 3pm, I figure it must have gone on for some time. Flashes in my minds eye of sunrise, but I couldn't tell you the details.

One thing I do remember is Julia Henning's Momster, Claire Henning, gave me some really spot on advice about life. Unexpectedly, it reinforced my wild bohemian values.

And it appears I lost my cellphone... and my iPod Shuffle. Posessions are fleeting.

I'm excited to be on the move.

Plane tickets have been purchased and a subletter found. Come June 1st I will be back to living out of a bag. Come June 7th, I will begin heading West. By the 14th I should be settling in the State of Jefferson.

My worrying side is unnerved by the way in which ramblin' comes so natural, feels so right. I'm starting to feel my age a bit, and I wonder if/when I'll evern be able to settle down. I joked a bit about this during Vagabender, that my life might become like a cheezy metallica song (anywhere I roam / where I lay my head is home), or the like. There's a long line of history there...

I love you baby
but you gotta understand
when the Lord made me
he made a ramblin' man

I'm excited by change. I can't help it. I'm an explorer by heart. My thirst for new experience and sensation seems insatiable. I don't think these are bad qualities, I just wonder how I can configure things so that I can start building a bigger pile of life-assets.

Maybe I'm being too square about the whole thing, and what I really need to do is Reclaim the Dignity of my Own Experience. Maybe what I need is to stop fucking second-guessing things so much. I'm a ways out from art school, but that work we did on judges, cops-in-the-head, and the poisonous nature of the word "should" is ringing strong lately.

In my last lifey post, I was struggling with the career choice dichotomy, and the upshot was that I have to forge forward without compromising. That felt right, and I even think I'm beginning to see what that could mean practically. The wider question of where I'm living and who I'm associating with is a little more ticklish.

This never ends, really. Oh, the joy of first-world problems.

Stoller:

Ok, now the substance. The ad makes a couple of claims. One, that web site operators don't pay for the internet. That is a lie. They pay massive sums of money for bandwidth, on the order of $10 billion last year alone. So does the public in tax subsidies for telecom companies, perhaps as high as $200 billion over the years (though it's hard to tell with all the mergers and weird accounting).

Word. You don't get to put shit online for free. You pay out the ass to get a fat pipe, which is why most people co-locate their servers with someone else who's already done that.

Well, they certainly seem headed toward the ontoligical showdown. That's satisfying. Gets my brain all het up. Interesting that the girls who died were the same ones with DUIs.

Causality? I tend to think it's the reverse: actors get written out of a show, they have to stick around for a month or so more, they get careless, etc. Boom. Boozed up in Maui, why not do a little joyriding. Lord knows I've done the same just feeling reckless in Oregon.

Anywayn, out here it's thunderbolts and lightning. First big Spring rain. Smells pretty good.

It's come to this. Sublet my place!

UPDATE: Ok, I think I have like 20 unread emails now. That's enough!

UPDATE UPDATE: What's with all the "UPDATE"s lately?

Fascinating.

50% of surveys Americans say the Democratic party "comes closer to sharing their moral values," compared to 37% of Republicans.

That's a bit of a monkey-wrench in the tired conventional wisdom of "values voters," but it shows that people may be waking up to the fact that health care, wages, and well-funded education have more to do with the well-being of families than whether or not Steve and Jerry down the block have legal recognition of their lifelong live-in love.

http://www.myspace.com/thepartyingpersian

Ha!

Took a yuppie (pink dress shirt) SUV door this evening on my way to my man Kevin's birthday dinner in the West Village. I almost dodged it, but there wasn't a lot of room to maneuver, traffic pretty tight for a sunday evening. I tried to break and cut around when I saw the door starting to open, but the edge clipped my front wheel, which stopped the bike, spilling me sideways and over the bars.

I came through without much damage. No fancy photos to show like before. Just a little bruise and scrape on my arm.

These things happen. It's part of the deal of riding in the city -- which I still think is safe. People are going to open their doors into traffic without thinking. We can't let that scare us off.

This guy who hit me was in the wrong. People are not supposed to open up their car doors into traffic. Since I was pretty sure when I got up that I didn't have any real physical damage, I just let it go, but I could have waited for the police and used my TransAlt spoke card (which has the specific laws you need to reference) to get him to write up an incident report. The pink-shirted yuppie guy would probably get a ticket and I would have a chance to collect something through his insurance agency should I have medical bills or need to replace part of my bicycle.

Still, I'm not gonna call the law on this guy. Maybe if he'd been a horrendus asshole I would have, but he was spooked and apologetic. I didn't want to be a dick about it, so I didn't try to guilt trip him into money for my wheel or anything either. Just walked it off and went to dinner. Selah.

So I'm fine, but the bike is going to have issues. The front wheel is a total loss, and there may now be enough damage overall to render it kaput. It's been through three real falls, a lot of rough riding and years of being locked up on the street, and that's just since I got my hands on it. The frame dates from the late 80's/early 90's, and it was originally owned in Hawaii, which I know because it still has the Honalulu bike registration sticker. I bought it from Pedal Revolutions, a used bike barn in the Mission, so it may have had other owners in California as well. Then I brought it to New York City, and now this.

Lately, it's been really pulling to the left and I've realized that the core triangle of the frame is out of whack. The headset is also coming loose, requiring daily hand-tightening. Now I think it might not be worth sinking any more money into. It's been my plan to give it to Frank to strip for parts when I take off in June anyway, so it seems like the bell is tolling.

Ok for now. Next week I'll be 27. Oh man.

In the torrentfeed, yo.

JUST HOOK IT TO MY VEINS!

Just watching some Law and Order CI while I eat my burrito... Donofrio is the MF man. His character work is damn tight. He's also real good in The Salton Sea as a brain-scrambled drug-lord, and in Steal This Movie as Abbie Hoffman.