I'm heading back down to Westhaven today.

Tomorrow I'm going to take my website offline and stop reading the news for a couple of weeks. It's an experiment in dicipline. The site archive will stay around, but the frontpage will become something really blank and simple, and if I truly feel the need to post something it will have to be in video form.

These are the rules.

Also, I'm probably going to have a thinger to sign up for a mailing list. The point of this will be for people who want to know when I go back "on the air" with whatever comes out next. I hope all my regular readers will sign up.

Happy birthday Brie!

Happy birthday Frank!

Go get 'em, Leos.

No, not "fat babes," obiese infants.

There's something deeply and thermodynamically wrong going on with our country.

Cocksuckers at Greyhound were sold out, but my peeps over at the Union Square Alamo car rental spot hooked me up with a one-way run, so I got back home last night with Luke and Julia. I'm realizing I'm close to broke; been letting invoices slide.

I'm going to def launch into a redesign of this site soon. Stay tuned for that.

Ok... off to the Oakland greyhound terminal, one of the finest human-watching opportunities you can get.

Lucas and Julia are up in Westhaven now. The Peach is safely back in Nueva Jorka. I've got a lot of catching up to do on work. Seems like projects are coming out of the woodwork, people wanting to know what my plans are for the fall, for next year, forever...

A little bird told me that DC dems are going to throw another 8-figure sum down the toilet to try and make a national voterfile. Stop trying to be the borg, dudes. It's not who you are. Embrace decentralization and win!

Ok; really time to go now.

Oh. My. God.

"Larrupin'" is a piece of American slang (new to me) that means "tasty good." It's also a restaurant about five miles north of Westhaven. It is teh awesome. Went there last night for a little datey dinner and had one of the best meals of my life.

Food is one of the few things that I don't feel any compunction against spending big money on. I'm a relative cheapskate on most other counts, and I sort of have a reflexive aversion to "luxury" items. I hate shopping. But good food and good drink is always a go for me.

And to round out the evening we saw A Scanner Darkly, the new rotoscope movie by Richard Linkleter. It's allright. I enjoyed the first half of the film -- with Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr. and Keanu being all paranoid and strung out -- more than the latter half. Keanu's too bland to really carry the rest, and while I really find the rotoscoping thing interesting, and hope it gets used more in future features, there were some choices made that I think were not so smart. It's entertaining and funny at points; definitely worth a rental when that time comes.

Great weekend coming up. Tommy, Chelsea and Greg are down for a visit from PDX, and Laurel's pug pup Frankie (video coming) is boarding with us/Hanna&Sarah for a bit, and I'm shacking up with The Peach to boot. Fun around the campfire, in the house. We're gonna hit up the Crabbies tonight too.

Also:

http://www.ihumpedyourhummer.com

Down in the Bay Area... legitimately "the area" too, since I spent last night in Marin where Kristin (the Girthly companion) has a sweet house-sitting gig. Today is all business and tomorrow I head back.

Things that are bullshit:

1. Citibank (my bank for almost ten years) offers me a loan at 18.5% to consolodate my credit card debt which is at 19.9%
2. They claim the high rate is because I'm 90 days past due on something, but can't tell me what. (I'm unaware of ever being delinquent on any payments)
3. Thanks to my legally mandaed annual free credit report I see this is from one of my loans from NYU; one of the agencies (Experian) has me as being 90-days delinquent last summer.
4. They offer me a two-point reduction on the loan if I let them take the payments directly from the checking account, but cannot put the money directly in the account if I do accept. They have to mail me a check, which I would mail back to them with a deposit slip.

Time to start thinking about switching banks. In real terms, I'd much rather have a community-scale institution for my banking needs (basically I need a checking account). Citibank got my business by being close to NYU when I was 18, but they haven't done shit for me since.

...

And what's more, the whole "credit report" game is ridiculous. The loan that Experian shows me as having been tardy on (I think I did have a problem with an auto payment not auto-paying during the Vagabender Era) is not even listed in the others. Apparently they all talk to different people and compile inconsistant data. What's more, you can see all the corporations that have been looking at your information.

Man, this shit is bullshit.

Samuel Taylor, who's giving me the shame. I met Samuel through MFA, where he still writes his political tracts (for, I might add, a larger and more important audience than I rant at here; hi mom). At that early stage he was a fan of my chicken-scratches. Looks like it's my turn to draw some inspiration from him.