“I’m as confused as a baby in a topless bar!”

“Kinky is using a feather Perverted is using the whole chicken”

“Dip me in honey and throw me to the lesbians!”

“All I need is some peace and quiet If I got a piece I’d be quiet!”

“DADDY FARTED And We Can’t Get Out!”

“Lord Help Me to Be The Person That My Pimp Tells Me to Be”

“Do you want to be a Ho? Contact driver for details…”

“PRACTICE SAFE SEX GO FUCK YOURSELF”

“Discourage Inbreeding BAN COUNTRY MUSIC”

“ZERO TO NAKED IN 6.2 BEERS!”

“Can I test drive your vulva?”

“Who’s Your Daddy?”

“I ♥ HOOTERS”

“If you don’t believe in oral sex keep your mouth shut”

“Help! I farted and can’t roll down my windows!”

“I’M NOT IMMATURE you stinky butt poo poo head”

I am typng this using the “Internet on TV” feature of my room. The TV is wall-mounted and has a display of 640×480, and is clearly using some custom, fullscreen version of Firefox. I feel bad for the guests who don’t know the keyboard shortcuts, or that you can browse in tabs. Now that I look at it I think this might even be Linux? This costs $11/hour.

The room is smaller than pictured on the hotel’s website, but comfortable enough, about the width of two and a half double beds. There is an abstract painting on the wall, the walls are white, and the furniture is this very light false “pine” color, if I know my woods.

On my way from the tube to the hotel I learned that my street is crowded with young drinkers on Friday nights. It’s filled with bars and restaurants, including Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, and even an American Fried Chicken, among other, no doubt classier places.

Tomorrow’s itinerary includes buying toothpaste and a voltage adapter. I would also like to buy a watch and somethng to read. There will also probably be pictures taken along the Thames, and sore feet.

Space travel apparently fosters a kind of delirium, and at one point I almost stepped out of the pod for “my first spacewalk,” eerily placid, until my co-pilot stopped me, thank god.

I arrived in the middle of the night. The moon base was very much like an airport, men with flashlights guiding me to the terminal. Even the insides, filled with rows of grey, plastic seats, mostly empty due to the late hour, but marked by the occasional woman thumbing idly through a magazine, looking up at me briefly as I passed. “Aww,” I thought. “Astronauts’ wives.”

The moon had been colonized for what felt like probably 10 or 15 years. Everyone there worked there, like I’d imagine Antarctica to be. Once outside the station, I found myself in a concrete plaza, with benches, a pedestrian street, some small shops and restaurants, by the look of things. Seemingly desolate beyond a block or two away. Small amenities. Dozens of people out enjoying the warm, artificial atmosphere. I looked up and saw Earth, fully illuminated by the sun.

I was giddy with pride that I had made it here myself. I approached a family eating ice cream, struck up a conversation. “Have you been here before?” “Yeah, you know, a couple times.” Nonchalant. “Would you believe me if I told you I got here in a pod I made myself?” Disinterested, incredulous, polite laughter.

The return trip was a bit more harrowing. I remember it being loud and painful; it required that I sever some wires connected to nodes grafted onto my skin, each snip producing a vague, metallic, dizzy, nauseous kind of pain. Alarms were sounding, I didn’t think my pod would hold up. I must have blacked out, and soon I was parachuting down into the Pacific.

A week or so later I told Ben and Jon about my trip, and invited them on another. We made it up there with no problems, hung out in the plaza in the sunlight. Looking up, construction was being done on a kind of stained-glass balloon, a big sphere in a stylized, color-saturated tribute to Earth, meant to inspire, I intuited, a reverence for all we had accomplished as a species.

Suddenly, a small firebomb was hurled unsuccessfully at a security helicopter, when we realized that the political climate on the moon was unstable, and that we had to leave before things got ugly.

We raced down dark flights of stairs, hurried but not frightened, though I didn’t have faith in my ability to get us back and was beginning to panic. “Guys, I should tell you, sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but, getting back is kinda hard, I almost didn’t make it last time, I’m not sure we’ll be able to do it, and even if we do I know it’ll be really uncomfortable, I’m sorry.” I did feel guilty. But I guess the adrenaline got me through it, and before we knew it we were tumbling safely down a chute into the basement of some facility back on Earth.

I woke up around 5:30am, still brimming with pride at what I had done.

I drove aimlessly and dismayed up to downtown Wheaton, which has always reliably been more dirty and human, to find a surreal scene of skeletal frameworks of new buildings and a town without power, the recent result of a brief and torrential afternoon thunderstorm. Business owners stood stationed outside their dark buildings, some smoking and all casually observing the powerless, customerless, slate-gray surroundings. There was an air of resignation to the fact that even with electricity, these blocks aren’t any more lively. Telling, that it took several minutes of driving in loops before I even realized the power was out.

Rifling through boxes full of childhood ephemera, helping reduce the clutter my folks are forced to put up with every time they move, finding college admission letters and Programs of Study booklets was terribly depressing. The promises of huge, ancient institutions for a duration that now seems largely insignificant in many respects, housing only several dozen or so salient, robust memories in its four years, few of which have anything to do with education, and many of which feel as distant and dryly historical-factual as junior high or, say, my birth — I feel guilty about them now, but naively so; crammed up against only slightly more yellowed marker drawings and Cub Scout certificates, peppered with paper-mache and bookmarked with high school IDs, these catalogues are beginning to inherit the quaint futility of those things meant to prove my life. What once felt like the beginning of my adulthood will before long feel like the end of my childhood, and I imagine this is how things will continue to develop. I took comfort in college nostalgia, and even in my remorse for not having appreciated it, because those feelings are predicated on the importance of it, on the belief that at one time, at least, I had access to something “real,” grounded. It was one of the few things in my life I believed I could count as not arbitrary, when, really, my faith in it was based mostly in its visibility, in its confirmation by tens of thousands of students every day. I wonder how I’d feel if it had been a tenth of its size.

I guess this all falls into my pattern of only trusting external validation. Internal validation is not only hollow, but dangerous; but something’s telling me I’m just supposed to get over it.

As much as I think I’d like to talk about my life here, I don’t, on account of the fact that (1) nobody I know reads this, and (2) even if they did, I’d have nothing to say that I haven’t already told them, except for (3) things that I either can’t talk about with them at all or can’t talk about in the same way with them that I do with other people I know. So really the only candidate journal-y stuff is either mundane or would have to be really vaguely, obliquely gestured at rather than talked about, in order that only those who know what I’m trying to say would understand.

To make things worse I’m even beginning to hate the way this site looks but have no real desire to change it, much less any idea how I think it should look. Color would be nice, anyway, and is Helvetica/Arial really all it’s cracked up to be?

I’m going to Chicago tomorrow for close to a week, and there’s a good chance I will try very hard to go to London for the first week and ½ of November, trying very hard to stay in The Strand Palace Hotel, which ideally will still look something like this:

Also on Labor Day I turn really old.

Oh and we got a new roommate named Asleep.

And I’m trying to get Ubuntu running on my old laptop, hopefully eventually on my desktop too.

And I saw Cape Fear for the first time last night.

And there are no good shows coming up, at least none that I’m thrilled about.

And Hampshire Market seemingly won’t re-stock non-diet Polar brand root beer until they sell all their bottles of diet, and I’m beginning to think that might be a worthwhile investment of ten dollars.

And the fact that I am now playing things composed by Bach for the violin, rather than Suzuki, creates the illusion that I have become about 300% better overnight.

And will it be possible to finish Gravity’s Rainbow while I’m home next week? Will I even try?

I paid $15 extra each way to be seated in exit rows and I think I’m going to be really glad I did.

Hopefully I’ll take pictures. Frequently when things like this happen, I plan to, but never do. Tomorrow there’s a long break between the ceremony and the reception, during which time we’ll probably visit this American art museum in our duds.

This weekend does mean, however, that I will be missing tomorrow’s Xiu Xiu/Casiotone/Pants Yell! show tomorrow at TT’s, which really sucks. But next week I will see some or all of: Junior Boys, Mono (probably sold out, on second thought, fuck), Rjd2, and The Books (is it worth a Ticketmaster $5.50 convenience fee to get these before they sell out?).

Oh and Monday I saw Parenthetical Girls at PA’s, which was one of my favorite shows ever.

Friday: 36°

• 7:00pm: McDonald’s: double hamburger
• 8:00pm: sleet
• 9:00pm: Smuttynose IPA
• 11:30pm: Sounds Lounge: Sierra Nevada, Hoegaarden
• 1:30am: Koronet Pizza

Saturday: 39°

• 9:30am: Vitamin Water: grape
• 10:30am: McDonald’s: hotcakes, sausage biscuit, hashbrown, orange juice, coffee
• 2:00pm: Brooklyn Museum: Ron Mueck
• 5:00pm: Other Music: White Flight, Shugo Tokumaru, Songs: Ohia, The Battles, The Wire’s Joanna Newsom cover
• 6:00pm: The Red Lion: Guinness, Sierra Nevada, coffee, Magic Hat
• 2:00am: Pommes Frites

Sunday: 35°

• 1:30pm: McDonald’s: double hamburger, fries, Coke
• 2:00pm: Vitamin Water: Kelly Clarkson-brand kiwi-strawberry
• 7:00pm: Snickers

“Too Much McDonald’s”