Sorry about the comments being all busted.

I think they are working now. Have at it.

I missed not hearing from you and thanks for the email. Whatever Newbury is, I hope you like it.

Clearly, I am a worthless piece of shit or incredibly dumb and lazy. I had a few half-way decent ideas boiling in my head tonight. Stuff I could right, you know, you dig, can you imagine me actually trying to write, right.

But, no, I avoided that until now, and now I have shame.

I could have written about my first local election. The booklet the county mailed had maybe 4 pages of instructions on how to vote with the newfangled voting technology, and it had one page on the actual voteable stuff. (By the way, the election site for my newly adopted county has the awe-inspiring URL of http://www.shapethefuture.org/. Not the least bit corny, no, not at all.) I only wish I could embed this video here. Remember when a black Sharpie and coloring were the only skills and equipment you would need?

For all the technology, we voted on exactly two things. Who we wanted on the Fire Protection District board and whether the spending limit on how much the fire district folks could get. I’d be lying if I claimed anything but that I don’t fucking know what a fire district is. I’m pretty sure it has to do with the bright red trucks with the sirens.

One lonesome idea I’ve been meaning to talk about is my hankering to head to an open mike. I performed in August at the Edinburgh Fest, and I’m thinking it’s time to head back to performing. At least up until it makes me want to cry again.

I also could have cobbled together a couple of thoughts on “new media,” old media, performance, art and the writers’ strike. Fucking hell, I’m so plugged in these days, I actually took a seat at a table meeting with Youtube.com folks about their new channels. I’m that fucking hip.

If I could get it up, I might even take some potshots at these assclowns, who are kind of self-annointed comedy experts. I became aware of them through one of the unfunnier, more sycophantic people I met in the Boston scene, who did some writing on the early site. I caught half the core staff doing the standup thing at a fest in a show we both did. Hmm, the least said, the better.

With time and inclination, maybe I’ll write about what a lot of comics, including those linked above, don’t seem to get when they throw out the new face and the new media and the new world order.

So, yeah, some half-assed shit ideas. I could have written. I might even have reviewed the movie American Gangster. Short take — Good, but Ridley could use an editor and a soupcon less self-indulgence.

Instead, I killed brain cells and time passed. I got caught up in a horrible phenom of the “new media,” reaction videos on Youtube.com from 2 girls 1 cup. The reaction are enough, don’t, I repeat, don’t ever try to find the original. I got through 10 seconds of, I think, 80 seconds total and bailed with the horror of humanity.

But, the reaction videos are an interesting flow. People are fucked up. And, they are quite multi-faceted in their ceaseless variations on amusing themselves.

Technorati Tags: entertainment, fire, shapethefuture.org, Intellectualism, movie, new_media, video, 2girls1cup, writing, comedy, Silicon valley, technology, vote, local_elections, Youtube, Youtube

Someone I don’t know very well asked me for a quiet personal conversation. It was so she could, ostensibly, pick my gadget-grasping brain about some unusual technical needs. She explained, she thinks her husband has been leading a double life for the last 10 years. She was clearly at her wit’s end, hovering in our tete a tete on the edge of tears.

Lots of questions are racing through my brain. Because I am not actually a nice person, the first one is how and why is it I seem to be a magnet for soulful, intimate conversations with folks asking my advice? On the plus side, it means I get to hear all sorts of interesting things.

The second question is wow, do people really have double lives? Scary.

The clear tech question that came out from a rather scattered, upset, non-linear story was about a phone line. Apparently there’s a mysterious extra cable for DSL or an alternative phone line that some dudes doing some other work in their house explained to her.

I am happy to live in the belief that neither M. nor I have another life parallel to this one. Unless sleep counts.

Technorati Tags: California, technology, relationships, work

Apparently, there was an earthquake last night. We felt exactly nothing. Based on the time, we would have been walking home after dinner. Oblivious.

My first California earthquake, and I missed it. (It wos closer to Nick’s old place than to where we live now. Maybe Nick’s house fell down boom.) I was already for the first quake. I was planning my tears, my shaking, my blaming M. for making my life dangerous and unsafe.

No drama. My earth did not move.

My central sadness today is about the joylessness of the holidays.

I like Halloween. Sadly, I work in an office that celebrates holidays with the fervor and fiesta wildness of a golf clap. The only tangible nod to today’s holidays was this plate in the lunch room.

Cute. But lacking somehow. No costumes, no frivolity, no decorations.

Meanwhile, M. taunted me throughout the day with the announcements from his office land. The IT department had sound affects and other elaborate decorations. M. had a vampire’s shrine with himself as the dark lord’s visage. Folks brought their kids in to trick or treat the offices and departments. They had lunch and party beverages and cake. He showed me pictures of his coworkers, witches and sorcerers and whatnot.

My coworkers were all dressed like office workers. I spotted one decoration, really. It was a cutesy wood carved “Happy Halloween” with a silhouette of a cat discreetly lying on a cubicle rim.

To catch some join of the season, I fled work a bit early with some spreadsheets in my virtual hand. I figured, what I missed during the day would come in the evening with little costumed kids begging at the door.

They didn’t show. So, we walked the streets. Here’s what I saw.

Desolation row.

Not sure whether the terrorists have won. Or maybe the good-old-fashioned-middle-class fear of pedophiles was keeping the streets clear.

We did see one wandering band. Tight knit and definitely together, maybe four adults and six kids. Costumes, revelery and then they were gone.

Wrong to my vision of the holiday, we did come across streets full of kids with their parents last Saturday. They were trick or treating their way done the main street begging at the doors of the local merchants, who had participating Halloween welcome signs in their windows.

I wonder what it means, but I only saw one kid who had bothered to wear something that wasn’t store-bought, polyester, pre-fab costuming. He wore overalls, work gloves, a bandana in his back pocket and a tractor or seed company on his cap. He drove his little sister around in a wooden wagon behind his tractor-like trike. Excellent farmer feel. Everyone else on the street was wearing a branded, commercialized, technicolor unit. Snow White, Cinderella, Tommy the Tank Engine, and way more princesses than one could count.

Deja vu on game four with a Red Sox win of the World Series of baseball. The games weren’t nearly as interesting, mostly with the curse being gone and all. But apart from staying anxiety-stricken during the second game, the Rockies didn’t exactly catch fire.

In 2004, I remember drinking and watching with Liz and then walking up and down Mass Ave. watching people go berserk. At the time, I had already lost my job, had plenty of time to cheer baseball and was spending my days shredding papers and what not for the great move west. Cambridge circa three years ago:

I thought I had somewhere pictures of folks dancing and jumping on the top of the Harvard Square T station.

This year, we went to a sports bar to watch the win. The tables were pretty fully, but definitely not standing room only, with maybe a ration of eight Red Sox cheering sections to one table of Rockies fans. When it was over, we cheered, a lot of people clapped and cheered, we hugged and we went out into the almost completely empty streets of Palo Alto. No horns honked. No one was screaming. All calm in a mild Cali evening.

Ahh, I remember Fenway.

Technorati Tags: American_League_Champions, baseball, Boston, California, New England, Red_Sox, Silicon valley, World_Series

It was cool in 2004, wandering the streets of Boston, thinking about my plan to move to California in early 2005 and watching the Sox take the series. My grandfather’s team. The team where every summer it seemed we got a chance to run up and down the bleachers at Fenway.

Better yet in 2004, I got a chance to run up and down the bleachers at Fenway in the middle of the night as a paid extra for “Fever Pitch,” just hours after the real, non-faked games finished up, when the local papers had already printed their block headlines of sports hope. I actually got to go inside the men’s room in the middle of the night and see the trough-like urinal I had heard about from my brothers.

Maybe because of my grandfather, maybe because of Little League games, maybe because it was the one sport where Pat new the rules and could read a box score or maybe because it’s the one sport where slow pans on TV and the long gaps, the conversations on the mounds, the hand signals, the dugout all provide enough time for you to feel like you know the players. Maybe it’s all of it, but every summer baseball is there in the back of my head and in fall I start paying better attention.

Of course, this year we saw this same team play in Oakland (and lose with flair in many extra innings) back in June.

So, there it is. Back of the mind subconscious part of my make up. And, I’m having fun. I like watching the games. I like assuring a sleepy friend in Boston that Game 2 could go on without her worrying and losing sleep. I liked wearing my socks of a red color to work.

Today, I realized that baseball trivia lived deep within me.

Two folks at the place of giving me a paycheck were talking Sox in the lunchroom standing next to the food. It was a serious fan conversation out of my league (no pun), but it was definitely not about baseball in general it was about the Boston Red Sox. I interjected with a little “Go Sox” admission of eavesdropping and asked if there was a Boston connection.

Turns out, I work every day in the same building, breathing the same energy-efficient, naturally lighted air, as Hall-of-Famer Jim Lonborg’s sister. Without even thinking, I spoke, and I told them of my little, little, little kid love of Tony Conigliaro (or maybe just saying his name). Somewhere in the lizard recesses of my gray-matter creases, I was channeling the ’67 Sox and spontaneously coming up with references in conversation. I would have been three year’s old. What the fuck?

Technorati Tags: baseball, Boston, California, Jim_Lonborg, Tony Conigliaro, World_Series, Red_Sox

I got a few inquiries today from places that aren’t here. The questions about fire.

We’re no where near the part of California that’s burning. We’re safely north of it waiting for an earthquake.

Technorati Tags: California, fire

Sox won the American League Pennant.

Right after, I texted a couple of fellow California-based ex-pats. My sis texted me. I emailed my cuz that I thought Papelbon was a fine name for a soon-to-be baby boy.

This weekend I was feeling kind of Boston. Autumn is the single best thing about New England. Trees, leaves, crisp breezes, crisp apples, Coco Crisp throwing himself against the outfield wall. Crisp.

Maybe the end of summer, the shortening days make me a little homesick. Not that I’d feel like coming back. More a whimsical little melancholy. Really, though, it was more likely traumatic memories brought on my the dialogue in “Gone Baby Gone.” I never made it a habit to hang out for long periods of time in Dot bars, but Ben Affleck caught the feel of places I’ve been.

‘Course, Ben ain’t even from Boston. But, my old neighbor Jimmy, occasional crack-smoker, “Hey, D., can I borough a cup of tequila, I’m jonesing, just a cup and I’ll get out of your way,” historian of all things townie in Cambridge, assured me he and his brother and their friends kicked the theater-fag asses of Matt Damon and Ben. So, maybe he’s from the wrong side of the river, but I have no doubt he knew folks like he threw into his movie.

Best side-note trivia is the friend character, Dottie, unfortunately not played by the local actress Dottie, and who was obviously proud to be in a real live movie in her “Dot Rat” T-shirt, never made it to the movie’s opening. I guess she got a little incarcerated. The source is Fox, though, and they need a fact checker. In a movie where Dorchester is referred to about every other minute, they say the flick takes place in East Boston, same as Mystic River. Probably, because the two scenes involving bridges go no where near the actual Mystic River.

Anyway, I should have bought Pat that parish T-shirt before she was gone.

Technorati Tags: American_League_Champions, Boston, California, Cambridge, Gone_Baby_Gone, homesick, movie, New England, Red_Sox