August 31, 2002

Because maybe
You're gonna be the one that saves me.
And after all,
You're my Wonderwall...

I dreaded today. I don't work a lot, but when I do, they're usually short little 4 or 5 hour shifts with people my own age at the bookstore. I usually get around 15-20 hours a week there. But today I had an 8 hour shift. No problem, I can do that.

But alas, it's with the grumpy old fulltimer women. These people delight in being all friendly to your face, and will swarm into a pack and ridicule you the second you leave. Which is alright. I do the same. I'm doing it now. My latest publicity stunt to disturb these women was to get my eyebrow pierced.
"Are you going to take that out?"
"Can't. It's gotta stay in at least 8 weeks."
"I don't know if you're allowed to have those."
"There's nothing in the dress code for it."
"Oh. You need a haircut, too."
"There's nothing in the dress code for that either."
"Oh."

And this is why I get as few hours as possible. They don't really like me, but they've no reason to get rid of me, and besides, I'm experienced. They lose me, and they've got a lot of inexperienced new people to train by themselves for Christmas.

So anyway. A couple hours into the shift, my girlfriend and her friend come in. Hey "GOSPEL", when's your lunch? I dunno, whenever I want I guess. So I take my lunch, and have Arby's with them. Yum! Yuck.

My girlfriend's real intention for being at the mall is to get this picture frame engraved that she got for me. It's got a picture of her in it, which I've been asking for for awhile. Now I have it, and I like it.

Finished with my 45 minute lunch, I realize just how much time has passed in the long long shift. Yippee, it's time for the fulltimers to go home. So for the last half of my shift, I can just dick around. And I did. And time dragged on and on. The moral of the story? There is none, except that maybe doing work helps time speed up. But that's a price I'm willing to pay for not doing work.

Then on the way home, riding my bike in the dark, I almost get hit by 3 different cars in 3 different places. Is everyone on the street and idiot, or is it just me? It's probably just me. So I stayed off the main streets and rode home, Radiohead still blaring in my head. (3rd day of my Radiohead trip.)

God loves his children.
God loves his chiiildreeennn, yeah.

I get to work tomorrow too. For 5 hours. And the next day too. For 3. With parttimers. Then I'm off all week. This would be a good time to dye my hair pink or get a nosering.

Today was supposed to be a normal kind of day for me. My mother was visiting Wales so that her boyfriend could see his children before they started school again. I had my girlfriend stay the night and we were going to watch a movie and fall asleep as per usual.

Today was not a normal day for me
It was about 3:30 am and my eye lids were beginning to fall. The movie had ended and I was about ready to sleep, so that in mind I switched the VCR off and lay down. My elvish ears seemed to pick something up at this point though, some incredibly slight noise coming from downstairs.

naturally curious, I took a step outside of my room and the noise continued. Common sense kicked me in the head at this moment, telling me that it's probably coming from next door or maybe an animal outside, although my imagination was still urging me to at least check it out.

I walked sleepily into my mothers room looking for something large and heavy as a precautionary measure. I found a large hammer and proceeded to clomp downstairs. As I reached the bottom step, without hearing or seeing a single moving thing other than myself, I knew there was someone downstairs with me. I kicked the door open and heared some noise in the back room. I jumped to the door and from there I saw this fucking huge guy standing on my window sill, quite obviously there with the intention of theft. In panic I screamed, rather loudly I thought, and the burgler did just the same thing. The last I seen of him was him pulling himself up to the window, at which point I had turned and belted my way back upstairs.

I woke my girlfriend up and forced out the words "There's a fucking guy downstairs, I'm not shitting you!". I searched the floor of my room for a phone and dialed 999. The police took their time to get here, took a statement from me and tried to calm me down. Luckily nothing was taken from my house. It seemed as though he was just on his way in when I disturbed him. I dread to think what might have happened to me if he hadn't have had a clear exit.

I have never been this frightened in my entire life, and I hope I never have to experience it again, although something inside tells me it's going to happen again at some point in my life.

My nerves are fucking shot, I doubt I'll be sleeping tonight.

My computer was not harmed during this burglery. Thank the high heavens.

Stability pisses me off.

I'm in love with the river of constant change. The myriad twists and turns of life where you never know what might be around the corner. That is where I live the best. There is where I find my sunshine. The danger around the next bend is fine with me, as long as those magical surprise boxes still appear. Lately there haven't been any of either.

Thought it might be nice to settle down and not have to think for a change. Thought it might be nice to have a regular job, get married and be a respectable dead guy. Well, sometimes trading freedom for security isn't the answer.

Five years in Orlando. It began as a quest and became a wonderful dream, at least for the first eighteen months of existence in this place. Bad luck took root in the soil after that period. Being suddenly stripped of your job, your car and any kind of income can have an impact on you, especially when you are riding the bus and bumming smokes and begging the guy at the pizza place to hire you. Funny thing about having skills is that when you are down on your luck, people won't hire you because they say you are overqualified and will quit on them the moment you get a better offer. There is a vicious cycle that kicks into motion when your life falls apart. The thing is, I enjoyed that period of my life. It taught me to fight and taught me that I could never give up. The fight kept me going and made me stronger. I knew I would see the light. I knew I would get beyond the desert and find an oasis. That is the stuff my dreams are made of.

Don't ask me to do long division.

Some years back I met a woman. She was a dead girl and experienced many of the same symptoms of death that I did and still do. Part of it she described as being a vampire but I changed her wording. Empathy is not a trait normally associated with vampires. I instead compared us to angels, as if in dying and returning to this place we were like the fallen whose wings were not strong enough to hold them in the sky. We talked for several days, had some fairly remarkable dead people sex, and then went our separate ways. She insisted on being a vampire. I couldn't deal with it any longer.

There is this need to go back out into the void. Here on my island I am stagnating and no longer working towards a cause I once believed in. There are new people to be met and new experiences to be had. I can always see it in their eyes. Yet, I continue to cloud my vision and lose the path. Too much I have seen already and yet not enough. Somewhere on the other side of a curtain there are two men on horseback who are dressed in red. They wait for me to return and I will not be able to get past them unless I have my wings again. The problem is, I seem to have wandered off the path, and I am losing the vision. I need to refocus and change direction. Too many ships get lost at sea when they throw the navigator overboard. Maybe I'll forget about it and just go eat some flowers.

And someone told you I was sane?
Come on.

I may have held forth on the following theme several times before, so forgive me that I cannot help myself.

I really, really cannot wait until The Two Towers is released on December 18. Since The Fellowship of the Ring was released on DVD earlier this month, I've had only the 10-minute preview of The Two Towers and various articles written about it to satiate me, and it's not nearly enough. I realize that it would not be a financially sound thing to do to release all three movies, FOTR, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, at the same time or even in the same year, however I am still quite dismayed that the three movies weren't released like the Star Wars Special Edition trilogy was released in 1997 -- release each movie on successive Fridays in the same month. I am so taken with FOTR that I've watched it probably 20 times since I downloaded an advance copy of it in DivX format sometime in July, which then turned into regular viewings of the DVD, of which I own both the fullscreen and the widescreen versions. (Yes, I am a completist geek.)

It took me six months to read the books. I'm reading The Silmarillion (LOTR's predecessor) right now and I intend to read LOTR again before the end of the year. (Or at least start reading it again.) There's too much to take in all in one go, neverminding the fact that I'll probably never get tired of reading it.

When the FOTR extended edition DVD set is released on November 11, I'll no doubt get it the day it comes out and watch it incessantly, not minding at all that the final cut of the extended edition is approximately 220 minutes long.

I've gone through the IMDB's entries for the three movies and made corrections to the bloody spellings of the character names, submitted goofs from FOTR, and added bits of previously unincluded trivia I picked up from my many repeated viewings.

There's still 109 days until The Two Towers is released. Don't even get my started about having to wait another year after that for The Return of the King.

I wonder if there's a 12-step program for addicted Tolkien geeks.