Kicking and Screaming, Back into the Mire

I am already pining for the days when my prevarications alone dominated these humble pages, and I enjoyed the privilege of looking down my nose at James and Zach (and Cathleen (and Jack now! Holy crap!)) for not updating as frequently (NOR AS MAGNIFICENTLY) as I. I guess I'll also have to actually read their posts from now on.

Booo.

Cheer up, working class drones! It's Friday! Time to spend your filthy lucre to buy cheap hooch at the company store, so as to use the days of the weekend to forget the mindless drudgery of your button-down shirt, blue-collar, middle-managed lives! Piss your lives away in an orgiastic amnesia, hoping for a permanent solace that will only arrive with death!
Also, chat transcripts! Please to enjoy!

Cathleen: Seen cloverfield yet?
Thomas: Nope.
Thomas: You?
Thomas: Is it any good?
Cathleen: Yeah, I'm blogging about it now.
Thomas: ...Wait, by blog, do you mean Elevennames?
Cathleen: yeah.
Cathleen: por que?
Thomas: I... I just don't know what to say. Someone else is updating it. My world is flip-turned upside down.
Thomas: ...In a town called Bel-Air.

Thomas: a/s/l?
James: hate bullets.
Zachery: hills/male/space

Thomas: So staff meeting!
James: Yes.
Zachery: YEAH
James: Staff meeting?
Zachery: Staff meeting.
Thomas: ...Staff meeting;

Thomas: We are thinking of a sixth writerface.
James: Who is this person?
Zachery: Awesome.

Zachery: Also, Thomas, winword tells me your todaypost is 681 words, counting tags.
Zachery: So, uh.
Thomas: Hey, shut up.

Thomas: About half of our hits are me, logging in to see how many hits we have.
Thomas: The rest I presume are errors or HATED CANADIANS.
Zachery: BUT WE HAVE HITS THAT ARE NOT YOU
Thomas: IMPOSSIBLE

Zachery: Also, if you make me write in five paragraph style, I'll cut you.
Zachery: EVEN IF IT IS IMAGINARY INTERNETLAND NON-CONSTRAINING FIVE PARAGRAPH STYLE
Thomas: If I make you write at all, it will be worth it.

Thomas: Friday is Chat Transcripts day, so the only real effort I have to put into that is copying and pasting. And making us sound funny.
Thomas: So it's still a lot of work.

Zachery: Five writers. Two names (counting Thomas a becket as one, because hey) each, plus one writer with one name.
Zachery: FLAWLESS VICTORY.
Zachery: See?
James: What happens when we add more people?
Zachery: The victory stops being flawless.

James: Also, I will be significantly less crazy
James: once I sleep.

James: My mother>You.
Zachery: Yes yes yes, cell phone call.
Zachery: You're lucky I'm here to translate your madness tongue, James.

Thomas: I am greatly pleased with updatesplosion. Now if only Beth could type up some words.
Zachery: ...her internet connection is a wireless one that only works if the number of streetlights that are on in the street is evenly divisible by three.

Thomas: CHAT MEETING ZACH
Zachery: I am in it.
Thomas: LIES
Zachery: I MADE IT
Thomas: LIIIES
Zachery: YOU CAN TELL BECAUSE IT IS NOT NAMED A STRING OF NUMBERS
Thomas: I CAN'T HEAR YOU I'M SINGING HYMNS

Actual content forthcoming. Save me a seat at the bar, girl scouts.

BONUS CONTENT:
Cathleen: fuck you!
Cathleen: with a rusty pipe that i ripped out of the walls and used to bludgeon the people who live downstairs
Thomas: Hi Cate!
Thomas: Wait what?
Thomas: Is this about James?
Cathleen: go look at 11names
Thomas: ...Oh dammit, I said Catherine instead of Cathleen?
Cathleen: YES!
Cathleen: like 10 times
Cathleen: my fucking name is on the top of the page
Thomas: But not on the posty screeny thing! It's my mother's name! Aliens, Cate, Aliens!

WE ARE ALL FRIENDS HERE HOORAY :D

The journey must start with Deathwish.

Did you see post below this one that wasn't by one of our new writers? That was more emote-ing than Zach's done about this site in months. One wonders what else he hides under his cap, aside from hair.

Regardless, I feel like I need to remind him, publicly, about beginnings and journeys. I will use an example, the record label called Deathwish Inc. (Former home to Modern Life is War, Cursed [Have you heard Three? If so, get in touch.] and Converge and current home to Life Long Tragedy, 108, Killing the Dream and Blacklisted) from whom a particularly large order for me arrived today.

They (and their long time brothers at Bridge Nine) didn't get to be the country's foremost hardcore labels quickly. It was through a series of hard work, excellent vinyl releases and signing bands they liked and were talented, regardless of whether the band would make money. Things slowly got better. They signed newer and younger acts, who toured voraciously. Though, it should be noted, being able to sell Converge merchandise may be the closest thing to a license to print money that this scene has, but I digress. These younger bands (Modern Life is War) steadily (but slowly) gained traction around the country, and as Deathwish tirelessly promoted the band on the internet, so too, did they gain more pageviews and more money, presumably, as evidenced by the tons of pre-orders the label now sells.

In short, the label has style and substance, though that didn't avail them for at least a couple years. Hard work, super fast shipping and having a good mailorder team pays off, and there is no question that Deathwish has been working at it, full steam ahead for a while. It is this same kind of hard work and verve we must emulate to deserve your time, dear reader.

I am not particularly concerned that after seven months, we are still in red ink, and have 20something readers. If we keep writing interesting things worth reading, word of mouth will raise our ship. Then again, this isn't a moneymaking venture, at least so far as I can tell. It was pitched to me as something that, if nothing else, is an outlet where I can continue to cut my teeth on the stone of longer form writing. If I see anything, a penny, a nickel, I will laugh uproariously until I am told, that no, this is our profit from the site, in which case, I will keel over laughing.

So Zach, if you want to do better, then write more. Let's see what you have to say about Gravel in 2012. Hell let's see what you've got to say about One Piece and speaking of which I should probably also check out the other five episodes of Baccano I haven't watched, because apparently, that's where it gets funny. This "either anime or politics" idea, I think, is crazy, because it assumes a zero-sum game that isn't true. We can write about both, it is simply a matter of working up the desire to take this place more seriously than we have when we started it.

As the introduction to Cowboy Bebop goes...

Let's do it.

Antony and Cleopatra, and the brain.

My dear friends of the internet,

If I may introduce myself, my name is Jack Grey. I'm ever so slightly overeducated, a fishmonger, a drinker of fine teas, and a magician. I'm tattooed and hermaphroditic.

Favourite authors include Virginia Woolf, John Ruskin, and Emily Post. (I thought it best that you were forewarned.) I think that trying to choose one's favourite Shakespearean play is a bit like trying to select one's most useful internal organ.

I'm between world travels at the moment. I'm drawn to antiques, to decadent cultures, to historical moments at which savage civilisations met strange natives.

But I suppose it's best to be on with it. I've heard that we're summoning ghosts.

I can, I think, safely state that we modern Americans are quite madly in love with the Victorians. We adore their fading photographs, their marvellously purple phrases, their stockings, the devastatingly straight lines of their suits, their conflicting romantic notions: prudish and prurient, secretive and enduring. We emulate their wallpapers, and, if I may be allowed to speak for all of us, we miss their manners. Desperately.

I would argue that this love affair with an epoch is well timed. Our empire is crumbling. It is no surprise that we'd look longingly to the culture of the fallen empire that we remember best. Perhaps we want to feel ourselves surrounded by their ghosts. We want to believe that we, too, will be remembered fondly by absurdly dressed Japanese teenagers in some glowing future. Or we want to learn to die gracefully. Or we really do just love the wallpaper.

Besides sharing in the collective obsession with the Victorians, I also like taxidermy a great deal. They were fond of the art, in fact.

They, I think, were doing it in conquest. When they were gaining their empire, they were sailing to strange lands, finding beautiful, naked creatures they didn't understand in the least, and animals of which they'd never dreamed, even in the mythologies of the empires that they themselves remembered fondly. The Pre-Raphealites, for example, were quite fond of the wombat, and there is the famous story of the first taxidermic platypus sent back to Britain: the receiver responded that it was a terrible joke and a hideous fake, that, clearly, no such beast could exist.

Taxidermy is enjoying a small revival, if only in my own mind. We, however, are not trying to catalogue dark continents, or to prove our masculinity or our skill with an elephant gun. We're clutching, once more, at ghosts. As our supremacy fades, we're forced to confront the fact that we've taken more than we ought. We've created quite the ecological mess, and, as a few monumentally populous nations in the East begin their own Industrial Revolutions that, we're a bit shocked to discover, we cannot stop, we note that we aren't dying alone.

I don't know about you, but I want an elegantly mounted gazelle head. I want gorgeous stuffed peacocks, taxidermic piranhas, gorilla skulls, and a stuffed crocodile, which I'll display in my study, so that my friends will understand instantly that I'm a magician of great skill. And I want them because, I'm afraid, their living counterparts may not be long for this world. The Victorians stole these creatures away from their native lands in order to prove that they were real. I'm afraid that we may need to begin preserving them for the same reason.

Yours always,

Jack

Of Sailing Ships and Ceiling Wax, of Cabbages and Kings

Blogger informs me that this post is, internally at least, the one hundredth post to exist on this site. This includes any number of drafts that were never posted, sad forgotten creatures unlikely to ever see the light of day or to serve any purpose except to make me feel like we might have accomplished something here.

To wit: in the seven months (really?) and two days (really really?) this website has existed, we have written on it. Not as much as we should have (I am exceptionally guilty) or, perhaps, as well as we might have (there is ever room for improvement), but we have written.

And we will continue to do so as we pass this largely nonexistent milestone. We are living, as the chinese curse goes, in interesting times. In order that we might survive, I think it is best that we practice being interesting people.

I didn't really have a vision when I came up with the idea for this website, beyond perhaps getting my friends and I to write things that we enjoyed and maybe, one day, being able to buy a pitcher of beer at the Penny Bar with strange coins plucked from the aether. I still feel much the same day: we are here to write and have fun, and perhaps even to better ourselves or create some content worth consuming, if we are capable of such.

In any case, not-quite-nonexistent audience: thank you very much for joining us. Next time I update, I'll try to bring some actual content with me. Would you prefer the update about One Piece I promised you a millenia ago, or would you like to hear about how I want a t-shirt declaring my allegiance to Mike Gravel in the 2012 election?

I figure it will be the last election, coming at the very end of the world. We might as well get it right for once.

Alternately, we could elect him the second Emperor of America. Emperor Norton I has gone far too long without a successor.

I suppose I answered my own question there a little. Still, if you're out there, in the dark, with a keyboard and a working internet connection, consider dropping a comment here and telling me what you would like to hear more about: politics or nerdery.

The Internet is SerioSHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP

My father introduced me to a new vocabulary term today - the Spruce Horrors. It's a phrase that woodsmen (googling it brings up an essay on prison rape!) used to describe the sense of disorientation and overwhelming fear that comes to one after working in the woods for too long, and then suddenly looking up and realizing that Holy Fuck You Are Lost. The trees all look the same, there are no obvious tracks back to where you are. It is the sense of abandonment that comes from forgetting to think about where you are, as you instead focusing entirely upon what you are doing. And then you look up and remember that you have to haul a twenty pound brush cutter untold miles back to your truck, it's getting dark, and oh no! Coyotes!

In my most ravingly self-congratulatory moments, I like to think that Elevennames tries to bring about a bit of the Spruce Horrors to it's readers.

Then I remember that I alone account for at least ten of our page hits a day (which is roughly 1/3rd of our total daily traffic) and then I get really depressed. Still, having a successful website that pays my beer tab is like having THE AUDACITY TO HOPE, so Ror.

ANYway, I bring up the issue of disorientation and growing horror (and coyotes!) in regards to Our Tubular Internets after reading this article from Wired magazine discussing griefers on Second Life. The article itself is something of a paean to Something Awful and its forums, so I am naturally incredulous of it's journalistic integrity. Also, it is written about one group of people in an imaginary world attacking another group of people in an imaginary world, and there are much better pieces out there for your perusal.

Who is the audience for that piece? If you give people anonymity, autonomy, and free reign to do whatever the hell they please, is anyone honestly amazed that suddenly, the sky will start to rain dancing penises? Are you new to the internet? Is this 1995? Hey, have you seen this cool new image called goatse yet? Anyone who isn't aware that sometimes people online are very impolite is probably an old person, and for serious, the baby boomers should all just be turned into soylent green already anyway.

The whole idea of Second Life is (to me) black-heartedly disgusting, the worst manifestation of the Spruce Horrors that I can currently think of in an online context. You are given the privilege to pay for your imagination, and in such a way that you can actually flaunt it in front of other people (which consist at least partially of sex-starved singles, sex-starved furries, and other sex-starved potpourri). Way to profit off of a childlike sense of exploration and interaction (and sex-starvation).

You douchebags.

The entire issue is at once a metaphor of colonialization and one of fucking playground politics. People have found out that on one hand, there's some money to be made off of this Internet thing, and seek to export it's heady spices back to their Real World, where their bank accounts may grow fat without much work (insert self aware pause). On the other hand, a group of people are given a playground in which to work their imaginations, and some people are being mean, and making fun of others. To say that civilization is at work with either would be to demean the very idea of civilization - administrators will either take action against the mean kids, or else the colonialists and the natives will be left to duke it out before the watching eyes of some bemused onlookers. Given that money is involved, the cynic in me thinks that it's more likely that steps will be taken to ensure a Safe Business Environment, but then I remember that, hey! It's the internet, and there are much more important things out there.

The Spruce Horrors, as you can see, are very easy to suffer from.

Don't stop if I fall, and don't look back.

Yesterday, I went on a vision quest or journey of sorts. Like Black Flag, who'se famous mindset I am beginning to resemble more and more every day, I just had to get away from this campus or life. Perhaps both. Maybe it was the misplaced urge to start a band and never take another backward glance, or maybe it was just the desire to do something different, no matter what and how.

Also like Black Flag, who's view of 7-11 was a light in a dark, dark world, so I have Dairy Queen. I will explain. It has one thing I like tremendously, soft serve ice cream. Lots of it. For cheap. One cannot get soft serve ice cream on campus, and every time I pass Dairy Queen on the way out to the highway, I've always wanted to go. Unfortunately, there isn't a way to get there with intersections and stoplights. One must have a car. It has mocked me for the last 2 and a half years, advertising its wares, and I haven't had an excuse to go with a group of people who actually have cars.

I have told myself for about as long that I could probably walk to Dairy Queen if I tried, but never took those first steps. I don't know what snapped. But it was after my political science class about propaganda (Did you know that the United States and the British were the founders of it?) and political persuasion that I decided I needed to take a walk. This is after, of course, I get invited into someone's house for a cup of hot chocolate, since it was bitter cold. I don't know what possessed me. But I knew, at that moment, I had to get away.

So. The idea germinated as I walked away from a presumably bewildered friend, that I should also go to the bank. When I got to the bank and after doing my business, I realized that, hey, I was already close enough to downtown, I could at least try to make it to the bridge that separates the town from the road to the highway. So, I walked by the abandoned now renovated movie theater, the liquor store, the McDonalds, Subway, auto body shops and Taco Bell/KFC to get to the highway, where, for whatever reason, there is a pedestrian walkway on the side of the bridge, to get to the strip mall at the other side.

I made it across thinking, This isn't so bad. Sure it's cold, but it's the middle of January, and for that, I've lived through much worse, and even as the cars are driving about 6 inches away from me, there's a clarity to my thought process. For Henry Rollins, it was the walking around the town before shows, and feeling like he was finally free of the prying eyes and claws of fans where he found his clarity. I felt the same way, except I don't have fans. It was a brutal coldness that enveloped me, wrapping itself around my thoughts like a blanket, shielding my brain and thoughts from surprised motorists. Unlike Henry Rollins, I didn't have to go back to the venue and have my testicles lit on fire by people who claimed to be fans. For some people, that sounds crazy, why would you go back to that? For Henry Rollins, it was because that was the only outlet for his neuroses. There was danger in that, of course, it was a hardcore punk rock show. For me, it's the cold and anonymity. I am no one. I am nothing. I am simply passing. I don't want to talk to you. It felt good.

After stumbling by some roadside artwork, falling into a stream and getting my socks wet all by the fading light of day, I made it to Dairy Queen, where I ordered a Blizzard, mumbled some words on life to myself, and it got dark. I smiled, knowing this is where it gets hard.

In retrospect, eating roughly 14 ounces of ice cream and then walking back for a half hour, and then walking back to campus in below freezing weather was not, medically speaking, one of my better decisions. As if to say, "next time, James, less fuck the world attitude and more distance from yourself, okay?" my body got colder and more frigid as I walked back past the stream and cars each not a yard from me on either side.

So, I did what I always do in these trying times: Queue Strike Anywhere on my iPod on set the volume at "eardrum rending" and got to work. And by work, I mean, walk in a straight line in the horrible cold for a half hour as cars, people and small woodland creatures passed me.

As I walked over the train tracks on the edge of town, I came to the conclusion that what Mr. Rollins found was the secret that, truly, you don't need anyone else to survive, but to live, you need some kind of human contact. It is a powerful misanthropy that I hope I can unlearn understanding. Striding, with some amount of pride, back up the hill to the dorm, I collapse in my chair, wondering exactly what I am going to with the Blizzard cup and with the last two or three hours of my life.

Zach prods me a couple times to update and after class, I write this. I wait for an ending to come to me. And then, I hear the Gaslight Anthem's "Wherefore Art Thou, Elvis?" and the lyric hits me.

I've got a fever and a beaker and a shot in the dark.

Taking Aim at the Fatosphere. WHICH IS TOTALLY EASY BECAUSE IT CAN'T RUN FAST.

The New York Times has this giant article on how fatty bloggers are all, I dunno, blogging. Which is great. For them, I mean. It is slowly dawning on me (because I am very, very stupid) that there are blogs to satisfy almost any sort of predilection a person can have. Whether you fancy cats or like anorexia or are fond of music or whatever, there is someone out there pontificating endlessly about it.

This does not mean I have to approve of what is being said. I do not take the fatty bloggers seriously, any more than I take the anorexia bloggers seriously. Partially because my recent BMI measurements placed me around the upper end of "Normal Weight". WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN, INTERNET? But also because it illustrates the one thing that I hate most in life: people who are satisfied with who they are and what they are doing. Blogs are supposed to be tawdry or witty or riddled with neurosis (self-referential pause inserted here), not life-affirming details of what some sassy overweight teen is eating and how she doesn't care who knows it.

That's great. I get it that when you are in certain states of life, you want to commune with other people. But this cannot be healthy. I mean, not just that it's reaffirming (what I interpret to be!) an unhealthy lifestyle (that is, the lifestyle where you are happy and you communicate with others - WE HATEFUL TROLLS DEMAND THAT YOU SUFFER), but that you're doing it and expecting praise. How brave of you to accept yourself! Aren't you novel, aren't you grand! I totally wish I could drown myself in the crushing mundanity of my own life in front of an audience! GRR.

There's no sense of self-reliance in so much of the online community. The self-acceptance that's so often preached online is nothing more than dependency wrapped up in the comfort of anonymity, that having attention paid to you is good, so long as people are stuck watching. It's worse, in my opinion, than a rich/poor division, because the watched/watcher division is invariably skewed towards the lowest common denominator. Television studios don't make shows that are too highbrow because then people would form dreadful individual opinions about things - including the possible opinion that the watchers of the show aren't smart enough to understand it. Wal Mart has pulled magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and the New Yorker and others. Do you know what this leaves behind? The magazine rack at the most popular store in America is pretty much just Nascar magazines now. The notion of challenging a reader has gone out the window, along with flowery prose and the effing Dodo Bird. As Kurt Vonnegut (speaking of things that are extinct) said, eloquence is just a matter of waste nowadays.

The notion of self-satisfaction (was going to say "satis-fat-tion" but realized that is an incredibly stupid thing to say - but I just said it! Yay me!) coupled with a desire for approval does not, to me, display any shade of good thinking. If anything, it reveals a crippling inability to achieve the kind of satis-fat-tion that makes an interesting individual, substituting trifles for actual content. This profligate blogging is no real solution, but a placebo to achieving a healthy balance between the personal and the private. It's no forward progress, but rather, simply justifying the old idiom that misery loves company. We may be perplexed by a single problem in life, but hey, at least we're all stalled at the same point.

Which is partially the purpose of my participation (what is it with all these multisyllabic P-words? My professors would've demanded my head on a platter by now) in the blog-o-rama. I do it because I am a neurotic, self-hating individual, but also because I've been told that I do my best writing when I feel strongly about an issue, and also because I can only hope to get a chuckle or two out of the reader. Hey, I'm a third child - getting attention is something that I'm good at. It may be that I think I can help the world (snrk) by blogging about blogs, in some kind of snake-biting-its-own-tail sort of way. It may be (read: is) the real fuel for my bilious temper is just simple jealousy, that there are people out there who I feel are undeserving of the attention paid to them (the hidden truth: SIMMERING ALCOHOLISM).

But at least I'm self-aware enough to admit it. I may not practice what I preach ( and who does these days? ) but I at least have the good sense to present myself as a trifling hypocrite, and not as someone who should be taken seriously.

Why Does Thomas Get All The Good Posts?

The simple answer is that the rest of us are busy leading very interesting, influential lives. Lives in which we make choices that impact the world and you know, change stuff.

The real excuse: probably laziness.

I, however, had food poisoning this past weekend. I dare any of you people out there to blog when you can't leave the bathroom for more than 45 minutes, and therefore didn't sleep for chronic fear that you would wake up covered in your own vomit. I am sure Thomas with his super frequent updating would have provided a blow by blow account of each heave and each rediscovery his body provided. Sadly I am just not as dedicated to the readers as he is.

Suffice to say, the past few days have not been full of fun carefree times. Therefor I bring you no lighthearted antidotes about my weekend, only tales of warning about eating anything with "fantastica!" in the name, no matter how good everyone says it is. Just reading that word now causes my stomach to lurch in fear.

Or maybe that is the hamburger helper I subjected myself to for dinner tonight . . . .

One thing I did manage to do was see Cloverfield this weekend. Now see is a relative term, since the whole movie is done in shaky-cam and my already addled stomach was having none of that. I had to cover my eyes more than a few times, not out of fear, but simply to not throw up on the person sitting next to me.

But motion sickness aside, it was a really good movie. And what is even cooler is the amount of internet hype that is out there about it. All of the characters have myspace pages, which of course show everything up until when the monster attacks New York. It almost makes me want to resurrect my myspace account and check it out. And if you are a huge internet junky there is a whole other level to the movie, because there is a movie somewhere online that shows an oil rig off the cost of Japan being attacked by the same monster as in the movie. It is times like these that I am impressed at how into this fictional tale some people really are.

This is one we need to keep an eye on since I have heard rumors of a follow up video that will be released either in theaters or on the internet that shows the whole things from a US Army solder's "perspective". This is totally one of those movies that I saw and thought was good, but now can't get out of my head.

Ok, well, my astronomy book has been looking at me in an abandoned manner ever since I started typing, so I guess I must go.

I wish I was able to use the Subjunctive Clause correctly

In case you did not notice from my garb, I am about thirty minutes away from walking roughly three miles to go and hack at parasitic plants. Sometimes, the only way to save nature from itself is in the middle of winter with a machete.

Last night was kind of Movie Explosion time. The Fountain was on, which is a great movie if you want to see Hugh Jackman become golden space pajama buddha after exploding into flowers (seriously) and experiencing some kind of floral apotheosis/painful death, as was The Squid and the Whale, which while lacking in golden space pajamas, manages to be kind of endearing and twee and maybe a little disturbing (and produced by Wes Anderson, may angels attend his every whim). There was also assorted other trash - sadly, none of Viggo Mortenson's cinematic triumph American Yakuza, but I suppose I shall just have to remain deprived.

The real undercurrent I felt, though, was that more often than not, these films all have a strong musical influence. I am totally being the first person to think that music is a common thread in the way that humanity entertains itself. I know, right! Maybe it's just because I saw Juno like 72 hours ago and the residual tweenessocity of the film is making me think that freak-folk is the next step in human evolution (Yeah, in 2002 it is!) and then I start thinking to myself HEY MAYBE YOU SHOULD EAT A MEAL TODAY. And then I start thinking about how I gained eight pounds in the past three days, and that fat people don't deserve to eat. And that's what happens when I stay awake until 4 am watching the best films of three years ago!

Continuing onward, ever onward, with our theme of Scary Mistruths (a week which is gratefully almost over), I share with you something quick. Once when I was a freshman in college (I think I still had a ponytail back then - ugh) I was going on a walk through town. I didn't really have many friends back then, and so I alienated myself a lot. Anyway, it was night, early fall, I was bored, and basically just enjoying the walk through a small town, seeing shadows that the lamp posts cast through the trees. I was perhaps watching my own shadow too intently, because I noticed that it moved when I didn't. At first I thought it was a fluke (as is my way) when the shadow of my left arm appeared to reach up, despite the material fact of my arm remaining calmly in my pocket. When the shadow of my left arm spasmed a second time, waving wildly before matching up again with it's physical brother, I realized that maybe it was time to turn back. I avoided the street lights all the way home.

Medulla O-blog-ota!

I am so jaded with football, on the whole, that you could make earrings out of my feelings. My feelings for football. Jade earrings. Because I'm so jaded. I come from Western Pennsylvania, and so when I was born, I had this tiny chip (no larger than a fly's eyes says I!) implanted into the back of my head, which, as the Superbowl draws ever closer, begins stimulating my reptilian hindbrain, turning me into a kind of walking man-ape. Except this year. Tom Brady and the Patriots are good players, and even better when you factor in their bold-faced cheating. Meanwhile, the humble Steelers are left behind and forgotten in favor of announcers screaming BRETT FAAAVVRRRE at the top of their lungs. And so, my tiny mind-control chip is just stimulating so much jade(d) tissue. Jade.

So whatever, Football. Call me again when you're cool. Oh wait, that might be a while.

It's very late right now.

I had a headache today. It was something of a production. Whenever I get these aches of the head, they are always sort of pulsing around the same central section, which I theorize is that little bridgey thingy between the two halves of my head. They also only occur when I eat too much salt, so having soup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner was perhaps unwise.

Anyway, I was going to type up a story about someone who was on the internet (as the kids call it these days) and able to communicate with the dead (except they were going to be bad spellers, and I was going to present it in the form of an IM conversation, just like how I sometimes post chat transcripts that are the only interesting thing to read on this website BUT I DIGRESS) when I realized just how little embellishment a story like that needs. How many of us have people on our instant messenger lists that we don't know, who we never talk to? How often do you cruise the Away messages of your perennially absent friends? So I mean, hey, why aren't they ghosts! Or something. This made sense hours ago, when my head was trying to separate itself into halves. Now all I'm thinking about is how much my grandparents would probably hate SomethingAwful.

Before I go, remember tableau? Of course not! But some people pretend to, and arranged themselves into reproductions of college poster-maker Gustav H. Klimt. And they're pretty good, because I believe that Klimt understood that all it really takes for me to approve of anything is pretty ladies and gold and maybe a scarf. Or a blanket. All tossed together in a basket. It's like a salad made of my favorite things!

Regardless, Haunting Tales Spooktacular continues tomorrow. Maybe we can even trick James into posting!