meet my new kitten!

franklin, the most adorable fluffmeister on the planet.

bright light city gonna set my soul, gonna set my soul on fire

i am a rockstar

a recent history, and why i haven't posted in ages:

sep. 21st, morning: maine coast half marathon. i ran it, and looked pretty bad-ass doing it. 190th place.

sep. 22nd: morning flight to los angeles.

sep. 23rd & 24th: beej and i ran around l.a., basked on some beaches, snuggled, talked about books and embracing the universe. we played dichotomy. then we listened to some sweet bluegrass.

sep. 25th: greyhound to vegas. reunited with my montana girls. love and drinking.

small dresses and lots of eye make-up. later, v.i.p. table at the club with a bottle. ha. who woulda thought.

later, couldn't sleep. i fed mar chips and salsa because she was sick, somehow this made sense. then i talked to a brit at the hotel bar for hours about music and life while drinking black russians. crawled into bed next to mar at 6 a.m.

sep. 26th: v.i.p. poolside bed (yes bed) and private pool. comped everything.

hungover, the four of us regained ease around one another (dangerous). always been there, almost forgotten but so quickly resurfaced. we talked about love and sex. we frequently poked each others' boobs. we walked around naked. (this is not sexy don't get excited). we traded clothes and complimented one another and talked about times.

more love and dancing.

sep. 27th: started to feel the exhaustion. gypsy buggy ride to love because we couldn't catch a cab. smaller dresses. dark circles, more make-up. red bull. someone pooped on the floor in our bathroom, one of us, had to be, but no one could remember doing it. it may have been nutella. another v.i.p. table (i know, hard life), another bottle, nice germans, dancing. consensus that european men are better than american men (i already knew this, however). i lost $3 at the slots, the extent of my gambling.

sep. 28th: andrea left. jessica left. marilee left. then there was one. i walked around the strip alone. i rode the spiral escalator at ceasar's palace three times. i watched the bellagio fountain show which appropriately was choreographed to 'viva las vegas'. i took a picture of myself in front of it. i took pictures of the construction and the sky.

now: sitting at the vegas airport, luckily this terminal has wireless. waiting for my 10:15 p.m. flight.

sep. 29th (tomorrow): flight will arrive in boston at 9:16 a.m. cab home, straight to work. hopefully i won't be too late......


(pictures to come).

in the depths of the godsick blues

listen.

i love love acid tongue.

weekend adventure

today my lil sis and i went to the pond and fed cheetos to the swans.

mt girl

end of summer makes me miss montana. it would be nice to sit at the top hat with some people i knew in second grade. to sip on moose drool and let the cigarette smoke marinate my clothing. to hear the twang of bluegrass reverberate across the wood-paneled walls. to feel it on the bottoms of my feet.

good morning

while driving to work this morning, 'never there' by cake came on the radio. i turned up the volume, slid on the aviators and rocked out. yeah, cake gets a bad rap, whatever. i'll love them forever because i picked up a copy of fashion nugget in 7th grade and was suddenly the coolest kid on the block. that says a lot considering this was at the apex of my awkward phase. anyway, 'never there' is awesome. horns layered over a staccato bassline and some strategic vibraslappin' action...and are those maracas i hear in the background? or a cabasa? then there's john mccrea who doesn't really sing the vocals, he's a little too good for singing. he's into a drier, cockier delivery. smug syncopation. you tell me that you love me so, you tell me that you care, but when i need you, baby... come on, it rocks. admit it, you like it too.

i arrived at work and promptly checked my gmail to find that i'd won disorientation tickets in some fnx email contest i'd forgotten i had entered. sweet. i have this unique talent for winning things off the radio. just within the last year i've won tickets for ryan adams, devo (yes, devo), and tegan and sara. hey, there are definitely worse things to be good at!

so this disorientation tour is okay. just okay. two of the five bands are actually pretty terrible. but the kooks will be there, and boy do i love me some kooks! rogue wave will be good too. i'll leave before flogging molly to prevent my ears from bleeding, but the first half of the show should be worth the cross-city journey.

fuck me up, steal my records.

i wish i could go back to last night. i could've listened to ryan for days. months. the air, the beer, the music, the friends, everything. it was one of those occasions when you're just existing and perceiving and suddenly you get this feeling that life is actually okay. more than okay, maybe.

today i'm dealing with a pheromone crash. i was oozing my musk all over the place last night, i think i'm a little dried out. that's just what he does to me. i wonder why i fall in love with rockstars. couldn't i prefer a less-complicated type? like athletes. or investment bankers. i'm generalizing, but you get the point. instead, it has to be the emotionally-driven musician who gets all mola ram on me, thrusting his hand into my chest to grasp my thumping heart and yank it from my thorax. it really isn't healthy to be so easily conquered. honestly, all you need to do is grab an acoustic and stop shaving for a few days and sing all achy. bam. i'm yours, take me. throw my name into a song or two. sing about your chameleon eyes and how i used to tell you their color every day because sometimes you just didn't know. someone had to tell you, and i was looking at them the most. sing about how you miss me. people will listen and get sad because it'll grub up their own pain, but you would know and i would know they could never quite understand.

ryan, though. what a sweet life he leads. he plays his music and writes, travels around and sings to make girls swoon. mmmm. that would be nice i think.

his blog makes me love him more. it's sexy in the way that cigarettes are sexy.

i secretly hope ryan is one of those people who never showers. just once a week, maybe, or once every two weeks. i hope he gets a really distinctive odor that no one would ever mind because it's just his essence and it smells sort of like his music. i hope his guitar smells like him, too. i hope i'd be able to catch a whiff from the front row.

sunshininess

thanks to my masterful painting skillz, my kitchen is now the lovely shade of dandelion.

it really brings some vibrance to the room, don't you think?

guest blogger #1: sir william j. fleming

due to a recent lack of inspiration, i decided to let someone else pour their creative juices into my blog. i couldn't think of anyone in the world who has more of these juices than b.j., one of my dearest friends. so here ya go:

guest post #1:
Except that I do and I do

Shannon is a gem. Let's just get that right out there. She and I were at high school together and formed several organizations of note during our tenure including but not limited to H.U. Intl. and a non-union construction company focusing primarily on cotton-poly blend units. Tehe. I said "units."

Anyway, recently, I was all like "Yeah, motherf-er," when Shannon was all like "I want to start a blog." Then we started brainstorming blog names and I had some really great ones like RoboBlogfromtheFuture, and Shanimatron 10069. She, however, opted for idontlikeyoubutiloveyou.

And, I guess that's good. I'm much better at ignoring emotion than Shannon, so it makes sense that her blog would be a little more serious and heart string-snipping than mine (which doesn't technically exist (my blog not my heart. I have a heart. Shh.))

Which is sort of why I like this blog, sort of why I like the title especially, and a little bit why I'm guest-writing on it.

I don't like you but I love you is something, thankfully, we've never said to each other (see title). But the tension in it rings roundly and loudly to me.

Shannon (and me, sometimes) are pretty good examples of one of my favorite concepts of all time which is the romance of self destruction. Obviously sometimes this is more true for each of us than others, and certainly we're not the most self destructive kids out there, but it's a huge part of our life like the time warp on third street before we ate a giant bag of chocolate chips.

We constantly surround ourselves with fun things that are god awful for us. On at least a few occasions, these things have included each other. On paper, her friends (myself included) are easy to hate. I certainly hate many of her friends.

So, why don't I punch her in the face? Mostly because she prefers to be bitten. And, concomitantly, I've had my fair share of scratches that've drawn blood from her. But why haven't we destroyed each other?

Well, we might. And that's fine. Being around Shannon is like being spirited away for a threesome in a minivan. It looks like such a dirty, reprehensible idea at first blush, and sometimes it is. But, more often than not, you can't wait to feel damaged again.

-Beej.