Wise is the person who can: take while seeming to give.

T


oni Dirtbag crashed at my house last night. I'm not at all pleased about that, especially considering that his wormy dog Butt Noodles slept on the couch.

---

This is sad in as much as the Corner has far and away more sexiness, psychos and soul than a lousy intersection can ever have.

I


  was hungry when I woke up this afternoon so I went down to the "Wayside" commercial centre at the intersection of Jefferson Park and Fontaine Avenues. It's sort of the downtown of the part of the Charlottesville that I now call home. It has replaced the Corner for many of the essentials of my life. This is sad in as much as the Corner has far and away more sexiness, psychos and soul than a lousy intersection can ever have. But the JPA Wayside tries, oh how it tries. And I have an open mind.

The JPA Wayside commercial centre has served my needs in the past as well. Back in the Spring of 1995 when the Malvern Girls lived in the attic of a house on Fontaine, I used to occasionally buy Mickeys Big Mouths at the JPA Fastmart (the place I'd been calling a Jiffymart in previous entries). Living in this part of town, there's little expectation of diversion from the streets themselves. The pattern becomes one of hanging out at the house while craziness comes to the door. More on that later.

I bought a box of fries from the Old Virginia Chicken place, the greasy spoon mentioned in yesterday's entry. I really like that place. It's so efficient and yet so friendly. The customers are real people. They don't have the velvety smoothe skin of youth and the bland television accents of Generation X. They backslap, twang and ya'all comeback enough to remind me I'm in the South.

Just outside the front door, a gutsy crow swooped down and then flew off with a chicken femur in his beak. Satisfaction was apparent in his winged retreat.

I ate the fries as I leisurely walked back home. As I sat on the front porch wondering why I'd eaten so much grease, Matthew Hart drove up in his car. Zach hopped out and I handed the remaining fries to him. As you may recall from the Ramathon, Zach has an amazing appetite and few are the times he has rejected food.

The rank odour of the Dynashack ashtrays had faded in my memory.

M


atthew was headed back to his Dad's place 25 miles to the west in Waynesboro and I came along so I could get some stuff 15 miles further on at my folks' place Staunton as well. Matthew's Dad's place was littered with the bright little toys and bloated plastic furniture that comes with a baby, in this case the lovechild spawned by his father's youthful new wife back in the month of Libra.
The house also reeked of cigarettes.
One of the things I particularly appreciate about my new house is that no one smokes inside. Zach smokes a little on the front porch. Oh, and Deya seems to have picked up a little bit of a cigarette habit as well. But Peggy is four and a half months pregnant and has managed to quit smoking while Matthew, Leah and I never started. The air in our house is fresh like Springtime. The rank odour of the Dynashack ashtrays had faded in my memory.
I was only reminded of the quality increase of my air supply by the dreadfulness of the air in Matthew's Dad's house.
I feel sorry for the baby to have to grow up in such a sick environment.

While there is a constant striving for bigger and better machines, most of the actual work I do could be done just fine on an old CP/M machine running on a 2 MHz 8080.

At the Shaque in Staunton, I gathered together some PC compatible machines to take back to 129 Observatory. These machines are fairly old, but one of them actually has a 486 microprocessor in it. While there is a constant striving for bigger and better machines, most of the actual work I do could be done just fine on an old CP/M machine running on a 2 MHz 8080. The responsiveness of such a system is probably a little better than this computer, a 66 MHz PowerMac running System 7.5.5.

While I gathered computers, food, an assignment from my Dad, and a much-needed toothbrush, Matthew Hart tried unsuccessfully to catch a rooster. He wants to have one living in the back yard of our new place. I'm sure no one is going to notice the disappearance of a single rooster at my house. Indeed, Matthew and I could probably take a goat as well. All the farm animals are on retirement these days, see. And if the landlord or neighbors complain, we'll say it's a seeing-eye goat.

We drank Redhook ESB on the way back to Charlottesville. I'm glad I turned my Dad on to that variety of beer.

I


  was on the Corner briefly, sitting in front of Higher Grounds. I was having impure thoughts about a girl talking at a public pay phone. There was something very appealing about her long wind-tossed hair and billowing hippie skirt. I was thinking of her generically, objectifying her outrageously in the privacy of my mind as we males are want to do. But it turns out that the girl knows me; she is one of those people who considers me a fabulous artist. She has often told me so while I sat stupid with booze. When she waved at me, I gave her encouragement so she came over to chat with me briefly. I know her face but I always forget her name. Anyway, she'd been to Morocco and her hands were covered with reddish brown arabesques drawn in henna. She says the designs will last for about a month.

I also bought two CDs at Plan 9. I'd never heard either before:

• Toxic Narcotic's 1994 CD People Suck (Rodent Popsicle Records) for $4
• Citizens' Utilities 1996 CD Lost and Foundered (Mute America) for $2

Janie's father had raped her routinely through her teenage years, and after his suicide her mother had committed her to an insane asylum, where she'd attempted suicide on numerous occasions.

The only reason I bought the Toxic Narcotic CD is because in 1991 I knew a girl named Janie from Boston who was good friends with the members of an obscure Boston death metal band called Toxic Narcotic. That one of their CDs should find its way to Charlottesville was like being on a beach and finding a bottle with a message from a long lost friend. To not buy it would have been like not opening a letter from Janie. Finding this CD made me wonder anew about what had become of her.
During the time I knew Janie she was the 19 year old girlfriend of Shandi, my pot-smoking under-achieving Oberlin College drop-out friend from Boston.
Janie's life had been an unending tragedy. Her father had raped her routinely through her teenage years, and after his suicide her mother had committed her to an insane asylum, where she'd attempted suicide on numerous occasions.
By the time Shandi met her, she was a street-smart hustler on the streets of Boston.
In the two weeks I spent with Janie, the strength of her character impressed me like that of no one else before or since.
Oh, I almost forgot to say, Toxic Narcotic is fairly unremarkable death metal with a hardcore punk influence.

Lost and Foundered is actually a fairly unique hybrid of grunge and country music, if you can imagine that. The music is actually pretty good. It's rather slow and dreamy. I keep wanting it to "kick in" and it never does. It might go well with a margarita on a summer afternoon.

P


ast 5pm I drove my Dart up 29 North on a mission to pick up Leah, who was stranded at work at Fresh Fields. On the way I stopped at Lowes and bought some spray adhesive and spray varnish as well as a grinding wheel for my powerdrill. There are lots of little things are house should have, and these are surprisingly among them.

L


ast night I'd used Photoshop to enlarge and distort nine still frames from the videotape of the drunken night of May 23rd. As you may recall, that videotape was shot as part of a photographers' collaboration orchestrated by Jenfariello. Today I wanted to get that project out of the way. So at UVA's Olssen Hall (in the Electrical Engineering School) I printed out the pictures. Then I found a piece of weather-ravaged plywood and ravaged it even more, abraiding it in the street and such. I ripped all the white margins off of the nine frame printouts and used the spray adhesive to affix them to the board. The adhesive was not as good as I'd expected, but I did get all the pictures stuck down fairly tight. Still, I wasn't quite satisfied with the results. The video stills depicted people hanging out and being drunk at Macadoo's on the Corner. As a concept, it was a good start, but it didn't tell the whole story. But I gradually felt a wave of insight coming to me: my images, I realized, were a depiction of a reality that is modeled on a fantasy. So I extended the concept by including little excerpts of advertisements from Details Magazine. I liked the irony of juxtaposing big grainy black and white pictures of real people getting sloshed next to small glossy colour pictures from the advertisement fantasy world they use to measure their lives.

---

feeling a little exploited

But I know too much about evolutionary theory to ever consider pregnancy selfless.

O


ne of the problems with being the most wealthy person in my house is that I am frequently taken advantage of. The other day I put 12 beers in the refrigerator and ended up drinking only three of them. It never happens that I go to the fridge and drink beer belonging to someone else. No one even bothers to ask if they can have my beer. It's just assumed that I'm the sugar daddy. Some people are worse about this than others. Matthew and Leah have a very good sense of justice and the need to pull their weight. Monster Boy, on the other hand, may have been spoiled by the fact that he's been supported by his friends since February. Sometimes it seems as though he has gotten use to not having to pull his weight. Hopefully his new job will bring on an era of unprecedented generocity. Then there's Peggy and Zach. They're living on the couch and they're using the facilities. But it's doubtful we'll ever be compensated for the space they occupy and utilities they consume. They may not express this overtly, but there seems to be a hidden message from them that they are Maryesque and Josephesque martyrs worthy of support. Zach has been impoverished by a long series of legal problems (public nudity on a beach, LSD possession, and, most recently, the lack of a Charlottesville city sticker on his car). These legal problems are mostly the result of a foolishly careless attitude. But the resulting poverty ends up being an expense incurred by his wife and his friends. We feel duty bound to step in when he has nothing. And now of course, Peggy suddenly and inexplicably feels the need to reproduce. That's her decision of course, but it seems doubtful that she has considered how poorly prepared she is for this. I fear she thinks of a baby like she thinks of a kitten. "It'll be so cute!" and such. We are conditioned by society to view her poverty pregnancy as a beautiful selfless act of sacrifice worthy of our charity. And she, wittingly or not, plays the roll perfectly. But I know too much about evolutionary theory to ever consider pregnancy selfless. Ultimately our genes want to reproduce themselves and outnumber other genes. They do what they can to achieve this end. Everything else is secondary.

Having said all that, I very much like the community in my house. And when I feel I'm not being exploited, I'll stop complaining.

craziness comes to the door as I'm leaving

A


fter my pre-work nap, I briefly saw a group of friends who'd been on a gothic mission to the graveyard. Deya, Monster Boy and Leah had refused to go because the mission had looked destined for catastrophe. This is because the driver had been none other than the ever-dangerous Theresa Venesian (briefly emerging from post-skinhead-stabbing-hiding to visit our new house). Absurdly, she was driving a U-haul. Those who had gone with her to the graveyard had been Jesse, Cecelia and Leticia the Brazilian Girls and Matthew Hart.

Jesse's house (where he lives with his folks) is not far from Observatory Avenue, and he's been visiting quite a bit lately. You have to love Jesse. He's the quiet type with a wild cat in his soul. Turn your back for a moment and Deya will have made a little sculpture of bottle caps and torn cardboard. Turn your back for a moment and Jesse will have the whole backyard on fire. Or sex with your girlfriend. Or a terrible auto accident. And he always emerges unscathed.

You know how Morgan Anarchy was supposed to leave for New York today? He didn't. The van he was to be riding in has broken down. I knew this would happen.

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