The SHARP explains the seeming contradiction by saying his desire to beat me up predates his becoming a Buddhist and is thus grandfathered.

I


n the lazy afternoon, Matthew Hart and I watched teevee while discussing some things. He said he's not well liked by the other dish washers at the C&O. They regard him, he says, as an over-achieving ass-kisser. The word might even be Stakhanovite.
Matthew also tells me that Aaron the SHARP continues to talk about whupping my ass. Matthew finds this ironic, since the SHARP claims to be a non-violent Buddhist these days. The SHARP explains the seeming contradiction by saying his desire to beat me up predates his becoming a Buddhist and is thus grandfathered. I really don't know that Buddhists are necessarily non-violent, but Matthew and the SHARP both seem to think they are, so that's what's important.

I


  drove Matthew Hart up to Fresh Fields/Whole Foods so he could pick up his lovely wife Leah. She was in a foul mood from a hard day working at the chain health food supermarket. Sudden plans to maybe go on a trip to New York next weekend required us to double back on 29 so Leah could fill out the necessary paperwork. The cross-traffic U-turn move I busted in the Dodge Dart wasn't for the faint of heart. The wheels on that thing have a most agreeable squeal.

In Farmer Jack, I bought a few groceries and a 12 of Natural Ice, which I split with Matthew. I noticed something: everytime we split the cost of beer, Leah ends up drinking too, but he only pays half. I'm sure he's not trying to stiff me; he's a high school dropout after all.

Matthew tells me he's the best-tipped waiter at the C&O, where the customers go ape-shit over his sophisticated accent.

T


he television was our entertainer. We watched an old 80s movie about a kid who takes some sort of drug so he can turn black and get an affirmative action scholarship to Harvard. Not that he ends up looking, acting, or talking particularly black, mind you. But he does manage to get a light-skinned black girlfriend in short order. Deya had joined us at this point and helped in the drinking of beer.

Deya's father has fixed her car and it's back on the road again. He charged Rory $400 for the parts and labour, at a modest $10 an hour. And with that matter behind us, evil feelings for Rory have mostly subsided. Rory has been doing an admirable job of reingratiating himself.

Tonight Rory the infamous former car thief visited briefly to borrow my bicycle chain tool. He apparently is cursed when it comes to things mechanical, because he returned not long afterwards with its broken remains and $10 so I can buy a replacement. A chain tool is a tough device made of rugged steel and it takes some doing to destroy it. I've had that particular chain tool since the 80s and have given it a lot of use.
Poor Rory; at least he has a good job. Matthew tells me he's the best-tipped waiter at the C&O, where the customers go ape-shit over his sophisticated accent.

Minga kept interjecting completely irrelevant discussion points and going off on unnecessary rhetorical tangents in his shaky old voice.

I


  went up the utility pole to cover some of the tracks left recently regarding our new "cable television scholarship program." When I was coming down, Katherine, the shapely blond girl who lives across the street (and who periodically comes by our house to pick up her little dog Nigel) was just arriving by car. She was surprised to see me just then dropping down from the pole. We got to talking about pirating cable teevee and she told me she's stealing service from her landlord's cable. Her landlord is a skinny old man who lives upstairs; his name is Minga and he likes to screw around with old cars. She told me he's plenty nice, but he's crazy. Like me, Katherine had been drinking and she was acting sort of flirty. This was disturbing me in a not entirely unpleasant way.
Matthew and Leah, always eager for exciting new social opportunities, came out and joined us, and soon so did Minga the whithered old crazy landlord. We all had a pleasant little mostly introductory conversation there in the middle of the street. Minga kept interjecting completely irrelevant discussion points and going off on unnecessary rhetorical tangents in his shaky old voice. Then he showed us an old pine trunk he'd suspended horizontally from wires to make a border between his front yard and the sidewalk. What an odd little man!
Our socializing came to abrupt end when a guy I take to be Katherine's boyfriend arrived. He has shoulder-length hair and wore a tie-dye.

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Monster Boy hasn't been sleeping at our house very much lately. Gossip and conjecture about him and Ami Sage are reliable conversational filler much in the same way as infomercials on television.

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Rebecca, Monster Boy's old girlfriend, sent me a long email today complaining about my portrayal of her new boyfriend Doug (aka "Dink Boy") in some ancient entries.

I


've noticed that my writing is so much better researched now that I always have quick access to the internet as I write. For those who know how to use it, the internet is a supplement to memory and learning. For example, all I need to know are a few key points about a movie, then enter them into Altavista and bammo! I have a review and the names of the actors, producers and directors. Rare is the time I'm left to say in these musings "I watched a movie, but I forget what it was called." The consequences of this easy research are not entirely positive, however. For example, I know from looking through the Atlas Apache web server logs that Daniel Reitman, my old college nemesis, periodically deploys search engines to find occurrences of his name so he can read the usually unflattering things I write about him. Sometimes he then complains to the webmaster (who is ironically me these days).

Along this same line, Rebecca, Monster Boy's old girlfriend, sent me a long email today complaining about my portrayal of her new boyfriend Doug (aka "Dink Boy") in an ancient entry and about the ruthless way I discuss other people in other entries. She apparently read an astounding quantity of my writing. But in the process of reading my journal for such things, she had to admit that she came to see some aspects of my humanity that stood in contrast to my usual "juvenile and cruel" gossip-mongering ways.

I'm surprised at how few emails of this sort I have actually received. Most people, even people about whom I am less than complementary, seem for the most part to like my journal.

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?970724