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he last few days Monster Boy has been staying home recovering from strep throat. It seems he went to a preliminary medical exam in preparation for his new career as a blood scraper at the hospital and they discovered the dread disease. I can't imagine it helps much that he's been sleeping on the back porch (his new room!) through these unusually cool nights.

My body might well have learned the minutia of Newtonian physics, but it's unlikely I would have ever applied any differential calculus to the equations being solved in real time in my cerebellum.

In the afternoon Monster Boy played a videotape of a skater movie. To call it a "movie" is a bit of a reach, since it was more like skater pornography: endless scenes of skateboarders doing tricks on a variety of prepared and unprepared terrain. It's riveting to see human beings able to so accurately manipulate their bodies at the high speeds necessary to be, what appears to me, essentially magical. Understand, I grew up on a gravel road and I never learned to skate and still have no desire to. But I have to hand it to these dudes. I'd never realized before that skateboarding is an art and a sport as well as a crime. Monster Boy says he used to skate, but then he started taking drugs. To do delicate stuff like skaters do, you have to keep a really clear head. Nonetheless, if I'd spent all the time necessary learning to skate like the pros back when I was an adolescent, it's doubtful I would have ever become any good with computers. My body might well have learned the minutia of Newtonian physics, but it's unlikely I would have ever applied any differential calculus to the equations being solved in real time in my cerebellum.

P


erhaps if I'd known back in June I was being cyberseduced by a fishnet-wearing Canadian goth chick, I'd have been more excited to respond to her email. But you know, I have too much trouble keeping up correspondence with the people I do know to begin new online friendships with people who aren't especially persistent. Despite my usually high levels of sexual frustration and my generally rarified sex life, I'm actually rather difficult to seduce, simply because my attitude toward the whole thing tends toward blasé. Unless I'm really drunk.

The University of Virginia is filling up again with fresh young bewildered faces. It's like the Spring when new little adolescent birds bounce around in the grass and fly weakly to hide in bushes as I approach them. And as with youthful birds, here at UVA there are plenty of hungry predators stalking about looking for fresh young meat. For the first part of the skit, she lies on a bed with her face bandaged up, awaiting the results of a speculatively corrective injection. I n the evening, I watched the episode of the Twilight Zone where a horribly disfigured patient in a fascistic other world is told she will have to spend the rest of her life in a community of similarly disfigured people. For the first part of the skit, she lies on a bed with her face bandaged up, awaiting the results of a speculatively corrective injection. One imagines the whole time someone like Cory Glenn beneath those bandages. But then, after the bandages are painstakingly removed, we discover that she's a beautiful girl, and that the doctors and nurses, whose faces you had never seen until that moment (and never been interested in seeing), are the truly ugly ones. It's a profound and deceptively simple trick to remind us that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that if the beholder is ugly in a world of ugly people, then it is the beautiful who are regarded as ugly. Later still, Leah appeared at the end of one of her many working shifts with Rory and a 12 pack of Natural Ice. She was wonderfully drunk, friendly, flirty, and combative. She even threw heavy objects at me, and I didn't mind too much. Unlike Matthew Hart these days, she has an ID that allows her into drinking establishments, and she had intentions of going barhopping with Rory tonight. Next Tuesday, she wants me to go with her to a place where they have $2 pitchers. D uring my prework nap, I had an especially evocative dream, completely in grainy black & white, of being part of some sort of Led Zeppelin video theatre project, circa Led Zepplin II. I really don't know why it was evocative, but when I awoke, I thought, "Man, I have to mention that in the musings." "I'm serious, this is very surreal stuff we're dealing with here." W ord on the 'net has it that Elly is attempting to get a restraining order against my referring to her website in my website. I hope she writes something about it in her journal. The guy from Heinovision says when he reads Elly, "I feel like I'm in a bistro in Prague, wearing a beret and sunglasses. This is better than Foucault. I'm serious, this is very surreal stuff we're dealing with here." I have a feeling Elly is sort of the Henri Rousseau of surrealist web authoring. She thinks her prose is photo-realistic and literary, but the fantastic bird-filled world she depicts is an amazing jungle worthy both of marvel and ridicule.

You know, the journal of that fishnet-wearing goth girl is actually a pretty funny read. Like I said, too bad I didn't know she was trying to seduce me until just today!

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