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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").
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playing hooky Saturday, November 22 1997
he alarm went off this morning as usual for a Saturday and I headed off to work. But guess what? The schedule had changed. What I'd thought was a temporary schedule anomaly was in fact permanent, and I'd have come in to work at 5pm. So I hung out for a few hours anyway, taking advantage of the greater bandwidth of the T1 to do the web surfing I would have been doing at home anyway (that is, if I wasn't still sleeping, which I probably would have been). The online journal scene occasionally makes for some fascinating reading, especially when certain of its members are extremely pissed-off. I really wanted to go look at the site that Maggy referred to (it supposedly still had "((water))" left intact between the title tags). So I asked around on diary-l (the online journal mailing list), but mostly all I got in response was incoherent insults from a guy named Zach. In among his insults, he denied the existence of web cliques and went on to tell me that he didn't think I was a very nice person and that he wouldn't want to "hang with" me. Of course, at that very instant my little heart broke right in two. Later that day Zach withdrew from diary-l entirely. He had been, up until that instant, by far the single most frequent poster to that list. This little episode didn't do much to dispel my lingering unease that the Internet is comprised largely of people lacking fully-developed social coping mechanisms. Back at Kappa Mutha Fucka, I installed some whiz-bang software and continued as I had at Comet. Destiny seemed to hurl me relentlessly towards an unremarkable evening.
editor's note: at this point my tale diverges from 22.html.
here was a knocking at my door. I opened it up, and guess who was standing there in a long day-glo orange wig? Jessika. What a surprise. She'd ridden down from Malvernia with Peggy's mother and father on their expedition to "see the baby." That would be Peggy's baby of course, the unblinkingly erstwhile Baboose. The others, Peggy, Zach, the Baboose, and Peggy's parents, were all downstairs. Peggy and Zach never visit anymore since they only ever came to Kappa Mutha Fucka to visit Matthew Hart, and he's never around anymore. The only reason they came this time was because Jessika had wanted to come. The others went off to go shopping and Jessika stayed to hang out with me. We discussed such things as Sara Poiron's new annoying clingy dependency on a vegan boyfriend named Seph, about Matthew Hart's pathetic recent decline, about Johnny Boom Boom's latest go of detox, and about the upcoming roadtrip.
Since Jessika was in town, and since I'd gone to work once already today, I called in sick. This was the first time I ever did such a thing. I felt pretty guilty about it too, but I think I was justified. I figured I'd have to write a fake musings entry too, but then I realized that would be just another amusing creative writing opportunity.
teve Weiner's new house was in surprisingly good shape. The floor boards looked new, as did the paint job. The house is one of the new things Steve has purchased on the heels of the death of his mother. He said she was hit by an eighteen wheeler, but I don't know how true that is.
I had my new camera with me, but when I went to load a new roll of film, the damn thing rewound it immediately, irretrievably. Damn that Snooky's! We were soon joined by Ana, Raphæl and their little son Nemo. Raphæl is a big eater and he spent considerable time in Steve's kitchen making himself and others various meat-containing food. Though Jewish, Steve keeps a good supply of bacon in his refrigerator. When he was cooking in the kitchen, Raphæl was out in front playing around with an old beat up BMW he'd just bought for ten dollars. The car was once owned by Farrell, who'd naturally cut off its roof.
I found myself wanting to fall asleep, but that was pretty much impossible. Steve was the only one who was managing to hold my interest. There were, of course, his usual embarrassing monologues revolving around his unflagging desire to sleep with Jessika, if only to show the other guys in town it could be done. (To this Jessika pointed out, "they wouldn't believe you anyway.") But occasionally there was more. Now and again there were flashes of true wit. For example, Steve was talking about how he'd bought a nice mountain bike recently, but that it had been stolen from within his old house on King Street. King Street is in a sort of low-income black neighborhood. After Steve had described how the lock had been broken on his house, he added "Afro-americans..." (at this point I just assumed he was going to make a negative racial sterotype) "...are known for their high S.A.T. scores." I'm a little worried about the Baboose. He has an awfully vacant look to his eyes, and he holds them open a long time between blinking. It's not a look of infantile curiosity that I see in his eyes. I see someone completely overwhelmed by the world. Once when I was on tussin, I found him too disturbing to look at.
s we expected, Deya was sitting around doing nothing much back at Kappa Mutha Fucka. I suppose she was resigned to spend a boring Saturday night by herself. Our arrival didn't really change the situation that much either. We ended up going to my room to go online and look at and update the map of the coming road trip. The roadtrip means an awful lot to Jessika; it makes the present situation (having a miserable job and living with her parents) worth enduring. We also discussed some other online matters with which Jessika and I are acquainted. Regarding the horizontal scrolling in Today's Stream, Jessika said, "that's annoying!" Of course, Deya didn't know anything about any of this stuff.
It was a little embarrassing having Jessika and Deya cluck clucking over my dirty sheets, organizational dysfunction and overall lack of hygeine. But they (or, more especially, Jessika) were cleaning my room, and it takes a pretty good friend to do that. Suddenly Bn arrived. Remember Bn? He used to work at Comet, but got a better job at Infini.net down in Norfolk, and so moved out of town. He was back in Charlottesville tonight and figured he'd come over. He told us he's become miserable in Norfolk, forced by circumstances to live with his old girlfriend Helen even though they've "really broken up" this time. "I've started going to bars," he confessed.
My room was getting hot and stuffy, and I was getting irritated with the fussiness with which Jessika was going through my laundry, so I relocated downstairs. Bn did a few wheelies in Matthew Hart's wheelchair and then headed back to Norfolk.
eya, Jessika and I headed up Carter's Mountain to visit "the families." It wasn't my idea of a good time (believe me, I'd had enough of unremarkable babies and cooing grandparents for a whole week), but we had to drop Jessika off with Peggy's folks since they'd be returning to Malvern in the morning.
On the drive home, I was listening to a silly little rap song on Deya's car radio. In the song, "I wanna be pencil on your paper" was used as a metaphor for "I wanna put my penis in your vagina." I picked up that ball and ran with it, coming up with lots of other metaphors for the same thing. The more ridiculous, the better:
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