July 17, 1997, Thursday

But Rory expressed every intention of repaying every cost incurred "and then some."

W


hen I returned home from work, I found Rory strapping on his inline skates (his principle transportation) in the middle of Observatory. He had no idea what he had done last night. The enormous vodka shots had made memories impossible to retain. I also found evidence that the evil mystery pooch had again pooed in our yard. As I hosed the nasty chunky yellow stuff into oblivion, Deya's father arrived in a pickup truck to deal with Deya's car situation. He was not in happy mood. I overheard him having a conversation with Rory. And as I expected, it was Rory who had stolen Deya's car last night. But Rory expressed every intention of repaying every cost incurred "and then some."
I've often feared what would happen if Zachary fucked up one of our cars, since he certainly has neither a job nor insurance.
Matthew expresses his doubts that Zachary would remember for more than a few days his obligation to pay for a hypothetical auto accident. He says Zachary would respond to a request for money by saying something like, "you're still thinking about that? That was LAST week!"
But unlike Zachary, Rory has a pretty good job, so it seems likely he will be able to make good on things, to an extent at least.


I


  was out of bed at 5pm today. That's incredibly late by recent standards. Again the day was a hot one, so I started it with a cold shower. I've not yet noticed an appreciable effect upon my libido.

Downstairs, Matthew Hart, Monster Boy and I discussed the Rory situation. As I'd suspected, the damage to Deya's car was more severe than just a flat tire. Its clutch is burned out, and the damage to the wheel is severe, indicating an altercation at high speed with a curb. Deya's father is a mechanical whiz and can probably replace the clutch, but this will take time and is a major irritant. In the mean time, Matthew has had to cancel plans to go to New York (that was going to require Deya's car somehow).

For his part, Rory is ashamed of his behaviour. He has expressed to Matthew his apologies to the entire household. Furthermore, he has sworn off drink for good.

I suggested that a guy like Rory must have a pretty checkered past. I wondered if he left England in a smoking ruin when he departed for the New World. Matthew joked that the massive English cow incineration that followed the Mad Cow scare was probably in fact just another one of Rory's big fuck-ups. Later on I joked that we Americans had fought a revolution to get away from the likes of Rory, breaking into song:

My name is Rory
I like to fuck girls up the ass
I'm from the British
Lower middle class.

My name is Rory
I drive on the left side of the road
Watch me swerve
Just to hit that toad.

N


ow Kappa Mutha Fucka has been thrown into a serious transportation crisis. Not only are both Matthew and Leah forced to ride bicycles to work, but now so too is Deya. I always ride my bike to work since driving a car the short distance to the Corner would be very American but an environmental travesty and too much trouble, expense and lack of excercise to justify the comfort.
My boss, Ken, who lives on the corner of JPA and Observatory, does drive to work, something I can't understand. He pays $1/hour for parking.

The car situation was now so bleak at our house that I was eager to do anything to improve it. Matthew and I focused on the Vomit Comet. It now has a dead battery and all the key switches no longer function. But Matthew aims to take the car to a shop and have it worked on. So we decided to see if we could make it run. Knowing that the battery is dead, the power is always on, and the starter can't be energized by the key, I figured if we could jumper it to a working car and bypass power from the battery to the solenoid, the car would start fine. We got Monster Boy's car in on the action and successfully fired it up this way. Matthew gassed it up at the JPA Fastmart, and then we returned home. To stop the engine, I pulled a big cable out of the distributor. Then I disconnected the battery to preserve its charge. The Vomit Comet is quite startable now, it just takes a complex series of operations.



Here I am in UVA's Olssen Hall, working on my musings. Later tonight, Diana the Redhead and her roommate Virginia are coming over. I slept so much tonight that it's doubtful I'll need a pre-work nap.



Well, I never did see Diana. The temptation to take a pre-work nap was too strong. I did hear Diana poke her head into my room to say goodbye as she departed for New York. The weirdness will have to carry on without her.

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The Internet as we know it didn't exist for about an hour at around 4am this morning.

D


id anyone notice the big Internet slowdown that began yesterday, hitting a crisis last night? The other day some fool with a backhoe accidentally severed a bunch of T3 lines of a major Internet backbone. The situation was made all the worse some hours later when Network Solutions' root Domain Name Server databases became corrupted. URL requests made by browsers worldwide returned faulty IP addresses. The upshot of all this: the Internet as we know it didn't exist for about an hour at around 4am this morning. I received a record number of calls for a weekday night from people whose email bounced or who couldn't surf to sites. What could I say but "the problem appears to be out there on the Internet somewhere." I am blessed to be living in interesting times.

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And like Ceej, I occasionally walk around singing a quiet relaxed-tempo "I am an anarchist, and I am the anti-Christ" as I putter around the place doing the little things that need doing. Some day I suspect I'll use it as a lullaby for a little accidental descendant. "Ring around the rosy/ A pocket full of posies/ Ashes, ashes we all fall down" was probably shocking in its day too.

now for a subtle dose of irony

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