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March 5, 1997, Wednesday

Rocking thing to say today: I'd come to like the inadvertant noises that drifted into the mix tapes I made in my childhood.

Finally we all broke into poetry after blixa started reciting Edward Gorey poems.
More stuff that happened in Sam 'n' Ellas last night: I hung out with blixa and someone calling herself "tussin grrrl." First I described to blixa the disturbing possibility that on the 28th Theresa was scratching and beating me while I was passed out and couldn't defend myself. "Ewww...what the hell is wrong with her!" replied blixa. Then blixa and I gossiped about various people we both know, folks like Peggy and Zach (now everyone knows, so I can say: she's pregnant with what has been nicknamed "the Beast.") and Matthew (aka "Snackfood") Hart and his long time on-again off-again lesbian girlfriend, Leah: they've eloped. Isn't it nice to see that the twisted and perverted youth of today are settling down into normal American family roles so that we might have yet another generation? Then blixa and tussin grrrl spoke of their drug experiences, especially with tussin. Finally we all broke into poetry after blixa started reciting Edward Gorey poems, beginning with:

H is for Hortense whose head was kicked in
G is for Gus who drank too much gin

While blixa and tussin grrrl continued on with Gorey limericks, I made a few of my own:

There once was a chicken named Todd
Who in a move to get closer to God
Placed his ear to a block
To hear termites talk
'Til an axe cleaved his head from his bod.

and (directly spawned by the preceding gossip session):

A wild young stallion named Snackfood
Met a lesbian mare in a badmood
Said he, "Let's make fillies!"
"You're giving me willies!"
Said the lesbian mare who was now nude.

It was a wonderful chat session, like fond days remembered from innocent youth when there was no nasty old internet to corrupt my morals.

Speaking of which, look at the Battered Black Book for March 4th, 1997. Ceej has found a Cybercensorship Search Engine with which you may determine if a domain has content blocked by "internet smut filtering software." Ceej's reaction to her discovery of inclusion as a filtered site in that particular entry was right-on. It's good to see a little organized rebellion against "filtering software" taking place here on the Web, among those who keep journals particularly. By the way, as casually as I might describe my drug use, violence, drunk driving, and even sexual activity, neither I nor the Big Fun Glossary is yet explicitly filtered by any internet filtering software. No doubt this is an oversight. Surely the mayor of Boston would be displeased to find 16 year olds reading my definitions in a Boston public library.

Before I went home I had a little depressing conversation with Jamie Dyer about the nature of the future that put clouds over the rest of my day.

I woke up at around 1pm. I'd had interesting dreams in which I was already seventy years old. I recall in the dream being a little (but only a little) sad about how quickly the time of my life had passed. I went to UVA's Cocke Hall to do some more fun web stuff. By now featureless grey snow clouds hung high in the sky, though the air was far too warm for snow.

Then there's the little kid who got in trouble for writing his name repeatedly in hundreds of feet of newly-poured sidewalk in Las Vegas.
Back at my house I started watching Oprah and kept watching teevee until a Simpsons rerun came on. Sandwiched in the middle was the news. The news was really screwy today. There's terrible flooding along the Ohio River in Cincinatti. It's the timeless story of people living on floodplains and wanting the government off their backs until comes the water and they think the very same government owes them for their foolish choice of neighborhood (while the press coos about the weirdness of Mother Nature). Then there's the little nine year old kid who got in trouble for writing his name repeatedly in hundreds of feet of newly-poured sidewalk in Las Vegas. He's being charged with felony property destruction for writing how cool he is. And let us not forget the local scene: there's racial tension in the Waynesboro public school system. Finally, there's cloned sheep in Scotland and a gunman in the Empire State Building, and they didn't even discuss either of those issues in the news tonight.

I slept a long time: from seven thirty pm until my shift at 1am. I needed that sleep so I could work on the online version of Ping's March issue tonight.

Typical of my job, I was given exactly one night to create all the twenty or so web pages for this issue. That's more work than you might think. So I downloaded the latest version of HTML Grinder to help me. It's a utility (partly hobbled as demo-ware) which allows one to do global search and replace in a web site: a very handy feature which I will have to use when I move my sites to another server. I've had an earlier version of this package since before I knew HTML, but tonight I really put it to work, and it did exactly what I wanted it to. Now, perhaps, I can consider myself a true web guru.

In Sam 'n' Ellas tonight, blixa revealed that soon blixa will be selling gametes to science. Since I have not revealed blixa's gender, you will have to guess what gametes those are. Later blixa and I discussed group houses, my job, my future plans, and the attitudes of children born under different sun signs.

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