March 26, 1997, Wednesday

A small question: Which causes a child more emotional harm: being taught that if he is naughty he will go to Hell to burn and have his eyes gnawed by worms for all eternity ^or discovering on the Internet that some adults enjoy putting marbles up their assholes?

Andrew was looking especially cool with his sun glasses.

Coming back from Cocke Hall, I stopped to hang out with the cool people in front of Higher Grounds. There isn't a lot of choice these days for places to hang out on the Corner, so I guess I'm just going to have to be cooler than comfortable. Housemate Andrew was looking especially cool with his sun glasses. Will was pleased with himself today; he's finished his signal processing programming project and his professor wants him to enter it into some sort of competition. Everybody there at Higher Grounds was expressing similar sorts of happiness and satisfactions, and exchanging little social graces, the sort I do not excel at. But I try, I try.
I want to be cool like them.
The gods all drool on them.
I want to be cool like them.
They attend the school of sin.
I want to be cool like them.
A rat bathes in the pool I'm in.
I want to be cool like them.
I could dual with the nine and ten.
I want to be cool like them.
I act like a fool token.
I want to be cool like them.
I ride my mule to gin.
I want to be cool like them.

For example, I heard the Cardigans last night on the radio, and through the cheery poppy Madonnaesque vocals I could clearly hear the desperate crying of redundant meaningless human mortality.

Despite recent fiscal problems, I bought a used CD for $6 today, Bob Mould's Black Sheets of Rain. It's from 1990, a good period in Bob Mould's creative life. And yes...it does start out sounding like Bryan Adams, which really isn't so bad. I find myself liking classic rock elements when they are deployed by my alternative heroes. For example, I heard the Cardigans last night on the radio, and through the cheery poppy Madonnaesque vocals I could clearly hear the desperate crying of redundant meaningless human mortality, and I was sincerely moved. Of course, I'd just been reading about how Mad Cow Disease was poised to wipe out mankind. Now I really am off the subject. Let see... Black Sheets of Rain has some good songs on it. I like "It's Too Late" a lot, though I've heard that a bit much on college radio. But on "Hear Me Calling" Mould sounds as though he's been lobotomized into a harmless B-grade folk balladeer. Like most Bob Mould I have in my collection, Black Sheets lacks something. It seems to have this tired ponderous sound that for some reason Sugar's phenomenal Copper Blue (my favourite Mould creation; I have it on tape) was spared. Sometimes I wonder if I'm gradually acquiring a collection of my favourite musicians' worst music. Of course, I almost always feel indifferent about unfamiliar music when I first hear it.

I went to bed at 8pm for some reason. I like getting lots of sleep during the work week. While I slept, I had the following dream:

...thus we constituted a confirmed sighting of alien space craft.

My father and I were standing in the goat pasture, which is up the hill behind the house of the place where I grew up south of Staunton, Virginia. To the north, we both could clearly see hovering refrigerator-shaped alien space crafts. The comet Hale-Bopp was visible too, but it looked exactly like the stylized version of Haley's Comet as it appears in Bayeux Tapestry depictions of the Norman Invasion of Britain in 1066. The space crafts gradually changed positions and appearance. I didn't want this phenomenon to slip away unrecorded, so, in the chickenhouse nearby, I drew a picture of what I'd seen, and I had my father do likewise without seeing what I'd drawn. We drew almost the same picture, except his was rendered in stunning fore-shortened 3D and lacked the satelite-style collector dish which I'd seen. The images were so similar that I took this as proof that we'd both seen the same thing; thus we constituted a confirmed sighting of alien space craft. How exciting! Later, though, I determined that perhaps what we'd seen were actually bread-cooling trays manipulated overhead on a series of lines and pulleys from some mysterious new bakery set up at the top of the goat pasture. Or else we'd witnessed the business end of a road-building crane working on a mysterious new highway project burrowing through Muellers' Mountain. How disappointing!

I feared I'd forget the dream, so I set up a screwdriver so that it projected out of my stereo's front panel. I hoped that later when I was wide awake I would see that and recall my dream. But I remembered the dream fine without having to see the crazy screwdriver representation.

There is news of a mass suicide in California. Religious nuts look much like lemmings from a distance.

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