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March 28 1998, Saturday

T

he vodka with bitters I'd been drinking, in concert with several kinds of cheap beer, left an impact on me this morning. It was a hard hangover, but I was still somewhat functional. I mailed a couple resumés, for example. Peggy and the Baboose came over in the afternoon, and Peggy drove Jessika and me to Studio Art near the Corner so I could mail off my resumés at the Post Office across 11th street.

In Studio Art, I bought some cheap acrylics and some brushes of various qualities. But when I wandered downstairs, I looked at the stained glass window supplies and realized that something inside me wants to make stained glass windows. It's sort of like electronics work, since it requires accurate soldering. But it's all bigger and (of course) exclusively visual. In electronics, things can be done shitty and look shitty but still work fine. For her part, Jessika thinks it would be chinese to make a "satanic stained glass window."

B

ack at Kappa Mutha Fucka, Peggy took off and Jessika and I tried out a new glass cutter on some shattered mirror that's been laying in the back yard. We made little triangles and postulated various arrangements of these. The sky was clear and about as blue as it gets these days and the sun beat down comfortably on my face, burning away my hangover bit by bit. Then we heard the phone ringing, so I ran in to check the message we'd just gotten. The news was from Jessika's mother Teri, and it was that Steve Weiner had died. It was my job to break the news to Jessika, the girl for whom he'd reserved his heart until the very end. She didn't believe me at first, but I could see her quietly weeping later when she was on the phone to her mother.

Jessika didn't say much from then until evening. I took a nap on a couch in the living room, wondering occasionally about Steve's unexpected demise. Jessika isn't saying much about it, and as I type, there's still no word on how he died.

I'm sure Jessika feels kind of guilty about this latest development; I know I do. Steve had been calling our house every day for the past couple weeks, sometimes repeatedly, leaving empty messages ten minutes apart on the answering machine. It got to the point where we hated to answer the phone, because Steve invariably gave a big guilt trip to whomever answered. "Why don't you come over tonight, I'll buy all the beer you want. Come on, you never do!" Since Deya and I screened a lot of calls for Jessika, making up lies about where she was, Steve didn't get to talk to her that much. It's not that she'd didn't like him, it was that his obsession had destroyed his entertaining quality. Actually going anywhere with him was far worse than babysitting, and not going with him deepened his obsession. And now, all of a sudden, he's dead, and his obsession (or his part of the obsession) is dead with him. What can I say about him as a person?

He was man imprisoned in so many ways. A pretty face could lock him up in a torment every bit as bad any jail cell. But, on top of this, he was imprisoned by the time of his formative years. He could never really transcend the 60s, and he continued living as a 60s person until the day he died. Steve's only children are a couple of books he mustered the sanity to write. I sure hope his latest, Jessie Upattinas (which chronicles, with hilarious poetic license, his infatuation with Jessika), is successfully published. Right now it's in publication-limbo, a bad place for a book to linger.

W

hen I came back from a bike-based mission to Olssen Hall, I found that Jessika and Deya (who had been visiting Peggy on Carter's Mountain) had returned home and then set off for the Outback Lodge to see Raphæl and the Ninth. They'd left me a note saying they were there to "pick up women." I could have ridden my bike out there to meet them, but I didn't feel like it at all. I experienced that special form of loneliness that comes when you know your friends are out having fun but you're all by yourself on the couch watching teevee.

I watched part of a "Turner Classic Movie," Rebel Without a Cause and even enjoyed it, despite the dated, stilted acting style and the fakey looking colours. Lately, though, I've been noticing that people felt free, perhaps (in comparison to today) even more free to do little human weirdnesses in old media like movies and music. The singing in some of the songs on Jessika's music compilation from the 1940s is so deliberately weird that I'm actually somewhat impressed. The only person I can think of offhand who is equally weird in modern music is, hmmm... P. J. Harvey? And in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, some of the quirky behaviours (of, for example, James Dean's somewhat Chaz-like opponent in the "chicken race" over the cliff's edge) would never be considered, let alone even acted, today, yet they made characters somehow more plausible for their having done them.

A peach flavoured vodkatea later and I was ready for bed. It was only about midnight, and the boys at the fraternity in the back were carrying on loudly under the warm night sky.


look at some of the webwork I do

I just created a set of meta-tags for this 200K web page by a Buddhist woman who, despite an ongoing government conspiracy to silence her, has finally figured out what exactly the deal is with extraterrestrial aliens. After creating the meta information, I submitted her site to a number of search engines. Give her some visits and create some evidence that she got her money's worth, will ya?

one year ago
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