30/03/04
26/03/04
Due to my being a stupid destitute loser jerkface moron, I find myself, for the time being, without the use of a telephone. My poor mother -who is, when I am concerned, prone to bouts of the sort of extreme speculative worry generally reserved for stuff like, say, nuclear armageddon in most people- is almost certainly having a coronary as I type this.
Anyone wishing to contact me, for whatever reason, is advised to do so via the Information Superhighway, unless you happen to be the phone company, in which case you are instead advised to suck my cock.
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Anyone wishing to contact me, for whatever reason, is advised to do so via the Information Superhighway, unless you happen to be the phone company, in which case you are instead advised to suck my cock.
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19/03/04
The radio channel that the folks in head office leave on the intercom before they depart can largely determine how enjoyable a shift is to me. It usually ends up being some saccharine "adult contemporary" junk that I've gotten fairly good at zoning out. Once or twice a week I'm treated to the "oldies" channel (and by this I mean, like, Little Richard with occasional chances of ? and the Mysterians, rather than, say, the Eagles with occasional chances of the Steve Miller Band), and these are usually the shifts I enjoy most.
The channel playing last night must've been new, 'cause I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. One minute it's all "White Wedding" and the next it's doing Britney Spears' new song. And then like Green Day or something. Must be some new radio format. Anyway, I'm not complaining; it was just a little off-the-wall is all. So I was mostly getting a kick out of it, and whistling my little shelf life away to Duran Duran or the J Geils Band or something, when what gets sandwiched all nice and inconspicuous-like between that and C+C Music Factory but... The JAM? What the shit? Again, no complaints here, but how weird is that?
Haha, anyway, Phillip's comment on my last entry got me to chuckling at myself. Something I should probably do more of. This stupid thing has become a sort of therapeutic outlet, and I tend to be more inclined to post here when I'm bummed out than when everything feels cool in my skewed little world- at those times I'm generally too preoccupied with enjoying myself to bother trying to articulate them. It ain't called "Mood Surgery" for no reason. This is where I get to exorcize my closet emo. Shh.
But yeah, one of the pitfalls of this approach is that anyone reading who doesn't know me all that well might easily be led to assume that I'm a whingeing dipshit ALL the time, when, really, that's probably only true like, maybe 30% of the time, heh. Seriously, I'm contemptuous of people who do little else but whine "poor me!" and seek attention in the form of pity. And I've known my share of those. That's not what I'm doing here, just in case that's the impression anyone's getting. Obviously I'm seeking attention of some sort, but my only real intention in writing this thing is to get shit off my chest, possibly striking a chord with whoever reads along in the process.
Guh. Holy over-analytical.
So wouldn't it be better if haemorrhoids were called "assteroids?" Then we could call proctologists "asstronauts."
Shut up. That's about the pinnacle of the humour I encounter at work.
post script- Expect new gimmick-related theme sub-blogs in the near future
post post script- Happy birthday, HITLER!
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The channel playing last night must've been new, 'cause I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. One minute it's all "White Wedding" and the next it's doing Britney Spears' new song. And then like Green Day or something. Must be some new radio format. Anyway, I'm not complaining; it was just a little off-the-wall is all. So I was mostly getting a kick out of it, and whistling my little shelf life away to Duran Duran or the J Geils Band or something, when what gets sandwiched all nice and inconspicuous-like between that and C+C Music Factory but... The JAM? What the shit? Again, no complaints here, but how weird is that?
Haha, anyway, Phillip's comment on my last entry got me to chuckling at myself. Something I should probably do more of. This stupid thing has become a sort of therapeutic outlet, and I tend to be more inclined to post here when I'm bummed out than when everything feels cool in my skewed little world- at those times I'm generally too preoccupied with enjoying myself to bother trying to articulate them. It ain't called "Mood Surgery" for no reason. This is where I get to exorcize my closet emo. Shh.
But yeah, one of the pitfalls of this approach is that anyone reading who doesn't know me all that well might easily be led to assume that I'm a whingeing dipshit ALL the time, when, really, that's probably only true like, maybe 30% of the time, heh. Seriously, I'm contemptuous of people who do little else but whine "poor me!" and seek attention in the form of pity. And I've known my share of those. That's not what I'm doing here, just in case that's the impression anyone's getting. Obviously I'm seeking attention of some sort, but my only real intention in writing this thing is to get shit off my chest, possibly striking a chord with whoever reads along in the process.
Guh. Holy over-analytical.
So wouldn't it be better if haemorrhoids were called "assteroids?" Then we could call proctologists "asstronauts."
Shut up. That's about the pinnacle of the humour I encounter at work.
post script- Expect new gimmick-related theme sub-blogs in the near future
post post script- Happy birthday, HITLER!
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18/03/04
Wish I'd gone to see Slitch last night instead of going to the Seahorse. I don't really dig any of the bands that were playing, and I hate that I feel the need to keep up the facade that I'm having fun when I'm not. Makes me feel like a fucking farce. People were being weird, and the closest I came to having fun was hanging out for five minutes with some girl who hated my fucking guts like a month ago.
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15/03/04
10/03/04
Seriously, whatever motivates my brain to work the way it does is a fucking alien force to me. For whatever reasons, my thoughts have been jiggering around a lot lately about the concept of permanence. Dunno what the deal with that is.
Another song I wrote as a kid popped into my head the other night, and I was dismayed to find that I couldn't remember all the words anymore. It was a fucking hokey song, and if a copy existed that were in jeopardy of being heard by anyone other than myself now, I'd probably haveta destroy it anyway. So, no big deal, right?
But dude, that thing's gone. Like, permanently; the guy who was in posession of all my first band's recordings went AWOL a couple years ago, and, well, to be blunt, I'd be pretty surprised to find out he's not in the later stages of decomposition now.
This, of course, saddens me more than I'll even attempt to go into here, but that's just not a can of worms (absolutely no pun intended) I care to open right now. Or maybe ever. Not that I didn't try, but he was long gone before he was even long gone, and there was never much I could do about that. I see that now. But that song. That stupid naive little song that was never even one of my favourites from the get-go; that thing's deep in the ground now, even if he's not. And as wrong and terrible and incomprehensible as it is when a person ceases to exist, how much moreso the memories that succeed them?
The song was called "Endless Cycle of Debt." It was one of a few I wrote at the time that translated okay onto acoustic guitar, and some of my ambivalence toward it probably stems, I suppose, from people always shoving a fucking acoustic guitar at me and accosting me to belt it out at parties. Way to scar the pathetic introvert for life, girls. But some part of me undoubtedly wanted the attention, because I almost always complied. I'm sure they all thought I was just being fey.
Whatever. Anyway, one of the first times I was coaxed into playing the stupid song, I ended up in sort of a strange conversation afterwards with this girl I'd never seen before. I'd never see her again either. She was interested in the song because just prior to our meeting she'd decided her life's thesis was a "Neverending Cycle of Regret." Interesting similarity, I guess. She dwelled on the fact that I wore all black, and kept asking of I was "one of those death people" ("goth" as a term was still a couple years outside the mainstream lexicon), which was funny to me at the time, in both attitude and assumption. I had goofy-coloured dreadlocks, and probably looked more like that Rage Against the Machine dude than Peter Murphy or whoever.
She wanted to talk about death though. I wasn't keen on the assumptions she was making about me, so I was fairly dismissive. It's annoying when people insist on seeing things in you that aren't there.
A week or two later she jumped off a cliff and killed herself. Gone, gone gone. I don't even remember her name. I think it was Mindy or Mandy or something. She was somebody's girlfriend's sister, I think. But she's gone man, and I don't just mean dead; no one I know would have more than the vaguest clue who I'm talking about. Maybe she had friends who keep her memory alive, and some family that will die unnaturally after her, I dunno.
I can't even remember her face.
I can't remember the words to my own damn song.
Every forgotten thing is a death.
Let's make some history.
Let's not be impermanent.
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Another song I wrote as a kid popped into my head the other night, and I was dismayed to find that I couldn't remember all the words anymore. It was a fucking hokey song, and if a copy existed that were in jeopardy of being heard by anyone other than myself now, I'd probably haveta destroy it anyway. So, no big deal, right?
But dude, that thing's gone. Like, permanently; the guy who was in posession of all my first band's recordings went AWOL a couple years ago, and, well, to be blunt, I'd be pretty surprised to find out he's not in the later stages of decomposition now.
This, of course, saddens me more than I'll even attempt to go into here, but that's just not a can of worms (absolutely no pun intended) I care to open right now. Or maybe ever. Not that I didn't try, but he was long gone before he was even long gone, and there was never much I could do about that. I see that now. But that song. That stupid naive little song that was never even one of my favourites from the get-go; that thing's deep in the ground now, even if he's not. And as wrong and terrible and incomprehensible as it is when a person ceases to exist, how much moreso the memories that succeed them?
The song was called "Endless Cycle of Debt." It was one of a few I wrote at the time that translated okay onto acoustic guitar, and some of my ambivalence toward it probably stems, I suppose, from people always shoving a fucking acoustic guitar at me and accosting me to belt it out at parties. Way to scar the pathetic introvert for life, girls. But some part of me undoubtedly wanted the attention, because I almost always complied. I'm sure they all thought I was just being fey.
Whatever. Anyway, one of the first times I was coaxed into playing the stupid song, I ended up in sort of a strange conversation afterwards with this girl I'd never seen before. I'd never see her again either. She was interested in the song because just prior to our meeting she'd decided her life's thesis was a "Neverending Cycle of Regret." Interesting similarity, I guess. She dwelled on the fact that I wore all black, and kept asking of I was "one of those death people" ("goth" as a term was still a couple years outside the mainstream lexicon), which was funny to me at the time, in both attitude and assumption. I had goofy-coloured dreadlocks, and probably looked more like that Rage Against the Machine dude than Peter Murphy or whoever.
She wanted to talk about death though. I wasn't keen on the assumptions she was making about me, so I was fairly dismissive. It's annoying when people insist on seeing things in you that aren't there.
A week or two later she jumped off a cliff and killed herself. Gone, gone gone. I don't even remember her name. I think it was Mindy or Mandy or something. She was somebody's girlfriend's sister, I think. But she's gone man, and I don't just mean dead; no one I know would have more than the vaguest clue who I'm talking about. Maybe she had friends who keep her memory alive, and some family that will die unnaturally after her, I dunno.
I can't even remember her face.
I can't remember the words to my own damn song.
Every forgotten thing is a death.
Let's make some history.
Let's not be impermanent.
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06/03/04
Ahem. Well that was a steaming heap of gibbering nonsense.
I got a haircut the other day. It was long overdue, considering that the last time it was cut I did it myself. I'm functionally-blind in one eye, so I'll leave you to speculate on how that turned out. Plus it was just getting too long. So on Wednesday I went to a proper barber shop and got it cut. Thing is, I'd been awake for maybe 24 hours at the time, and I don't function well in the throes of sleep deprivation. So yeah, I didn't explain my, er, hair plan terribly well to the old guy, and, well, long story short, I now look like I just got drafted. The guys at work have taken to calling me "G.I. Eb," which isn't spectacularly original, but is pretty apt nonetheless. At least there's still a little left in the front to take the edge off my hydroencephalic forehead, so I don't haveta worry so much about everybody calling me Charlie Brown like the last time I buzzed my head. Good grief. I liked it more (secretly, of course) when it was de rigeur among friends to call me Eeyore. But really, I always thought of myself as more of a Fozzy thee Bear sorta guy, if we're talking about relating to puppets or cartoon characters. Nobody ever bought this. Anyway, this crew cut dealie's actually sorta grown on me. It'll be nice when it grows on me enough to enshroud the fucking zit on my left temple I didn't even know existed until two days ago.
I bought a few CDs that same day, which had also been long overdue. The place didn't have anything particularly current that I've been wanting to check out, but I still managed to snag a few things that are making my now-conspicuous ears flap with joy. Milemarker's Anaesthetic album in particular. Oh, and the 20 Years of Dischord box set also. That thing is just a gem of a treat of a tome, if Punk Rock will allow me to digress into such language. Great stuff.
So if I'm gonna take advantage of the one night of the week in which I'm able to go out and make like I have a life, I guess I'd better get off the internet and into bed.
Bye-bye. I'll probably go back to posting drunken gibberish in twelve hours or so.
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I got a haircut the other day. It was long overdue, considering that the last time it was cut I did it myself. I'm functionally-blind in one eye, so I'll leave you to speculate on how that turned out. Plus it was just getting too long. So on Wednesday I went to a proper barber shop and got it cut. Thing is, I'd been awake for maybe 24 hours at the time, and I don't function well in the throes of sleep deprivation. So yeah, I didn't explain my, er, hair plan terribly well to the old guy, and, well, long story short, I now look like I just got drafted. The guys at work have taken to calling me "G.I. Eb," which isn't spectacularly original, but is pretty apt nonetheless. At least there's still a little left in the front to take the edge off my hydroencephalic forehead, so I don't haveta worry so much about everybody calling me Charlie Brown like the last time I buzzed my head. Good grief. I liked it more (secretly, of course) when it was de rigeur among friends to call me Eeyore. But really, I always thought of myself as more of a Fozzy thee Bear sorta guy, if we're talking about relating to puppets or cartoon characters. Nobody ever bought this. Anyway, this crew cut dealie's actually sorta grown on me. It'll be nice when it grows on me enough to enshroud the fucking zit on my left temple I didn't even know existed until two days ago.
I bought a few CDs that same day, which had also been long overdue. The place didn't have anything particularly current that I've been wanting to check out, but I still managed to snag a few things that are making my now-conspicuous ears flap with joy. Milemarker's Anaesthetic album in particular. Oh, and the 20 Years of Dischord box set also. That thing is just a gem of a treat of a tome, if Punk Rock will allow me to digress into such language. Great stuff.
So if I'm gonna take advantage of the one night of the week in which I'm able to go out and make like I have a life, I guess I'd better get off the internet and into bed.
Bye-bye. I'll probably go back to posting drunken gibberish in twelve hours or so.
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05/03/04
Killing me slowly from afar. Melting my brain while I try to maintain disinterest. You on my mind is like a wax thought museum of dictators and freezerburnt winter saints left out in the midday sun. Fucking bubble bitch. Heart fried in this tallow is not gonna make for good food. Stop telling me you love me.
I am a game to you. A confession game. But you'll never see that. You never think about me when you think about me.
But yeah, I love you too. I can't help that. Fuck's sake.
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I am a game to you. A confession game. But you'll never see that. You never think about me when you think about me.
But yeah, I love you too. I can't help that. Fuck's sake.
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02/03/04
At the very core of my being, I know that I am a good person. A righteous friend. A charming, down-to-earth conversationalist. An understanding moralist. A silent worshipper of beauty in all its forms. An empathic listener.
I wish there were a drug or a machine or some magical incantation that could strip away all the layers of bullshit that prevent this goodness from infiltrating the surface of my being. I see it in the people I call friends too. The occasional glimpses of what's inside a person are more telling than a thousand years' worth of murky, fucked-up external fronts and neuroses and quirks and habits and affectations. Every so often it slips through, and one glimpse of the core of an essentially-good person is all it takes for them to have my unquestioning allegiance, no matter what garbage is clouding up the surface. This is the standard by which I interpret someone's character.
But it's not always so easy to see. People have greatly varying degrees of extraneous junk cluttering up their personalities. I know I sure do. For the most part, it's fine; it's not all bad junk, after all. I like a lot of people's junk, including some of my own, and I think the mass accumulation of such detritus is what most people call Culture. I'm not sure I'd wanna spend my life in some profoundly uncluttered world. It'd just be nice to be able to access the unfettered essences of such particularly-cluttered people as myself once in awhile.
Like, how much of yrself do YOU feel bubbles through to the surface? I wish I could say with confidence that "inner me" and "outer me" are in perfect accord, but that'd just be a load of crap. How much is lost in the translation? Maybe this is just more external bullshit, but one of my most solemn fears in life is that people might be unwilling or unable to see through (or at least look past) my bumbling fuckup of an external countenance long enough to determine whether or not what lies at my core is agreeable to them. I know I never know where to stand with people for whom I cannot determine this, no matter how much we may seem to have in common superficially.
If such a cut-the-crap device existed, I would lie naked, for the span of one hour, with each and every person I know, and just chill, basking in our gestalt-selves. Life would make more sense then, and we could all go back to our bullshit and wink and chuckle about it.
I mean, life would be pretty boring without bullshit.
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I wish there were a drug or a machine or some magical incantation that could strip away all the layers of bullshit that prevent this goodness from infiltrating the surface of my being. I see it in the people I call friends too. The occasional glimpses of what's inside a person are more telling than a thousand years' worth of murky, fucked-up external fronts and neuroses and quirks and habits and affectations. Every so often it slips through, and one glimpse of the core of an essentially-good person is all it takes for them to have my unquestioning allegiance, no matter what garbage is clouding up the surface. This is the standard by which I interpret someone's character.
But it's not always so easy to see. People have greatly varying degrees of extraneous junk cluttering up their personalities. I know I sure do. For the most part, it's fine; it's not all bad junk, after all. I like a lot of people's junk, including some of my own, and I think the mass accumulation of such detritus is what most people call Culture. I'm not sure I'd wanna spend my life in some profoundly uncluttered world. It'd just be nice to be able to access the unfettered essences of such particularly-cluttered people as myself once in awhile.
Like, how much of yrself do YOU feel bubbles through to the surface? I wish I could say with confidence that "inner me" and "outer me" are in perfect accord, but that'd just be a load of crap. How much is lost in the translation? Maybe this is just more external bullshit, but one of my most solemn fears in life is that people might be unwilling or unable to see through (or at least look past) my bumbling fuckup of an external countenance long enough to determine whether or not what lies at my core is agreeable to them. I know I never know where to stand with people for whom I cannot determine this, no matter how much we may seem to have in common superficially.
If such a cut-the-crap device existed, I would lie naked, for the span of one hour, with each and every person I know, and just chill, basking in our gestalt-selves. Life would make more sense then, and we could all go back to our bullshit and wink and chuckle about it.
I mean, life would be pretty boring without bullshit.
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01/03/04
Ahhhh, a party! A show! A GOOD show!
Saturday's events were much welcomed by me, and did not fail to deliver great enjoyment. This city was starting to feel like a withering snowy husk of a place, with my dingy basement apartment at its epicenter, and my dead-end workplace on its periphery.
The show was great. Man I love the Seahorse. When I showed up, conversation with the door guy went something like:
Door Guy- Oh, hey, we're gonna haveta check inside yr bag
Me- Er, ah, well...
DG- Why, you got booze in there or something?
Me- Well, sorta, yeah... see, I'm going to this party after this...
DG- (cuts me off) Yeah, that's cool. Just go with this guy ("this guy" being the bouncer) and stow it out back.
Next!
So yeah, the show was drunktacular. I only caught the last two songs of Colour TV's set, so I didn't get a chance to catch much of their vibe, but they seemed like something I might dig. Ran into Electric/Ian just prior to their last song, and he said they were pretty good, with a little more of a Go4-ish thing going on in the earlier part of their set. Cool. Looking forward to seeing them again. Oh God was Oh God, and by that I mean "most entertaining band in the city." They played a bunch of songs I'd never heard before, so that was cool.
The Hold deserve their own paragraph, but I'm not sure where to start. This band is everything that I like about "hardcore." They play as if twenty years of anal retentive genre-refinement has gone out the window, and that's fucking right on. I never was a hardcore kid (well, outside of skateboarding, I guess) but I always dug that first wave of hardcore (same goes for punk rock in general, now that I think about it) for how it put all those bands on the same page without having a fucking bible's worth of defining constraints. Sorry, but Minor Threat just don't sound like Black Flag, and Black Flag sounds nothing like the Dead Kennedys, and it's really sad that what those bands did has basically been reduced to some bland, readily-identifiable formula. It kinda makes no sense. The Hold sound like they dig all this stuff, but could give a fuck about somehow properly emulating it or some shit. Meh, they're good, and authentic, 'nuff said.
Ok, enough ass-kissing. The show was a blast, even if I managed to make a douche of myself left right and centre. I'm such a fucking social retard. I managed to derail a perfectly pleasant conversation with some girl I barely know into some drunken diatribe about how I lost a job to an old friend of mine because she had "fantastic tits." Nice one there, Rico Suave. I'm like a fucking social train wreck, I swear. The whole time my brain'll be screaming "shut up shut UP SHUT UP!" but somehow I always manage to keep blathering away. Small wonder the punkers don't mind me hanging around.
So speaking of which, after the show I took off to Colleen's Leap Year Drunkfest. It was mostly dead by the time I showed up, and all I really remember is a couple of the weekend warrior elder-punx trying to intimidate me with their elderly punktitude or something. Uh, yeah dude, I'm not twelve, and I don't doubt that you could kick my ass, so, um, what was yr point again? Crashed on the couch for a little while. Woke up and headed across the street to the gas station to snag a cab back to the north end, and ran into Petey MacFadden and ASB Andrew doing the same. Jumped in with them, much to the chagrin of the little punk chicks in their company. Like, you know this guy!? Eeew. Gee, sorry doll, I left my tattoos and piercings in my other suit.
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Saturday's events were much welcomed by me, and did not fail to deliver great enjoyment. This city was starting to feel like a withering snowy husk of a place, with my dingy basement apartment at its epicenter, and my dead-end workplace on its periphery.
The show was great. Man I love the Seahorse. When I showed up, conversation with the door guy went something like:
Door Guy- Oh, hey, we're gonna haveta check inside yr bag
Me- Er, ah, well...
DG- Why, you got booze in there or something?
Me- Well, sorta, yeah... see, I'm going to this party after this...
DG- (cuts me off) Yeah, that's cool. Just go with this guy ("this guy" being the bouncer) and stow it out back.
Next!
So yeah, the show was drunktacular. I only caught the last two songs of Colour TV's set, so I didn't get a chance to catch much of their vibe, but they seemed like something I might dig. Ran into Electric/Ian just prior to their last song, and he said they were pretty good, with a little more of a Go4-ish thing going on in the earlier part of their set. Cool. Looking forward to seeing them again. Oh God was Oh God, and by that I mean "most entertaining band in the city." They played a bunch of songs I'd never heard before, so that was cool.
The Hold deserve their own paragraph, but I'm not sure where to start. This band is everything that I like about "hardcore." They play as if twenty years of anal retentive genre-refinement has gone out the window, and that's fucking right on. I never was a hardcore kid (well, outside of skateboarding, I guess) but I always dug that first wave of hardcore (same goes for punk rock in general, now that I think about it) for how it put all those bands on the same page without having a fucking bible's worth of defining constraints. Sorry, but Minor Threat just don't sound like Black Flag, and Black Flag sounds nothing like the Dead Kennedys, and it's really sad that what those bands did has basically been reduced to some bland, readily-identifiable formula. It kinda makes no sense. The Hold sound like they dig all this stuff, but could give a fuck about somehow properly emulating it or some shit. Meh, they're good, and authentic, 'nuff said.
Ok, enough ass-kissing. The show was a blast, even if I managed to make a douche of myself left right and centre. I'm such a fucking social retard. I managed to derail a perfectly pleasant conversation with some girl I barely know into some drunken diatribe about how I lost a job to an old friend of mine because she had "fantastic tits." Nice one there, Rico Suave. I'm like a fucking social train wreck, I swear. The whole time my brain'll be screaming "shut up shut UP SHUT UP!" but somehow I always manage to keep blathering away. Small wonder the punkers don't mind me hanging around.
So speaking of which, after the show I took off to Colleen's Leap Year Drunkfest. It was mostly dead by the time I showed up, and all I really remember is a couple of the weekend warrior elder-punx trying to intimidate me with their elderly punktitude or something. Uh, yeah dude, I'm not twelve, and I don't doubt that you could kick my ass, so, um, what was yr point again? Crashed on the couch for a little while. Woke up and headed across the street to the gas station to snag a cab back to the north end, and ran into Petey MacFadden and ASB Andrew doing the same. Jumped in with them, much to the chagrin of the little punk chicks in their company. Like, you know this guy!? Eeew. Gee, sorry doll, I left my tattoos and piercings in my other suit.
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