the lady in the car next to me appears to be giving herself a breast exam. strange.

i often glance at the cars next to me as i pull up to a traffic light. occasionally you'll get the nose picker. someone was telling me last week that they actually saw a guy pick it...and eat it. no, i know, it's really disgusting. but these people are out there. way out there. it's always weird getting caught looking. for the longest time, i would try to move my eyes, or act like i had actually been looking down at something on the passenger seat of my car. sometimes you do the turn to look, see that they are already looking, so you keep turning your head as if you actually meant to look at something behind you.

i stopped doing that about two years ago. i decided that it was much more fun to admit to your voyerism. let them know that you were checking to see if they were using the index or the middle finger to pick a prised one. it's toughest when it's a beautiful girl. i mean, i am definitely a coy one. but standing your ground creates this great rush. "yeah, i'm looking at you. does it freak you out?"

i'm not some guy out there trying to freak people out by staring at them in traffic. the habit actually goes way back to my early childhood. something about the switches in my brain. i often would catch myself staring at some inanimate object deep in random thought. when i snap to, i don't know how long i've been like that and most often i can't even remember what had me so entranced. we had several siamese cats when i was growing up. they are notorious for their ability to stare down their prey. their attention span is outstanding. i never lost a staring contest with my cat. once the cat even got freaked out and took off across the room with a loud "hiss."

there were times when friends thought i was catatonic or had lost consciousness and they would have to shake me out of a trance. it's not nearly that bad anymore. i've learned to recognize when i start to slip into some deep thought process that will distract me from my surroundings. this was a mandatory evolution i put upon myself when i realized that i could, on trips to houston from austin, drive up to 45 minutes with no recollection of how i had gotten to that point in my journey.

so now it's mostly just a hobby. something i do when i'm relaxed or tired. but at the lights, i'm just looking to see what's around me. who's around me actually. i look at the gentleman waiting to turn left and see my own vernon hardapple; some character that i've created to justify that man's existence in the car next to mine. he has his own world, completely separate from mine. or maybe he knows one of my friends' eighth grade teachers. i don't know. that's what's so amazing. i live in a town with one million, fifty-two thousand and three hundred other people, 50.9% of whom are women and 47.67% that are between the ages of 18 and 44. of this number, in the past two years, i've encountered personally roughly 3.5% of them at restaurants, stores, pumping gas, and waiting in line for the men's room at the xpo lounge. of all those people, i know the slightest details of the lives of maybe 40. everyone else is a totally different world that i know nothing about.
and that's just one town, in one state, in the us, which makes up something like 20% of the world's population. i like to think of statistics like these when i start thinking that i'll never find my perfect match. there's still alot of available women out there. it would just be a whole lot more convenient if she lived in the same town as me.

so i might look at the pretty girl across the intersection from me and wonder what her life has been like up to this point. what if we were to meet. would we have some common ground on which to build some sort of conversation? i would think that in most cases we would. and now, when i get caught looking at a cute girl in the jetta next to me, i smile. people really should smile more at strangers. maybe people like me wouldn't come across as freaks if everone just learned to smile more at their fellow man.

but i don't smile this time. it's dark out, and my tinted windows would really prevent her from recognizing any sort of expression on my face. which, right now, is one of slight disbelief. "what? is she? no. surely not. what's she doing with her....?" i really don't want to stare this time, so i turn away quickly. "i think that woman was feeling herself up," i think to myself. no. come on now, let's think about this logically. she was probably just doing a breast exam...in her car...at a traffic light?

that's a pretty stupid explaination.

well...do you have a better one?

maybe this is the beginning of one of those letters to playboy. maybe we should take another look.

i don't think we better had. pull forward a little more. there...that's good.

o, well, now i can't see at all.

that's the point. do you really think you're ready to reach that point in your life where you're writing letters to playboy that every man (and women) who reads it will say "certainly that couldn't have happened?"

i'm not sure. let me have another look.

no. the light's green. go.

my friend dsaint just announced the arrival of his blog! please, please, please go visit his blog and check out, especially, the little "why do this" link at the top. i can already tell, this is going to be one of my favorite blogs to visit.

go...what are you waiting for? GO!


you're still here? GO!

when it all came down to the last few days, i found that i actually had options to consider. a gentleman and his sister had looked at our house last week and then called to say that they were definitely wanting to sublease from us. this call came while i was talking to jeff, who had just told me that he was certain that he wanted to move in and be my roommate. he had imparted this information to me only an hour after paul's friend from work, who also happened to be named jeff, called to tell me that they wanted to move in, but were in a lease until the end of august.
i had a choice. my clear preference was to stay put; nobody likes to move, especially from a house that they like living in. i wanted jeff to be my roommate, but that would still leave us with the task of finding a third roommie to cover the cost of rent and bills.

i thought about it a while. it was really a tough decision for me. but it seemed like the most sensible and clear choice was to pack up my shit and move on. it will be much less financially draining, which at the present time in my life is very important.

ben and hyla have generously offered to let me stay in their spare bedroom until i am able to move into a different place. they are wonderful people and i am extremely grateful for their kindness. it will be strange, though, living under someone else's roof for a change. so i'll be sleeping in josh's bedroom for a few weeks. my other options were moving to houston and living with my parents or brother, or moving to the ranch and once again, living with my parents. now, no offense to certain houstonians, but i have no desire to return to the city of my childhood. god knows i would love to be back near austin, but the jobs there are even sparser than in dallas right now, and i love my friends here so much that i prefer to stay put.

thanks to all of you who have been there for me since i've lived in dallas and especially during these past few months of endless bad luck. i owe each and every one of you a beer...at least one. but it'll have to wait until i get that kick-ass job. i'm...uh...kind of broke right now.

so i'll be signing off from the treehouse later this week and taking up post at my temporary place of residence, ben y hyla's. that is...if it's still ok with you guys?

guess i better check on that.

what is your cyborg acronym?

gotta love alabama

alabama man shoots world's biggest rat

or...

alabama man

happy birthday kiehl!


also:

what's your phone number spell?

and...

it's drinks and apes night, courtesy of dgall. get your simian ass down to the xpo lounge at 7pm. we'll be monkeying around there until 9 or so and then heading to a screening of timmy burton's new laugh-a-minute comedy, chimp schtick.

interesting deep conversations with acquaintances.

spilling your guts over a beer and a few pain-killers. a little birthday party for my friend james miller. playing some music on the guitar. sharing time with friends.

also.

nothing to do with tonight's party....

what is the feeling of wanting be near someone because of the way they talk, think, react? what does it mean when you relate entirely to someone that you've never met, but you've listened to them intently? you don't have a right to like this person as much as you do, but you just relate to them on a level that is all to personal to you not to feel some sort of intimate connection. it's called a crush, ain't it?

also.

nothing to do with a strange crush....

a possible messiah has emerged on the roommate front. don't want to curse it though. more details as it becomes more of a reality.

speaking of curses, and not wanting to invoke them...got a really good job lead today. any good vibes/prayers/karma/hutzpah you can send my way at about 10:00 a.m. Thursday is greatly appreciated.

follow-up to the irving avoilles story coming soon....

Happy Birthday James Miller!

you're old.

imagine a very big fan and ungodly amounts of shit.




now imagine them coming together.

the hard drive wiped clean, mark discovered that he forgot to back up his internet and email profiles and now he has lost every email contact that he had accumulated the past six months as well as the bookmarks for all the companies he had applied to.

there's just something to be said for old media.

so it could be worse. at least i have a working computer. the next several days shall be spent reinstalling all my software. at least i can blog. so i got that goin' for me...which is nice.

"Error: File System Map Inconsistent"

my computer has coughed and spit up and refuses to feel better.

another event in the long chain sent down from the "gods of making mark's life a living hell."

i will try replacing the os rom as that has been the only information i have found on this problem as a possible fix.

could somebody please tell me one thing that i should be positive about?

"it must suck to be that old", i thought to myself. the idea of having been around for ninety-four years was both at once frightening and inspiring. how does the soul hang on that long? at what point does the body tell the mind, "look, ole chap, i think we've run the gammut. how about turning it in?"

irving wasn't that kind of man though. he saw each day as another opportunity to outdo himself from the day before. everything took longer, sure. but it wasn't as though he felt like challenging himself at the 100meter either. he had seen the passing of a beloved wife, three children, and five grand children. the guilt was the only thing that seemed to hurt anymore. was it his fault that he had outlived his loved ones? irving tended to think not, but he couldn't help but wonder if maybe it was all some sort of cruel joke. it was as though he hit 78 and began getting younger again.

so he reveled in it. at eighty-seven, he became the oldest man to freefall from 20,000 feet. at ninety, he received his third phd; this time in cultural anthropology. and why not... irving was cultural anthropology.

i'm sure he got similar gazes to mine every time he went somewhere, but i was shocked when he walked toward me with his venti non-fat mocha valencia.

"may i?" he asked pointing at the brown velvet chair next to mine.

"of course. let me --"

"i'm fine. thank you though."

"sure. um... mark." i said stretching a cautious 'wet fish' hand to greet him.

"irving avoilles, pleased to meet you." he gripped my hand with great force and raw strength and my unpreparedness caused me to wince suddenly. he noticed and gave a pitying furrowing of his brow both apologetic and slightly offended. "i've seen you here several times this month. grande caramel macchiato, right?"

"um... yes, actually" i'm not sure why, perhaps i always had my head in a book or found myself distracted in conversation of nearby tables, but i had never noticed irving avoilles before today. he certainly wasn't a character to be easily missed. dressed in a bright blue sweat suit with giant g-a-p embroidered on his chest, he wasn't exactly the poster child for twenty-something fashion trends. "do you live in the area?"

"seventy-one years" he breathed with a sigh of something between pride and remorse. he settled back into the lounger and was almost swallowed by the immense wings on either side of him. a wry smile formed on his stoic face. "opened the first five and dime this side of downtown at this very spot over sixty years ago. you never would have made me believe back then that they'd pull in four dollars for a cup of coffee."

"i find it hard to believe myself. even harder to believe that i willingly pay that much to feed an addiction. i used to be content with the daily pot at home, but the convenience of it all has...." his smile had flattened and he stared off somewhere between the grinder and the pastry case, his eyes wide, his chapped lips pursed. i feared that he had drifted off into some alzheimers induced catatonia and flashed my outstretched hand into his gaze.

"she was twenty-four the first time we met. she bought a packet of barrettes, two #2 pencils, and a ne-hi."

that first friday morning, i was introduced through memory to madeline, irving's wife of fifty-one years. i was given a picture of her dark, springy curls and blushed cheeks. over the next several weeks, i would find myself immersed in the avoilles family as irving related every important event of his past with amazing detail.

those bastards have done it again. my new mantra is "my computer is fast enough, smart enough, and people like it." so what if it runs final cut pro 80x faster than my machine. so what if i can now burn my movies to dvd. i musn't think that it is superior, or i will certainly start having problems with this current machine. they listen to what you type you know. and they get very jealous. why, my computer is listening to me right now. well you don't have to worry, honey, you are wonderful and i wouldn't trade you for the world. even if i had the $4,678 it would take to enter g4 god-dom.

damn, i drooled on the keyboard. anyone have some money i can borrow?

frustration

bitterness

disappointment

nothing is going my way recently. i've been unemployed for six months. six months, more than 250 resumes to more than 250 companies in more than 20 cities in over 4 countries. six months and a dozen rejection letters, four interviews, and no encouragement. i had four freelance jobs lined up for july, now i only have one and i'm not sure that one will come through either. my unemployed friends that have actually looked for work have found jobs. what makes me such a looser that i can't land one? i know i don't suck as a designer. shit, maybe i do. occassionally i'll write something here and people will respond to it, but that even seems few and far between.

this is the world of depression.

denial reigns supreme. most of the time i'm able to blame things on a souring economy, an edgy market. the field is saturated afterall and i'm not at the top of my lot.
other times it's just self deprecation. as it is tonight. the compounding issues causing the gears in my brain to start firing insults at my own abilities. insecurities abound. it must be something i'm doing wrong. it's all my fault. how could i suck so much?
then it makes its way into my being alone. the low self-esteem ruins my ability to meet or intrigue people of the opposite sex. that feeling of loneliness drives the esteem further down. the cycle spirals out of control and i find myself helpless.

i even tried returning to faith. dusting off my trust in a higher power to take care of my woes and gleen what afflicts me. even here, once again, i feel i have been ignored. driving me even further away.

what about eastern philosophy? surely i haven't amassed this much bad karma? come on. i'm a good person. i care deeply for all of my friends and i take care of others' needs over my own.

why do i feel so damn forsaken? why can i not seem to fall asleep before 4 am; and even then lying awake for quite a while trying to make my brain stop. stop thinking. stop feeling. just fucking stop.

now i post my frustration here. i open up the internal struggle to anyone who wants to read. now i face the concern of friends and family. it's nothing new. i've been here many times. "you should get help." "you should talk to someone."
i don't need to talk. i need a job.

i'll try and wake up in time to go sailing with friends in the morning. just another escape from the internal struggle. a few hours more of denial. and then back here, back to the empty email box. back to the over-qualified and under-qualified form letters bundled with the pizza coupons and "have you seen me?" direct mail pieces. back to my world. a world where nothing seems to go my way.

thanks... i feel much better now.

"donny was a good bowler, and a good man.
he was one of us. he was a man who loved the outdoors.
and bowling.
and as a surfer he explored the beaches of southern california. from la jolla to leo carillo, and up to pismo.
he died... he died as so many young men of his generation, before his time.
in your wisdom lord, you took him. as you took so many bright, flowering young men at khe san, at lan doc, at hill 364. these young men gave their lives.
so did donny. donny who loved bowling.
and so, theodore donald karabotsos, in accordance with what we think your dying wishes might well have been, we commit your final mortal remains to the bosom of the pacific ocean. which you loved so well.
good night sweet prince."
- walter sobchack : the big lebowski

RANT
if i ever find out who chooses to make these little javascript windows that constantly stay open in the background of your desktop and launch these fucking advertisements and they can't be brought to the front without closing every other browser window, i'll kill'em.

i just lost a very nice blog thankyouverymuch due to one of these little bastards and i'll be damned if i'm going to retype all that now.

i r pissed!

it was one of these domain name registration sites that put it up there. how can i get these guys?
/RANT

know any cheaters? sad, sad, sad.

but strangely enticing. these are people who otherwise might end up on jerry springer, confronting their cheating significant others on television.

nothing....

absolutely nothing. doesn't make sense to try and force it. it's just not there.

damn.

yes.

i am excited about the new spider man trailer.

thank you.

this looks pretty stupid and funny.

i decided to head down to curtain club tonight and play a few songs. i had a migraine all night and it was very difficult to concentrate on what i was doing. i planned on only playing a couple of songs, but the "crowd" wanted a third so i played high and dry. falsetto with a headache. mmmmm.

i don't think i have enough angst to be involved in the dallas music scene. everyone dresses in their black t-shirts and ratty jeans and me in a guayabera, shorts, and my birks.

but now the headache is gone and i have tons of work to get done. by now you've noticed the design update here. if you have a high-speed connection, you can also check out my portfolio site which will soon be undergoing renovation as well.

by the way:
house to sublet
3 bedrooms, 3 baths, 2 living, fireplace, deck, treehouse, hardwood floors, cat5 wired, w/d, ca/ch, huge lot, pets o.k.
off preston near lbj
$1450/month
interested?

notice anything different?

there are plenty of bugs. and obviously not a lot of content. pictures, links, and more bio stuff will be coming in the next few days.
but it's up.

huzzah

i met kollette when i was twelve. i had decided that i would spend my summer volunteering at the museum. it was my first day there and it's safe to say that i wasn't feeling real sure of myself. afterall, i was at least a year younger than everyone else there that day. technically, only "teenagers" were allowed to volunteer, and i was still six months away from turning thirteen. i didn't know my way around the museum and was far too young to be trusted with assisting the instructors in their summer science classes. i was told to take the elevators to the administrative offices on the fourth floor where i would be stuffing envelopes.

not extremely scientific work.

i knew it was going to suck. i considered walking straight past the elevators and to the park to wait on my mother. instead, i reluctantly slumped to my post.

she wore pigtails. long, blond, curly pigtails. i knew at once that love was out of the question. it would have to be a crush. i was too young at this point to have truly felt the sting rejection can put on the heart and i gave my best shot at charm.

i sucked at charm.

kollette showed absolutely no interest. after all, i wasn't even thirteen yet. she probably was already dating guys in the tenth grade, and i wasn't terribly bulky back then. i didn't make much progress in four hours of folding, stuffing, and running envelopes through an automated licking/stamping device. alone in a room for four hours and we probably exchanged fewer than a dozen words with each other.

i would find out a couple of weeks later that kollette was the daughter of jim. jim was one of the two teachers at the museum during the summer. i got along great with greg, the other teacher, but jim was intimidating. jim was the father that you dreaded talking to the night of your first date.

jim and i would become best friends. we had to...he was my ticket.

for the first time in my life...

i have jet black hair.

pictures to come.

a good buzz + the buzz of mosquitos + fireworks = misery on the right ankle only

guess it's time for some apple cider vinegar.

there is a general belief that, in most cases, dogs and their owners seem to look alike.

precious is an unkempt pomeranian standing no more than 8 inches off the ground at the shoulder. she obviously has issues. she would like to be more beautiful, but her small toy tongue can no longer groom her long silken hair. she prefers not to walk; it takes to long to get from here to there on such tiny little legs and it's just so much nicer to be carried. she is tired of being by the door. where is sam?

sam is in his mid fifties and smells of marlboro reds, lone star, and bad hygiene. his short frame has put on an extra 150 pounds or so over the years and it would seem that no comb or razor has come near his head in several weeks. sam is loud and very vocal. sam doesn't understand why anyone would not want to eat meat.

sam loves precious.

precious sometimes dreams of years past when that nice lady that smoked too much would comb her hair and put a small pink ribbon on top of her head. it's been long enough now that she has to really concentrate to remember her face. she does remember the yelling and fighting that seemed to happen nightly in the months before nice lady disappeared. don't misunderstand. she loves sam. afterall, he takes her from place to place and supports her bottom just so that she can sit up in his arms. he doesn't serve her the good tasting food from the can anymore, but most of the time there is a good supply of crunchy stuff in her bowl and she is always sure to get pieces of a big, fat, juicy steak once or twice a week.

but she misses nice lady. even when she would come home late at night with that aroma of stale beer and cigarettes, she would talk in that high pitched voice that made precious turn her head ever so slightly in interest.

precious knows that sam misses nice lady too. for a long time after she stopped coming home, sam would sit in the big cooshy chair and tears would drop onto precious' nose. she liked to lick them from his face and taste the salt, but she felt sad for sam. often she would bark and try to get sam to stop, but it only seemed to make him weep even more. one time last year, sam held up the phone to precious' ears and she could hear nice lady's high pitched voice, but she couldn't see where she was.

precious wants to go find nice lady, but these damn legs are so short and the pavement gets so hot. maybe sam will take her to nice lady some day.

sam, come here, i want to go over by the pool.

this friday, der krieger und die kaiserin opens at the inwood. as it so happens, they will also be showing a midnite screening of lola rennt. so kids, the plan is to catch the late show of the princess and the warrior (say, the 9:30 show?) and then stay on for the midnite show as well. it's a franka double feature folks!

so come on down to the inwood friday night if you're in dallas and we'll have a tykwering good time.

let me know if you're coming out so we can save you a seat!

back in dallas. time to catch you up with the past several days. tough since tonight's austin city limits taping is very fresh on my mind. i'll get to that in a minute though.

i decided friday evening that i was done with my work at the ranch and headed into austin to hang out with mark. we drank quite a bit and i decided to let loose on my frustrations with having been asked to leave the band that i was a part of for 6 years. we fought. we got it all out in the air. we decided not to strangle each other, made up, and mark gave me a wonderful print of one of his uncle's photographs. it was touching, kids, let me tell ya.

my body started responding to the mounting austin heat around 12:30, but i believe it was at least 3 more hours before my brain stopped trying to make me feel guilty for the night before.

michael's plane from l.a. landed around 5:30 and we met james shields at chuys. after dinner, and nice conversation at mojo's we ended up at antone's where friend patrice pike was releasing her new band's first cd.

it's always fun hanging out with michael jerome.

sunday night found us having dinner at mezzaluna with mark andes and timbuk 3 founder barbara k.

then today i wasted an hour in a camera store looking at all the things i would buy if i was truly appreciated for my talents and someone gave me that kick-ass job. after dropping $25 on a new filter, i headed back to michael's room at the radisson and james and i went to the austin city limits taping. we ended up sitting behind rich brotherton and jody denberg. it was an incredible show, and our wonderful seats have pretty much guaranteed me some screen time when the show airs. unfortunately, i don't know yet when that will be. but keep an eye out for the first austin city limits show of their 27th season featuring richard thompson. oh and let me know if you see me.

uh oh. i've managed to ramble on until nearly 5:00 a.m. and i have a lot to do in the next five hours. time to catch a few nods.