having one of those cliche bouts of looking over my site and realizing how much time goes by between posts, i had the cliche thought of making the cliche resolution to try and post every day for a while to get some juices flowing again, and this is the requisite cliche post in which i declare the above cliche intention.

i might take weekends off though because i spend very little time at the computer on weekends. and this is something i’ve wondered at… i would consider myself somewhat of a web junkie in that when i get going, i’m ALL over the net consuming information at a blinding pace — faster, i’m sure, than could result in any valuable retention of said information. but that’s when i’m in surfing mode, which is between projects at work or on a weeknight when i go home and decide it’s ‘finding some new music night’ or ‘researching that next major purchase night’ or something like that.

serious webaholics, i know, wake up and crawl straight to their computers for more surfing. i know some of those people, and wonder if i should ascend to that level of connectedness, and what that might get me. as it is, even when i’m home all day on the weekend, i only check in to see if i’ve got any emails, otherwise it’s almost all books, tivo, crosswords, video games, netflix… most still screen-based, but i guess i look at leisure time as time to be spent with leisure media, and for me the internet falls either into functional or at least ‘curiosity’ media.

how blogger fits in i guess would be, ideally, the part where i take a step back from all the intake and try to form some sort of personally relevant insight, or at least coherent analysis to aid in digestion and retention of the supposed value, of the subjects of my rabid consumption. otherwise it’s just a life of flickering data washing over me from all points with nothing gained.

that’s how i’m thinking anyway. hopefully if i stick to it for a bit the value will increase over time as i readjust into thinking a little more and not just gouging on words like a literary bulimic.

i think i’ve gone overboard lately with having fun. honestly, i may have overdosed on it in the last month and a half. with weekend trips, beach days, all the great stuff i’ve been up to lately, i kind of want to sit at home for a week and be really boring. is that a bad thing?

this is because even when i have a ‘down’ weekend or week, i end up going out for drinks this night, tagging along to a dinner or lunch or party that night, and then there i am another week gone by and i’m still exhausted. how retarded is it to be tired of having fun? but i think i just have a hard time saying no to things, because there’s a voice inside me somewhere that always chimes in with a friendly, ‘you’d rather sit at home by yourself? exactly how lame are you?’

it might be partly because work is crazy right now, and i’m trying really hard to be great at what i do. however i’m not always sure if any failures to be great are specifically because of things i did or didn’t do, or just because there is only so much i can do and things are only ending up as great as circumstances allow. professional pressure may then, as it turns out, be requiring a little higher percentage of my daily energy allowance normally reserved for having a kickass time.

so how about it september? if i get through the rough waters of all this blasted ‘enjoyment’, you wanna hunker down and do some serious seclusion? what’s that? college football starts labor day weekend? shit, you’re right.

life has been good. the trip to illinois, even if it wasn’t a thrill-a-minute type of vacation, was a very pleasant time. jessica was nice enough to at least pretend to get along with everyone, and several people made a side comment to me at some point about how cute she was, to which i invariably replied, “i know, it’s hard to believe i’ve held on to her this long.” also, the large amounts of food and beer and lawn games made for a satisfying midwestern weekend.

almost the whole time i also had a song in my head by islands, so i thought it was only fair to make ‘rough gem‘ the pay day song upon my return. that descending ‘doot-doot-doot’ part between verses gets me every time.

in los angeles news, now that we’re back, i finally got my reimbursement check for the car i rented after the accident i had in FREAKING APRIL. but at least i’m squared away now so i can’t complain too much. if only they paid ME interest the way i got to pay the credit card company.

oh no, i’m just now realizing how many other cool things there are to mention, so this might get long real quick.

for example, the comedians of comedy show last night at the troubadour was outstanding. patton oswalt and brian posehn were huge highlights but the rest were all pretty solid too. a great full night of laughs i’d strongly recommend you go out to see if they come around again — so incredibly worth a ticket for less than 20 bucks (which doesn’t include the 4 beers that happened to make it even funnier, unfortunately).

also, i just realized moments ago that both the mountain goats and cursive have new albums coming out the same day, and that day is NEXT WEEK. i really hope my head doesn’t explode.

and finally, in the unending stream of mountain goatsnews i can’t help but spread, their site has a link to their ‘woke up new’ video on youtube, which is directed by rian johnson of brick fame, and quite quite good.

whew. done.

dinosaur comics was good today. or was it yesterday’s that i just read today? anyway, it’s good as usual but this time i chuckled aloud instead of that cerebral inner “mmmm, yeeeees, that’s quite humorous, ha ha, ha ha, bravo.”

that’s my inner sophisticate replete with monocle and swirling brandy glass.

did i tell you how i played board games three nights in a row over this weekend? probably because i shouldn’t, because it’s sort of embarrassing when i think about it. board games should best be played under ‘oh wow, i haven’t played that in a while’ circumstances. e.g., friday night for cobi’s birthday, where it was a lot of fun until i lost at pictionary. i HATE losing at pictionary.

that’s why i was okay with playing again at spencer’s saturday night (post-swimming in the infinity pool and eating a delicious but 16 dollar french dip at dinner. nuts!), where we trounced the competition then watched spencer guide us to victory in trivial pursuit as well. that guy knows kind of a lot of things about pretty much everything, but probably doesn’t get to use all that knowledge for tangible gains except during board games. his poor brain, just crying out for proper recognition!

this weekend it’s off to illinois for a touch of chicago fun then several days of family action. should be a nice homey midwestern weekend which i haven’t had in ages and am looking forward to. hopefully jessica feels the same and isn’t secretly thinking, ‘i’m terrified to be meeting upwards of 20 of brian’s relatives all at once and they probably won’t like me’. especially because they almost definitely will and there’s nothing terrifying about my family unless you hate it when nice people offer you large amounts of tasty food and a seat on a porch in which to enjoy a cold beverage.

that would be an awful phobia, wouldn’t it?

something i thought about recently that i want to have a conversation with some smart and interesting people about: would your life be better or worse if you flat out were not required to sleep, ever? aren’t sharks like that or something? but the point being that your whole life is just one long, continuous day with light and dark periods. pros, obviously, you could do so much more, but cons then are theoretically a big deal. like would you then be expected to work 15 hour ‘days’? would the likelihood of going crazy increase with never getting to ‘shut down’?

as you think it over for my upcoming roundtable discussion, please listen to the new pay day song, some music that i’m sure will not put you to sleep. it’s from the new album by a band i only recently discovered (in the pages of urb no less — i know, right?): dat politics. i described this stuff to my friends as what you would hear if you had a pizza party for your 10th birthday inside an old-school NES, and instead of playing duck hunt you had a dance-off. yes, to me, that’s a fun concept. can’t you just imagine mario and the princess getting all crunk in 8-bit craziness?

oh boy is it good to be home. don’t doubt that miami wasn’t great — after all, a convening of many great minds such as the conference i attended is sure to have some high points, and a few nights in a place like that is sure to send a bunch of advertising people into a frenzy. gin and tonics were rapidly consumed in hotel bars in the evening, ‘dead or alive’ was heartily sang in a karaoke bar after midnight, hotel pools were perhaps inadvisably crowded into after the bars all closed at 4am. overall both highly stimulating and fairly draining both mentally and socially. glad to have had the experience.

then there was the weekend! i’m pretty sure jessica and i have figured out our vacation pattern after this one. that being step 1: go somewhere we’ve never been. step 2: eat and drink ourselves silly. step 3: come home fat and happy. now we just have to figure out step 4: come back afterwards and exercise like crazy to burn off all those calories. however, the delicious desserts, wines, cheeses, breakfasts, were all heavenly and so was having a great girl to share them with. so i’m a happy guy.

especially now that i’m back and i can get back to living my normal life, which is strange when you wake up monday morning thinking, ‘oh boy, i get to actually go to the office and sit at my desk today!’ without a hint of sarcasm. it really is good to be back to a steady schedule for this week; i can catch back up on the world outside of myself, get back to finding some of that inspiration we spent those days in miami discussing how to seek out and use for the bettering of what we do, and perhaps most notably, put my couch to some good use while i sit home and NOT drink alcohol for a change.

so i think what i’m gonna do tonight is swing by the record store, buy some hopefully great new music, and throw it on while i do domestic things over the next few nights such as clean my neglected bathroom. do my abundant laundry. hopefully squeeze in some netflix and backlogged daily show episodes. and overall be very excited to have a week lacking in excitement.

……

and oh yes, i will spare you yet another gushing mountain goats-based post (for now), but i just happened to notice while cruising around elbo.ws today that several tracks from the new album are popping up on their charts. i’m trying hard not to play all of them to death and just be excited the new album is weeks away, when i can properly digest it as a whole, which i always find does more justice to the songs. but, you know, if you’re inclined to sneak a little peek, there’s some beautiful piano work and soft sad songcraft you might want to indulge in just to whet your appetite… and i swear i’ll put a non-goats pay day song up tomorrow after my amoeba run.

Back home, but about to leave again tomorrow for an anniversary weekend…aww. Tell you all about both trips next week, promise.

in miami for a conference. life is so hard. See you wednesday, internet.

(ps: just logged in and saw this photo again… does it look to you like all those palm trees are in italics?)

netflix guilt is news? bitch please, i’ve been talking about this phenomenon since college, right along with harpers guilt, and i know the same thing occurred to me as soon as tivo entered my home. congrats, newsweek guy, for editorializing about something every media-hungry twentysomething has already thought of already.

but on the more positive side, i’ve found a cure for this, at least on the netflix front. first, get into a tv series available on dvd. then, put a season’s worth in your queue, and if it’s good, you are watching and returning those discs like nobody’s business. once you finish a season, stack a dozen or so movies between disc six of season one and disc one of season two, for example.

if you’re lucky, and you pick good shows, wanting to see the follow up on that last cliffhanger helps marvelously to propel you through that batch of films you’ve been meaning to see forever (i’m looking at you, spaghetti westerns and noir classics). or if you’re really gonna torture yourself, you can even insert the movies between discs of the series, although that prevents you from occasionally indulging in a 5-episode marathon of HBO genius, so plan carefully.

i was thinking the other day; if green lantern’s powers all come from his ring, why has no one ever just slipped some rufies in his drink and taken it while he’s sleeping? he’d be pretty much fucked at that point, right? then it’d be like when you steal your little sister’s doll or something and wave it over her head and she’s just whining and hopping and helpless to end your torment.

[ed: i just looked this up on wikipedia (see: power ring), and it turns out some iterations of green lantern through the years have been able to summon the ring back to them if it is stolen or removed. psh. easy out.]

regarding my actual life, i am utterly spent. the weekend in vegas was lots of fun, especially the first night when jess, mad and i found a lucky roulette table at the endearingly low-budget frontier casino, slogan: cold beers and dirty girls. the three of us made friends with an nice lady named gina who brought us good luck and thought we were a laugh riot, so it was all fun until she bailed and too our luck with her. weak sauce, team, we should know when to quit next time.

saturday was pool day and very relaxing, maybe so much so that by the time we got some drinks in us at the big conference party at the palms, we were zapped. of course, not until after we lost more money of course. i’m beginning to fear that my dear dear girlfriend may be the source of my bad luck on the past two trips to vegas. after all, the previous three i walked out at least 50 bucks ahead… but i’m really hoping it’s something else, like, you know, getting drunk and making dumb bets.

not to let a nice bad luck streak end, i returned home early sunday morning on a 6am flight, to walk back to a long term parking lot at 7:15 in LA and a car with an utterly dead battery. another 80 bucks down the drain. lucky for me the guys at the lot had a jump kit, which is kind of like a magic yellow miniature briefcase. so i drove home, slept half the day, and had to sweat through replacing the battery in my 90-degree garage.

then monday, i get up early, again, fly out for a meeting, and due to others going over time, come right back without having done anything all day but wait. find out as soon as our plane lands we get to go back for 9am the next day, which means waking up at 5:30. that’s three days of waking up before the sun. not to mention i had to go see the rakes show at the troubadour that night, and i realize during the set i’m not even really that into the rakes and i should have stayed home to eat ice cream and doze off on the new couch instead. that would have been so much more productive and delicious than a decent band with a singer who doesn’t really sing and getting stuck behind a guy with carrot top hair who just loves to bob and weave to the music.

alright, i’m descending into a rant now and like i said, i’m spent, so i will take tonight to recuperate and be cheerful brian again before you can say wednesday.