so there it is, in case you, like my parents who are also new Very Large Television owners, are wondering what the new rig looks like. i won’t say i love it, because it’s not a deep emotional feeling. i do have an unbridled techno-lust for it, however, as right now it’s the second most beautiful thing in my life (kisses jess, you can’t be replaced by electronics, don’t worry). if one were able to have an affair with a plasma screen, though, it would be tempting…

normally i wouldn’t post to brag about a purchase, and i don’t really think i’m doing that right now. it’s just that one of the things i always thought getting into the professional world was, ‘someday i’m gonna be doing well enough to own a Very Large Television’, and i’ve finally done it. and so far it’s as good as i hoped it would be, and i’m not boasting that i’ve got it as much as recording my pride in having come to a point where it was even possible. good job me, keep it up. (as in, you better keep it up or they’re going to repossess it, but let’s not be dour).

anyway, playing video games on this thing is epic. and watching netflix movies just got to be so much more of a treat. we also started watching deadwood recently and holy shit, that swearengen fella is a whole lot more intimidating on a bigass screen where every angry wrinkle in his face jumps out to tell you to back the fuck off. overall, i’m tickled.

you should come over and watch football on the new HD tivo if you can, as it should be grand. just to sample the quality, i caught a few minutes of monday night football the first week after we set this bad boy up, and it nearly made me gasp out loud. please, just don’t jump up in excitement and knock it over, or i think i’d have defensible grounds for manslaughter.

on paper (or this reasonable approximation i’m writing on now), you might say this weekend was your generic holiday weekend. a group of guys on a small road trip to san francisco to see our two friends who live up there. we arrived friday night, had some beers and played halo. we woke up saturday, got burritos for lunch and played ping pong until our college football came on. then we barbequed and went out for drinks that night. totally standard.

but with this group it’s always so much more fun than it sounds, because these are easily my very favorite people in the world. we’re laughing and talking shit the whole time, and usually also at least partially drunk. and then there are always the little details that make it more noteworthy, like ted throwing up over a third floor balcony, josh shattering a glass table during a vigorous ping pong game, dan proving a miraculous talent for talking to girls whenever in the bounds of SF for some reason, people passing out in embarrassing positions, or the dangerous air quality resulting from that many guys crashing in a confined space.

so that was good. and even better, i came back exhausted to a nice laid back evening at the neighborhood bar with jessica, and a small easygoing barbeque monday with a few games of beer pong all of which i was on the winning side, including a one-on-one showdown with my trusty teammate/girlfriend, which i managed to pull out at the last minute for a fortunate maintaining of my manhood. cap it off with some good old deadwood on the big new tv and you got yourself one hell of a weekend.

now if only all that party-related exhaustion hadn’t given me this stupid head cold. my eyeballs hurt.

this weekend we finally had our carpets cleaned after 3 years of highly attended parties, college football days, and general disregard for regular carpet maintenance. the results, while impressive, still came with a certain cost both financially (almost 300 dollars for not even three full rooms?!) and emotionally, as it would seem fortune deemed it appropriate to send us the least responsible carpet cleaner of all time. so mainly for my own memory, as i will want to tell this story in the future, i’m going to get down some of the details of my encounters with this highly professional individual:

• appointment was made at 2pm saturday. he called to say he’d be a half hour late; he was an hour late, arriving at 3. partly because he went to the wrong house the first time… our address is on SOUTH detroit, not NORTH. that’s what the ‘S’ means, chief.
• on the elevator ride up to our apartment, he laments the fact that he was up til dawn trying to ‘get with this chick’ and boy is he tired. it was a shame her roommate wouldn’t just go to bed already and leave them alone, so he just passed out. also, ‘girls are so stupid sometimes’. apparently he met her at a really exclusive club, ‘where you have to pay to get in’, and kevin federline and prince were there. i was suitably impressed, of course.
• did i mention he had an off-center lower lip stud? it was tiny and gino thought it might be a whitehead at first.
• after spraying pre-treating chemicals all over our floors, he went looking for an attachment to the big steam cleaner he’d brought up, and couldn’t find it. checked the van, not there. he insisted that somebody had ‘jacked it’ after he unloaded it, though i watched him unload and never saw any such attachment, so i assume he left it at his last job.
• he then spent another hour looking for the piece, calling his boss to see if someone could bring him the piece, using the key i loaned him to get into our lobby weightroom to recharge his phone, and finally coming back up around 4:30 with nothing to show for any of it.
• he told me he’d have to come back the next day to finish, so what time was good? i suggest between 11 and 2 so i could maybe go play volleyball. he suggests 3pm because ‘i work at this church sometimes. with kids.’ i consent. no volleyball, i guess.
• in doing a small part of the room just to demonstrate what he’ll be finishing tomorrow, his machine leaks dirty water all over our kitchen floor, which he mops up with a dirty towel before leaving for the day. ‘see you tomorrow bro’, he says.
• i call his boss afterwards to complain and he really has nothing to say, giving in easily to my request for a price cut and, i suspect, inwardly wondering why he ever hired this young man.
• i spend the next morning putting together my new entertainment center (more on that tomorrow), and he calls at 3pm sunday to say he’s running a little late and will be there in half an hour. he was an hour late again. i go down to the street to let him in to find him hitting on a girl who’d been out walking her tiny dog. i wait for him to finish his conversation and we head up.
• did i mention the night before he called me at almost 8pm, long after he’d left, asking if he left his keys at my place and could i look around for them? not being at home at the time, i can’t help him, but offer to call if i find anything. i don’t, but am more concerned that this is all an elaborate scam to rob us at a time he knows we’re not home. he hasn’t yet, as i suspect his capacity for planning a theft to be akin to his punctuality.
• when emptying his steam cleaner after the first bit of cleaning, he asks to dump the dirty water out over our balcony. i suggest the sink might be easier, but he ‘thinks it would be cooler’ to dump it off the fourth floor into the alley below. i consent. nearly black water fountains down into air, luckily no cars or pedestrians pass at this inopportune moment.
• after cleaning the place, and dumping off the balcony a second time, nearly 30 hours after the original appointment was supposed to begin for a supposedly two-hour job, our carpets are (mostly) cleaned. he has no idea what the few remaining spots might be or what to do about them. ‘maybe they’re burn marks?’
• he shakes our hands, is glad to have met us, and shuffles off with his machine and bag of supplies — leaving a 3-foot length of plastic tubing sitting on our kitchen counter, which he does not return for.

on npr this morning, i heard an ad for the worst gumshoe story ever:

“curtains” stars frasier’s david hyde pierce as a detective with an eye for details and an ear for music…”

yikes. is there an offshoot genre called ‘rainbow noir’ that i don’t know about?

i didn’t write yesterday because i was gone all day watching and playing video games for work then i went straight to jess’s place once i was home (my life is so hard). watched syriana from netflix and it was really well done. even though i was a little lost at parts i even liked it then for daring me to keep up with it. i like movies that respect me enough to challenge me a little. it’s sad when one of your favorite actors gets exploded though. no fair.

today i thought i was in a bad mood but it turned out i was just anxious about a big purchase i was thinking about making, but tonight i just went out and did it, and come saturday when it is delivered i will be a very happy camper. netflix and video games are about to get SOOOO much better.

and while i’m here i’d love to review the new mountain goats and cursive cd’s i ran out and picked up tuesday night as soon as i could, but i have to say they’re a bit more challenging than i thought, so i’m still digesting them. no spoilers or anything until i figure out what i really think.

in the ‘upcoming events’ section, and speaking of the ol’ goats, i can’t wait for saturday night’s bookeaters show… what a killer combination of musicians and authors, with andy richter and somehow jake gyllenhaal too, however he fits in. tickets still available if you want to come too!

i’m hoping they have screenprinted posters to commemorate. what a sexy charitable purchase that would be to hang on my wall — especially if it says ‘bookeaters’ in nice big letters to proudly display what a nerd i am.

did you know you could do this? custom labels on heinz ketchup bottles for like 6 bucks? that seems like the perfect prank gift waiting to happen, but i’m having ketchup writers block at the brilliance you might be able to fit onto three lines at 18 characters apiece. so far all i could come up with were two referential pieces, one surrealist (magritte), the other pop culture (simpsons). so glaringly unoriginal.

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ps: the label on the final product obviously wouldn’t be as crappy as the mockups they offer on the site, they claim. but i didn’t have time for photoshopping this morning.

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?