The Twilight Zone

I feel like I'm in a Twilight Zone episode. I get here and am promptly bombarded with e-mails by this womyn upstairs on how to deal with the stupid Windows Search Companion and the highly annoying Sonic Update prompt. And she wants to borrow my XP CD. So I go upstairs to help her out and drop off the CD. Then I return to my desk and deal with a case which requires me to find a real employee to deal with. So I look around and BJ and Scott are nowhere to be found. This isn't surprising, however. So I wander across the aisle and there's no one. Poking around some more, I discover that the joint in devoid of people. Where the fuck did everyone go? There must be a meeting that I don't know about happening.

Blogs were featured in the Wisconsin State Urinal yesterday:



It was actually a pretty good article. Too bad the editors don't put as much effort as they did here on stories about local politics and such. You know, events of real import. Isn't that new editor embarrassed by the WSJ? Or is she proud to have so many sports stories on the front page?

There were some blogs referenced in the article and I checked out a couple of them. One chronicled the author's brief visit to Poland. I was so fucking jealous! I must go there myself. Another detailed the conversation the author had with a friend of hers from out of town about the nightlife here in Madison. The womyn, to put it mildly, was less than enthusiastic about it. The dance clubs were very boring, apparently. Now, I've never been to any of those clubs and have no desire to. The only reason I can think of to go to one of those joints is to get drugs. But I wondered: do womyn who like to dance like to dance to any old music? I mean, House, techno, and the like is painful to my ears but obviously some people love it. So do these womyn who go to Club Majestic and their ilk - do they enjoy the music or is it the scene that attracts them? Do they ever get the itch to do a contradance or the Foxtrot?

I guess if I really wanted to score some drugs, I can just head down to my local PDQ. A couple weeks ago or so, I sat in my car parked in the lot waiting for The Dulcinea to use the ATM inside. A white kid in his early 20s was standing outside the store looking around. A black guy a little older than him walks out of the store and flashes something in his hand. Then he walks inside towards the back where the bathrooms are. The white kid remains outside for a minute and then heads inside himself and follows the same path as the other guy. I expect drug deals to happen but I found it really funny that they should do some dealing right in the headlights of my car which was running and my visage quite visible through the windshield.

I'm listening to some Son volt - Trace - at the moment. "Windfall" is just blatantly catchy and upbeat - who couldn't like the song? And "Tear-Stained Eye" is such a wonderfully melancholy piece loaded with so many memories for me. It's odd to think that, at one time, it was all new. I got into them shortly after being dumped by a girlfriend in 1996. A few years later another girlfriend pushed me out of the picture and I again found myself listening to them. Then it became part of the soundtrack on my drives to and from Louisiana when my father died. 24 hours alone in a car driving to the empty house of your recently-deceased father is a whole lotta no fun, lemme tell ya. But Son Volt helped keep me company. Their music has become firmly entwined with my life. It's like an old friend.

I've been itching to put together a mix CD for work but have neglected the idea. I heard a couple tunes from Brian Wilson's new Smile on the loudspeakers at Border's last weekend. I recognized "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" right away and it was fantastic! I really wanna get it so I can crank it on the stereo at home. The odd sounds, the aural chaos - it was just perfect. Of course I have a Smile bootleg with it on there but the fidelity just doesn't compare. I tried downloading it from a newsgroup along with "Vegetables" but the messages were no longer available. The rest of the album was but not the 2 songs I really wanted to hear. Go figure.