I bought Scribblenauts and it was a terrible mistake; I'm never going to be able to do anything else ever again.

For those who don't know what Scribblenauts is, it's a very creative game that's just been released for the DS where you are presented with a basic puzzle, and the ability to summon anything in the world in order to solve it. For instance, on an early level, the item you are trying to retrieve is on top of a tree. You can summon a beaver who will cut down the tree, or you can summon some termites to swarm over it until it no longer exists, or you can summon a ladder to climb up and get it, or you can summon a fire and burn it to the ground.

In one level, I am tasked with getting a candy bar from a vending machine. Unfortunately, the banks of vending machines are guarded by a fierce Bully.

"This is no problem," I said, "surely we can come to some sort of arrangement. Maybe I'll just buy an extra candy bar for him or something." Unfortunately, he proved surprisingly resistent to negotiation, and punched me in the face until I died.

"Fine, if you want to be an asshole, let's play hardball," I said. He's from the street, so here's something he'll know to stay the fuck away from. I summoned a knife. Unfazed, he began pummeling me, so I stabbed him. As I triumphantly stood over his corpse which immediately vanished in a puff of smoke and began to stride confidently towards the now unguarded vending machines, the level abruptly ended! I had failed!

"What," I cried despondently, "I'm not allowed to kill the bully?" It was as if there was some sort of law against murdering people in order to get to candy.

Maybe...maybe I'm just not allowed to kill him directly, I reasoned. I typed DEATH and the grim reaper himself appeared and scythed the bully into oblivion, ending the level. Okay, I said, what are bullies afraid of? Maybe I can make him cower in fear long enough for me to hit the vending machines. I summoned a POLICEMAN and dropped him nearby. The bully immediately set upon him, punching him over and over again. "Wow," I said as the policeman drew his sidearm and blew his head off, ending the level, "this is one fearless motherfucker." I felt that 'Bully' might be a bit of an understatement as far as describing someone who would take a swing at a cop.

What else might a bully be afraid of? I tried LOGIC and REASON and SELF ESTEEM ISSUES, but sadly, none were recognized. I presented him with a mirror, which he gazed appreciatively into before pummeling me further.

I tried incapacitation. I summoned a rope and tied the bully to one of the vending machines. He was still trying to kill me, but much more slowly, and he was much easier to evade now that he had to drag a thousand pounds everywhere with him. Sadly, he still eventually managed to catch up and beat me to death.

I thought for a moment. I might actually be able to ignore the son of a bitch while he hammers uselessly on some sort of impenetrable metallic exoskeleton. I typed MECH, which summoned a twenty-foot tall bipedal inverted knee battlemech. "Ahahaha!" I cackled as I hopped inside, "Wail on this, asshole!" I strode forward in my enormous mechanical suit. As soon as he noticed me he launched into an assault, doing no apparent damage and suffering considerable losses every time I took a step forward, trampling him unintentionally under my feet. Just as I got past him, I noticed a problem: my mech was too tall to fit under the ceiling to get to the vending machines. As I took another step forward, I accidentally kicked the bully, killing him. Simultaneously, the mech's face hit the overhang and it exploded, killing me.

I gave up. He's a crafty bastard, and let it never be said that I don't know when I'm beat. Just for catharsis though, I spent the next half hour summoning anvils and dropping them on him and laughing.

A few days ago I was playing a game online with a friend from Ontario. We were both having some connection problems. I was just sitting there doing my own thing when suddenly he said the following:

"haha...the bestiality inherent in human beings"

I was midway through typing 'what' in "...what the fuck are you talking about" when he abruptly logged off. I didn't see him for the rest of the night. I brushed it off, figuring he was in the middle of making some sort of subtler point when he was suddenly logged off against his will. Why he would have had anything to say on the subject of bestiality was beyond me, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The next day I was carrying on several conversations simultaneously when a different friend logged on.

"parents came I am curtained" she said. I squinted suspiciously at my screen and switched to another conversation to consult with the participants there before responding.

"Guys," I said tentatively, "I think I'm being contacted by some sort of internet singularity. Has that ever happened to you before?"

( If you think the plot is thick now, it only thickens from here )

A couple weeks ago, I realized I hadn't shaved in a couple weeks. I applied shaving cream and suddenly said, I wonder what I would look like with a beard, like an actual, whole-face beard. Figuring it was a good time to experiment, I shaved my head, and cleaned up my cheeks and neckline a little and then looked in the mirror.

"Huh," I said to myself in the mirror, "that looks pretty retarded." I had suspected that I didn't grow dense enough hair on my cheeks to actually make a full beard worthwhile, and it turns out I was absolutely right. In order to make it not look like a patchy piece of shit I had to take it way down my cheeks, and once I lose 50 pounds I'm sure it will make me look rugged and cut but until then it just makes me look like a ten year old with a stupid beard hanging off of his glasses.

But on the other hand, I had already shaved, and didn't want to bother doing my whole face. As I put away my shaving gear, I wondered who would be the first person to actually man up and tell me I looked retarded. I decided to keep the beard until either someone told me I looked stupid or someone made a 'You missed a spot' joke.

Instead I got nothing. An eerie silence. Two people total mentioned it at all, and both referred to it in passing, as if they were afraid that if they looked at it directly they would get sucked in, never to be heard from again. "Please," I begged silently, "Please someone tell me I look like an idiot so I can get rid of it." I tied ribbons in it. I dyed it green. I used my razor to erratically slice patches into it. The worse it looked, the more studiously people ignored it.

Oh well. I guess I'm stuck with it for a while.

The weekend before last, I went to visit my aunt Rita. I had a great time, and got to see everyone except my cousin Craig, who had a wedding to go to, and my cousin Kyle, who had gotten ill while camping.

Two days of enthusiastic albeit silent incubation later, I left work with some mild cold symptoms, and I have spent the subsequent week coughing, sneezing, struggling to breathe, and getting extremely bored with sitting around at home.

I went in briefly on Friday to deal with some stuff that needed to be done before the end of the week. The rest of my team were there for a bit, but eventually departed for a morale event taking place on the soccer fields. As they were leaving and taking stock of who they had with them, they noticed that I wasn't there.

"Hey Graeme," someone said, "Come to the party with us."

"What? Are you nuts? Absolutely not."

"Why not? It'll be fun!"

"Dude, I can barely stand upright. I'm going to finish up here and go home and sleep. That'll be my morale event."

"Oh come on," someone else said, "Come have a drink with us! It'll have a good sort of antiseptic effect."

"Besides the fact that I don't want to infect every other person there, I've got alcohol at home. I promise I'll have a drink as soon as I get there."

I lied. I didn't have a drink. I feel guilty about that, but not guilty enough to go back and do it now. Tomorrow I'm going in whether I feel better or not. Hopefully someone on my team gets sick and is more willing to test the curative properties of alcohol than I am. That way I'll know for next time.

"So," Colin asked, "Are you just fucked, then, or what?"

Alcohol throbbed at my temples and I did my best to ignore it. It was a question that I had asked myself more than once. Enough times that I felt like I had come to a conclusion I was satisfied with.

"I don't know," I answered. "But if I am, I don't think it matters, in the long run." I had another drink. Why the hell not, right?

I could use a drink.

In Washington state, you have to give notice of your intention to move out of a place 20 days before your lease is up. A woman from my apartment complex called me at work 19 days before my lease ended.

"Hey, we need to know if you're breaking your lease, or what. Like, by the end of the day, sort of thing."

"Fuck," I said. The possibility of moving to a new place had come up, but I hadn't made a final decision and I felt unequipped to make a snap decision about whether to keep the place or move. Fortunately, just then, John emailed me out of the blue.

"Hey, should I buy The Orange Box?"

"Yes! Should I move to a new place?"

"No. Moving sucks ass. You should definitely stay put unless you have a really good reason. Why are you thinking about moving?"

"Well, the new place is cheaper, is closer to groceries, movie theater, mall and liquor store, and about eight friends already live there. Actually, shit, those are all great reasons."

"Dude, are you retarded? Why do you even have to ask about that? You should definitely do it."

I was taken aback. "Be...because moving sucks ass? You're the one who pointed that out, work with me here."

"Forget that, go sign the papers like right now. You asshole."

I was taken aback. John was being kind of a prick. Nevertheless, his advice seemed sound. I ducked out from work to cancel my lease.

( Oh God, so many words )

I'm back online. Some of you may not have known that I was ever offline, and I apologize for that. Apparently I didn't tell enough people that I was moving, but to be honest, it came as kind of a surprise even to me. It was all kind of sudden.

I might have a more interesting story about it later. But don't get your hopes up, I probably don't.

Went to look at a new apartment complex today. If I decide to take an apartment at this place it looks like I'd get to choose between a monthly savings of twenty percent, or an extra 400 square feet in the form of the addition of an extra bedroom and bathroom (for the same price I'm paying now). Is there anything about this housing crisis that isn't awesome?

My laptop is reaching the end of its lifespan. The hard drive and DVD drive both appear to be suffering intermittent issues, and despite its long years of steadfast service it's starting to show its age. Visions of new laptops have begun to dance in my head.

Immediately after buying my laptop I had a chance to use a tablet for a while and I loved it. I don't know if I could articulate exactly why I loved it, but I thought it was the cat's pyjamas and I regretted the fact that I had just spent a bunch of money on a laptop, robbing me of an excuse to pick up a tablet. I decided that my next portable-type computer would be a tablet.

Now that that is becoming a real possibility, I am having to balance my continued enthusiasm for tablet computing with my opposing desire to buy a computer that isn't a piece of shit. I'm intrigued by the idea of multi-touch computing and would like to pick up one of those, but...Jesus. It's like they're specifically pricing these things so that nobody will want to buy them.

"But Graeme," no doubt the computer manufacturers would protest, "even a pen-based tablet screen is expensive! A multi-touch capacitor costs almost $500! We're losing our shirt selling these things!"

By my calculations that means that a multi-touch laptop should cost about $500 more than a normal laptop. And yet the ones I've looked at are smaller (in terms of screen size), with fewer features, shittier hardware, and are fucking twice the price of much, much better computers. I was astounded at how much hardware I could drop into a custom laptop and stay under twice the price. What I'm basically saying is, throw a multi-touch capacitor in a laptop that's worth buying and jack up the price and I'll definitely pay you for it. And also, stop shackling tablets to your trash.

"Why don't you just buy both a tablet and a decent laptop?" asked a ghostly voice in my head. "OooooooOOoOoooOOOOoOOOO!" It was scary stuff.

Once I had calmed down, I said "Wow, that sounds like the best of both worlds. But wait...I'm...I'm sure there's a reason I don't need to buy two laptops. There's gotta be...hang on, what am I saying? I'm not in school anymore; I can do whatever I want. This will kick so much ass."

I've also been noticing that my desktop is starting to thrash a little bit. Maybe I can find a manufacturer out there somewhere with a three-for-one sale. This is going to be the best July ever!

Jenn emailed me on Friday last week. "Hey, if that wasn't just a fun story on your blog and you actually couldn't get your hands on wings, I can pick some up at the market when I go this afternoon and bring them with me."

"My 'fun story' had a happy ending," I pointed out. "I got all the wings I needed. The fact that they were attached to chickens is a technicality." But I grew concerned. It seemed almost like she didn't know that the whole thing was a...well, for lack of a better word, let's go with 'lie'. She didn't seem to know I was lying. I took pity on her and admitted it. "Yeah, it was just a fun story."

When she arrived at my house that night, she marched purposefully up to me and stared me in the eye. "You didn't really throw thirty whole chickens in the garbage, did you?"

I glanced uncomfortably around the room. I had already admitted that it was just a 'fun story'; was this some sort of...escalation? Was I now engaged in a battle of wills? Did Jenn selectively read my emails? I noticed Sarah was listening quite intently, so I answered honestly. "No, Jenn, I assure you, no chickens got thrown in the garbage."

"So you didn't...okay, good," she said, and walked away satisfied.

Later, after a couple of drinks, Jenn asked "So what the hell are you going to do with thirty chickens? Can we look forward to a roast chicken night sometime in the near future?"

I had a similar moment of internal silence wondering if I was being led subtly into some sort of verbal trap, but concluded that at this point it was far more likely that she was, in fact, just concerned about the waste of food. "Jenn, there are no chickens. The whole thing was a big lie! I admit it, okay? I made it up because it was a far more interesting story than 'I went to the grocery store and bought wings and then came home, curled up in bed and cried myself to sleep.' I was just spicing things up."

The room was silent for a moment.

"Jesus, Graeme, why do you have to lie so much? Why are you such a liar? What the hell, man, we trusted you!" I pressed my fingers to my temples and went back into the kitchen. Jenn scrambled up from her seat and followed me. I glared at her when I noticed her there, but she looked at me sympathetically and tried, even though she's short, to put her arm around my shoulders.

"Hey," she said, "do you want to talk about what's making you cry yourself to sleep? I'm here for you."

She looked so serious that I struggled not to laugh...which is not to say that what I did instead was in any way appropriate. "Goddammit Jenn, what the hell! I made that up. It was just in there for effect. You don't have to believe everything I say! Half of it's untrue! More than half, on a good day."

Looking rebuked, she went back into the living room. I felt guilty for a minute but then I had a couple of wings and they were really good, so I felt better.

I prefer the term fiction to lies, by the way. It makes me sound less like I enjoy deceiving every female I know (along with most of the males) and more like an auteur.

I'm doing Wings Night II tomorrow with a potentially improved cooking technique brought to you by Alton Brown. I went out tonight to buy the wings and hit a problem.

"Hey, can I have, like, a mess of wings?" I asked the butcher.

"Chicken wings? Sorry son, all sold out. That man over there bought the last of them." He pointed at a thin, crooked-looking man dressed in black with a thin moustache and a top hat, whose shopping cart was overflowing with enormous packages of chicken wings.

"Mwa ha ha!" he snickered, and slithered away.

"Fuck!" I said, offending a nearby woman carrying a baby, who shot me a dirty look. As I snuck out to the parking lot to key the word 'Fuck' into her car, I had a minute to think about what to do now that a supervillain had made off with my plans for tomorrow's dinner. I returned to the butcher confident.

"Sold out, eh? Okay, gimme...let's see, ten times twelve over four...thirty chickens."

"You...want thirty raw chickens? Are you sure?"

"Absolutely." I was sick of my Friday night plans getting screwed up by supermarket stocking issues. It was time to own the means of production.

It took a few minutes to wrap them all up and put them in my cart. When we were finished the butcher turned to the customer waiting behind me, who was eyeing my cart skeptically. "What can I do for you?"

"Uh, yeah," he said, his eyes still on my cart, "can I get a chicken?"

"Oof, sorry, son, we're all sold out. That fella there just bought the last thirty."

I seized the moment. "Mwa ha ha!" I said, twirled my moustache, and dashed for the checkout.

You win.

Warning: If you are expecting rapid progress (say, on the order of an entire project in two weeks) you are going to be disappointed, and yes, I'm talking to you, Sam. I have to figure out how to write (or port) a LUA/XML parser, a quadratic solver, and a matrix math library before I can even start remembering how much I forgot about how to intersect with a sphere. In school, we started with a fair amount of sophisticated (or at least confusing) code and I either have to find reasonable substitutes or rewrite all of it. I don't expect it to be THAT hard but it will no doubt be kind of a pain in the ass, and I do have other things to do. That said...

( Step 1 )

I am inexplicably pissed off.

I've gone back to lying a lot in this journal, because God knows people don't need to hear the exacting details of my life. Life is no longer as interesting now that I am not in school, where there were wacky hijinx waiting around every corner, or at least a soul-crushing amount of work I needed to be doing at any given time that I could bitch about to get away from. These days it's all accidentally sleeping in, staying at work late because I slept in, coming home and eating whatever's in arm's reach, killing time on the internet, watching TV, forgetting to pay a couple of bills and going to bed. And tonight I am inexplicably pissed off.

I want to buy a tablet computer, write a ray tracer and a stock tracker, start a webcomic, write a book, appear in a TV show, take a vacation to California, New Zealand, Las Vegas, and assorted points in Ontario, start a company and sell novelty t-shirts, open a bar and franchise the hell out of it, get back in shape, get paid to make video games.

In the last year of school, a bunch of people got really, really into climbing, to the point where they never spoke about anything but the new shoes they bought and how much I would love it if I would just agree to go with them. We were sitting around talking one day, by which I mean we were sitting around, they were talking about climbing, and I was listening to them talk about climbing and surreptitiously rolling my eyes.

"You know," Keith said, "it's a pain in the ass to have to drive to Guelph to climb. Half the people at that club are based in Waterloo and nobody likes driving out there. We should open a climbing gym out here."

There was general agreement that that would kick ass.

"I saw a building on the other side of town with available space, I'm pretty sure I can get the money for a couple months' rent, and..."

"Whoa, whoa, hang on," I said, suddenly shaken from my reverie by his apparent intent to actually follow through on what was, to me, clearly an insane fucking plan. "You can't actually do that."

"Why not?" he asked, looking at me with that look people get on their face when they're totally convinced that they've come up with an awesome plan. You know the one. I'm sure you can recall plenty of times you've seen it on me.

"Be...because..." I realized that I had no good answer and was going to have to wing it. "Because shit like that doesn't happen in real life. You're describing the plot of a fucking daytime TV movie. I bet there will even be an evil corporate bastard that wants to turn the climbing gym run by the kids with a spunky can-do attitude into a McDonalds knockoff, and they'll nearly succeed until you stage a huge climb-a-thon and the citizens of the city all rally behind you, and you win, only without an evil corporate bastard to rally against, public interest eventually wanes and your gym is forced to take out loan after loan until finally it's reposessed by the bank and then it sits empty for a year until it burns to the ground and nobody bothers rebuilding it, and you're forced to take a job bussing tables in the Evil Corporate Bastard headquarters cafeteria to pay off your horrific debt load. That last part never makes it into the movie but that's how it happens in real life."

By this point I had everybody's attention. I had gone a little red in the face and was speaking a little frantically. "Uh, are you okay?" Keith asked.

"I'm fine," I insisted. "But that's why you shouldn't open a climbing gym."

"Well, that's a stupid reason," he said with his trademark directness.

I have spent every waking moment of my life since that day trying to answer the question "If you want to do something, why the hell shouldn't you?" There's always a reason to do it: because you want to. The reason not to usually boils down to answers like "Because that's insane," or "Because life doesn't work that way." I either have to come up with a better answer or start shopping, coding, drawing, writing, acting, planning, designing, scouting locations, working out, and...making a video game (that one's hard to verb).

I know you're all burning to know how my cupcake dilemma turned out.

( Yeah, or not )

Last week was the Game. I'm not at liberty to say much about it except that it was really good. I was on team "We'll do it live!" and let me tell you, did we ever do it live. Fuck it! Fucking thing sucks!

Most importantly, I forgot to bring a hat, and nobody brought sunscreen. And then I hung around outside all day, in the sunniest day Seattle has seen since about last August. By the end of the day I was feeling a little bit sunburnt.

"I need to get out of the sun," I said around 5:30pm, a little bit choked up, as I muscled my way into a seat in the van. I hadn't spoken in a while and this drew the attention of my teammates, who all expressed themselves at once.

"Holy shit, man, your head is purple."
"People shouldn't be that colour."
"Your head is some sort of medical mystery!"
"Get in the van already! Holy crap!"
"Fuck it! We'll do it live."

"I know, I know, I'm getting in the van! Dammit, guys! I'm getting in the van, and I'm doing it live."

It was okay for a few hours because it became night time, but if the next day was equally sunny and gorgeous I was going to have serious problems. I wore my hooded sweatshirt for the first half of the day, but as occasionally happens on extremely sunny days it started to get a little bit scorchingly hot. Fortunately, being an extremely hoopy frood, I had come prepared; I had brought my towel. I wrapped it around my head and secured it with an unfolded paperclip I had found on the dashboard.

"...this is your solution?" Sarah asked, observing me skeptically. "You MacGyvered yourself a...burka?"

"It's not a burka!" I insisted. "It's a ninja hood!" I dove and rolled behind a nearby rock to illustrate.

"...a blue fuzzy ninja hood?"

"Yes! I solved the hell out of this problem and I did it live."

"Goddammit Graeme will you stop saying you'll do things live."

"No!" I tried to think of a way to work in the phrase "Fucking thing sucks!", but I couldn't come up with anything so I just stared at her with great intensity. Eventually she scoffed and walked away, and I chalked it up as a total victory. Point: Graeme.

----------

I finally got sick of going to the grocery store. I hate walking around, putting things in my cart and so forth. I hate it so much that I almost never do it, which means a lot of the time I end up with no food, and completely unmotivated to go get more, which means I end up eating a lot of things which would not normally be considered meals. I decided to start ordering my groceries again on the offchance that not spending all that time wandering around the grocery store might get me to eat something worth eating.

It's my birthday next week and I am making cupcakes to take to work on Tuesday. I carefully ordered everything I needed, meticulously compared the order to the recipe, and immediately after clicking Confirm remembered that I don't have any little paper cupcake cups. I screamed with the agonies of the damned: I was going to have to go to the grocery store, and pay the delivery fee for most of the groceries.

No. Wait. I don't accept this. Fuck going to the grocery store. I'll figure something out, and I'll do it live. Fuck it!

Has it been a year since the last beta of The Game?

Oh my, it's been more than a year.

Well, it's time for this year's, and I'm pretty sure this is the year I get my ass kicked. Wish me luck! I'll see you in 48 hours.

I consider most facets of a bachelor party to be optional. You don't need strippers or road trips or abductions. One thing I'm unwilling to compromise on is alcohol. Alcohol has to flow freely. I implemented this idea to great effect at Colin's bachelor party. Unfortunately it happened that the bachelor party was the night before the wedding, which I consider to be the ideal night for a bachelor party but does cause some logistical problems the next day. For instance, I spent most of the cab ride to Seattle trying to remember which side of the body the liver is on, and wondering whether the stabbing pain in my side was a simple side effect of drinking Jägermeister or whether I should be consulting a doctor about my tragic case of Escaping Liver. As I cradled my aching head in my hands and cursed myself for not drinking more water before going to sleep the night before, I found the energy to speculate about how Colin was feeling. Probably not so hot.

That might be trouble.

I admit I was expecting a certain amount of good-natured animosity due to the sheer volume of alcohol I poured down Colin's throat the previous night, but I was unprepared for the incredibly violent sentiments hurled my way every time Colin so much as thought about me. As the abuse continued, I began to feel a strange sensation...I felt guilty. Colin verbally lashing me was not unusual but usually I was able to take it in stride. It felt different this time. Maybe it was because this time I couldn't hit back (it would take a lot more abuse to convince me to spar with a man on his wedding day), or maybe it was because this time he really meant it.

The ceremony was beautiful, Colin looked about as nervous as...well, a man who's about to get married, but Jenn looked like she was about to burst into laughter and/or tears. I thought he might let up on me after the ceremony concluded successfully (and - it bears repeating - beautifully), but Colin continued to try to explode my head with telekinesis.

"Dude," I couldn't bring myself to say at the reception, "if you're actually angry at me," (I couldn't tell if it was some kind of twisted facade - if he was just trying to make me feel guilty, mission accomplished!) "...do me a favour and don't read the card until you've cooled down." Instead I apologized again and slinked quietly out of the building. Rather than contributing to their happiness, the wedding had apparently succeeded despite me...not a feeling I found I enjoyed. I had become some sort of comic book villain, The Devourer of Happiness, Destroyer of Weddings.

I laid awake for several nights, expecting any minute to hear the rumble of the mail truck heralding the arrival of a small white envelope with a tiny card inside: "You're dead to me. -Colin" Or simply a knock on the door to reveal Colin himself, who would step inside before taking his well-earned swing. Maybe Jenn would come too, and watch and laugh. It was no more than I deserved. And what if one of their parents got their hands on my card before Colin or Jenn found it and destroyed it after reading as instructed in the message? There were simply too many doomsday scenarios to contemplate. People excuse my normal tomfoolery in the course of our normal lives but there was context here. Tomfoolery around a wedding ruins what should be the best day of someone's life. I had gone too far.

As I sat fully dressed in the dark on my bed at 3:00am on the fourth night, sweating and shivering, I suddenly realized that this was ridiculous. A huge effort of willpower stopped the chattering of my teeth and I tried to rationalize to myself. Colin and Jenn are the most stable, loving, trusting couple I know. I could have driven a bulldozer through the church in the middle of the ceremony and it wouldn't even scratch the surface of the deep affection that those two feel for each other...although I might get some stern words from God. Who the hell was I to think that I'd ruined everything with some alcohol and some bad jokes? Assuaged, I lit some candles, put on some soft jazz and took a hot rose oil-scented bath and went to sleep.

I got up the next morning and found that someone had posted some pictures of the wedding. Apparently my fly was open for a nontrivial chunk of the day.

"Goddammit, why didn't anyone tell me?!" I yelled.

Moral: Don't even bother trying to count the ways you screwed up, cause there's at least one you don't even know about.

I saw Star Trek today.

It was good, but I don't feel great.

That's it for now. Same old story otherwise.

Hoo boy.

Got good and drunk for the first time in several weeks.

Why the hell don't I do this more often?

Colin's bachelor party. We went to Coyote Ugly. I bought Colin...four shots of Jaegermeister? Was it five? I don't remember. I owe Dan ~$100. Something like that. This is where I would tell you what Dan's Coyote Ugly name is but the Coyote Ugly name generator seems to have been removed from the internet for some reason. What the hell, right?

When we got out of the extremely loud bar a man approached me insistently asking for something. I didn't hear what, but I assumed it was money.

"Sorry man, I've gotta give like all my money to my buddy over there." I pointed at Dan, hoping to persuade the man to go ask Dan instead of me.

"Man, when the fuck did I ask you for money?"

"Oh. Sorry, I'm having trouble hearing you, it's fucking loud in there." I gestured toward the Coyote Ugly club from which we had emerged hoping he would understand. "What were you asking?"

"Can I write a poem about your name?" I belatedly noticed that the man was holding several torn bits of paper and a Bic pen at the ready.

"Oh. No. Thanks though," I slurred. He moved on to someone less drunk and/or more accommodating to his mission to write poetry based on the names of people emerging from a bar without ever asking for any money.

"What the fuck," I said, when we were two blocks away. "Why does everyone in Seattle want to write me a fucking poem?"

"Totally," agreed Jesse.