and its head popped off. I have heard it said that dandelions are nothing more than a common weed- the scourge of the carefully groomed and chemically treated lawns of the suburbs. I remember bringing them home: a bouquet of slowly wilting dandelions flopping around in our chubby fists, slumping over and bopping around like drunken puppets in a rodeo. Mothers everywhere arrange these offerings from their children in jelly jars and whatever makeshift vases they can find. There they sit, on the kitchen counter mocking.... mom hates dandelions, she and dad just paid a lot of money to have the landscapers eliminate the leafy vermin from the yard, and yet there they are in the place of honor - the centerpiece of the dinner table. Dandelions aren't going anywhere. The roots of dandelions can extend over a foot down into the soil- the flowers themselves can grow up to well over one's knees, growing up through the pavement in a parking lot. You have to admire a flower that grows up through a crack in the pavement. That takes some grit. This is no pansy- it grows through cement. Tall and matter of fact, slim velevety stem gently curving up towards the sky, crowned with a golden afro. Eventually, as the season progresses, golden petals turn to soft white down. The back yard is alive with the bobbing grey heads of geriatrics, and when the time comes, a disturbance, in the form of a running animal, a late summer breeze, or a wishing child will stir the parachutes loose, setting them free on the breeze, to float to their future home. They will settle on the sides of highways, in the cracks in the pavement, and in the very yards of the people who just spent a fortune to eliminate their ancestors- they will grow where they wish when they wish, they will return to the yards of those who try to elminate them, and will make their way through the hands of a child into the premium blossom display locations on the coffee tables of suburbia. The dandelion is not a weed. It is the fuck you flower.

Question of the day: Where does all the energy go? I got to thinking about one of Newton's laws, the one about every action having an equal and opposite reaction. I was thinking in terms of sound. Sound definitely has an energy...like when someone is driving a car with a deafening sound system. One that is loud enough to make my car shake. Sound makes the human eardrum vibrate and the brain interprets the vibrations into a particular sound. But where does the sound actually go? If I was sitting in a room talking to someone, my words would hit not only their ears, but also the walls, floor, ceiling etc. Where does it go from there? I would assume that the energy gets absorbed by the earth...but then what? Is the Earth harboring sound-related energy from the beginning of time? It can't just disappear, right? Maybe I don't know enough about physics to be writing about it and stuff. Maybe it dissipates into outerspace, but then what? And where does this infinite chain of energy come from? When I talk, I'm not really 'creating' energy, its more like I'm transfering energy from myself to outside myself. Like burning calories. So in the big picture, I'm really turning food into vibrations that resonate throughout the rest of time? That would be really freaky. Even on a spectacularly small scale, I could be affecting stuff all over the place just by honking my horn at some dipshit driver. I really gotta be more careful what I say now because you really can't take it back, in a literal sense. Don't even get me started on light related energy. That has to go somewhere too apparently. And it has to be 'created' somewhere. What if there was only a certain amount of energy in the universe and its just a matter of it showing up in different forms. Like it was all created at once and all you can do is manipulate a limited amount of pre-existent energy. That would probably answer my question because the energy would just get redistributed and end up back where it came from. I wonder if the Earth ever does something with the energy that we don't know about. Like put it into other things. Does my conversation eventually end up in a Peruvian carrot? We get energy from food, so the food must have gotten that energy from somewhere else. Cue the Twighlight Zone music.

I was going to write a post about trees (again) but I'll get to that in a minute. It just dawned on me that upper case letters are stupid. Why do we need to uppercase certain letters when there is no real distinction between them and their diminutive counterparts? I think it would have been wiser to just do something like draw a line under a lowercase letter if you really want to make it different for no reason. Some of them aren't even similar at all! How do you get "G" from "g". I call 'bullshit' on grammar! Now that I think of it, maybe uppercase is the right one and lowercase are the superfluous additions. All the uppercase letters are the same size but the lowercase are all over the board with height and some of them drop below the line. That is one crazy set of characters. I guess all uppercase letters doesn't really lend itself to cursive either. Cursive used to piss me off but then I realized that I could cheat with cursive. I have terrible penmanship to begin with. I just don't care and now I have a 2 inch plate on my index finger's metacarpul so I have an excuse to be sloppy. But cursive you can get away with just scribbling a few jagged lines and calling it whatever you want. I think cursive will only last 10 more years. Penmanship as well. Nobody is going to write anything once everyone has laptops and stuff. Who needs it? I know what the damn letters look like so why does anyone care if I can manually write them like a frickin scribe. Scribes went the way of the dinosaur like a hundred years ago when everyone learned how to write and nobody even blinked an eye. Writing could be a difficult transition though. I think the reason why we won't ever give up hard-copy writing has something to do with magnetism. A lot of data is stored in computers and stuff which is all binary in its most basic form. I don't know the exact details, but I think that harddrives store this data magnetically on a disk. Well, the earth has a magnetic 'sheild' or something (I should probably look this up to double check) that is emitted from the poles due to a swirling mass of iron in the earth's core. Well, what happens if something goes haywire and the earth gets subjected to some kind of super magnetic field from like a solar flare or something and the sheild can't block it all. Then all the 001101001011101100100101010100 gets turned into 0000000000000000000000000000. All that stuff that we worked so hard to compile gets erased. Consider the Earth formatted. Then, since everyone forgot how to write they'll be lookin' for scribes and guess what!?! Scribes will charge huge amounts of money for their services and then reinvest that money into rubber companies until they own the majority of shares, at which time they will close down the rubber factories so that nobody can buy erasers anymore and then, following this progression to its natural conclusion, people get really frustrated with crossing everything out because its so messy and that will be the end of amateur penmanship...and the reinvention of the professional scribe!

I have a friend in DC who's been hearing rumors all day about Cheney resigning. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/051018/18whwatch.htm

Miracles amaze me. Her left eye is lazy. She looks so Israeli. Nicotine and gravy. Waaaaaaah! So about them trees. I don't know why, but trees have become a subject of great fascination lately. Trees are pretty amazing and I can't explain them. Basically, they're made out of wood and I'm pretty sure they're the only things made from wood. Secondly, they're huge. It's the huge part that has me going. How did they get that big? I'm sure they must have evolved from much smaller trees but that would have been like millions of years ago. They got those petrified wood pieces from dinosaur era 60 million years ago and those trees were probably huge too. So it would have millions of years before that when they first started out doing the tree thing. Can you imagine what it was like at first? I can. It must have been like a 2 inch tall forest spread out over the continent. 2 inches! That's nuts! I'm guessing, but still. They couldn't have always been hundreds of feet tall. So back then, in the days of the 2 inch forests, could you have 'chopped' down a tree and gotten actual wood out of it? It probably would've been like a toothpick. Did those tiny trees have bark? They must have because what else would they have...I wonder if there were tiny deciduous and coniferous trees...like was there birch/elm/maple etc? That would have been so cool. I bet there were tiny microscopic animals that lived in the 2 inch treetops and they must have been crazy looking creatures that you can't even imagine. The problem is that this time-period I'm talking about is so far back I can't even begin to imagine where all the stuff is now. Like we know dinosaurs turned into oil and stuff and sometimes bones got left behind in places, but the time-period I'm talking about is almost unfathomable. Those tiny animals probably evolved into bigger stuff and eventually dinosaur size. It must have taken a helluva long time for dinosaurs to evolve into giant monsters. Trees have really seen it all. I'm almost in disbelief concerning how big trees are today. Those are some giant plants. And they all start from a tiny little seed. Man, life can be so strange. I wonder if humans will ever be able to construct a working seed. Like from scratch. I wonder what kind of pieces you need to make a seed. Probably some celulose and carbon or something. Then, when the seed goes in the ground, it just lives off of dirt and water and sun light. Must be something really good in the dirt for that to happen. So basically, wood is made from dirt at least a little bit. I just got an itch. I think itches happen when new cells are trying to squeeze their way in between the old cells. Cause you can never see anything that would cause an itch and it definitely causes some kind of reaction and feeling. Then when you scratch it, you are moving the cells around so it makes room for the new one. Unless you have a specific itch producing stimulus like itching powder or a rash. That itching powder was nasty shit when I was a kid. It didn't itch so much as it burned and hurt. Man, that was no fun.

I can smell winter coming. It smells like a dead season. I got a new coat for this winter. I got it at a Himalayan store in Old Saybrook. Its wool and it was handmade in Nepal. I hope my goddam car makes it through the winter. Oh, if you ever get your lock frozen, hold your key in a flame and then try it again. That trick works with 'dead' pens too. I keep a pen in my car to keep track of mileage because I have another unfounded theory about something mundane. I think that keeping your mileage is like getting a routine check-up for your car. I know, the whole tune-up/oil change probably more analogous to a check-up, but hear me out. Here's what to do. You take down the mileage every time you get gas and then when you figure out your mileage later you make a graph and then you can see how your car is feeling. I don't know whether better or worse mileage is good or what not, but I like to think that it should remain consistent. I tend to think that worse mileage is bad. I should really find out what I'm doing more often. I confess, I just like to make graphs. Then I go around spewing data all over the place with no actual idea of what it means. I should probably do my mileage sometime soon. Then I will (maybe) post the results on here. My car gets the best mileage ever. I don't want to say how good because I don't want to jinx the latest numbers and have them be bad. It's a three cylinder though and I drive it a lot. I also get the oil change a lot. I love knowing that I have new oil. I and use that Slick 50 stuff that's 15 frickin' dollars. That stuff reminds me of rubber cement. Its very viscous. That's like penicillin for a car. Nothing can go wrong with it now. I wonder what penicillin actually does. I think it comes from mold. Sometimes you would be surprised what is in some things. Did you know that there is something radioactive inside of smoke detectors? I think its like Americaneum. Crazy that someone figured that in order to detect smoke you needed something radioactive. My dad always used to say, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." and I always tried to think of fireless smoke. It just doesn't happen. You can get like vapors or something if you mix the wrong two chemicals together like in a mad scientist laboratory, but its not really smoke. What if you did that old-school rubbing two sticks together and they started to smoke but there wasn't any fire yet. I'm sure there probably is some tiny microscopic fire going on because my dad is not usually wrong about anything. It would be nice to prove him wrong just once though.

So I went outside today. It was cold. Somebody asked me, "Why is it so cold?" and I think they meant it as a rhetorical question but it got me thinking, "Why is it so cold?" I think the obvious reason is the whole Sun getting farther away or less daylight, but then I started thinking about the whole cold phenomenon. I think some science class told me that cold happens when molecules slow down and hot happens when molecules speed up. So I guess it's cold because the air molecules are moving more slowly. But then when the wind picks up, it feels colder. Why doesn't the wind make the molecules go faster and heat up? Like friction. And what happens inside ice cubes? It would appear as though they are inanimate but they probably aren't on a molecular level. They obviously don't get all the way down to 0 degrees Kelvin in a standard freezer. They're nowhere near that cold. But what would happen to an ice cube that was that cold? Would it actually be that cold? Like if you dropped a 0 Kelvin ice cube into luke warm water, would that amount of coldness dissipate into the water and freeze it? But I've also heard that liquid water can't get any hotter than boilng point because then it turns to steam. Maybe the same is true for the other end of the spectrum...like it can't get any colder than freezing point. I wonder what happens if you drop an ice cube into boiling water. Probably what you would expect...

Ahhhh...let's take a minute now to stop and smell the roses. They smell nice. Now lets take a minute to stop and admire this blog...not the words I'm writing, but the blog itself. Its really nice also. Nice job Tim. I really like what you've done with the place. As for my blog in particular, I decided to go with a blue/green scheme because it seemed to be easy on the eyes. For the text on the left, I chose grey because it seemed like a mellow choice. It really shows up well against the green background also. See that box on the upper left? I assume that Tim made that snappy looking logo. Kudos. That's me in the picture on the top right. Putting my picture up there lets everyone get a better idea about who I am. Under that is my general information which is pretty accurate. But enough about me. Let me divert your attention something different. There. That was slick. What is the difference between sand and dirt? Sand definitely has a different texture to it. I'd venture to guess that sand must've come from something bigger. Like it is really just a bunch of chips from bigger stones...and where does all the sand go that the snow plows plow onto the grass. I'm not talking about the sand on the side of the road where the streetsweepers get it...I mean on the grass. It seems like they've been plowing roads for years and there should be huge piles of sand on the grass, but there's not. Can grass grow in sand? For some reason I really doubt it because sand is so loose and probably can't hold water for very long. That's just a guess though. There must be a difference between sand and regular dirt. Probably nutrients or some other high school science answer.

So, I have no real job as of yet so there is theoretically a lot of time to blog it up. Theoretically. In real life I spend these 'days of no money' watching tv. So, here's another terrible idea I had with no practical purpose. Have you ever seen a tree that grows near a fence? Sometimes the tree will grow completely around the fence. I want to take that principle and make a money tree. Here's how its gonna go down. Every month or so I want to take a steel band and strap it to the trunk of a tree. Underneath the band will be quarters. Lots of quarters. Then as the tree grows, these quarters will become part of the tree. After I'm dead in like a hundred years, someone will chop the tree down and all these quarters explode from their arborous domicile. Or maybe they won't explode and nobody will notice until they burn the tree and find quarters all over their fireplace. Or maybe the tree will die of natural causes (or unnatural causes due to the amount of metal lodged in it) and then there will be quarters in a straight line on the ground when the tree decomposes. I just got another idea. What if I banded steel rods or titanium rods to the tree vertically? Would that become a super tree? Like, you know how trees sway in the wind, well this one wouldn't. It would be really really stiff. I wonder if that's bad for trees...I already considered pennies instead of quarters but copper poisoning might have killed it before the experiment was over. I think that when I have some land I'm going to like to plant trees and do weird experiments with them. Like splicing and making them grow in weird directions...or making two trees form into one like 20 feet up in the air. That would be neato. A tree a year...or maybe more. Maybe one tree I would put car tires around every year until it was too big to get one around it. Then there will be another tree with steel plate embedded to look like a serpent swimming up it and every couple years the serpent will 'grow'. Do you think a tree will die if you drill a hole through it? Maybe I could have a pierced tree and then I could put some other type of flowery plants inside the tube going through the tree. Like a flowering oak tree.

I had a million dollar idea and I'm going to write it here trusting that nobody is going to steal it. ...I hope you're sitting down for this! Ready? It's a Sistine Chapel puzzle! But wait, there's more! This isn't going to be some ordinary run of the mill jigsaw puzzle. This is going to be a scale model Sistine Chapel puzzle that will cover every square inch of any room in your house. They're going to have to be custom made to fit your room, but it will transform that room into your own priceless replica of the Sistine Chapel. The technical challenge of it will be to size it up to any shaped room. I'm thinking I can do it by getting a 360 degree panoramic picture from the center of the chapel. That will be the template. Say, for instance, the chapel is in the basic shape of a cube. I will take the cube and fit it into a sphere (with all 8 corners touching the sides of the sphere) and then extrapolate onto the sphere whatever is visible from one point inside the cube. Then once I have that sphere (which will be severly distorted because of perspective) I can resize it to accomodate your room (which will be a different sized cube than the chapel itself). The only real problem is that the room will be wickedly distorted unless you are positioned in the right spot. Now I know that hardly anybody is looking forward to spending years peicing together a puzzle that big, so for a few extra bucks I will send you the puzzle slabs already put together (but jigsawed so it will look like you spent a thousand hours on it). Then you just glue them to the wall and commence the praying. The Sistince Chapel is really the tip of the iceberg though. I could do Grand Central, Taj Mahal...anything! So, million dollar idea? I'll be laughing all the way to the bank! I just have to open a jigsaw workshop or something. Who's with me? Jan?

I love regular Toblerone, but the white kind is too sweet. It's cool that someone wasn't satisfied with regular old chocolate so they went out and made it completely opposite chocolate...'nah, nah, no more regular chocolate....dark was good and milk is ok, but let's just fuck it and make it white'. I can eat lots more regular milk chocolate than I can white chocolate too. Orange tic tacs are like that too. Nevermind eating more than one, I have eaten the whole container at once. Those things are way too good to be mints. Lime tic tacs are just like the orange in that sense. They're a little harder to find, but they're a more drab shade of green than the minty ones. They might be Lemon Lime. I'm sure they're artificially colored and all, but they sure picked an unappetizing color for the Lime ones. How many freakin colors does Gatorade come in anyway? I think the people who made Gatorade were ran out of money when they were making flavors and just decided to go ahead and replace flavors with colors. Those things are great for hangovers too, for getting you rehydrated. I heard that Pedialyte is really really good for that too, but I feel funny showing up somewere with beer and baby juice. You wanna know what's NOT good for a hangover? Egg nog. I love the stuff, but forget about at those times. They should sell egg nog all year long dammit. It's not like trying to find a daffodill in August, it's freakin' egg nog! Go bump some eggs with the nog and make more. What do egg nog manufactures do for the rest of the year? Find good prices on nog for next year? ...or they could make cream and butter and stuff I guess....but I'm sure there is still some special egg nog manufacturing equipment that lays dormant for 3/4 of the year. Crank it up! Seasonal work must be crappy. Unless your making buttloads of money like those crab fishermen over by Alaska. I bet those guys make tons of money in a really short time. Then the probably come back to shore, blow the money on wine and sleeping pills and then party till next season. Ha! Man, if i made a buttload of money like that there's no telling what I would do....but I'll try. First, I'd ged the most expensive finance person I could find and ask them to watch some of my money while I blow the rest. Then I'd get into my 1990 Geo Metro hatchback, rev it up and attempt to 'burn out' as I leave the finance lady for the Honda dealership and get a grey S2000. I don't want to blow all my money on a car though because it's just going to be towed around behind my super huge motor home. Yeah, then I'll drive that thing all over blowing money left and right. Anyone is welcome. That would continue for months....at the least.

So its almost the weekend, which gets me thinking about weekends. Who got to designate which days would be 'week days' and which would be 'weekends'. I would probably guess that it's some kind of jewish thing because they had Sabbath on Sat night/Sunday. Back in the day I'm sure that people worked like everyday of the week if they weren't jewish. We got it good now though, compared to then. I wonder how much more stuff would be around if nobody acknowledged weekends. There might be lik 2/7 more stuff, ya know? Stuff is interesting too. When somebody says something about creating things, I just see it as manipulating pre-existent material to make it look different or something. I know, I know...people can create things by using words and stuff like poetry, but I'm more interested in physical stuff. Like plastic. Plastic is petroleum based and petroleum comes from dead stuff like dinosaurs. So when I'm suckind down a rootbeer through a plastic straw, I'm really sucking it through a dead dinosaur. There must have been lots of dinosaurs in Iraq because of all the oil they have there. It's like we're grave-robbing or something and I'm sure there's some kinda bad karma coming from all that. I wish I knew more about that kinda stuff. Speaking of grave-robbing, when does archaeology become grave-robbing? I think it would be cool to dig up some dead civil war guy and see what he has. I bet the only things that are left are bones, belt buckles, buttons and eyelets. Wouldn't that be strange? There would be like a handfull of eyelets from his shoes down around his ankles. I bet the market is good for Confederate eyelets right now. Pretty hot commodity. If I was going to be a grave robber I would get business cards that said "tomb raider" instead. I'm sure there's lots of ethical issues that have to be sorted out before I begin my tomb raiding business. My mom said that the first job I ever wanted was 'climbing trees'. That seems like such a good idea for such a small kid. Even now, I wouldn't mind climbing trees for a living. Not doing anything to them either. Just climb them, climb down and then pick up the paycheck on friday. Kids don't think too far into that kind of stuff, its just 'going to work'. I used to hate when people would ask what I wanted to be in elementary school. I remember that I used to screw with teachers and tell them that I wanted to be an astronaut because I was pretty certain that they would have like nothing to say about that. I was always screwing with teachers like that. Saying stuff that I knew wasn't true but would make them think I was nuts or something. They knew I wasn't nuts, but I got a kick out of it. Crazy people are, well, crazy. I think I'm going to be a terrible father. My kid is going to puke or something and I'm gonna be like "See what you did you frickin' nOOb!". :) Just kidding. I'm probably gonna tell them all kinds of fake stories that wouldn't make any sense to anyone but a kid, ya know?

I have the greatest brother in the world! This guy went out and bought me a brand new baseball glove because the one I was using was old and tired. It was way too expensive and its awesome! He also put new brakes on my car, which was a complete pain in the ass because the rotors are shot and the calipers were being little bitches. It took a lot longer than it should have. He also kicked me and my dad's asses at poker and wound up taking home $100.

Its very windy today. Too bad I have to work pretty soon.

I played a game of baseball the other day. It was really one of the best Sunday afternoons I've had in years. We had 19 players, so a full team of 9 on one side and our team had 10 (we had 4 outfielders). It was a real game. Umpire and all. A full 9 inning game which my team lost 10-6. It was so frickin' cool though. My brother Kyle was the consummate coach and he really handled the responsibility well. He filled out a grade A linup and took up the slack wherever we needed it. He even had some great rips at the plate. What really struck me about the game was the smell. I know it sounds funny, but when I was playing the infield and sporting the leather glove, the smells of the game brought be right back to my childhood. I guess I never really apprecieated the game when I was younger, but being out there again made me feel like a kid again. The way my hand smelled after 9 innings inside a leather glove, the way the dirt got in between my toes from running around the infield...its the little things like that which made me realize why I love this game so much. Smell is probably the most incomprehensible sense I could imagine. The rest of the 5 senses I can comprehend because there is more of a physical sense to them, but smell it virtually invisible. If you really think about it, scents are discerned from invisible particles in the air. Certain scents, like the smell of a baseball game, I haven't smelled in over 10 years, but they came back right away and were strangely familiar. It was exactly the same way it smelled back then. Alright, now I'm about to ponder on this subject with reckless abandon. What is the physical composition of a scent. Like, what if you could capture a scent on the atomic level, what characteristics would it have? I know that all molecules, which make up everything in our physical world, are elementary. There are no substances, that we know of, that exist beyond the Periodic Table of Elements. So, what exactly were the smells of baseball? Obviously there were molecules of the glove that separated from it and made their way into my olfactory sensors. Most likely they were carbon based atoms because leather is organic. But whatever methods went into the tanning of the leather, the oils that were applied to break the glove as well as the infield dirt that the glove was exposed to over hundreds of innings impacted the smell. I wonder what baseball smells like to a dog, because dogs have a much better sense of smell than humans. I don't mean 'a baseball'...I mean baseball in general.

Yeah, the Yankees got the skills...what the hell was Tampa Bay doing to beat them all season is beyond me. I'm just going to make up a reason. Lou Pinnella is a voodoo master and each game he plays against the Yankees he sticks pins in all their heads. At the end of every game, he removes the pins and decapitates the dolls so that the players never remember why they got beat so bad. Then he re-stuffs the heads with new stuffing and reattaches them to the bodies. When the Yankees play the Devil Rays again, they have no idea that they lost the last game so they figure that this will be an easy victory. This motivates them only enough so that they make Manny Ramierez look like a 'gamer'. This is why they lose to Tampa Bay.

Just got out of work and getting ready to go up to Montreal for a few days with my girlfriend (Lastexit) to go see Pearl Jam. I'm totally psyched! I hope you don't need a passport to go to Canada. I'm really kinda curious to see if all the Canadians look like Terrance and Phillip. I hear that there is an archaeology musuem up there too so hopefully we will have enough time to go check that out. I'm so glad that I have the next 3 days off. I don't like being a petroleum merchant. I found a job online today that totally kicks ass and I'm going to send out the resume tomorrow. I have a feeling that I'm going to go through like 7 jobs in my life and every one is going to get exponentially crazier. It's just a hunch. Like one year I'll work for a company that offers rope swing rides off of the arms of the giant Jesus statue in Rio De Janeiro and the next year I'll be a helicopter courier delivering goats blood to Tom Cruise's secret south Pacific island. Years later probably end up being a used car salesman...

Sometimes, when life gets me down, I like to pick up some chalk and challenge the folks at the old people's home to a game of hopscotch. I'm totally undefeated. Once, a long time ago, I lost a very close match to this spanish girl at school. After she won, she started yelling all this gibberish at me and then she kissed her fingers and beat her chest a couple times and pointed up at the sky. I think she was trying to tell me that her father had died from eating tacos without washing his hands. That's how I learned about personal hygiene.

When I come here, I don't necessarily want to 'write stuff' or 'read stuff'...I come here because its part of my parole. I just wanted to get that off my chest.

Awww right...I got a blog here! That's right, I'm gonna post some posts and say some things. You better believe it!