In 1998, I got a new credit card in the mail and after thinking about how many photocopies I could make for $1500 or if that was enough to buy like one sixtyfourth of an acre in some deserted forest, enough to build some kind of treehouse-esque unabomber shack, I suddenly realized that I had the insane desire to buy a MiniDisc recorder.  So I rushed over to The Good Guys, this old Best Buy-esuqe electronics store, and bought a Sony MZ-R50 and rushed home and recorded Joe Satriani’s Crystal Planet onto a blank disc.

(Reasons significant: 1) Joe Satriani recorded his first album after receiving a credit card in the mail; 2) He was signed to Sony, and I think a song of his was in a MiniDisc commercial, not that there were tons of those in the US; 3) I had recently broken up with a girlfriend, and the reason I broke up with her, or the catalyst at least, was driving two hours to Portland with Ryan in his Miata to see Joe Satriani, listening to CP the whole way there, and both of us bitching about our respective girlfriends and vowing to somehow escape the situations, only I did and he did not.)

I did not have a good way to record digital to digital for a long time, and the MiniDisc required you to record stuff in real-time - you didn’t just download a bunch of MP3s and dump them to the disc.  You also had to carry around however many discs with you, and if you brought three and went to work, you were guaranteed to be sick of all of them by the time you got to the train station.  I vividly remember going on an awful first date with a lowtalker who produced feminist programming for cable access and still lived with her mom and wanted to go to dinner at a soup restaurant and then go to see this movie about white supremacists, and then I really fucked things up because the movie interviewed all of these white supremacists in Bloomington, Indiana, and while they’re talking to these guys about the evils of Jews, they’re all drinking out of Pizza Express cups and I’m like HOLY SHIT THOSE ARE PIZZA EXPRESS CUPS I HAVE LIKE 90 OF THOSE IN MY APARTMENT.  She was still somehow interested and kept calling and I eventually told her I was in love with someone who lived in LA, which was partially true anyway.  So after this first date, I had to walk her to her car at the cable access thing, and it was like eleventy billion blocks from the train station.  And the only MD I had with me was a best-of from Millions of Dead Cops, which is like 27 songs, a dozen of them being “John Wayne Was a Nazi” and the rest being entirely unintelligible 22-second long songs.  And I think I listened to it nine times on the walk back to the train.  And that’s why I got an iPod.

I have an 80GB iPod and it’s almost full, and it’s also lasted longer than any other, which means it will fail soon.  It is my damn lifeline for morning traffic though.  Is there something that will hold more music that I need to get?  Maybe I need to get a bunch of iPods and put them on a bandolier like Chewbacca.  If they made an iPhone that could fit 80 GB I would just do that.  Maybe when the drive dies in this (inevitable) I will find a way to hack it into a socket that I can hot-swap a bunch of different drives.  Maybe I will just wise up and say “why the fuck do I have all of these Charlie Parker albums and I only listen to two of the songs, so fuck it” and get the collection down so it will fit on my iPhone.

I’ve still got all of this MiniDisc crap in my storage locker.  I think if I had infinite time I would make some kind of art project out of it, like make a MiniDisc-based mellotron keyboard. Someone did a movie about the mellotron, a documentary, which I guess is a lot better than my last attempt at a documentary.  I got blindingly drunk in Laguardia airport, then had to fly to Pittsburg via Cincinnati Ohio (which is really in Kentucky, the airport I mean) and so I got to OH/KY and had a few more beers and decided I was going to make a concept movie about the moving walkways in the airport and started filming The Walkway is about to end, which is basically me sitting on the floor by the end of the walkway, and every ten seconds, a robot voice says “the walkway is about to end!” and every single person that walks past ignores it and stumbles when the moving ground becomes non-moving ground, and the whole thing is an important metaphor for something, but then I started to sober up and had to catch a plane to Pittsburgh and that’s the end of the story.  (The footage for that is in my storage locker, too.)

So Brad Hawpe got let go this morning. What a bummer.  I mean, the guy was not doing well statistically, and the Rockies have a deluge of outfielders that are outperforming him, and they need to clear the roster spot to get some kind of pitching relief.  But still, it bothers me.

Hawpe’s one of those ghosts of 2007 that remind me of why I became a Rockies fan in the first place.  The very first free t-shirt I got at Coors Field was a Hawpe shirt.  He used to be an incredible hitter, the kind of guy who always batted well north of .300 and would sky almost any shot that was left up.  Between him and Holliday in right field, you had this incredible one-two punch that would do serious damage to weak pitching.  I went to a lot of lopsided games that were chiefly his fault.

He’s been on a downward sprial, though.  He almost won the 2008 All-Star game with a robbed home run, and now he’s hitting in the mid-hundreds. It’s so strange how all of the 2007 alumni have just fallen apart. Garrett Atkins got released from the Orioles for poor plate performance (just showing up is average plate performance for Baltimore); Kaz Matsui was batting like 0 for 29 for the Astros before getting let go.  I won’t even get into Aaron Cook.

I just saw Hawpe play on Saturday, and didn’t really think it would be one of his last games.  I thought since he made it past the trade deadline, he’d coast until winter.  Guess I’ll have to get used to seeing him in a White Sox uniform, or where ever he goes.

This happens to me constantly.  It also happens to my Mac.  I don’t entirely know what the phenomenon is called, other than “why the hell does my computer keep doing this.”  But I wrote about it in a story I was working on, so here’s my best explanation:

I opened the laptop, but it wouldn’t boot.  I didn’t know if it got zapped, or if this was one of those Windows dance of sleep things, where the computer is sleeping and you hit the power button for 1.7 seconds and not 1.9 seconds and it wakes up and asks you if you want to put it to sleep, but when you try to hit the button again, it does sleep, or it reboots, but if you hold the button for the same amount of time because you want it to reboot, it doesn’t reboot and then it asks you if you want to make it sleep, but sleep is different than suspend, because for suspend, you have to hold the button for 1.8 seconds and then not hold it for 1.6 seconds and then hold it for 1.7 seconds, or it won’t wake up and/or it will ask you if you want to suspend.

I think after I make my first million dollars, I am going to shut off all of the sleep options on my laptop, and physically remove the power button, and then hardwire the power cord into a Yamaha generator, and then pay someone to constantly add oil and gas to the generator and haul it around 20 paces behind me like guys in Saudi Arabia haul around their wives but no burka and then I will get some kind of BOSE headphone so I don’t have to hear the generator and maybe I will have to hire a second guy to constantly swap out the AA batteries in the BOSE headphones and maybe have a second set with fresh batteries so I can hot-swap them and not have to hear the generator while I’m swapping out the batteries, although that’s probably not a full-time position, so maybe I’ll get that guy to also transcribe the thousand or two spiral notebooks of hand-written garbage I’ve hand-written over the last two dozen years, provided he can read my handwriting, and good luck, because I can’t even read my own fucking handwriting at this point.

Here’s a picture of me making candles in 2002.  You probably use a similar setup when you’re making meth, which I’ve never done, but apparently the state of California thinks everyone does, because I spent twenty damn minutes trying to buy some Claritin-D at Safeway yesterday, and it probably takes less paperwork to buy dynamite.

(Actually I think my elevation is something like 13 feet, but I don’t really know how to check.)

I made it back from my short trip to Denver yesterday afternoon.  We had a great time with no major hassles, other than Denver’s horribly mismanaged airport security line, and a couple of pouty four-pawed felines who get upset when we leave them with a petsitter.  The only real issue is the trip seemed way short, and we barely saw any of the city, aside from Coors Field.

My perception of Denver is weird, because when I lived there, I thought it was a pretty small place.  But when I think about all of the places we didn’t see at all during this trip, I realize it’s pretty damn huge.  And I also realize now that in my year there, I barely scratched the surface; there are so many things I never did there, I could probably line up a years’ worth of weekend voyages and daytrips and visits and expeditions.  And part of that is that during my year there, we spent almost every weekend going to the movie theater at Stapleton, and then going to the Target there.  There’s a lot of good food in town, but I ended up at Bar Louie’s or Breckenridge Brewery eating nachos and wings and trying to watch a game on mute.  I feel like if I had the time, I would be able to do a lot more there.

Example: we went to the Denver Art Museum.  Never went when I lived there, and I was slightly reluctant only because the King Tut thing is there now, which means there’s this mad rush of confusion with the herds heading in to see the mummies. But for ten bucks, we spent a couple of hours looking through the exhibits, and even the outside of the buildings is pretty awesome looking.  I mean, I am always conflicted about fine art, because there are pieces I really like, and not just photorealistic painting, but modern art that elicits some kind of response from me.  But there are other things that don’t, maybe because I’m an idiot or never studied art, or don’t see how a fire hydrant painted blue is supposed to signify the coming of a second ice age due to botched foreign policy.  But the DAM had some interesting stuff, and it’s just another example of something I completely missed while I lived there.

Anyway, I’m slowly getting the pictures on flickr, and I’ll write up the baseball games eventually…

Hello from Denver, my former home and now a great vacation spot for me to get my baseball fix once a year.  We got into town Thursday night, saw the Rockies beat the Brewers last night, and will go tonight and sit right behind home plate for game two of the series.  We also took the stadium tour and I got some great pictures from the field.  We will be flying back tomorrow, which thankfully means we get to miss the last game.  Sunday is “faith day”, sponsored by the jesus freaks at Chick-Fil-A.  “Faith day” is code for conservative christian day, when all of the lovely folks from Colorado Springs take a break from their megachurch and come up to see a baseball game with the heathens and sinners. I’m very tempted to go rent a press-on-beard and turban and see if “faith day” really means all faiths.  I’m sure nobody would get the joke.

There are a lot of things I love and miss about Denver, but that’s sure not one of them.  Like yesterday, I was sitting down in the club level to eat my pizza, and overheard some windbags losing their shit about the TERROR MOSQUE, repeating ad nauseam whatever Fox and Friends told them to believe about the mosque going in “at” ground zero in New York.  I honestly don’t give a shit either way, and I really don’t like to burn cycles on politics, but as a person who was in lower Manhattan in the fall nine years ago, I really don’t like it when tea party types circle-jerk in the name of all things 9/11.

Anyway, Denver is weird in that way.  I mean, it can be a very left-leaning place - there are a lot of hipster types with way too many tattoos that smoke way too much pot and spend a lot of time eating lean and mountain biking and a bunch of other stuff that’s pretty much incompatible with the belief system proclaimed by all of the christian conservative types that stomp around here.  It’s weird that a city with as many damn pot dispensaries can also have so many megachurches.  (In our old neighborhood - LoDo - pretty much every former Pilates or Yoga studio in the area has converted into a legal pot store, with a cheeky name like “Rocky Mountain High”.  I think some law must have changed right after we left, or people just wised up that selling medical weed is way more profitable than running a doggie day care.)

It’s weird to be back in general.  It’s not as oddly nostalgic as it was the last few times I returned, but it is still weird to vacation in a place I used to live.  I mean, we parked last night in the lot that I used to look at all day when I was in my office writing.  And it looks like that apartment’s vacant, so if I really wanted to come back in exactly the same fashion, there you go.  But it’s funny - we were talking the other day about “wasn’t that apartment really great”?  And then we started thinking - “yeah, but when the sun rose in the morning, the bedroom turned into a sauna”, and “there were no screens on the windows, and these giant Jurassic Park bugs would fly in”, and “every time the garage door opened, two floors below, you heard this ‘beep beep beep’ sound”.  I still did like the layout of the place though.  One of our main criteria when we shopped for our new place was “some place like Denver, but to own instead of rent”.  And the neighborhood is hurting, tenant-wise.  It looks like the place is only at a third occupancy, and they’ve built several super-huge modern apartment buildings, which all sit vacant.

Not much else.  My nephew turns 13 today, which is weird.  I vividly remember my 13th, if only because my parents were getting divorced then.  I can’t even imagine my parents married now, so it’s weird to think of their split.  I just remember being overly concerned about getting a home computer, because I spent my hours writing BASIC code on sheets of paper, trying to invent a new Zork-type game to streamline my D&D playing experience.  So you know where my priorities were those days.

Okay, I should get off of this shared computer in the business center and go find a quiet place to write on my netbook for a bit before we start the day.  Full report when I get back to sea level and have my real mac and the ability to upload a few thousand photos.