The middle toe on my right foot is red and purple. I'm thinking that's not normal.

I'm hung up over smayx. I cannot exactly justify why but she does remind me of a woman I had a huge crush on in college. Oh, if only...

Uh-oh... I'm staring at women again.

What an amazing life I lead. This isn't to say that I am in an enviable position. Far from it. But, I cannot, at least, say that I lead a boring life. What I would give for a boring life! Imagine it...

Some dolt reactivated my account for three more months. Huh... Okay. Thanks. Dolt.

I'm done with Suicide Girls. The models are finally boring me and I doubt the future holds much change. Hey, just like politics! Anyway, adios.

This is a new post. No, really...

Today is my birthday...

.

...but, it's still all about tits. This beautiful woman is still, amazingly, not a Suicide. That's about as logical as napkin bath towels, people. Show any support you can for her, she deserves it. She's a sweetheart and a treat for the eyes. You rock, Kleio! You know, she may be the only reason I renew my subscription... Weird.

I wanted to write something profound on my birthday, maybe even something detailing how wonderful my life has become thanks to the love of my wife, but instead... Oh well.

Back in October of 2004, nearing my little niece Gabrielle's birthday, I stopped on my local Sunday route to buy a Barnes and Noble gift card so that I wouldn't have to be bothered for actually considering what to buy as a gift for my niece. On my way into the store I caught a glimpse at a thick book, shrink-wrapped and looking all the while like a dictionary, sitting on the new arrival section of the store. Forever a victim of the cruel master of the written text, I went instantly to the book and picked it up. It's cover was black and had a matte finish. I read the title, emblazoned in, naturally, white type: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It was written by some woman named Susanna Clarke. I frowned. What the fuck was this damn thing? Did I know of the author? Not likely. Why was it so damn heavy? Is this a historical piece? Should I care? Whatever trick the muse of literature had used to lure me towards the damn big book had worked even after I put it down and walked a few paces away. I literally turned back around and picked up the book again, scrutinizing it. I was puzzled. On the back sleeve were several quotes praising the piece, and one made me blink in surprise. It was written by Neil Gaiman, an artist I admired greatly at the time (this was before his terrible "Anansi Boys" was released and the clumsy film "Mirror Mask," which he wrote the screenplay for, hit the theaters...), and in it he praised Clarke's ability to weave the fantastic and the historical so seamlessly. Not knowing at all what the book was about (it was shrink-wrapped, remember), I took the damn thing up to the register and bought it, almost forgetting to get my niece's gift card in the process. In the company van minutes later I tore off the plastic protection and cracked open "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" for the first time.

People often speak of favorite things that rule their idle times; books, or movies, or drug habits. Whatever... I'd never really had favorites specifically in music or movies or books or art or any form of expression. Then I saw Hitchcock's "Vertigo." On the television, there used to be a syndicated program on PBS titled "The Prisoner," starring Patrick McGoohan, which I watched obsessively as a baffled child and returned to decades later as a bored, listless man of thirty, awed and ashamed. In an unwearyingly boring art class at Sierra College, a drab instructor put up a slide of a painting by an Italian Baroque artist named Caravaggio. In 2000, I bought my first Stereolab CD on a whim after reading a small article about the band in "Spin" magazine. Suddenly, I indeed had fucking favorites to hang my loyalties upon. With the pinnacles of these respective art forms establishing a measure by which to judge all of the others, I began to tout proudly about my favorites for this and that and so fucking on, but literature escaped such tagging. I don't know exactly why.

I'd read obsessively. I loved Philip K. Dick because he questioned everything under the sun. Robert Asprin, God rest his soul, made me a reader in my teens thanks to his addictive Myth series featuring the adventures of Skeeve, Aahz and Tananda. James Morrow makes me hate him for his ability to work with words so damn beautifully. Certain books, like Gaiman's "American Gods," Lethem's "Amnesia Moon," or Morrow's "This Is the Way the World Ends" knocked my mind out cold. But, still... I never touted a favorite book up to anyone. I thought it impossible. A book demands too much of your time, too much of your mind to just simply be labeled good or bad. Why bother if it just to represent all of that time in a simple equation? True, I read a lot of lame duck books, but none really made me angry like a movie could, or an over-hyped album. I'd read "The Hobbit" and thought, "That was boring," but I wasn't angry. I could see what the author was trying to pull off, but he failed in my estimation. It never really bothered me not being able to say I had a favorite book.

Today I finished listening to an audio reading of "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" for the fifth time. Actually, it may be the sixth...? Huh. Anyway, as with all the previous times, I was mesmerized. Pure, unfailing escapism is a beautiful fucking thing, isn't it? The reader for this recording is also known to me by name: Simon Prebble. He could make the Bible interesting. Shit, he could read a box of cereal's ingredients and make me burst into tears. Anyway, to get to the fucking point, this book is it. It really is. My favorite fucking book. Period. None come close. It's ridiculous.

I wanted to write something clever, but I think my brain is hanging out with my stomach. This modern world climate drags me down. I read things and I think, "People need to start dying a lot faster a lot sooner starting now," and I become aghast at my selfish ideology because, naturally, I don't want to include myself in that Great Purging of the Human Beings that nature needs so badly. In truth, nature will win in the end, because nature will still go on even if this planet becomes a lifeless hulk rivaling that of her orbiting tomb we call the moon. Man will lose. So, why gripe about the possible loss of drinking water for the next generation of bunny humping carbon wastes? Why feel a moment of desolate isolation when confronted with the sad, same old song of the rich getting richer and the poor helping the rich get richer? Really, why care about anything at all?

Well, if you don't care then you become a husk of a thing, dry and crackling. You shrivel up and resemble nothing but that which should be rotting in a pine box six feet under the ground. There is no true revolution without blood, but the sight of blood makes me nauseous. Should I become like our world leaders? Get some grip of lunatics to do all the killing for me, and leave the statistics for my eyes only? Nah. That's hard work!

Why am I writing this? I dunno... I'm okay. Life seems fine. I'm, like, still relatively healthy and happy in my marriage. I don't live in constant fear of my well being or for those I care about the most. The world just seems like a blacker place to me these past several years. The sun's trajectory seems to slip closer and closer to the horizon daily. I am poor. I have debt. I try to mend these things as much as a man who is unimpressed with the materialistic things of the world can be motivated, which is to say hardly. I fancy myself an intelligent man, but conversation has dried up. Magazines and websites ring the same bell of doom every day, the world gets uglier and uglier, and people get more and more present and more and more fat and more and more and more and more and it just gets to be sharp enough of a thing that it punctures the thin layer of a scab I have over my heart and--BAM!--I write this shit.

So, yeah. I'm fine. Thanks.