1. What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before?
Performed a wedding as Reverend Martin Kruse

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I'm really not one for resolutions.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Karen and Denis brought the handsome and smartly dressed Julian Raphael into the world.



4. Did anyone close to you die?
Nope. Although I heard this summer that an old buddy from LA killed himself.


5. What countries did you visit?
Nowhere.


6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked
in 2008?
A better president.

7. What date from 2008 will remain etched upon your
memory, and why? November 2nd.


8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Made a little more money this year than last.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Getting Nickel to his homework.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I made out pretty well, this year.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
New fawcett for the kitchen.


12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
President Obama

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
George W Bush

14. Where did most of your money go?
My kids.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited
about?
Nothing immediately leaps to mind.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?


17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a. happier or sadder? Happier
b. thinner or fatter? A little Thinner
c. richer or poorer? A little richer

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Saved money.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Fretted less over things that I have no control over.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
I spent Christmas packed under layers upon layers of snow.

22. Did you fall in love in 2008?
Just the usual suspects. Carole, Medbh, Nick, Nezzie, Claire...

23. How many one-night stands?
None.

24. What was your favorite TV program?


25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this
time last year?
I try not to hate. It's a nasty word.

26. What was the best book you read?
Get Up: A 12-step Guide to Recovery for Misfits, Freaks, and Weirdos by Bucky Sinister
Even if you don't think you need it, read it. It'll hip you to some concepts that will change the way you think about the 12-Step world.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
The record I bought this year was Kings of Leon's Only by Night, which sounds a lot like the Pixies... Interesting.

28. What did you want and get?
Better sales at work.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?
The summer block buster Iron Man.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were
you?
I turned 44 and hung out with Carole and Jesse on one of the last nights of Encanto.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
George W Bush meeting an untimely demise.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
WTF?

34. What kept you sane?
Carole

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Barack Obama

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
The Election.

37. Who did you miss?
Gabrielle Bouliane

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Denis Theriault, my brother in law.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008:
Never underestimate the power of friendship.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
"I get up
 I get down..." 
Yes, Close to the Edge

41. Who did you spend the most time on the phone
with?
Melissa from work.

42. What LJ users did you meet for the first time?
No one, this year.

01. soundcheck banter
02. Waka
03. Pictures of Matchstick Men
04. The Long Plastic Hallway **the first line of this song reflects my youth**
05. Turquoise Jewelry
06. Mao Reminisces About His Days In Southern China
07. Militia Song
08. Skinhead Stomp
09. White Riot
10. (I Was So) Wasted
11. Shut Us Down
12. R n R Uzbekistan
13. Seven Languages
14. Good Guys and Bad Guys
15. Take The Skinheads Bowling
16. When I Win The Lottery
17. L'aguardiente
18. New Roman Times
19. Interstellar Overdrive

I wound up at Karen's house in Oakland Monday night. (Details to come, look for Desert Journals in the next couple days).

She lent me this book called, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, an oral biography of Warren Zevon.

I can't put it down.

Thanks, Karen!

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) * Star books that you've read for pleasure (versus something you read because someone made you. it also counts if you've reread it for fun later) (I'm not doing this part...even the few that were assignments, I read willingly and enjoyed)
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien*
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (only the first 3)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee*
6 The Bible (most of it)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte*
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell*
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller*
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien*
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

God love him...

( Read more... )

But I think they are funnier when they are totally absurd, like mine:
(stolen from everyone)

ROCK STAR NAME: (first pet, current car): Spike Volvo

GANGSTA NAME: (favorite ice cream flavor, favorite kind of shoe): Vanilla Adidas

HIPPY NAME: (what you ate for breakfast, favorite tree): Muffin Willow

SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, city where you were born): Peter Pasadena

STAR WARS NAME: (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 of your first name): KruMa

SUPERHERO NAME: (favorite color, favorite drink): Black Whiskey

NASCAR NAME: (the first names of your grandfathers/grandmothers): Martin Ana

STRIPPER NAME: (the name of your favorite perfume/cologne/scent, favorite candy): Polo Mounds

TV WEATHER ANCHOR NAME: (Your 4th grade teacher’s last name, a city that starts with the same letter): Norwood Nehalem

SPY NAME: (your favorite season/holiday, flower): Autumn Poppy

CARTOON NAME: (favorite fruit, article of clothing you’re wearing right now): Mango Cammoflage?

I love Mike Doughty. There. I said it. I love the guy. I loved it when he told me I was too loaded to come into the Knitting Factory so many years ago. I love that he played with a totally underrated band, Soul Coughing. I love that he kicked smack and lived to tell about it. I love that he's religious and not in-your-fucking-face about it. I imagine he'd talk to you about it, if you ask. You could have on his last tour. I loved that the last tour, he had a jar in which people posited their questions and he picked them at random: "How does a guy get over a broken heart?" He said, "Shave every day. I'm serious..."

Mike Doughty didn't pick my question on that tour because I was too broke to see him in that small performance space on North Mississippi Street. I imagine it must have been fun, since it was small and intimate.

But it's always taken a little time for the music to hit me... You never know how your art will impact someone when you throw it out there. All my art wound up seeming interesting to a couple people but I never pushed it to "the next level," mostly because I couldn't imagine doing so. But Doughty has. And God bless him for it. We're incredibly lucky.

I saw him the other night at the Wonder Ballroom. I threw caution to the wind and dropped all my lunch money on a ticket. It was worth it. Rode my bike all the way across town, nearly bonked out, but found a pizza place nearby--terrible pizza, btw--and went into the show. My son Nickel was right at the stage with his mom, who acted bitter and unpleasant toward me. (I mean, it's been like 9 years, let it go).

I had a couple beers and watched the show. He played well, with his band. They were pretty darned good. I love his drummer. Then Doughty said, "This song is only 60% original." Then he played the song in the video and it finally struck me what it's about. So, I'm embedding it here.

I'm pretty political, but you wouldn't know it from my LJ of late. I'm just fed up with all the bullshit with the election. Yeah, I'm down with Obama, but while he and Hillary snipe at each other, there are fine young people, Iraqis and Americans, dying over the twisted thinking sitting in the white house.

And I've really had it.

And I've run out of things to say about it.

One word, and one word only. No hyphenated cheats. One. WORD. ONLY.

You.
Can.
Only.
Type.
One.
Word.

Not as easy as you might think. Remember: one word answers.

1.Where is your mobile phone? TV
2.Your significant other? work
3.Your hair? fucked
4.Your mother? dead
5.Your father? dead
6.Your favorite thing? Claire
7.Your dream last night? War
8.Your favorite drink? Pabst
9.Your dream/goal? Ireland
10.The room you're in? Basement
11.Your ex? Bitter
12.Your fear? defeat
13.Where do you want to be in 6 years? wealthier
14.Where were you last night? asleep
15.What you're not? dead
16.Muffins? Blueberry
17.One of your wish list items? Transporter
18.Where you grew up? Brooklyn
19.The last thing you did? worked
20.What are you wearing? camos
21.Your TV? off
22.Your pets? annoying
23.Your computer? elderly
24.Your life? incredible
25.Your mood? reflective
26.Missing someone? Veronica
27.Your car? guzzler
28.Something you're not wearing? handcuffs
29.Favorite Store? iTunes
30.Your summer? gone
31.Like someone? wife
32.Your favorite color? black
33.When is the last time you laughed? work
34.Last time you cried? forget

My mood:

so last night, I'm thinkin, wtf, I should write something into my LJ since it's been, like, forevah since I said anything... worthwhile or not...

Facts being what they are, I'm simply not as deeply embedded in the LJ world as I used to be. I got shit going on all the time. I don't even have time to enjoy my beloved beer and PC games.

So, last night I'm poking around on LJ and find that there is some kind of boycott happening. Something to do with new owners who don't seem to get the LJ scene and its many little subcultures and sub-sets, particularly the folks who don't feel like dumping money into this proof that a hundred monkeys won't ever write a Shakespearian sonnet, although some surprisingly good writing comes along, all the same.

The most embarrassing moment of my young life was when I was 8. Emerging from the showers with my stupid yellow towel, I hung the towel on the fence at the public pool in my new town and dove right-the-fuck into the 6ft end. Some asshole 4th-grader finked me out to the lifeguard for both diving (a strict no-no, posted nowhere) and getting into the pool during rest-period, a double no-no. The lifeguard, an arrogant, '70s longhair with a six-pack stomach pulled the hook off the fence and splashed it into the water and strung it through my under-arms, yanking me out of the water. They didn't call it time-out. It was called, "The Penalty Box," and I got a maximum sentence of one hour and a half there, where all the shit-head kids spit on me and snapped their towels and made farting noises. Evidently, another sin at this new public pool was farting in the water.

So, with this story in mind, I feel that were I to post last night, during the "boycott," I would once again be the "only kid in the pool."

So, I respected the boycott.

And what I was gonna say wasn't all that pressing, anyhow.

On the other hand, I didn't really feel all that passionate about the boycott, either.

Just sayin'...

(In case you're wondering, I was going to say something vacuous about Jethro Tull and how their music somehow made a good impression on me back in the day. Like I said, nothing earth shattering here...)

i'll think twice next time i wanna say something nice to someone...

be nice and they think you're being manipulative.

well, lick the nutz and call me when you're human.

i could go into details, but the last time i did that, the person i was talking about died.

i had nothing to do with it.

so, whatever.

not interested.

keep moving.

-s_W