I love All Hallow's Eve. Today at my day job our usual Fight Friday was replaced in light of the holiday by Fright Friday, an event where employees (read: me) were encouraged (read: discouraged) to dress in a costume.

I wore my ratty nasty WaterFire jeans, a hoodie sweater full of holes, and carried around a little paper cup. Who was I, you ask?

The General Manager of the Boston Red Sox.

This is going to spoil the surprise for our Halloween present, but check out my answering machine message.

I've come to think of rush hour in Providence as kind of a pleasant afternoon stroll, easily slipping in and out of the crowded lines with a half dozen different alternate routes home in the event of congestion. I've become a bit of a master at it, weaving in, twisting the indecision of the accident-prone to my advantage, consistently beating the averages in my small commute home. However, thanks to the autumnal timefuck, I learned that true fear is that pleasant afternoon stroll... in the dark with 25% visibility. What was usually an enchanting erotic ballet became the awkward fumblings of Catherine the Great's pages trying to squeeze a horse-shaped peg into a human sized hole.

Heard the car door slam behind me like the distant rumble of a sawed-off, echoing fruitlessly against my ears now numbed by rage and the cold, driving New England rain blanketing the night in a chill.

So, in anticipation of its sequel, I've been trying to beat Max Payne for the past couple of weeks. Absorbed by both the kickass Matrix style effects and the gritty film noir storyline, I've generated a Mickey Spillane filter for absolutely everything I do.

The neon signs laughed with the false charm of a Yakuza - that welcoming grin of cold blooded murder. Shop Smart. Shop K-mart, they said. A sham for the den of criminal debauchery inside.

I mean absolutely *everything*. Even going down to the store has become an experience evaluated only in terms of how many people I could drop with dual Ingrams in slow motion. Add to the equation my three quarter trench coat and a somewhat drizzly evening, and this geek is a public embarassment just waiting to happen.

I walked up to the "cashier." What that really meant was the broad who took the dime for the goods. I grabbed something off of the shelf just to play it Bogart. She scanned it and without flinching an eye she said, "$8.49."

I could tell she was hiding something.

The line between fantasy and reality is a lot more black and white for most people, but apparently to me it is not so much "drawn" as it is "chalked with hopscotch pastel just begging to be hopped around over."

"I got what you need," I said lowly, growling against the deep seated rage against the loss of my wife and daughter that was forever stuck against the back of my throat, burning with the bile of grief and revenge.

I don't have a wife and daughter.

"$8.49 sir," she repeated, rolling her eyes. Real professional, this broad. Kept her hand close to her chest. To raise pulses, I pulled back against my beltline and whipped out my card. This should get me through, I thought. How wrong I was. In a heartbeat's fit of forgetfulness, a cosmic clumsy moment that takes the salt out of old dogs and the life out of a greenhorn's lungs, I fumbled the card, sending it tumbling to the floor. She just looked at me blankly with cold, unfeeling eyes.

I picked up the card, and quit acting like a douchebag.

I picked up the card, and quit acting like a douchebag.

Not that I have a whole lot of points of comparison, but RENT is easily the best musical I've ever seen. The show was considerably more low budget and laid back than I ever expected, especially since we're going on almost a decade since it made its huge splash on Broadway. Preserving its shoestring roots, the set was large and reasonably elaborate, but certainly missing the gigantic lazy susans of Meet Me in St. Louis, a certain charm that I appreciate.

One of the interesting thoughts that were proposed over the course of the night is the fact that a lot of what is in the musical is no (at least in places other than the Midwest) blase. A drag queen and a junkie's misfit adventures in Alphabet City's ghetto might have raised eyesbrows before, but - besides Elton John - does anyone even talk about AIDS anymore? I remember even five years ago when everybody who was anybody was sporting the red ribbon and the big hubbaloo with Slayer and their T-shirts. Before it was a disease that only homosexuals got. Now it's a disease that only black people get. It seems so long ago that people would talk about their one friend that got AIDS.

What's even more frightening is that the epidemic is far from over.

Tickets to RENT and I don't even have to drive to Kansas City. Living in civilization can be pretty wonderful sometimes.

At a benefits meeting this morning at my dayjob a saleslady promoting our handy dandy 401(k) package asked the question, "Does any one in here really believe Social Security is going to be around when you retire?" To which I immediately replied, "Elect a Democrat."

Jamie quit, Jodie got married, but I'm still here.

Google just innovated its way around investment bankers. Actually determining market value by using an online auction, as opposed to a couple rich white MBAs; sheer brilliance.

New Anti-Flag record out. Crunchy even in milk.

So, some guy with a key to my apartment waltzed in and took nothing but a beer from my fridge and my electric and Mach3 shaving equipment.

I wonder what this says about the value of the rest of my possessions.

Now, if this doesn't scare you out of becoming a rockstar, I don't know what will. J. Guevara's "Where Are They Know?" note is a harrowing tale of the horrors of hasbeenry, which quite frankly scares me to my very core, touching that hypersensitive nerve of failure that all rockstars have like a dentist's drill to an exposed root. Man, if 2 Skinnee J's can't make it, who can?

One time, I had a boss who told me about a horrible decision he had to make that morning. With newborn child in arm and halfway through the diaper change procedure, he looked towards the child's exhaust chute to discover that it had a couple rounds left in the clip. Eyes immediately shooting down to the brand new bathroom floor carpet, he manually intercepted the offending waste mid-shit and deposited it in the toilet, with nary a mark on the pristine floor. Proud of himself when relating the tale, I immediately responded that I would prefer never to be forced to make such a decision.

Unfortunately, I got stuck with such a decision this morning. Sleepy-eyed and in my underroos, I entered my bathroom to engage in the masculine morning ritual. Barely conscious, I begin to take care of business when I see on a single fine thread of web the biggest goddamned daddy-long-legs I'd ever seen descending upon me Dungeons and Dragons style, no doubt to infect me with its acrid venom to liquify my insides and suck me down like a disproportionately large Awful Awful. Lacking the time to thoroughly research the actual danger I was in or, even, to think of anything at all, I frantically spent a heartbeat looking for a weapon with which to dispatch the vile creature. Lacking any in my still sparse bathroom, I discovered the only one I had... was already in my hands.

The thought of that little fucker's horrible final moments, booklungs drowned in my acidic Mountain Dew heavy piss was little consolation during this afternoon's cleanup.

All hail President Beefman.

By the way, if you want a clock these motherfuckers have got the goddamned hookup. It looks like Doc Brown's garage sale over there.

Awwww sushi. Stop and Shop opened a turbonitrothunderfuck store up in Seekonk, and I finally stopped by the wicked convenient sushi bar. $5 california rolls that are fresh and quick to pick up are definitely up my alley.

At the same time, however, it is kind of disappointing. Though I've only been into it since I've come up here, sushi has consistently escaped McDonaldsization unlike all other forms of Eastern cuisine. Something about the increased liability of raw fish seems to drive away any Japanese Jack-in-the-Box contenders, I guess.

So, I'm driving back to the (401) after a weekend of hardcore peeping, and as I turn a bend in the Green Mountains and look down at a valley full of the most brilliant yellows, oranges, and reds I've ever seen, I take a moment to ponder how the hell I get so lucky.

With that aside, I'd like to expound on some other interesting facets of Vermont culture. For one, it has a lot of wildlife that interferes with traffic, much like in the Midwest. There appear to be two main signs: "Deer Crossing" and "Moose." Apparently, moose don't "cross" roads in the normal sense of the term, as that would suggest an unrealistic amount of movement. Moose instead meander across roads at a speed that is so close to zero, the state just calls the asymptote and assigns them the same traffic advisory as big rocks.

And then there's the hippies. The goddamn state is *full* of tree-hugging, Green-Party-voting, no-bra-wearing damn filthy hippies. So much so in fact, if you examine the cosmetic usage statistics, Vermont uses the lowest amount in the entire goddamned country. And that's a country with Idaho in it, man. You never see ladies clutching Avon cases in Burlington.

Best pizza in the world. Leonardo's. If you happen to be a rockstar or millionaire, I'm sure they deliver nationally.

I came up to Burlington to visit Emily, of immodest ankle bearing fame, and am absolutely overpowered by the unique beauty of autumn in Vermont. I now know why Nebraska is so drab during the winter: Vermont took all their fucking colors away.

I'm dead serious about the brilliance of these leaves. In fact, Vermont residents have become so used to visiting drivers pulling over to the side of the road and admiring the beauty that they have developed the widespread term "peeping" making perpetrators of such action "peepers." In any other state, such a term would be a bad thing.

Ireland redefined in my mind what "green" really is. I think Vermont is redefining brown, red, orange, and yellow. If only for one season, Thoreau might have been right in declaring this place as the most beautiful in the world. While I'm not ready to jump on that particular bandwagon yet, I do think I've found the most beautiful place in America.

And also a convenient border jumpspot in the event of a Bush re-election.

Time for another installment of "Strange Shafted Search Strings." I am always amazed by some of the search phrases that bring people into the Shaft website. Some are amusing, others are just strange, but this one caused me a bit of alarm.

"medicine lodge kansas occult 5 11.3 %"

Being my hometown and knowing its usual social characteristics, I was naturally a touch worried that this was going to find my mom before I knew it. So I did a little research, and found this yohan. Apparently, Medicine Lodge has a bit of an occult problem. Read the letters in particular, as they reveal a plot so sinister, a crime so egregious you will come within inches of yawning just reading about it.

I would blame the large amount of satanic material subliminally displayed throughout the Shaft website for bring this sort of bullshit my way, but I think its probably just another thing to chalk up to my redneck past.

So. My favorite band. Good show. Certainly not great. And they left right afterwards so I didn't get to meet them.

Michael Stipe, though, was absolutely amazing to watch. *That* is the kind of frontman I want to be. Always mobile, screaming at the top of my lungs to the crowd, and crawling on top of every piece of PA equipment I can reach. Peter Buck was rocking out incredibly hard as well, doing numerous big jumpkicks into the air and such. Certainly not what one would expect from REM.

But, they just didn't play the songs that I wanted to hear. My all-time favorite song ever, Nightswimming, was played on the encore of all the past 5 shows, but they played Exhuming McCarthy instead tonight.

*sigh*

Guess I'll have to wait another 2 years for them to go on tour again.

After ten years of listening to my favorite band I finally get to see them live. That's right. Sunday, Rob is going to see REM. I'm beside myself with anticipation. Seriously. Just like in their new video.

The reviews I've heard about them live almost inevitably are setting me up for a big disappointment. This is a critical time in our relationship, REM. Everyone else says that you are haughty and terrible live. They say you rough up British Airways crockery and are unpracticed. Please prove them wrong so I can love you again.

So you don't have evidence North Korea has nuclear weapons? When the hell has that stopped you before?