I spent my first Genocide Celebration Day away from home with Andrea and her family. She put on a pretty good spread between her roommate and her alone, with all the traditional dishes and a couple curveballs that still has me wishing I lived there so I could snag the sweet leftover lovin'. However, after the ham, the turkey, the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, and the bread, I turned to her, belly full of happiness and asked, "Where's the pumpkin pie?"

She paused for a moment, gave me the finger, and said, "Probably with my new drummer. Asshole."

I didn't get any pumpkin pie.

In all the happy holiday hubbabaloo, my ass said unto me, "Rob, I have little to be thankful for."

In all fairness, it does get the shit end of the skid mark quite a bit, however I would like to think it has a decidedly better time than most asses. Spacious interior, adequate maintenance, and protection from foreign intrusion are all benefits that my ass receives with nary a complaint from me, but when it finally said that seating in the Spectre household was substandard, well, I had to put the folding chair away and agree.

I said to my ass, "Hearten, for this day you will have a throne fit for your magnitude" and departed forthwith to ye Olde Office Maxxe for sweet, sweet relief. After an extensive and carefully observed audition process, I had my selection in hand. Sadly, it seemed that the chair for which my ass was so fond would not be the one I could take home. Those wily sharks at Office Max have things called "display models" that are functional and put together, whereas the one at the front counter that you exchange your ticket for is in a box in a million unintelligible pieces.

I resolved that this could pass. After all, I'm a reasonably intelligent young man, and have been known to assemble a Star Destroyer or two back in the day. I grabbed a little beer, which would be my metric by which to gauge the effeciency of my construction. Sadly, I would pay a high price for my hubris.

After about 5 beers and a lot of head scratching, I found the directions. After unassembling the Tripodal I had created, I offered a beer to the chick that lives upstairs. It took her far fewer to complete.

Why isn't anyone asking the real important question with regard to this case? Are we *sure* Michael Jackson isn't a zombie?

I finally got the Shaft website to validate XHTML today, meaning that we are mere breaths away from turbonitrothunderfuck new layouts of the website, the first of which will no doubt commemorate our annual raping of the Native American people. As it turns out, Thanksgiving is some pretty serious shit out here. Before the Wampanoag were building casinos, I guess they were saving the white man from starvation, and it all went down just a short drive from my house. Maybe we'll have to celebrate it Shaft style with a special holiday season stylesheet.

Cox. Perhaps the most appropriately named telecom in America today. For they have a whole lot of them in their customer service department, shiny and new with interchangable attachments to make your getting-fucked-in-the-ass experience as personal, intimate, and deep as possible. After 48 hours without service, I finally get back online with the counter-intuitive superiority of their live chat support as opposed to their phone, which as near as I can tell was outsourced to a third world nation populated entirely by mongoloids; the natural result of a civilization built on brother fucking sister. I suppose I should just be thankful that my abusive telecom relationship isn't as impersonal as some folks.

So Andrea and I opened up for two amazing folks over at as220. Mary Bue, fresh from the Midwest herself, gave an absolutely captivating performance and sold me a CD that still hasn't left my player since. A really progressive sound that immediately likens itself to Tori Amos, she is a really nice girl in addition to a musician, though I must admit I wonder where her daintiness comes from because it sure as hell isn't in her tunes.

After grabbing her disc, I was treated to Ryan Fitzsimmons who apparently was from Syracuse but sounded like he was from the Midwest with this jazzy, alt-country vibe and a pearl snap shirt that would make any hick proud. The people that we get to play with are so amazing, I'm really wondering what exactly it was I did in a previous life that gave me access to such great tunes. I hope it keeps up.

I've always been a big fan of open mikes everywhere I go. It's just a good creative environment where your audience is usually only musicians, so it gives the opportunity for some good pointed criticism as well as yet another excuse to buy a friend a pint. There are, however, some inexorable truths at every open mike that I seem to consistently obliterate. I always show up retardedly early, I never tune before I arrive, and, worst of all, I shake hands with the weirdos.

There were a good crowd of folks around, punctuated by the friendly, but decidedly crazy Herb. After sitting down with a pint I shake Herb's hand and he begins to talk at me. Literally. Like I was some strange genetically-modified wasp that could only be bat down with sheer volume of words. Herb was very round, always wore sweat pants, carried around his critical gear in a plastic bag, and was convinced that preternatural energies were distrupting his electrical system with the goal of preventing him from shaving too much. After about, say, three sentences he quickly detailed his significant narcotics use; quite a thing to be doing to a complete fucking stranger. I guess crack does kill.

He gave me a CD to listen to, but I think I left it at the club. I think I'll probably go back and rip a particularly choice mp3 and put it in here, so you can hear what I mean.

And, finally, the answer to the world's biggest question has been answered.

Man, some crazy shit happens in the morning.

I woke up before noon again today it what was like the 94th consecutive day. Over the weekend I couldn't even sleep past 10am, signaling that with my 23rd birthday I am now officially lame, to forever awkwardly wade through the sea of cool with poorly fashioned crutches to barely keep my nose above water.

I've been doing some behind the scenes mojo on the website, trying to bring it up to spec. The end result on the page will be staggeringly... the same. But I assure you it would be much cooler. Seriously.

I can't tell you how much I wish I was in England right now. In the article is a rather clear example of MSNBC's conservative bias, skewing a statistic that 62% of Britons polled believe that the United States is "generally speaking, a force for good" to an endorsement of his visit.

Finally, a mass of folks ready to take this yokel to task.

Happy birthday to me!

And the second best birthday gift ever is the opportunity to rock out on the date of my creation.

See you at Zog tonight.

Andrea had her, like, 90th birthday today or something so a small soiree was thrown at her place. She was kind enough to cook some sort of hippie fresh pasta or something, and a generally good time was had by all. This good time was shared by her father's dog, who genuinely tried to fuck the life out of *every* piece of furniture in her house. Right in the middle of an emotional love note she was reading aloud for her birthday and I look over to find the dog getting busy with someone's backpack. The conversation that followed was this, verbatim:

"For fuck's sake, he's at it again!"

"She."

"She?"

"Her name is Natasha."

"I didn't know they made girls like that."

"Why is that so odd? Girls do the same thing, you know."

"Not in my experience, I guess."

My buddy A-train told me that I should go to the Great International Beer Festival with some associates of his; an outing to get me acquainted with some folks through our mutual admiration and appreciation of beer. The idea immediately struck me as brilliant, but I failed to take into consideration the Mephistophelean nature of Aaron's character. The lies he speaks may not be of his own invention, but he is truly Satan's spokesperson, giving an unassuming, friendly voice to lies of promise and paradise. At very least, I should be wary of any man who convinced me to join the Star Wars version of The Crack.

Willingly diving head first into his infinite bag of delicious deceits, I headed out to the convention center in a cab with a chick-to-guy ratio of 3:2. From the very beginning, the odds were against me. Everything seemed so innocent. We were only given a "taster's cup" which was literally the smallest size of plastic cup you could pick up at Wally World. Even at this small size, the booth representatives of various beers would only fill your cup half-full (or half-empty, depending on the number of different booths you had already visited), masking the copious consumption with little bite size servings.

However, the crowd generated an element that could not have been foreseen. You see, when twelve people are clamoring for the freshest Guinness in Rhode Island, one simply doesn't sip and savor the flavor. We were literally taking shots of beer, tanking one half-cup at a time in order to be ready for the next table. After about 12 tables, the $30 entry fee quickly became cost-efficient and the ambition to reduce the individual worth of each drink escalated to the point of obsession. By the time the night was over, in aggregate, I imagine each drink we consumed was well below a 25 cent price point.

Such rapid introduction of liquid to my renal system is greeted almost as a manufacturing deadline, my kidneys effectively saying, "Look mother fucker. You can bring whatever you want, cause we're going to package this shit Quicksilver-style and pass the savings to you." And pass, my friend, it did.

Getting in line for the shitter at any festival is a trying chore. However, at the beerfest it was a self-defeating endurance contest of high stakes and heavy competition. Imagine, if you will, the clamoring of a collected 250 drunks, each with hazy eyeballs floating from the rapid imbibement that this Satanic environment causes. Exits from the portajohns were cheered and indeed some of the more intimate pairs used the tight confines of each Port-A-Shit at the same time in an effort to bring some efficiency to the ridiculous affair. On our second piss trip and almost on the verge of release, the girls found Aaron and I waiting in line and attempted to communicate their desire to leave. The words however were lost, as A-train had already committed himself to a Zen state of meditation with the sole purpose of keeping his piss out of his pants.

The man had to piss so bad he couldn't speak.

Comfortably numb and open to suggestion, I followed our motley drunken crew to Ri-Ra's. I don't believe the bar was selected because of its Irish flair (which I loved), but rather because 1) it had alcohol and 2) it was closest. Honestly, if Chuckie Cheese was serving Bud Light, I'm sure we would've stopped there. The night from that point on included a cover band, a cab ride, and some guy telling me he would tip my sister.

What order those occurred in remains a mystery, perhaps one that it best left unsolved.

For those of you concerned about the provocation of my film-going johnson, it received little comfort last night. The geeks had a night out on the town, leaving our beloved computer screens to see the last (but likely not final) Matrix film. If you could hold on to your pajamas for a little bit and not see the film on opening night and are looking to avoid any coloration of your experience with spoilers, well, I hate to tell you this, but you might be better off with another band today. Well, any day really.

So, take The Matrix franchise, remove absolutely everything good and/or geeky from the film, sprinkle some of the magic dust that George Lucas uses during his prequel writing sessions, and then bake a gigantic choad on the film reel before distribution and perhaps you too could create the greatest film-going disappointment of the year. With a grand total of one (1) actual Matrix fighting sequence wedged in a sea of Star Wars hippie bullshit, I'm beginning to wonder if the Wachowski brothers actually remembered making a Matrix film at all, or if they just thought they were too cool for that sort of thing anymore.

Biggest piss-off of the night: the "hive-mind." In the world of machines, there's apparently a physical manifestation of 01 that speaks for the entire collective. Now, I don't have a problem with a single personification of the enemy, as any NES fan has a profound respect for boss characters. The problem is, this particular personification of the enemy fucking sucked. What The Wizard of Oz was going on with the face thing. A human face created out of bunch of constant moving machines isn't frightening. You can get the same look with one of those picture things full of pins from the mid-90s. Where's the innovation? Where's the gunfight? Just where the hell did The Matrix go in the space of six months? No questions were answered and, even worse, no questions were raised. The Matrix doesn't have to be an epic. We have enough of them already. To try just makes one look silly.

Shit. I guess while trying to get the hell out of my apartment through an unbelievable mound of leaves I forgot to talk about Kill Bill. Seriously, there's a pile literally knee-high collecting all over the goddamned state. It's like the sky itself is shedding deciduous leaves and depositing them in the most inconvenient of places. I was advised by some locals that I should take care to make sure to clean out the grill of my car every morning, lest the Satan rain completely incapacitate my engine's ability to cool itself. I assure you, it doesn't need any help in that area.

So, I've been waiting for a good Quentin Tarantino movie for such an ungodly period of time, I almost forgot what one looked like. Though significantly more puerile than Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, the non-chronological sequencing and, of course, ultra-violence finally made everything alright in the world of film. It was like we'd been missing something all this time.

The source of irritation though, is the segregation into a two parter. As big a fan as I am of upcoming double-disc releases, I'm already waiting on The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Really, my film-going cock has been teased enough.