The other night I was driving home and what should I come across but a raccoon. Clearly a sow with a disabled foot, how the hell such a creature got this far inside the city I could not understand. A few other Prov residents, likely their first time seeing one in the flesh, stood about and marveled. After watching the sow's behavior, I could tell she was a mama. Sure enough, out of a storm drain a litter of five crawled out of the storm drain to the claps and cheers of a now huge throng of onlookers.

Ro appropriately asked, "Didn't you used to shoot those?"

"Yeah, but only after I sent a dog genetically bred to hunt and kill after them," I replied.

In other news, I found out last night that H.P. Lovecraft is buried, like, 100 feet from my house. Apparently a dunce for not knowing this, Mr. Necronomicon himself was Rhode Island born and raised. This was said as a point of pride by many Rhode Islanders, which gave me a bit of pause. Identifying yourself as progeny of the same environment that produced a dude capable of cogitating Cthulu doesn't seem to me like a particularly sane call to banner.

Incidently, I was sure to check under my bed twice for the presence of tentacle.

Last night I snatched my shitkicker hat and hit the town with Route 44 for an NNFP benefit at Providence's extraordinarily chill Black Repertory Theatre. Though we were initially billed as "dancable bluegrass," the first time Ian kicked into the big hits of Allman Brothers' "One Way Out" I think we sank that miscommunication like a 12 inch shot to the rudder. The first show featuring the full and hastily assembled complement of the band, it was a huge hit. I believe everyone had a blast, including the fine Forest Practioners who were getting their feet wet in the fine art of fundraising also for the first time that night.

We had the difficult responsibility of following a fashion show and a talented traditional Hindi dancer, both having more beauty in their left toe than we have in our entire band. Fortunately for us, beauty is not as primary an instinct as booty-shaking among tree-hugging hippies as all assembled had a true ball for their tax-deductible dollar.

Getting paid to have this much fun shouldn't be legal.

Since puberty, my face has not so much been the focus of my identity but rather a physical and spiritual battleground upon which a neverending war against my natural canine/porcine hybrid superfreak genetics is fought with bitter tears and the latest technology. Everyone's face undergoes the horrible, radical changes of hyperhormonal release, but usually these changes calm down after the endocrine system learns that it doesn't have to release everything it has all the time. Unfortunately, either my personal pituitary capacity didn't come to the same conclusion with age, or it, like my face, has an extreme dislike for me. Perhaps its still a little raw over the whole Accutane thing. Maybe its just pissed because it is losing.

The werepig that I am, I have counted on my good friend technology to help out of every debacle with my face. One of the larger fronts upon which I must wage this conflict is the ubiquitous and alarmingly fast appearance of hair. This battle is particularly perilous as I believe if left unchecked for a period of 36 hours, it may well take a federal search and rescue team to find me underneath my overgrown beard. With such high stakes, I tend to dance merrily on the bleeding edge of technology, so while Gillette is still fucking everything and going to five blades I have to settle for their new M3.

With an impressive BMW-sounding name like M3, I'm sure the guys at Gillette thought they had a winner. However I don't think their market analysts fully considered the ramifications of consumer confidence in three razor sharp blades twitching around like a 12 year old kettledrum player in the back of orchestra who has to pee. This instrument is strictly for individuals with two major qualifications: 1) outrageous facial hair growth and 2) complete lack of desire to keep any facial hair straight.

My left sideburn is now a long trapezoid while my right is quite nearly a rhombus. But hey, my five o' clock shadow didn't show up until 2pm this time.

25% is such a deceivingly small percentage that I wonder if there is something simply unethical about advertising such a percentage off a total purchase at a bookstore. I wouldn't go so far as to call it illegal per se, but in my opinion it is very much like flipping off a nun in traffic. Yeah, you *can* do it, but everyone is just going to end up thinking you're a dick.

Sadly, I wasn't able to snag the pair of latest Repairman Jack books, but I loaded up on a fair balance of trash and treasure. Among the trash is the guilty delight of another Terry Pratchett novel which like free basing is sadly both horribly addictive and fashionable in the underground. But when you are heaping tomes in your bag with blissful fantasies like, "25% means that, like, every fourth book is free," one's editorial selection can end up a heap of black tar on the concrete under the overpass.

A few folks have been asking about the show and pointing to the two new folks showing up mysteriously in the photo gallery. The answers will come my child, but only in due course.

After months of anticipation, I finally got out to see Saved! Being co-produced by one of my heroes notwithstanding, it pleases me to no end to have a 21st Century film join the illustrious John Hughes genre of high school deviant filmmaking. Loaded with abrasive satire that made even me blush, its not the God-is-not-so-great film that I came into the theater secretly wishing for. I'm not even sure if it was the Church-is-not-so-great film the trailer said it was going to be. I think, ultimately, it's another film in a long line about life on the outside looking in, but with the notable presence of thought to consult the greater outside that we all seem to inhabit.

I speak, usually at nauseating length, of the sense of urgent happiness that comes knowing there isn't an unmoved mover over your head striking down hopes and dreams with predestination schemes, but when the shit hits the fan a warm blanket of faith can become a pretty comfortable home. And in perhaps the film's most shining moment, when the biggest shit hits the fastest fan, it doesn't deny the blanket's existence at all...

It just insinuates it would be a lot warmer if shared with others.

A long while back I talked a bit about a guy Darryl I met down at the Blackstone. Expecting (and for the most part seeing) no one for the first show with the new lineup on Thursday, I was quite surprised to see Darryl show up just in time for our set. After giving him a little time to set in, before we went on I said my hellos and gave a shake.

He said he came to see us, because even if the place was full he felt like we were playing for him.

And for my penny, that advice was absolutely right.

Nice wings blanco nino, but too bad your ass got saaaacked.

For Michaela's birthday, the crew headed out once again to Tortilla Flats for their legendary appetizers (most noticably their hot wings). .plan fans will remember some months ago my boy Jesse and I headed here in search of intolerably hot wings, and promptly put the kitchen away with extreme prejudice. My taste buds tempered by the hotter fare found in at the Indian place on Wickenden and the commanding performance we had the last time we told these guys to do their worst, well, we were more than a little confident in our ability to play ball.

As luck would have it, we got the same waitress who had served us the last time we were out. Yet again we asked for the hottest wings the kitchen could produce. Yet again she attempted a small protest. However, after I told her to tell the line cooks that we were busy out in the front fucking their sisters, she suddenly recognized us.

"Are you the website guy?"

"Um... maybe?"

Google being what it is, apparently some management at Tortilla Flats found the Shaft website and the little smack I had to talk about the tameness of their hot wings. We came immediately to find out that the kitchen had in fact been waiting for us to come back in for an opportunity to inflict vengeful suffering upon their anonymous hecklers.

Insults to mothers and siblings aside, Jesse and I were still supremely confident that we could handle anything that came our way. As the appetizers came out, we got our game faces on. The first batch of wings - a mild set for the non-masochists in our crew - came out on in a tortilla shell with a nice garnish of lettuce and tomato slice. In stark contract, *ours* came out in between two plates crawdad style, almost as though the waitress was desperately trying to avoid any physical contact with the chemical used to prepare our wings.

The wings themselves were covered in a dark, dark, *dark* red covering peppered with numerous seeds of undoubtedly volcanic origin. Testosterone getting the better of common sense, I immediately dug into the first wing. I had once said that habanero peppers take three or four wings to truly kick in the pain. However, this wing was a chemical burn the moment it touched my tongue. Pain unimaginable was already covering my entire face and I had only taken a single bite. This meant the pain that was to come was undoubtedly going to be worse. In an effort to save a little face from the thorough beating, I quickly dug into another wing. Attemping to capitalize on my long standing theory that there is only so much pain from spice that a human can experience, I thought if I could just pile in wing after wing I would be able to eventually make it through my half of the order and thereby claim victory on the mighty throne of manhood.

Alas, I was saaaacked. After only the second wing, my face felt virtually indistinguishable from battery acid. Jesse and I were thoroughly rocked into the land of humility with only soulless husks quivering in the places where men once stood.

I once said that there is a definite limit to the heat that habeneros can produce. However, after empirical evidence proved otherwise, I am here to testify that Tortilla Flats can put that fucking rumor to rest for the low, low price of $6.95.

I stepped outside yesterday morning to commute to Boston with Scottie Homslice when, much to my dismay, both of my eyes started to burn like I had just sprayed hydrochloric acid Red Eye style directly into my pupils. Apparently, I neglected to catch my morning news which would have informed me immediately of an Ozone Alert in Providence.

Evidently when the Prov metro area experiences a day particularly absent of wind, the toxins that normally inhabit the air I breathe coagulate into near-sentient, invisible poison slices that find exposed eye tissue, converge, and skullfuck like hornets on angeldust. It was pretty rough going in Providence, but by the time I got to Boston I felt like the title character of a McFarlane comic book, which is to say endlessly tormented and dead with fires raging where my eyes should be. Scottie, being Jersey born and raised, spent the day laughing with glee as I languished through a sea of pollution. His own extremophile body has acclimated to smog to such a degree that his lungs physically reject air that can't be seen with the naked eye. My redneck self was stuck flipping around like a goldfish knocked out of its bowl onto some tissue paper.

I'm still boycotting the Harry Potter movie. And yes, I did spend the entire weekend by myself.

After slipping into a small coma after the disaster that was my friday night server move, I got up at what seemed to me the bright and early hour of 10am to go kick it with T-dub's crew and get our Jyhad on. In stark contrast to my earlier big game experience at the tournament, this match was punctuated by frequent and significant apologizing for the play of certain cards and an overly lengthy period of play stemming from a competitive environment that could only be described as "polite." Tomorrow we'll be hopping together to get our game on once again, hopefully with a competitive edge sharpened by a collective 6 hours of knowing each other.

"SOF?"

Check.

"Patch cables?"

Check.

"Laptop batteries?"

Check.

"Case of Red Bull?"

Check.

Sometimes being a computer geek can make you feel disproportionately important. Got a big server move tonight for my esteemed employer. My associate Scottie and I's most optmistic estimate on the amount of time it will take to complete the project is catching breakfast with his wife before it goes cold at 8am.

A lot of people have tried to empathize with how rough it is going to be, but honestly - and this is between you and me - I think Scottie and I live for this kind of shit.

Hey! Look at this Van Gogh!