Crossing Ohio

Ohio highways pretty much sucked. I was driving through construction zones the majority of the time. And for some reason they had 5 grades of unleaded fuel at the pump... 5? WTF

Pennslvania was nice, for all of the 60 or so miles I drove through it. Then New York, up into Buffalo. New York was nice, but lots of bad drivers. They must have been coming from Ohio cause there were lots of bad drivers there too.

Niagra Falls, on the U.S. side is a ghetto, and not like the nice ghetto Tim lives in, but something like that movie with Wesly Snipes and Judd Nelson, about crack houses. Other than the Falls themselves (on the US side), I have expected someone looking like Chris Rock to be running around, shouting at people at the crack den.

Canada was great, eh! While the Canadian side of the Falls was very much like Branson, it was not a shithole. The people were nice, the area was clean and there were no projects. The view of the falls is better on the Canadian side, but when you go on the boat to see the falls I think you get equally wet. I had a Canadian Beer called Rickards, which was excellent, I'm going to have to look for it here.

Then I went up to Toronto on maybe the 4th day. All I can say is that city is freakin huge. Down the main street of the city is something like the Delmar, except if the loop was maybe 5 miles long! There were people everywhere and much diversity. Ahh, the last place I expected to see tons of Asians was Canada, but there they were. While I was in Canada I went to a couple wineries, toured two castles (Dundurn Castle and Casa Loma), and went up the CN Tower. Canada was pretty cool...

Going home I went down through Detroit, which leaves me able to say... Detroit=Shithole.

Back in town

Well vacation was good, but as with all vacations it seemed to end too soon and now I'm back home having to go to work tommorow. Seriously, anyone wanna hire a CCJ graduate from UMSL? I want to tell my job to go fuck itself in the worst way.

Back to vacation.

Last week I was on my way to Niagra Falls, and after a very long drive I stayed the night in Cleveland. Contrary to popular belief, Drew Carey is a liar, because Cleveland most definately did not rock. Downtown was nice, but all the outlying areas were kinda run down looking, and after all the town was created on the backbone of the steel industry. I saw Jacobs Field, which was pretty nice and the Indians even won that night! While in Cleveland I took a tour of a WWII submarine, which was really neat. I also went to the Rock N ROll Hall of Fame, which was ok....I just didn't think to much of it. It struck me as a collection of junk that rock stars didn't want anymore and they decided to call it a museum.

On day two Cleveland pulled a fast one on me, by serving the most awful sandwich ever made and the worst resturaunt ever created: Bennegins. It was a ham and turky sandwich with chedder cheese in the middle, then the whole thing was dipped in batter and deep fried. Sprinkled with powdered sugar and with a rasberry sauce to dip it in, this monstrousity was delivered to me and made me ill. Bennegins=Bad

More to come!

I graduated!

Well, I'm officially a college graduate from U.M.S.L.

Tommorow I leave to go on vacation.

I'd like to call my job and tell 'em I quit. (That would feel exquisite)

Playback

Blurbs

Apparently there was a "blurb" as Heather calls it, about us in PlaybackStl. Its not much but you can check it out here.

Don't see Wolf Creek, it fucking sucked, even while we were drinking 100 proof Southern Comfort... Now thats some big suck.

Rosetta Stoned

So about a week ago I had, what in my singular estimation could only be called, a highly vivid dream about my ex girlfriend Emily. Dream perhaps, or nightmare perhaps, I do not know. I awoke and felt really shaken, like somewhere inside of me was a feeling that a flicker of life was gone and that I should be sad. I did feel bad, I felt sad, I felt as if a part of me had actually died, perhaps I left a part of myself inside my dream and when I awoke the door to bring this conciousness closed and it was forever lost. That is the feeling I had when I woke up.

And in that moment where you first wake up and you do not have your bearings, for a split second I actually have to ask myself why I feel so empty. But just as quickly as I questioned my new unknown emtional loss of being, I recalled the dream, which seemed nothing short of a vivid memory that I was mulling over in my head. For a time this particular morning it was no longer a dream but rather a memory, once that I might have staked my life upon being something I really, truly experienced. It was so powerful that even once I poured my morning coffee and was driving to work, I still felt the inner workings of my mind going over the scenario over and over and over, trying to detail every last aspect of the dream. From my personal experience it seems that the intricasies of a dream fade as time passes from my own inital recognition.

In my dream I was standing over her body, I was looking down upon her as she exhaled her last breath. She was pale white and even the color had run from her lips as if it was trying to hitch a ride on her soul as it was departing her body. Her chest caved and sank as I could hear the final exhalation of breath, a hollow sound that sent chills through my body. And it was cold, freezing, so cold that I was shaking, but that may have been caused by my reaction to this scene. I could see the last heated breath stream out of her mouth and then nothing, nothing at all. Only stillness. Stillness until I fell to my knees, as if in defeat and in total and utter despair, tears creeped up and out from behind my eyes as I held my hands to my face as if maybe by some bleak chance God himself my hide this from my vision and when I looked back she would be alive.

I knelt there next to her body, which was still, and began rocking back and fourth. Her head lay at my knees, and I was hunched over, having moved my hands from my face and placed them on her own. She was so cold, but I could not let go. I looked down and saw everything that I loved, everything that was important to me, I watched it perish and there was nothing I could do. As I cried harder I ran my fingers across her face, feeling her lips and her soft cheeks that were now ice cold, over he eyelids, across her forehead and up to her scalp. I finally opened my eyes to look directly down upon her and see her face with tiny trickles of liquid on it from my tears.

I called my father and he came over. For some reason he said we should bury her, thats the part I don't get. I don't remember anything in the dream that reminded me of civilization, so perhaps it was set in the extreme past. But he said we should bury her, so after I stopped crying we got some shovels and went out back. As we dug I caught site of her body, which my father had brought outside in preperation for burial. When I saw it I broke down again, this time just collapsing into the mud, tears streaming down my cheeks. My father told me there was nothing I could do, and he continued to dig the entire grave on his own. There was some sort of unspoken knowledge that my father had had to bury my mom in the same manner, and he had gone through something just as terrible, and he tried to bear my burden of sorrow.

He finished digging and helped me lower her in, loosely covered in sheets to shield her. I stood there in the cold, dark night, as I watched my father he bury the only person I ever loved. I don't know why she died, or how, only that she did, and only that it felt real.

"It was so real, like I woke up and walked around
Also a bit terrifying, I don't want to be alone when I tell this story
Overwhelmed as one would be, placed in my position
Such a heavy burden now to be the one
Born to bear and read to all
The details of our ending"

Cinco De Mayo

This pretty much says it all. Come see us at Just Bills. Apparently we're playing with some Goth Vampire band, I'm totally serious. So we thought that we should dress up in some kind of theme too.

The best we came up with was since it is going to be Cinco De Mayo on friday we should dress up as mexicans. Somehow we translated that to, a gigantic ass sombrero, and a huge ass mustache. Now even if sombreros were in ready supply, I doubt we could get Tim to do it.

So my backup plan is to have Gary wear his Werewolf costume from Halloween, to compliment the Vampire people. Fuck yea! I'm bringing my Silver Mace +1 that does Aggrevated daamage too! Either that, or we could bring Gary's Sarcophogus on stage and he could awaken as "the mummy" and play all wrapped up in toilet paper. At least we know he'd use the toilet paper.

Do yourself a favor and go out and buy the new Tool CD: 10,000 Days. It just came out today, and its pretty bad ass. It even comes with some sort of 3-d glasses to look at the artwork done by Alex Grey.