But about documentaries…they seem to be getting more and more popular.  Obviously 9/11 is a biggie, but I can’t help but wonder if the whole Reality-TV craze has helped ease the general public into actually finding these films interesting.  Because last I knew, the word documentary had a big boring PBS cardigan-wearing stigma around it.  ”It’s a documentary.”  ”Ewwwwwwwwwww.”  Now I’m imaging (with the help of the advent of the digital video camera age) a whole slew of documentaries coming soon, about everything you can imagine.  It’ll probably get pretty shitty…there’ll be movies about smelly socks and working in record stores…but I’ll bet there’ll be some good ones, too.  Just about anything is interesting if presented realistically (now the word real has a stigma to it…of gaudy fakeness).  Um…what the fuck am I talking about?  I don’t know.

Bought some records a few days ago.  Felt good.  Saw !!! last friday with Olsen and Gustav.  Also felt good (thanks Mia!).  Good good good.  (Trying to motivate myself into some postive thinking.  Is it working?  Nope.)

Well, CNN is on the TV behind us, in Spanish, but the theme song for the War On Iraq is the same … that mellifluous little melody with a hint of sympathy tinged with jingoism. As you can imagine, there´s a lot of graffiti here about the war, and none of it is very US friendly … Strange to see it from this perspective, though I haven´t really seen much because I kind of boycott the coverage. Interesting to see its social implications from another country. I was in Czech during the few weeks after 9/11, and that was a strange time too… a month of anthrax and drums beating for blood. Huh.

So, today I think we´re heading across to Pureto Jimenez, an hour by boat, and check out the beach over there. Tomorrow Maja and myself are taking a little Cessna back to San Jose, and so on and so on so forth and blah blah blah and if it happens I´ll tell you then …

Ok. Ciao.

So, no raincoat. Oh well. Towed car. Oh well. It’s snowing here, cold, wet and white, but in 12 hours I’ll be sipping a yellow beer in San Jose, and in the following days swim in both the Caribbean and the Pacific … what’ve I got to complain about? Right. So I take it slow today … I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow, I learn by going where to go. Fine. I shower slowly, and shave meticulously, a close shave that I seem to think will last longer .… it’s so quiet when you’re doing this, looking at yourself in the mirror for so long, quite a personal and often reflective time … steam obfuscating the edges of clarity … I started wondering if terrorists, if practicing shavers, did this before a big event … then I started thinking about 9/11, if Atta shaved or not, and if he did, what was he thinking about in a hazy hotel bathroom looking at himself in the mirror, and then I figured I should stop thinking like this because it’ll wind up freaking me out.

So instead I came up here to write a quick entry, drink a cup’o, and listen to Miles and company. I hope April treats you right, intrepid reader.

Better yet, I hope no one else has the gaudy pompousness to call you “intrepid reader” for a long time after this moment.

And be careful when you feed the pigeons. Bohumil Hrabal fell out of his window and died upon the cobblestones of Prague when attempting to do the very same thing.

Insanity, maybe. I’m between shifts, prepping up to go to job # 2: Bartending, the Ultimate Moonlighting Gig, and am curious to see the general sentiment and feeling (and “vibe”, if you will) of the customers, especially as bombs light Baghdad up all green for us on CNN Headline News … “getting bombed” may be the poor pun of the evening … I may bring my survival knife … a headline I saw today said, “Baghdad: sleepwalking its way into history” … huh. I had no idea we were contending with a rogue crew of crooked somnambulists! Well, fucking A, let’s blow some shit up!

Hey, for shits and giggles, check out this army movie we made this weekend in the car … it’s Quicktime, and doesn’t have sound yet, but it seemed appropriate.

Click here to view the embedded video.

May God bless us, each and every one.

Relief awaits the patient … this has been made evident by the announcement yesterday of a new airline: HOOTERS AIR. Yes, chickenwings and orange satin shortyshorts have now taken to the air. Limited runs between Atlanta and Myrtle Beach, with connections to Newark on the way. Brings me back to the good old days when me and my frat brothers would hop a slow moving freight train behind McCormick Plaza and ride the 35 minutes down to Gary, Indiana, walk down 7th Avenue to the best fucking Hooters in the country, catty-corner from Demont’s Drive-Up Liquor & Gun Shop.

Shit. Worst thing is, you can never go back, man, you know? I couldn’t tell you where half of those guys are at now.

This is how I like it now, though. Drinking the coffee at the precipice of a despot-less world, sitting in front of a 21″ flat-screen in my underwear, scratching my soft gorilla chest until the phone rings. I take pictures of cornerstones and collect them in my filing cabinet under a folder entitled PROOF. And people never let me down because I don’t expect different from them … this makes it all the easier, I say.

Anyway, this isn’t what I started this entry for. Well, in a way it was. Having just finished the new CD, it feels empty without having some people you really love listen to it, share it with .…

Go now immediately and seek them out, buy their shit! For their latest 7″ and an MP3 you can check out, go to http://www.whitedenim.com.

Get their s/t 3“CD at Archigramophone Records: http://www.archigramophone.com/nicenice.htm.

See their website before it goes big: http://www.nicenice.net.

And whatever you do, don’t stain or strain your ties with those who you love.

Lightning Bolt has been surrounding my brain lately.  When at home I play them LOUD LOUD LOUD, then I go to work and they’re stuck in my head while I waiting on tables and making bloody marys.

Going to see a neurologist on Wednesday.  Woo hoo.

This pic is from September 12, 2001.  The morning of 9/11 I had just purchased a plane ticket to NYC…then a few minutes later the first plane hit.  Obviously my flight was cancelled, so I ended up taking a bus to Martha’s Vineyard and shutting out the rest of the world for a few days.  That my towel is an American flag is a total coincidence…we were so shut out of what was going on, we were unaware of the flagfest that was happening everywhere else.  I only really thought about what had happened on a few occasions…first when I saw the boxes of blood being delivered to NYC via the bus I was on, second when the bus went through Boston and I saw some tall buildings, and third when I was riding the ferry out to the island, watching the seagulls keeping up with us.  After that it was swimming in the ocean, drinking good wine, eating swordfish and accidentally partying with the BRMC.  Strange days, indeed.  Most peculiar, mama…roll!