I have a tree outside my window...

A few minutes ago, one of the neighbor kids scrambled up the trunk and got himself about 18 feet up the tree. He then started calling for his buddy to come see how fucking clever he was, getting all the way up there like that. His buddy came running, and our hero spent 5 minutes loudly proclaiming himself the king tree-climber, and generaly going on about how cool it was to climb trees, before announcing (in a slightly scared voice)that he couldn't get down.

In my mind, this illustrates everything that is wonderful about children, and at the same time, why I find most of them so annoying.

Don't worry, he did eventually find his way down.

As an aside, I hope everybody likes the updated look for the blog!

My peeps get a much-deserved shout-out.

My good friend Ray Brown has informed me that he too (and not only DogButt) has been known to read the Blog. Imagine my chagrin!

(No, I don't exactly know what chagrin is... I've always imagined it as a big, wide grin that is thrown with such flair that it is preceeded by the sound effect "Cha!")

At any rate, while I'm standing around chagrinning, I should point out that the influence of Ray has been felt in this Blog before, most notably, in the last post I made.

See my use of the word "Ominous-ossity." It was Ray Brown, in fact, who taught me the comedic value of placing the suffix "Ossity" at the end of a word. He has been known, for example, to refer to a very hot day as "Possitively brimming with heat-ossity." Comedy gold. He is also the pioneer of the now wide-spread practice of replacing the word "You" in song titles with "Jews." For example, "I Just Called To Say I Love Jews," and "Jews Light Up My Life."

But I digress. At any rate, welcome to the Blog, Ray!

As a side note to DogButt, please don't stop leaving comments! I love the comments!

As a side note to fans of spelling, I am aware that the propper spelling of "Ossity" is "Ocity." I choose not to spell it correctly because to do so makes it feel like "O'city," Which I suppose is the generic label for Dublin.

As a side note to anyone that is neither Ray nor DogButt nor a fan of spelling, Um... Hi.

Back from the beach!

I have nothing of interest to say here... YET!!! YET!!! Hang in there! I'm just back from a very nice week in Ocean City, NJ and I just wanted to announce my intention to write something very interesting and witty in this blog SOON.

But not tonight. Instead tonight I present the trailer for the upcoming blog! In widescreen!!!

------------------

This trailer has been rated R by the Pointless Blog Association. It may contain swear words, sexual innuendo and also cause headaches.

(black screen... ominous music)

IN A WORLD...

(music gets... ominous-er. ahem.)

WHERE ANY RANDOM ASSHOLE GETS A PUBLIC FORUM TO AIR THE CRAP THAT SPINS AROUND IN HIS NOGGIN...

(even ominous-er! we are completely enveloped on ominous-ossity! suddenly the screen explodes into a picture of me! no wait! just my eye! no wait! Just my eye-BROW!!!)

ONE MAN...

(the eyebrow TWITCHES!!!)

WRITES A BLOG...

(cut to... my NOSE. Nay! My NOSTRIL!!!)

SO INANE...

(the nostril flares!)

SO POINTLESS...

(we maybe catch a glimpse of a nose hair extending blow the nostril rim! scandalous!)

SO FUCKING DUMB...

(now we see a shot of a completely empty theater... dirty floor, empty seats... crickets chirping)

THAT NOBODY READS IT.

(chirp chirp...)

(a picture of DogButt!)

EXCEPT DOGBUTT.

(sudden jump cuts! monkeys with ray-guns! race cars colliding! wet napkins! the statue of liberty sinking into the ocean and the wailing of children and a river of blood and that creepy song gene wilder sings in charlie and the chocolate factory!!!)

COMING SOON... THE MOST SHOCKING WORDS TO EVER BE WRITTEN WILL BE WRITTEN BY JOHN BAKER WHEN HE WRITES THEM IN WRITING WHICH YOU WILL READ!!!

(aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!!!! that's like, a choir singing really shill and spooky, like in the omen! aaaaaaaaaaaah!!!)

STARRING JOHN VOIGHT AND ABE VIGODA...

(picture of john voight! picture of a shriveled dried prune!)

THE BLOG!!!!

(the words "the blog" appear in 90 foot high letters of flame!)

(and then in really small print:)

DISCLAIMER: JOHN VOIGT AND ABE VIGODA DO NOT APPEAR IN THIS BLOG.

(fade to black...)

My head is running around on me!

Ever have some sort of really strong emotion in a dream, and then it carried over into your waking life?

When I was in college I had this dream that involved this girl I knew. And no, it wasn't a sex dream, you pervs. Get your minds out of the gutter. Anyway, this girl was not a particularly close friend of mine... She was a couple of years younger, and was in a campus group I was running at the time. I would have classified her as an "aquaintance" at best. Not someone I hung out with, not someone I knew all that well, and frankly, not really somebody I gave a lot of thought to.

Then I had this dream. It was me and her, on the run from some unseen villian or villians. And we were in love. And she was having my baby.

In the dream, my love for her and for the child she was carrying was completely and totally real. She was the love of my life, and we were starting a family together. The plot of the dream is really unimportant. I don't even remember if we got away from whoever was pursuing us. The thing was, I woke up with all those feelings of love and connection still ringing around in my head.

Does this ever happen to you???

The next time I saw this girl was so weird. In real life we were two people who barely knew each other. In my head we had been in love. She was like a psychic ex-girlfriend. Every time I looked at her, I saw her pregnant with our baby. And I wanted to reach out and hold her, because we had practicaly been married.

So, so, so strange. That lingering dream-feeling always fades out, the same way that it becomes harder and harder to remember the plot of a dream you had. I knew if I played it cool, eventually the feelings I had for her would go away. And they did. It took 3 weeks, but eventually, everything was back to normal. When I was around her, I saw only this girl I kind of knew. When I spoke with her, I felt only the vague friendship we had always had. All that love, all those feelings, our unborn child, all slipped back down into whatever subconcious place they had come from.

How is it that the emotions we feel in our dream-time can break into the waking world like that? I had a girlfriend several years ago who would dream that I had done something thoughtless to her, like kissed another girl, or called her a name or something, and when she woke up, she would stay mad at me for the rest of the day. I'd spend the whole day paying for something I had never actually done.

Sometimes I get the feeling that my brain is like an unruly roomate - someone I only share my skull with. Some days he's quiet and lets me pick what chanel to watch, and other days he plays his music really loud and stinks up the place with his cooking. Some days I get to drive, and somedays he takes the wheel and careens us headlong down some dark, unexplored alley - some place I never would have gone on my own.