Merriest Autumn to Ye All.

Ahh, today is a beautiful fall day. The air feels fresh and crisp, and the leaves on the trees are turning from the soft green of summer to vibrant shades of red, orange and gold. Everywhere you look there are signs of autumn; people in the neighborhood have begun digging out their jackets and scarves, their cheeks a little rosier from the chill in the air, and the breeze is rich with the scent of freshly-picked apples and warm pumpkin pie. Harvest Tyme has begun, and Old Mr. McGintywillow and his boys are hard at work on their farm, just as sure as Old Mrs. Stillnerbrau is hard at work in the kitchen, making her famous apple-cinnamon preserves to sell at the Wood's Hollow Autumn Festival. The students in the schoolhouse are abuzz with excitement, planning what ghoulishly frightening goblin disguises they'll wear for Trick or Treating this Hallow's Eve. Why, their teacher, Miss Penny Jacobsonflip, cannot even hold their attention long enough to assign this eve's home-work! And as here I sit on my front porch, carving animal bones into crude, mis-shapen X-rated toys, I reflect upon the autumns of my youth, and wish I had the time to jump once more into a pile of freshly-raked leaves or roll one more newly-bourn baby down a flight of steps.
Ahh Autumn, a tyme to reflect.

Good morning. If you have time, go to click here. I promise it will make you laugh. Pinkie swear!!

AHHH!! Bea Arthur Lapdance!! BEA ARTHUR LAP DANCE! I don't remember this scene. Maybe this was after mom and dad told me it was past my bedtime and sent me to my room.

If I see one more article on the internet today about Britney Spears getting married, with the phrase "Oops, she did it again!" written in it, I'm going to throw my computer monitor down the stairs. No! If I see the NAME Britney Spears anywhere I happen to click when trying to read the news, there's gonna be hell to pay. It's unfortunate that my monitor must be the recipient of my wrath because I can't physically assault the entire internet. I can only hope one day technology will allow us to do so.
Lisa sent me a really cool article about the Monterey Aquarium today. Apparently they have a great white shark on display, and it's actually feeding. This has never happened before, great whites always refuse to eat in captivvity, then either starve to death or are released back into the ocean. I hope this shark continues to do well, because I really want to go and see it. I have always been fascintated with sharks for as long as I can remember, but I've been having nightmares about them for as long as I can remember too. For my entire life I've had nightmares about sharks at least 2-3 times a week, and they stopped for a little while, but now I'm having them again. I still love sharks and I would have loved to study marine biology, but I know the second I get into the water, all the sharks would be like, "Hey!! It's that girl we've been dreaming about eating for the past 25 years!! Let's get her!!! Grr!!".
Goddamn sharks, man.

I like this picture because my grandmother looks gigantic and glowing, and I am dwarfed by her mere presence. This is the grandmother I wrote about back on January 9th (see archives). I think from this picture you can see how much fun she is. See how much fun I'm having? Why do I doubt we are laughing at the same thing here? Hmmmmm.

I did a painting for Kristen and Ezzy as a wedding gift, because I'm such a fucking cheapskate. I hope they like it. I also hope they open their present before seeing the picture of it on my blog. Anyway, I used to collect antique keys from thrift shops and antique stores when I lived in NJ and I used to polish 'em up in my dad's glass beading machine. The summer dad bought that glass beading machine, us kids went hungry. It nearly bank-rupted us. Thanks Pops! We still make fun of dear old Diddums for that one.
Anyhow, I finally found a use for my old keys. I can put them on paintings, like this one NYAW...

I just did a search for a picture of a glass beading machine to link up to so you could see my dad's most prized posession. I found nothing. He did buy it from the Snap-On Tools truck that was always parked in our driveway, I can tell you that much. Oh forget it!!!

Here's Beetlejuice from Howard Stern. You fill in the blanks here.I, for one, particularly enjoy his teeth.

My friend Buck just sent me a link to this great website. It shows all these people lookin FLY for their senior pictures. I wish Middletown North could have sprung for an awesome "rubble and debris" background with yellow police tape.
I remember when North got a solid gold lion for the front lawn outside of school. It wasn't so much solid gold as it was spray painted cement, but boy was it flashy!! It was great to see our school mascot gleaming majestically in the dirt next to the North sign. Every once in a while during a fire drill you'd see some guy run over and start humping it.

Lisa and Kristen pose for a lovely photo at the wedding. Aren't they splendid? God wanted Kristen to get married. It's just mommy that didn't.

Kane waits for the bus in Bayonne. From the bus we took the subway. From the subway, we took a guy's wallet.

Ahh, badly scanned photos from my NJ trip!
Here we have a picture of me and Lisa with my mom, Uncle Snake and Uncle Ed, after a hearty meal at the Brother's in Red Bank. Right after this was taken, my two uncles asked a family walking by,"How much for the little girl?". Those jokers.

What's with this Jennings guy? Talk about King Nerd-O. What a giant loser. I bet he's never had a date in his life!!
Wait, he won how much money? Oh.

Alright, just calm down. Let's everybody just CALM DOWN! Now relax, no one's gonna know! I got plenty of paper towels and.....CALM DOWN I SAID!! Jeez, if you keep making a scene, I'm gonna have to get the.....JUST RELAX! If you'd just sit still for two seconds I can wipe it off!! STOP it now. Let's all just settle down now. I mean it.
Cut the crap!

I was about to write a long blog about our NJ trip, but Lisa already beat me to the punch. So to sum it up, I'd say the trip was awesome. I actually started crying when we got back to Arizona and I was hit with a wall of heat and too-bright sunlight. Ugh. Can't wait to go back east for good. The funny thing was, I ran into a girl from my German class in high school at a restaurant. I told her I am living in Arizona, and she said she had moved to Louisiana for a few years. She missed NJ so bad she had to move back as soon as she could. Yeah, I hear ya.
Kristen and Ezzy's wedding was beautiful. I've never been to a wedding where everyone was just so happy to be there and the bride and groom were just beaming. The place they got married at was really cool too, and they had an open bar. Oh I had a few drinks! Kane and I ended up dancing like retards to Beyonce's "Crazy in Love", so a lot of alcohol was consumed between the two of us obviously.
I have to go meet Lisa for lunch now but maybe I'll write more later. I haven't been writing much due to how hectic my life has been lately, but things are about to calm down, so bear with me.
Until then take care of yourselves. And each other.
;)

"Untitled" by Trish
The air conditioning in my car stopped working.
It now blows dangerously hot air in your face.
The air conditioning in my car stopped working.
In Arizona. In the summer.
The air conditioning in my car stopped working.
I just ate Taco Bell for lunch.
The air conditioning in my car stopped working.
I had two crunchy tacos and a soda.
The air conditioning in my car stopped working.
I paid $3.23 for my tacos and soda.
The air conditioning in my car stopped working.
Now I want to go home and watch Montel Williams.

I’m still in the process of packing up my apartment for the big move this Sunday, and last night I was going through old video tapes trying to eliminate some of them. I found one with two episodes of Nickelodeon’s old show “Salute Your Shorts”, followed by an extremely old episode of “The Family Feud”. Why do I have a tape like that??

I think I’ve been making my boss mad by wearing my headphones at work. I don’t see what the big deal is, I’m doing a project with the small princess cut sapphires that requires my full concentration, so it actually helps me to put on my headphones. Anyway, she keeps making a big show of coming in to talk to me, and she just walks up and starts talking, then she “sees” my headphones, and is like, “OH.”. She never has anything to tell me either. She has a few fragments of thoughts, only a few of which pertain to me, and she sputters out sentence fragments or begins to sketch something on some scrap paper on my desk, until her cell phone rings and she runs away. She hasn’t said that she’s annoyed that I’m wearing my headphones, but I know how she is. Well, I’M annoyed that I have to keep taking them off for nothing. So there.
Also, according to my boss, highlighters are called “Pinkouts” and "Yellowouts", and how tall you are is not your height, it’s your “heighdth”.
I hope tonight I find the old video where I filmed the lawn guy fertilizing our front lawn, and then dubbed "Hard Knock Life" from the Annie soundtrack over it. That video cracks me up.

I haven't watched any of the Olympics. I'm not a sports person. I just don't care which country is the best at running through the grass with an egg balanced on a spoon. What? That's not an Olympic event? Sorry, that was an event from my elementary school's Field Day. It's easy to get confused, our Field Day was so similar to the Olympics. We'd get all juiced up on McDonald's orange drink (what is that stuff anyway? Why is it not juice, or even soda? This worries me.), we'd tie our legs together with whoever was our best friend at the moment, and give that three-legged race a run for it's money. Or we'd fall down and get grass stains on our new pants, and cry until some other kid crapped his pants, thereby bringing on bouts of distracting laughter. Aren't the Olympics just like that? Don't even TRY to tell me no one on the "Dream Team" shit their pants. I can smell it from here.
I am moving out of my apartment on August 29th. I'm going to miss it very much, but Lisa and I are getting an apartment together, so we can save much moneys. I'm happy about that part, but I'll miss living alone. It's been 4 years, and lots of fun. Cut to a slow motion montage of me playing with sock puppets, setting the stove on fire, making the sock puppets drink beer & fight, and spreading butter on my face, with "All By Myself" playing over it.
It's going to be weird timing, because I'm moving 3 days before I leave for NJ. I hope I won't be all tired and cranky during my trip. Probably not, going home always is a good time.
So a few days ago I bought an mp3 player. This is a big step for me, cuz I never even had a cell phone. Anyway, I love it waaaay too much. It only took me 3 days to wear out the batteries. I installed all the software on my computer at work. I hope it doesn't fuck anything up, but my mp3 payer is not compatible with Mac, and that's what I have at home.
"Robin Hood and Little John runnin' through the forest, jumpin' fences, dodgin' trees and tryin to get awayyyy. Contemplatin' nuthin but escapin, finally makin it, Oo-de-lolly, oo-de-lolly, Golly what a day."

Last night we had the first of two dress rehearsals for the play Lisa and I are directing. We open this Friday night. Anyway, this bitch stopped showing up for rehearsals, so I've had to jump in and take 5 roles. I think it's going well, although I'm pretty bitter about not being able to see the show I worked so hard on. It's okay though, it's been fun being on stage again. Anyway, at last night's dress rehearsal, we had a small audience. During act 2 we were doing a scene where I play a retarded girl named Clara, and my friend Allison plays a retarded girl named Sheila, and she's telling me about the guy she likes, who, coincidentally, is also retarded. Anyway, as she's talking to me, I'm supposed to be shoving popcorn into my mouth all angrily. Just as the lights go up and we are about to start the scene, I put some popcorn in my mouth and start to choke on it. I coughed as hard as I could, and a piece of popcorn flew out of my mouth and onto the stage. Allison saw it and we both started laughing hysterically. I think it worked out pretty good. I bet it looked like I meant to do that. It was hard to act like an angry retard after that though.

There was this group of guys I used to hang out with from '98 up until like 2 years ago. They all lived at a house in Tempe together, which was nicknamed 1810 Funhouse. (Their address was 1810 Randall, but they had bands play there all the time and had punk shows, so it was a Funhouse.) Many guy moved in and out of the house over the years, but when I first started hanging out there, there were the original four.
There was Jeff, who has been and will always be one of my best friends in the world. He went to my college (Al Collins Graphic Design School) and the day I met him he was sitting behind me in class, quietly saying things to himself like, "Are you fucking kidding me?", and "What the fuck is this guy talking about??" about our teacher who was trying to lecture. I turned around and gave him the finger, and we've been friends ever since. Jeff loved video games more than anyone I know. When a new Final Fantasy would come out, Jeff would lock himself in his room with a keg of beer and play until he finished the game. He once bought himself a set of throwing knives and he got really good at it. I introduced him to "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and he got hooked on all things Buffy. When the musical episode came out, Jeff, our friend Corbin and I once spent an entire night in Jeff's room singing all the songs. There was a show going on that night too, with about 100 people squeezed into the house, and we were just trying to sing over the bands playing. One time Jeff got all the Harry Potter books on tape (which was about 60 tapes), and he had this great idea that we should just sit and listen to the tapes straight through, and drink tons of beer. We only got through the first half of tape 1 before we gave up. We couldn't stop making fun of the british guy who was reading the book, then we decided to make up porno names for all the characters. Then we passed out.
Then there was Bob, who also went to my school. Bob liked to smoke a lot of cigarettes and draw devil girls on everything and go off on tangents about how our school sucks or how his job sucked. Bob was a lot of fun just to go up to and say something about anything, and watch him go for like an hour about why Rolling Rock was the only beer anyone should ever drink.
After that was John, who was the house's "funny guy", who lived in the basement and often had blue hair and fell down drunk a lot. I dated him for like a week or two, but that ended when I literally caught him with some girl's pants down. It was cool though because a few days later Jeff got drunk and went down to John's room and peed on his sheets for me. Jeff rocks.
Lastly there was Mikey, who was a cool little punk guy who also was just the nicest person you'll ever meet. He wore glasses and lots of argyle sweaters, and had the greatest music collection I've ever seen. He had this one album from the 70's with this black guy in a leisure suit with a big afro and a hat with a feather (I hesitate to say he was a pimp, because I really don't know if this man had himself some prostitutes. Don't judge by appearance, motherfucker.) on the cover, and the album title was called "Yer Momma". I wish I could remember the guy's name, but the song was a very fast tempo reggae beat, with someone yelling "Yer MOMMA!" every 20 seconds or so. We all used to crowd into Mikey's room and dance around to it when the mood hit us right. One time he and I went to a "Poison" concert with our friend Dan. It was awesome to see all the old mullets come out for a wild night. Mikey also loved Huey Lewis and the News. At first I thought, "Yeah, he just likes Huey because it's a cool thing to say." Is that cool? Probably not, my idea of cool is warped by your standards probably. Anyway, Mikey really did LOVE Huey Lewis. He went to every Huey Lewis concert that went down (and surprisingly there were a lot more in Tempe than you'd expect!) and drove to every thrift shop and obscure music store looking for original Huey Lewis LP's. He had tons of 'em. I always loved doing shots with Mikey in between singing "Power of Love".
Most of the guys have moved out, or I just fell out of touch with them. Jeff just moved to North Carolina this year with his girlfriend and their 6 month old son Xander.
Anyway, the whole point of this is, this morning I woke up with that horrible song "Cruisin'" in my head. The one sung by Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis, for the soundtrack of that weird Karaoke movie. I didn't see it, because I hate movies about karaoke, but I hate that song even more. So anyway, "Cruisin'", Huey Lewis, Mikey, it all made sense this morning.
There you go, there's a blog.

Good morning to whoever reads this. It is 12:14 pm, and I'm sitting in my office, taking a brief pause from making some rainbow sapphire jewelry. I've been working really hard on it for the past week, on an order for 131 assorted rings, bracelets, earrings and cufflinks. Yay. I am the only one in the office who can make these lines of sapphire, and it's a bitch. I'm almost done though so good job to me!
My friend Taryn just made a brand new blog, inspired by me, Lisa, Kane and Toole. Well, probably mostly Toole, since he updates just slightly more than the rest of us. Anyway, Taryn and I work together, and try our best ot get through the week without murdering anybody. So far she posted a very cute story about her family making fun of her. Good job Taryn, and good luck updating every day. I'll be watching!
So I'm disappointed about everyone's opinion of The Village. I haven't seen it yet, but I've been looking forward to it for months. But everyone I know who has seen it hated it, and I usually trust these people's opinions as far as movies go. I guess I'll just have to see it for myself, but now I am much less excited about it. Poop.
I did see "The Notebook" on Friday, which I loved. I normally am not into romantic movies, but this one is very different. Yeah, it gets really sappy at times, but not in a bad "Meg Ryan+Tom Hanks" way. It was very sad though, it made me, my mom, Lisa and everyone in the theater cry like little bitches. I read the book last week, which I liked, but this is one of the rare times that the movie is actually better than the book. Like "Jaws". That book was a big pile of crap after having watched the movie a million times. DON'T READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO READ THE BOOK. I don't want any assholes emailing me that I spoiled the ending. Anyway, the book sucks. There' s this whole side plot where Ellen Brody has this boring, long drawn out affair with Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss's character). It's written all cheesy, like Peter Benchley wanted to throw some graphic sex scenes in there for the hell of it. I hated the ending too. It pretty much ends with the shark dropping dead. Seriously. Thank god Spielberg made such an awesome movie. That man has far better vision than I do, I guess. That's probably why he's a world famous director, and I'm just a douche with a keyboard.

Don't you miss your teddy? You left him in your past.
You used to love your Teddy. You swore your love would last.
You left him in the attic, and you grew up too fast.
Well now old Teddy's got a knife, and he's gonna stab you in the ass!!
Holy Shit, run away from Teddy!! 

That's a poem I just wrote. Swear to God, I made it up. It's good, huh? You don't have to lie. It's okay, I just had nothing to write.
Wouldn't it be funny is that poem was not about a teddy bear at all, but about Theodore Roosevelt? "You bastard, why'd you wheel me up to your attic and forget about me?? I was a terrific President, just ask Eleanor!! I sang with Annie, for Pete's sake!! Well, FUCK YOU TOO, TRICIA! Fuck you too."