1) I borrowed a friend’s video camera to capture some footage from our band’s recent tour to California.
2) Our orange boy cat, Mandy, who’d had a year-long fight with chronic renal failure, was having a good enough day that we decided to give him his final rest.
3) I discovered the sneaky “Life In A Day” marketing campaign to sucker people into providing a bunch of footage for an upcoming documentary produced by one of my favorite filmmakers.

I spent my weekend gorging on junk food, choking back tears, and putting together what ended up being this video/slideshow. Most of it probably isn’t usable in the documentary, though all of the live-action parts were indeed shot on July 24, 2010.

This video contains numerous sufficient answers to each of the questions posed by the Life in A Day project.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter to me whether I get a request for the footage to be used. Nor does it matter to me if people think my wife and I care about our animals too much or take them too seriously. Of all the losses I’ve had to endure in my life, this one is no less important to me.

I also cheated and used “This Year” by the Mountain Goats as the music, since I had no time or energy to come up with my own audio, and the song fit my mood perfectly.

Rest in peace, Colonel Mandarin Mango Spock Cecil Harley Best Orange Kitty.

Which hotel is better? The Radisson, or the Holiday Inn?

Which one has better filters on its building-wide plumbing? Better filters on the plumbing for its ice machines? Is any of the water in this building filtered at all? If so, what exactly is filtered out, and when did they last replace the charcoal through which the water is filtered?

Why and how the hell is charcoal, that nasty black shit you burn to cook your pounds and pounds of dubiously-packaged meat products at your family reunion, used to filter out other nasty black shit from water intended for ingestion by intelligent human beings?

How old is whatever plumbing that lies between whatever filters may or may not exist here and the faucet in the bathroom (where you defecate) that is the only place I can currently acquire the most important substance on this planet without either paying an ATM fee to get 20 dollars I’ll need to break at the front desk in order to use the vending machine or getting in my car and driving to a convenience store to buy a bottle of stuff from the same local supply as said faucet?

Would it be safer to just fill my ice bucket from the machine and let it melt, or forget the ice and just choke down the room-temperature tap?

The bottom line is that I’m not a pansy and I drink tap water. But I like it cold. And the ice that came out of that ice maker on the third floor of the Midtown Austin Holiday Inn (Please pardon our mess, we’re making our hotel even more awesome so that you’ll press “9″ when you get that automated telephone survey call asking you how awesome was your stay at the Midtown Austin Radisson, er, Holiday Inn.) has pepper flakes all up in every 4th cube.

At least I’m telling myself they are pepper flakes. If I weren’t still on antibiotics for a recent strep throat infection, I might be less inclined to buy into that assumption.

I’m tired, I’m thirsty, and I’m about to use the wall-mounted hair-dryer to fix myself a nice, delicious glass of life-enabling beverage.

And say cute things best left unspoken.

I cannot heal the weak or sick,

I much prefer to help them kick.

I teach the rules that have no class

From the text we all keep in our ass.

There’s no degree, in school or verity,

To grant myself austere authority.

So keep your skyward faith and virtue –

I can’t and wouldn’t take them from you.

I seek no truth but constant learning,

For no one fact can quench our yearning.

Some years ago, Trent Reznor said or wrote “without my pain I am nothing.” I found that humorous, and responded (to myself and whoever else was listening) with the other one.

My tenth grade English teacher, a large person, sat on my futon in the summer of 2000 and broke it. A few years prior to that, she lectured students adamantly on how certain she was that she would one day die at the hands of an avoidable condition she had no earthly right discussing with teenagers in a public school.

A few days ago she accidentally drove her SUV through the facade of a salon in my hometown. I never hated her, even when a lot of my good friends implied that they thought she was evil incarnate. I still don’t hate her, but I’m a little bit resentful of her sitting on my futon and telling me that one of my friends was on illegal drugs in tenth grade. She knew nothing about him, except that she did not like him. He might have been on drugs, but he probably didn’t take them as often as the doctors and parents told him he should.

The futon wasn’t even really mine, but she did break it.

I am on the back porch right now, shivering in the nonexistent, Texas spring cold. I am not in pain, and I know full well that it’s closer to my preferred temperature inside the house. Yet I sit here, trying to convey how happy I am. I hope some day to have better reasons to sit happily on my back porch at 2:40AM.

I am half way through the first season of House. I don’t know why the show is sometimes called House MD but usually just called House. I do know that I need to read a lot of Sherlock Holmes.

I went to a bar tonight. Last night. Whatever. I went because I knew friends would be there. I was surprised to find more friends than I expected there.

I was too chickenshit to try harder to get B to come with me when we reached that moment where she admitted that she did not actually want to go to the bar.

The only pain I really have to endure right now is that caused by the fissure(s) in my anus. I could start eating right and fix that in a couple of years. Or I could have surgery. Or I could allow a physician to inject botulinum toxin into my anus.

This is as honest as it gets, whatever it is. I don’t need to define “is.” Nobody does, and that’s the beauty of the verb.

The coolest thing about House, MD is that nobody gets him. But I do. You probably do, too, but the coolest thing is that nobody gets him but me.

Fiction, baby. This ain’t it, but I know I could make a lot of it.

I like people, and I have developed a decent internal skeptic’s compass over the years. It required many years of minor trials and odysseys. Here’s a very small cross-section:

• Getting caught picking my nose once in fourth grade and being stuck with the (in hindsight amusing) nickname “Booger” for several years. Had I seen Revenge Of The Nerds by that time, I might not have taken it so personally. Not that Booger was much of a cinematic role model. All in all, the way it happened was best. The whole “Booger” thing was my first real social heartbreak, followed shortly by my realization that, since they weren’t real, I would never get to meet (or join) the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
• Middle-school bromance with a very smart nerd who knew an excessive lot about Commodore computers, Star Trek, Weird Al, Mad Magazine, and online hyper-erotic text adventure games. He once came out of the bathroom with a small ruler, blurted out a non-whole number between 1 and 6, and extended the instrument to me with the intent to compare measurements. When I expressed my cold disinterest in touching anything that had been in contact with his Alfred E. Neuman, he produced a fresh one, still sealed in plastic. A highly entertaining and educational friend for a 10-year-old reject named Booger to know, but ultimately a disgusting individual. Perhaps “ultimately” is a poor choice of words. Cancer got him between 8th and 9th grades. I still miss him sometimes. We “broke up” between 7th and 8th. The Laura Winslow of his not-so-private Urkelian desire ended up dating the dude who gave me the B-name for quite a while. Incidentally, both guys had the same first name. Incidentally, I’m Facebook-friends with both of them (married to other people) now. Incidentally, do you know the difference between “incidence” and “coincidence?” I could actually write an entire book on how much this kid affected, mostly for the better, my social development. We’ll leave it at this for now: Weird guy. Probably died too young. Wish I hadn’t said so many mean things to him. I’d take back some of them if I could.
• Making music with other kids in middle-school and high-school, outside of and entirely uncontrolled by said schools. We fought labels, both imaginary and real. We recorded albums. We did local shows. We were completely awful. Wouldn’t change a thing about it, except the part where I lost my copy of that one kinda-fun-but-still-awful album we did. I especially wish I still had those liner notes we made. Every now and then I run into someone who says he has a copy of both, but somehow I never end up with a copies of either. Hint: If you have a copy the “Filthy Immigrants” Khoa-Filty McNasty split cassette and want to make me eternally more complete and gracious, slip it to me digitally if you can.

None of this has any direct correlation to money and employment. I guess I have a long way to go before I’m adept at picking a topic and sticking to it long enough to get my meaning across.

It’s time for some major changes in lifestyle. Or at least one. There are a few employment options I’ve been weighing, and if I choose any of them, the ability to wake up without needing to crawl out from the quicksand of nicotine dependency will greatly improve my desire to get her done.

I have many things to look forward to in this regard. Since the advantages of being a non-smoker are widely known, I won’t go into all the pollyanna platitudes a lot of transitional quitters tend to puke upon their friends. Also, since I’m merely documenting and not preaching any sort of revolutionary call to arms, I will focus on the ways this will help us out financially:

• Somewhere around one hundred eighty extra dollars in our bank account each month. A little more than twice that if and when my beloved kicks the craving to the curb.
• Increased mental bandwidth for seeking more favorable wages.
• The aforementioned ability to attack the workday earlier so that I can finish it more quickly.
• The goal itself: A better job. I could try to quantify this, but why bother? Any extra income would be tons better than my current predicament, especially if I were to calculate what I’m making based on salary over hours worked. That’s probably why I won’t quantify this right now. Doing so would depress me further. I don’t need that added mental hurdle.
• Better ability to utilize the otherwise wasted time and energy on selling all the valuable junk we have stacked about the corners of our home.
• Increased ability to engineer our exit strategy from the quagmire of debt that 2009′s adventures in underemployment left us.

Add all those non-numbers up, and I think it’s pleasantly probable I will once again be a mental millionaire this year. I’m so motivated now that I think I’ll go get that butt in gear right this instant.

It should be noted that iTunes shuffled up Oingo Boingo’s “Nasty Habits” just as I finished this writing.

I hit submit, accepted the Terms of Service, and followed through to the verification page that uses a captcha-type image system to make sure I’m a human. I typed it as read. Hit submit again. Got the email to, yet again, verify that I exist in corporeal form by clicking a link. Success!

The posting did not appear on CL. I hadn’t copied the text I had written directly into the CL web form, so I couldn’t immediately resubmit it.

An hour has passed. Still not there, and the list of active postings in my CL account is still empty.

I can remember the two-word phrase the captcha-style verification form asked me to type. I can remember how good it felt to write that posting, hoping that it would make a few people smile, even if nobody ever responded. Even if someone did respond, but it never amounted to anything, billing-wise. I just can’t remember enough of it to recreate the posting. Oh, I’ll redo it, and keep a copy before I submit it. But it won’t be the same.

That two-word phrase I duplicated, like a one-off Gutenberg, meant to prove I’m worthy of displaying my offerings?

“piddled peace-”

I’m still smiling.

I don’t debate. I have considered joining debate teams and clubs in the past, but something always kept me from doing so. It has taken me years to figure out what that something was, and now I have it: certainty.

I am certain that I don’t posses the conscious skill of manipulation necessary to purposely win a staged argument with another intelligent person.

I am also certain that I am too needy to risk losing the respect of people (hint: it’s almost everyone) I care about by embarking on a crusade to convince them that the way they think is wrong.

Lastly (but not finally), I am certain that the few talents I do possess are much better areas in which to focus my time than squaring off against other opinionated and certain human beings.

My favorite leaders in fantasy all exhibit this certainty to varying degrees. In no purposely particular order, Spock, Bones, Kirk, and Picard, though not immune to the attraction of a good argument now and then, ultimately rely on the collaboration of their trusted company above the outcome of carefully scored debate. If you can spot the possible exception among the four — the one of these things that ain’t like the other — then you’ve probably figured out why he’s my favorite character of the bunch, and I’ll fix you up a mint julep as a reward, you green-blooded son of a bitch.

I know I may have lost some of you there. Some people just aren’t wired to absorb the real-world inspiration I and so many other nerds glean from that admittedly cheesy and unbelievable future conceived by Roddenberry, complicated (not altogether negatively) by Berman & Pals, and supported by so many other big-name nobodies. I get that. Even take comfort in it. An obsession adopted universally is virtually indistinguishable from religious fundamentalism, and in my world that dog might hunt, but I won’t truck with it.

Regardless of whether you think Star Trek has made our world a better place, I’m the captain. I’ll admit that my ship usually has a complement of one, but I am certain that one is enough to make good things happen. This is not at odds with the idea that the good of the many outweighs the needs of the few. Or the one.

This all sounds a bit too egocentric, even to me, so I’m going to give it a rest for a while. However, I propose that moderate egocentricity is not intrinsically sinful. Nor is it a synonym for narcissism. Put your thesaurus away; it will lie to you if you trust it above your friends. The best advances in art and science came about because an egocentric person or group decided to stop being a starving, self-defensive genius and release at least a little bit of that ego upon the world in an effectively selfless manner. Be good to others without losing the ability to be good to yourself. Losing ground on either side of that has all kinds of possible outcomes that are decidedly bad for all. Remain conscious of the possibility of such unnecessary outcomes as cobainism, hensonism, godwinism, or possibly even the aforementioned fundamentalism. Take care of yourself and yours, support others when you can, and just tolerate the rest.

Don’t hate: actuate!