"At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald (author of The Great Gatsby)


"Things which he was once proud of and wanted to show off like a kiss on the cheek were later things to hide and later still things to be ashamed of."

- KLAFA (Rusty)

(I got a manic series of emails from Dave Brother Dave in response to the "Photocopy art. Finger, nose. Tongue." post, which I've strung together and edited because I can.)

No... nope. Let's see... I graduated and moved above the CC Club that year. We only lived up there something like 7 months. Met Cathy when I was 18, same as CC Club and graduation. You made the fateful promise to publish me while I was still at mom and dad's, for a graduation present or something. Completed "work" on it above the CC Club. TKLAFA (The Kindergarten Leaves Are Falling Again), circa 1986. We are old fuckers. OLD FUCKERS. 'Course, you're older.

Wait, WAIT.

I was a punk throughout school career, I was 17 when I met Cathy... yes, yes. Because you gave me the 20oz of Bull (malt liquor) graduation night, and I drank it that night (closer at Burger King) in a "large" cup with a straw to magnify the affect ("affect: The conscious subjective aspect of feeling or emotion" - what can I say... it's the arteest in me) which turned out to be nothing. Thanks anyway. I turned 18 (legal - at the time) with Cathy at my side. I legitimately drank alcohol with Cathy and Piggy on the back steps of the house (we didn't close on it yet, and had no key to drink inside). Piggy found something in the overgrown grass next to the back steps... what was it?... shit... I will ask Cathy... wait...

OK. Cathy didn't remember what was found, then I did. Nothing was found. We stashed the empties down there. A subversive move because we did not yet "own" the house.

("Let's get sushi and not pay." - Repo Man)

I'm living across the street from Scott and Zelda. William Burroughs evoked the spirit of Scott's words when he wrote in Kim Like The Great Gatsby: "Kim believes in the green light, the orgiastic future. He believes in a magical universe: unpredictable, spontaneous, alive. A universe where anything is possible. A universe of many gods, often in conflict." (You can hear Burroughs read this bit on the CD Smack My Crack from Giorno Poetry Systems, released back around 1987 or so. RIP, Bill.)


Being so close at the moment, I figured it wouldn't hurt anything to acquaint myself a bit more with Scott's jazz-age writing. As it happened, I already had a collection of his short stories sitting unread in a box, which I'd gotten for free just ages ago when it was left behind at my brother Dan's after a roommate of his moved out. If I'd known how much I was going to like it, I would have read it long before now.


In the story Bernice Bobs Her Hair (published in the Saturday Evening Post, May 1, 1920, when he was 23), F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: "At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide."

Fitzgerald died at 44 of a heart attack, spared the fate of hiding in the caves of his convictions. In his last year of life, he wrote in a letter to his wife Zelda, who was hospitalized in an asylum: "It's odd that my talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me - the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending, but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past."

Adapted (slightly) from the American Red Cross First Aid Textbook, 1933.

Got an email from Jeremy a few days ago: "Stumbled across this today."

Man, that Argentine spam entry was prophetic. (Caution, geek entry ahead.)

Until yesterday, this site was "hosted" by a free server. Sorta.

The story: The blogging program I'm using, GreyMatter, suddenly broke for no apparent reason back on the 22nd. I loaded a fresh, virgin copy to another directory, triple-checking all the paths and CHMODs. The test copy also didn't work. (This particular server allowed PERL programs to run from any directory... in theory. In practice, it seems that PERL programs were allowed to run from no directories.)

I put in a request for the server's folks to make sure that everything was kosher on their end, knowing that it wasn't. They responded within a couple hours, saying that they rebooted the server and the problem should be cleared up. It was. It was deceptively encouraging.

In the meantime, I'd taken the opportunity to re-investigate Blogger - which was having troubles of its own the first time I looked into it, which is why I decided to use GreyMatter... which I thought it would be more reliable, being on the server that hosts my site and all. Huh.

Anyway, things were fixed, and the next day I was uploading a post when things busted again. Put in another help ticket to have them reboot the server... and still haven't heard back. It's been a week.

I gave Blogger yet another look during the second, extended downtime, and thought about using their BlogSpot for hosting: building a frames-based site under the domain name hosted at the free server. But the more time that went by, the more pissed off I got at the free server. (Geez, it was free... what did I expect?) So I did some research, and am now trying out a discount hosting service. We'll see how it goes.

The free server: DuploWeb
The new server: Feature Price "Mini Plan"

For some reason I get spam from Argentina, which I can't read even if I wanted to. Babelfish et al notwithstanding. I filter unknown emails straight into a "Later" folder, and if I have time will usually give them a cursory glance before trashing them (because ya never know).

This ani was in an Argentine spam, and it sums a few things up pretty well.

(Unsolicited emails typically drive me nuts, but there's something about this one that seems so shoestring, eager, and "pure-hearted" that I actually kinda admire the moxy behind it - misguided though it may be. But mostly I find it funny.)

Crazy Search for Email Address.

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And this soft can send e-mail quickly at the same time the search. It like a mail servers, so the sent out e-mail is not filtrated or rejected.

Please attend to, the probational edition can not saves the search result, only by the intact edition can saves the search result.

You can limit the range that can search and spider in the same sub domain, any sub domain, not this domain or no any limit.

You may pay me the payable charges by telegraphic money order telegraph from any postoffice on whole world, then fax the receipt to me, and send a notification to me by e-mail.

I am pure-hearted without doubt, I will serve you in good.

Please remit money to:

Xiulin Mo (Remittee)
No. 229 Rongshan Road
Lingui County
Guilin City
Guangxi Province
People's Republic of China (Mainland of China)

How Contact Me
Contact: Xiulin Mo
Address: No. 229 Rongshan Road, Lingui County, Guilin City, Guangxi Province, People's Republic of China
Tel: 0086-773-5592687
Fax: 0086-773-5592687
E-mail Address: humanlong@21cn.com
Country: People's Republic of China (Mainland of China)
Postalcode: 541100

100-year-old of basically-Scandihoovian extraction, still livin' up on the farm in northern Minnesota, sharper and smarter than I've ever been or will be... but she'd never been to a Chinese restaurant. Ever. So my in-laws-to-be (who had come out from Maryland for her 100th birthday party) took her to one.

This is a few minutes after she picked up a pair of them things for the first time. I should be so coordinated.

I webbified a circa-1990 photocopied-art booklet Dave Brother Dave did a long time ago. Like, around 1990, give or take. Sheesh. Anyway, here. (My advice is to start on page 4.)

This is the artist at our grandma's 100th birthday party with his finger in his nose. That's his daughter: a chip off the ol' block.

(Next-Day Update: Dave Brother Dave sent me an email saying, "Look way better as thumbnails, don't they... most of life is better in miniature.")

More than half my life ago, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test made me want to be a Prankster. FURTHUR! No left turn unstoned! The Importancy Coat! No matter that I was already over a decade late and didn't understand the context of the book outside of my limited juvenile Minnesotan experience: It moved me in my world.

For years I carried the memory of the feeling of that book around with me as I went ahead with the too-many-hours-a-day job thing, the mortgage thing, the marriage thing; then clawing my way through the divorce thing, the bankruptcy thing, the foreclosure thing; and eventually getting to the living-in-a-1955-school-bus-in-New-Mexico-for-a-couple-years sorts of things.

When I finally read the book again not so long ago, it wasn't as... powerful as I remembered.

But there ain't much I'd trade my time on the bus for; and I look forward to getting back on again. Hopefully not in New Mexico next time, though.

I came across the archived files of the very first website I ever made - and it's really not as horrible as I remembered. In fact, a lot of it's kinda good, especially where the fun shines through.

Where's the giddiness in what I do these days? One of the "Ten Commandos Of Fun" from Pete Wagner's Buy This Book (a play on Abbie Hoffman's famous title) is Thou Shalt Make Fun To Have Fun. Yeah, yeah. That's kind of like saying that you have to spend money to make money. (I can think of quite a few things that are cannibalistically self-perpetuating, for better or worse.)

So I've trotted out that old website, that first impulse... maybe as incentive, maybe as reminder. Don't know. What I do know is that it seems a lot longer ago than just six years since I made the thing. And I haven't really gotten all that much better.

Alas. And hurrah. Whatever. We'll see what shakes in the next few months; it's beginning to look like they're harboring some unusually potent varieties of strangeness.

It would be reasonable to expect that I'd have an answer. But I don't. Feel free to choose one or more of the following possible reasons for why I'm doing this, or make up your own:

1. I'm not sure if I'm getting slowly more sane, or gradually more nuts. The fact(s) of that matter may become self-evident in these entries over time.

2. Despite my atrocious conceit, I'm still not self-absorbed enough. True, there are those who know that their existence depends on my appearance - and that helps. But it's just not enough.

3. If I do everything Jeremy does, eventually I'll become him, confounding my enemies and giving me access to all of his cool friends. And then he wouldn't be able to call me "mysterious" anymore.

4. I just don't seem to be terribly passionate about anything lately, and the thought occurred: why not take my personal ennui to the masses? I can't imagine that it would do much for them, but it might entertain me.

5. All the money, fame and accolades I've received over the past few years while designing and writing five-eighths of the 100 hippest, smartest sites on the web have grown tiring. I seek to rejuvenate my soul by slumming here.

6. My little brother is smarter, and funnier, and more artistic, and more imaginative, and a better writer than me.

7. Blogging: Viagra, Ex-Lax? Bulemia, Syphillis?

8. I live in a house made of naturally-harvested birdshit and sloughed snakeskins. I eat organic gravel, drink magnetically-purified juices of fallen leaves. My TV is filled with faeries and gnomes fighting and fornicating.