You may or may not (probably not) have heard that I'm learning to ride a moped. In case you yourself are thinking, "Man, I need to get in on that", I offer a few tips to make your experience smoother and your learning curve less painful. The first and second most important things to remember are:

1) Don't fall off

and

2) Stay upright

respectively. These two facts would have no doubt have served me well. Not only would there be fewer Jeff-shaped indentations in the road, there would be fewer road-shaped indentations in my flesh. To the above, I would like to append a corollary:

3) The road is your friend! Stay on it.

Indeed, you may find number 3 helps immeasurably with both 1 and 2. Just follow these simple rules, and you too can race down the road at speeds marginally higher than zero.

Existence, for me, boils down to essentially two major choices. Do I retreat into the comforting depths of isolation, or do I brave my deepest fears and track down that elusive goal of interpersonal interaction?

Every instinct I have points me in the direction of escape from anyone who would try to speak with me, and an eternal separation from any situation where this communication might occur. Every day, I consistently hold this point of view as the ideal, and my eventual destination.

It is telling, however, that even throughout this determination to avoid people, I periodically want nothing more than to be able to manage it. Isolation provides nothing but simple comfort, while any message or statement directed towards me, even if not meant as reassuring, even if all it does is verify my existence, I often cherish and hold as sacrosanct.

This, then, is my dilemma. All that I am pushes me toward one extreme, while genuine exchanging of words suggests unequivocally the opposite. Talking, then, would appear to hold the answer, but I fear the very method of its delivery. Perhaps there is hope, but from here, the outcome I know to be optimal seems a dim aspiration.

This is a review of the Ashbrook Village apartment complex. There were several others, and they are all in the same vein. Emphasis is mine:

"The apartment was given to us in disgusting condition. Gum was stuck
under window frames and on the carpet, large petrified lumps of food
were left in the cabinets and actually painted over, a sticker in the
bedroom doorframe covered an actual booger and nose hair that had been
stuck to the wall. One of the doors in the fridge was broken, the ac
didn't work, one of the burners on the stove didn't work, there were
stickers stuck all over one of the closet doors, there were large dents
in the two bedrooms doors as if they had been punched, and the carpet
is a wide variety of colors and stains. Since moving in, we have had to
struggle with maintenance on several occasions, they have "fixed" our
ac about 4 times and our stove twice, among other things. We also have
a bug problem, everyday is an adventure, not knowing what kind of
creature is going to invade our space. We have had slugs crawling up
the wall (inside), spiders, millipedes, and many other unidentifiable
creepy crawlies. And of course cockroaches. We reported them and asked
for our apartment to be sprayed, so they sent a notice to our building
asking everyone to pull out all the furniture from the walls and take
all the food out of the cabinets. They never showed. We have since gone
back to the office 4 times to ask them to come spray, each time getting
a promise that they would come and they would call as well, and it
stops being surprising when they don't show. Now they are very rude to
me when I go to the office to ask for them to come, or to get a
package, although I have been very polite through this whole
experience. They are the most unprofessional office I have ever seen,
very rude, we have to keep following up with them, they have not done a
thing they said they would do 4 times in a row now, and we have yet to
hear an apology from them. They have absolutely no concept of customer
service and do not care about the tenets or how they treat the tenets
at all. Do not live here, even if you might have to spend $100 more
somewhere else! Do that! Apartments are small anyway, there is no
storage space anywhere! I definitely don't recommend Ashbrook Village!"

Thank you, anonymous poster. You have saved us much hardship.

This comes to you forged from the tiny keys of my new phone which happens to have Internet capabilities, so you might not find my typical level of verbosity. However, you may rest assured that my trusty thesaurus yet remains at my side.

In the past I have been loathe to see movies with which I am not familiar. Possibly because of the time investment involved, but most likely because my default attitude toward just about anything is mild disdain. The burden of proof is typically upon whatever is being presented to show me why it should be upgraded in status to "casual indifference", possibly continuing from there. That's my theory, at any rate. Usually I just say if it were worth seeing I would have seen it already, an argument made airtight by virtue of making no sense whatsoever. Since I up to now have been using my Netflix account exclusively to view Star Trek DVDs, I figured maybe it's worth the effort to fill in some of my more egregious omissions.

That's all the room I have? Should've used the compu-

There are several issues I must address, each one more important and relevant to your life than the last. (Note that this statement can still be true even if the level of relevance is negligible. I love words.)

If you, in the course of your life, ever feel the need to resort to chemical assistance in getting to sleep at night, I am here to warn you: do not. Drugs aren't the answer. Take it from me, this world-weary junkie recently snatched from the iron snare of Tylenol PM. Sure, it may knock you (or at least me) out cold within half an hour of ingestion a good several hours before your biologically designated sleepy-time, but the dreams... if such an action would not result in insanity followed by death, I would swear off the act of sleep merely to avoid that prison of my own subconscious.

Have you ever seen that episode of Star Trek: TNG where Riker is trapped in layers upon layers of artificially induced dream worlds that slowly drive him mad? (If you haven't, your life thus far has been wholly without merit, but nobody's perfect.) I now know exactly whence that idea was derived. My dream, or should I say dreams, were eerily similar. I would wake up from one only to find myself in another, and then another, and then another. All told, I had four different dreams in one, each one a progression from the last. In each dream, with each time making me even more sure that this time it had to be real, the narrative my mind created for me was for me to be two hours late for work. This no doubt sprung from my desire to get up in time for work the next morning lest I be late, but I needn't have worried - by the time I awoke, cold sweat soaking the pillow, fists clenched from the palpable terror of being late, the first thing I noticed was that it was only 4:30. I made it with enough time to get a coffee at Sonic before work, remarkably slow employee who almost made me late a fifth time in one day nonwithstanding.

Now that I've sworn off the use of anything as strong as or stronger than Tylenol, I'm hoping my potassium supplements aren't considered "drugs". I like being able to control my bladder without experiencing cramps of the spectatcularly worst kind, and that's a freedom, nay, a liberty, it would take a lot of convincing for me to do without.

I wasn't expecting to be able to drag out the freaky dream story for so long, so you may consider these other topics mere footnotes. Of course, this makes my statement in the first paragraph to be untrue, but I think I'm okay with that.

I can now consider myself a true gamer. I know, I know, big deal, I'm now a member of the subculture I've already been a part of for years, etc. But for all this time, even though I have owned some kind of console for most of it, the PC has been my true home, managing complex stat tracking systems or clicking enemies to death. Until now, the more visceral experience of playing with a controller in hand was one I shied away from, and the only way I accomplished it was by playing PC games on my 360 until the familiarity from the old system kicked in on the new. It's a good tactic, and I recommend it to all the old folks like me who are stuck in their ways. Once you hit 18 and that whole legal adulthood thing kicks in, it's hard to open a mind that has been hardened by age, but let me tell you that there is hope for even us jaded souls.

I can't even remember the third topic I was going to address, but the fact that my console-playing managed to beat it in importance tells me it probably wasn't very compelling.

As some of you may know, I have been searching for a creative outlet. Some of the ideas I have considered include:

• A comic strip. Rejected because I can't actually draw, and I have no desire to release my soulless abominations so callously referred to as stick figures upon an unsuspecting populace.
• A novel. Rejected because I lack the patience to sit down and tinker with all the intricate details that would be required to build a cohesive novel.
• A computer game module. Rejected partly because I have like five of these things laying around unfinished, and I don't want to pick them back up because each one shows a lower level of creative maturity than I can put forth now, and I definitely don't want to start from that ground up all over again. Again.
• A short story. Still an option, but as I was thinking about exactly what it would be, I hit upon another even better idea. I will write it down as soon as I figure out how to end this bulleted list. Luckily for you, the wait shall not be nearly as long for you as it is for me.

There we go. We are now unbulleted. It was actually a ridiculously simple process.

My idea, insert drum roll here, is to build a world. Not a world, like, the solid one we're living on right now. A trusted source tells me that took an entire six days, and I really would rather not spend all that time on it, at least not right away. I intend to construct, in painstaking detail (the more painful the better), a setting from scratch. When I say a "world" I don't mean something like a campaign setting, designed to accommodate endless stories. I mean, quite simply, a setting. A place for a story to occur, in whatever form that story ends up taking. This is better because, in my fervent desire to move from project to project without really finishing anything, I like knowing that there is something else important to be done, and accomplishing that is equally important, and the original project can be moved back to easily. This method might even help everything be more interrelated.

There is the possibility that this only sounds appealing because it will take so much longer, meaning I get to put off having to finish up in favor of beginning yet another related facet of the setting. But therein lies the beauty of this: everything I do adds to the richness and completeness of the setting. As soon as I get to a place where I can put together a genuine creative work, I will hopefully have a lot to choose from to make a plot and theme, even if the setting itself is not complete.

This is normally where I'd stop, but you're getting two blogs for the price of one. Lucky you.

I began to suspect my creative process might be lacking when I tried something different and its effectiveness hit me like a ton of bricks. That's right. Not metric, imperial. That's just how weighty these bricks were. Luckily I survived this masonic assault unharmed, but rather suspicious of all forms of masonry and the practitioners thereof, which will no doubt continue until the day I die, possibly due to another act of random brick violence. Regardless, I will now detail my new method.

It's called stream-of-consciousness writing. This is a term I first heard at that fancy learnin' place I attend, but apparently didn't consider it might be worthwhile to actually use it until now. What you do is get a pen and paper, or a keyboard if you prefer, and just write. It doesn't have to be related to anything. It doesn't even have to make sense, really, so long as it is coherent enough that you can extract something very much like meaning out of it. I won't give you my exact example here, because for some reason it is important to me that I at least seem mostly sane, but it led to some interesting places. Slightly more specifically, the idea I came up with is that the setting could itself take place inside of a book, but the book is unauthorised and technically in violation of the copyright of an actually established and respected book, making everything in that world a pale imitation of a much nobler place, and everyone knows it. While it is fascinating to think about the type of society that background would generate, I ultimately rejected it as being a little overcomplicated and appearing like it spoke in favor of fan fiction. I don't have anything against fan fiction really, but I would rather not base any serious work on its defense. Still, I will take what I learned from that and move on. I will most likely retain the theme of existing under a shadow, but maybe not. I am much further along that I was.

Has anyone else out there given this kind of thing any thought? Do you have any ideas or suggestions about how to put forth creativity? I think I'm doing pretty good now, but it certainly couldn't hurt to ask.

Step 1: Put your music player on random.
Step 2: Write down the first line of the first 30 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing they are.
Step 3: When someone guesses the song title and artist correctly, mark that first line, and tell who guessed it. Do not use search engines.

My list:

1. Who keeps the balance in suspended skies, supporting Earth with inward thrust
2. Are there no shadows where you are, I can see everything as day
3. Hey, I'm the guy who found the treasure in your eyes and that's no surprise
4. When I made up my mind, and my heart along with that, to live not for myself
5. Found in your sheets, dead in your sleep
6. I didn't know that this fuse was for the end of it all
7. Fill me in, turn me inside out, sometimes I feel like just letting go
8. Nothing short of a nuclear blast could stop me, stop me from connecting the dots
9. Feels like you're miles from here, in other towns with lesser names
10. Allow what's done to preach new insight to your life, hindsight is perfect vision
11. In this moment synchronized inside, words that paint a legacy of life
12. Here we go again. I believe you, but I've always been one to take advantage of
13. Would I believe you when you would say, your hand will guide my every way
14. Dedication is nothing but a word. What have we become?
15. You've got a lot of nerve and I've got a lot of fingers to point
16. Backstabber, you liar, betrayer, I should've known you'd be just like your father --- Disciple - Backstabber, guessed by my dad
17. See the light, looking for the answer now, I can feel the fire burning inside of me
18. This place I pass is in my eyes, the words you spoke will blow away like leaves in time
19. Wanting, watching, debating on which way to run to
20. When I was just a little baby, my momma held my hand, tried to hold me steady all she could
21. I don't want to be the one to break you, but could I please borrow some change
22. So let your face consume my mind. New day springs light on the burdened
23. Before I judge you, maybe I should stop, hear your words
24. Back so full of scrapes, with miles I've walked of waste
25. Will someone please radio for help, 'cause I think I'm allergic to myself
26. I was looking forward to this day for so long, I had it all planned out
27. Put the knife in the table, deck of cards fly across the room
28. We watched them fall, eyes locked to mine, feeling as if I had let them down
29. Could it be that I am just a product of my own selfishness
30. Open that door, I'll follow you into that space where nothing is regretted then forgotten


There is a veritable spectrum of genres represented here, and even a Swedish band that never actually published any music in the U.S. So good luck with that. If you really want to, I won't stop you from using search engines. I certainly won't know about it. Well, if you get number 17 right I'll be suspicious.

EDIT: Whoever gets number 6 will get a bunch of extra points. I'm not sure how many, we're not really operating on a point system here. But I'll say... five.

As much as I hate talking about myself, I'm going to take another brief run at it.

My ideal situation has always been one where I am among people with whom I am comfortable communicating. But I can't help but wonder: is this actually possible? Historically, I have never been able to overcome the fear that manifests itself whenever I am in a situation where talking of any kind might occur, even if it's with people I'm supposed to be close to. This is a fear that prevents me from gaining anything from any type of communication, and almost certainly limits possible chances of meaningful communication in the future. The magnitude of my dislike for it is such that I avoid talking at all costs unless it is required, the only exceptions being when my desire for human contact is so great that it precludes my apprehension. This seems to be happening fairly frequently as of late.

Furthermore, I am wondering how this affects my worth as a human being. Can I truly accomplish anything by myself? Even if I could, would it be worth the effort? People seem to be designed to talk, and I apparently am no exception. But what happens if this is a need that cannot be fulfilled? Does life just go on regardless, or is there a solution somewhere?

From what I can tell, there are indeed people who wouldn't mind talking to me if I were able to. The problem lies with me. I need to be less afraid.

Many of us have looked through a college catalog at least once and seen some rather strange classes listed within. Things like Advanced Basket Weaving and Turf Management and the like. But today I saw one which I think is safe to declare the winner.

Ethics of Massage.

Most striking, this was one of only two classes relating to massage, implying that the ethics were equally important to learning how to do it. I guess I can see how an overexcited masseuse might be tempted to, well, violate the ordinary codes of conduct. I'll even grant that this might be a big problem in some places. But an entire class that tells you not to do it? Would not a pamphlet, or failing that, a lecture, suffice? Apparently these things are too quickly forgotten. I can just imagine the type of situation that would culminate in the decision to devote a semester-long class to this.

Instructor: Now, Mary, just imagine a young man is on the table in front of you. Where is it okay to massage?
Student: Uh, his back, his shoulders, his arms, his junk...
Instructor: Mary, I'm gonna have to stop you right there.

It's an epidemic is what it is.

There are few things I get truly excited about, and I count concerts among that select group. Last Wednesday I went to an Anberlin concert in Charlotte with Shelaya and some of her friends, and I enjoyed it enough to write a blog entry about it. Which one, you ask? Why, this very one!

I was very close to not even being able to attend. I had been unable to secure a method of transportation, but luckily Cory had managed to find time away from his busy schedule of scoring with Asian women and mild homo-eroticism and all those other proud Naval traditions to deliver me in style. I may have descended from on high out of a flaming chariot, or maybe it was just a car. Who knows; we live in a world of uncertainty. But regardless, I owe the entirety of my experiences that night, up to and including what I hope is temporary deafness, to him. I will attempt to repay him by not immediately asking for such a large favor the next time he comes around. But I can't guarantee it. Remember, uncertainty.

The concert itself began pretty much as I expected. Understand that I would never under ordinary circumstances stand for these conditions - so crowded you can barely breathe, information entering my senses at a far greater rate that I can begin to interpret, many loud/stupid people, etc. It's safe to say that if the band were not present I would never have entered the place, although I suspect the crowd would agree with that sentiment. But for a concert, for Anberlin, I would do all this and more. I'll admit I had been critical of their change in sound from a heavier punkish rock to a more pure and sometimes mellow "rock" genre, but in this concert, I finally understood. My least favorite song on Cities, Inevitable, became one of my favorites almost immediately after hearing Stephen Christian sing it live. Seeing him deliver the performance in person added a whole new level to every song, and I think it's safe to say that my musical horizons have been broadened by it. Stephen has an aura of tranquility around him, and despite the chaos inherent in such an event, listening to him and seeing him on stage was enough to transfer it to me. From what I could tell through my admittedly poor sense of empathy, Shelaya would probably agree with this. Also, I really had to go to the bathroom before they played, but at the end? Not at all. Although this probably has more to do with my own bizarre biology than any kind of mystical Power of Rock.

I had intended to launch into a more indepth discussion of the time leading up to Anberlin's performance rather than go right into it (I even planned the structure of this entry while I was there), and in this now-missing paragraph I intended to compare the opening bands unfavorably and more than a little sarcastically, but to be honest they weren't that bad. Few can compare to Anberlin, and the crowd as a whole seemed to be well aware of this. However, they did an adequate job of preparing our ears for an aural assault. The bass player of the second band had a stage persona I can only describe as "funky".

As I mentioned, there were many loud/stupid people. If I were more the writer I claim to be, I would probably know a word to describe this without resorting to a slash, but none that I am aware of can convey quite the meaning of, well, loudness and stupidity. In particular, an individual who appeared to be roughly fourteen, if that, seemed to find it amusing to attempt to start a mosh pit while no band was actually playing. I would find this intolerably asinine if even I weren't directly affected by it, and the fact that the large person in front of me was forced to collide into me a number of times made it sure that I would have to take action. Indeed, I gave this gentleman the frowning of a lifetime. A frown that would give small children and the elderly nightmares. After this proved ineffective for some reason, Shelaya managed to extract the very thought running through my mind that I was attempting to focus as a weapon to bring to bear in case any of them had the abilty to read minds, and verbalize it with such an intense delivery that this group of men about twice her size were each visibly shaken to their cores. I felt like I had to take a step back out of the path of this onslaught lest it do to me what the Ark of the Covenant does to Nazis. Unfortunately, the source of the disturbance was out of range, but the group surrounding him did their best to contain his antics for genuine fear of having their faces broken. The large guy in front of me who had previously been this mob's Weapon of Mass Destruction became a wall of flesh through which no foolishness could penetrate. Big Guy In Striped Shirt, your efforts will not go unrecognized, and your name will be sung in songs of victory for years to come, whatever it may be.

I didn't do a whole lot of talking during the event as is my custom, especially since there were more than two other people there, but to those I was with, although I guess more specifically to Shelaya since the others probably won't read this, I enjoyed myself far more than I have in recent times, and as soon as I recover from this one, I would most assuredly be prepared to make another such trip. Provided I can procure another flaming chariot.