Today was fucking surreal.

I woke up and realized it was my birthday. But I couldn't, for the life of me, remember how old I am. I had to consult my fucking myspace page to figure it out. The answer was 29, in case you were wondering. I'm tempted to put in that old joke about how memory is the second thing to go, and I can't remember what the first is, but that seems kind of lame.

So then I leave for work only to get stuck in a massive traffic jam. Apparently, someone thought that Monday rush hour was a good time to repave one of the city's main thoroughfares. A thoroughfare which has the exit ramps of one of the busiest metro area highways right next to their little construction project. It took me twenty freaking minutes just to get out of my parking lot. It took another twenty to go the three quarters of a block to where I could cut through the neighborhoods to go around it. Or so I thought. I drove two miles out of my way, took an alternate route, and still got caught up in the construction. There was even an entire fully-loaded coal train caught in the traffic jam. I didn't know that was even possible. I guess it's a good thing I took a dump before I left.

Then when I finally got to work (over an hour late) there were cupcakes. Sooooo many cupcakes. And signs proclaiming the glory of my twenty-ninth birthday. And also a spandex water-bottle cozy, for some reason. Now, my bosses buy a cake for everyone on their birthday. It's just something they do, and I think it's kind of cool that they do, but it's usually just a cake and a card and standing around like an idiot while people sing Happy Birthday at you. The sheer volume of cupcakes aside, the decorated signs and water-bottle cozies were kind of a mind-fuck.

Then when I left work, I went to the health food store to get a steak because, well, I spent most of my birthday staring through a jeweler's loupe at little pieces of cold-rolled stress-proof steel and cutting a 0.060in radius that had to be completely freaking flawless for some reason, and I wanted a goddamned steak for dinner goddamnit. So I'm at the health food store buying an organic porterhouse roughly the size of my head, and the crazy little hipster girl at the register starts in on this whole meat is murder trip, and how any self-respecting human being should be vegan, and not only vegan, but they should only ever eat organic vegetables. So I had to sit there and explain to her, as calmly as I could, some of that Lion King circle of life shit, namely that to have organic vegetables you have to have organic cows, because if you don't have organic cows you don't get organic manure and organic bone meal to fertilize organic crops. So organic vegans like her desperately need people like me who buy organic beef, so shut the fuck up and give me my motherfucking steak already.

What is it about veganism? I mean, you don't want to eat meat, that's fine. You don't want to buy or use products which contain animal parts, I totally get that. I respect that. But what is it about going vegan that turns so many otherwise completely reasonable people into such self-righteous cocksuckers? Obviously I'm not talking about all vegans, or even most vegans, but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. In fact, I'll bet every single person reading this knows at least three of these people. It's like a vegan diet just does something chemical in some people that causes them to become complete assholes. They should start putting warning labels on the broccoli: "Warning - May Cause Sanctimonious Cocksuckery."

Right, so then I went to the Kmart across the street to get some soap, and toothpaste and stuff because I didn't want to pay ten bucks for toothpaste at the health food store. As I'm walking to the door, I see this car, a cream colored mid-'80s Volvo, covered, completely covered, in troll dolls. There was a crowd gathered around it. People were taking pictures. People were posing with the car. People were pulling in off the road to see the car. It was... actually really kind of creepy. It's hard to explain it to anyone who wasn't there, but I had the overwhelming feeling that I was about to be sucked into the plot of a horror novel in which an agent of Satan drives around the suburbs stealing people's souls and trapping them inside hundreds of troll dolls and Mardi Gras beads. It kinda makes my skin crawl even just thinking about it.

Today was like, you know how sometimes when you drop acid it seems like the universe just throws a whole year's worth of weird shit at you in the space of seven or eight hours? Today was like that. But without the acid. At several points during the day I found myself feeling really glad that I don't smoke pot anymore. But now that I think about it, maybe a little weed might have made it easier to cope. Days like these kinda make me wish I still drank.

On the plus side though, I finally beat Earthworm Jim today!

One of my beer-pong neighbors (specifically the hot blond one) is wandering around the courtyard, brandishing a mostly empty Stoli bottle like a club, and muttering surprisingly threatening things to people's Halloween decorations and several of the trees.

It's times like this I really wish I had a video camera.

Dear Emo/Hipster guy,

If your ass is too fat to fit into your skinny jeans, this does not mean you should just leave it hanging out. And no, the fact that you have skinny little-girl calves does not make up for it. Seriously dude, it's not sexy, and it's not ironic. Just because you desperately want to believe you can fit into your little sister's pants in no way means that you actually can. You look like burst sausage in a denim casing, propped up on toothpicks. Wearing Chucks and a trucker cap do nothing to disguise this. Even the little five-year-old girl you walked past thought you looked like douche. She said so.

Just sayin'.

So my neighbors set up a table in front of their apartment and have been playing beer pong all afternoon. I just watched their ball land in dog pee. Nobody noticed but me.

I gotta tell ya, watching beer pong is a lot more interesting when you know for a fact that someone is about to drink dog pee.

So, The Book Slut tells me that AbeBooks.com has added a weird books section to their site.

Some of the titles include, but are not limited to:
Is Your Dog Gay? by Charles Kreloff, Patty Brown, and Victoria Roberts
The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories by Alisa Surkis, and Monica Nolan
The Thermodynamics of Pizza by Harold J. Morowitz
How to Avoid Huge Ships by Captain John W. Trimmer
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America by Julian Montague
Outhouses by Famous Architects by Steve Schaecher

And my personal favorite: The Haunted Vagina by Carlton Mellick III. About which one reviewer notes: "It’s difficult to love a woman whose vagina is a gateway to the world of the dead . . ."

Truer words have never been spoken.

Kyle's funeral was today. I don't think the actuality of his death really finally hit me until I was driving away from the service--you know, the real weight of it (listening to Lucero and Flogging Molly while I was driving did not help matters). Seeing so many faces from the past, some of them even major figures in my life at one time or another, brought down an avalanche of memories I had almost totally forgotten about. It's been kind of hitting me in stages all night.

Today was just all-around surreal. Running errands this morning in my funeral attire was sort of a shocking reminder of how differently people treat you based on the costume you're wearing. I got hit on by the snotty chick at my bank who usually just gives me shitty looks when I'm in there. Old ladies randomly walked up and started conversations with me in the supermarket (one of whom went on a 15 minute diatribe about the Kennedy dynasty, and what a bunch of jag-offs they all were). Everyone and their mother were calling me "sir," and the entire world seemed bent on being ridiculously polite to me all of a sudden. It's pretty bizarre how differently people respond to a pair of dress slacks and a tie. People are so amazingly bigoted in such small and subtle ways.

Cranking the weirdness factor for the day up even further, I stopped by my old high school, which is in the same part of town as the funeral, to see if one of my old teachers was around. Given the context of the day, I think the English language pretty much completely fails when it comes to describing the feeling I had walking those hallways again; weird just doesn't even begin to touch it. And to top it off I saw a girl I know on the cover of Guitar World magazine!

I hung out with April and Jess for a while after the service. That was really cool, and cheered me up for a while, but today has just been one long super-gigantic mindfuck. Kyle was one of the good ones. It really sucks that he's gone.

I really fucking hate funerals.  

I just got an email from April informing me that Kyle King, a guy I went to high school with, and the singer in one of my old bands, died Tuesday.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/denverpost/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=132021766

Didn't see that one coming. Died in his sleep of all damned things too. 

Crazy.

All weekend I've had this crazy-strong craving for onigiri, which is a sort of stuffed triangley rice ball thingy. You find them a lot in bento boxes, and sometimes they're shaped like Hello Kitty.

Unfortunately, my craving doesn't seem to be strong enough to get me off my ass to drive all the way over to the Asian market to get dashi and miso, or that pickled plum stuff, or salted salmon, or any of the other stuff that onigiri is usually stuffed with. So instead, in true American fashion, I'm turning healthy, savory, yummy, cherished Japanese comfort munchies into sugary junk food. Making it sweet probably technically qualifies it as wagashi, and not onigiri, but screw it, it's going to be filled with dried fruit and honey, and it's going to be awesome godammit!

Is it just me, or is it weird that the most time consuming part of cooking Japanese food is washing the rice? I mean, rice should be easier than that, shouldn't it? I also wish there was such a thing as fresh nori out here. Working it over with a Bic lighter to get it like it's supposed to be is a pain in the ass. Just sayin'.

So, apparently scientists have figured out a way to fabricate DNA evidence.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

Given the current nature of the world we live in, this is possibly the scariest thing I have ever read.

Also, so much for the next season of CSI.

This whole sand animation has to be one of the coolest art mediums ever.