Big J is On His Way

The Rapture Index tracks all the signs that precede the Rapture. An index over 145 means Rapture is rapidly approaching. We’re at 151 - fasten your seat belts.

Become the center of attention

wow. Planned Parenthood’s “I had an abortion” t-shirt.

Down with Love

I hate life.

I’m talking about love. You know it probably started out as this great idea in someone’s garage. You know God was outsourcing that shit in the beginning. The little angel/architect/whatever put it out there and people couldn’t get enough of it.

At first it was this underground thing that the cool people knew about. Then there was the backlash and someone came up with hate. Then God’s little bureaucracy came along and unleashed a committee on love. Only a committee could fuck it up and add jealousy, longing, a watered-down version called like, unrequited love and all the other little baroque accoutrements that have come with love ever since.

America by Bus

Began building out a new section on the site for the Greyhound bus trip across America.

Tentative Route

I don’t have dates yet, but each city is roughly a day in the 30 day trip. Right now I think I have 5 days of play to use when I want to stay somewhere longer. This is just a tentative route.

1. Knoxville, TN1. Asheville, NC1. Washington, DC1. New York, NY1. Bar Harbor, ME1. Boston, MA1. Toronto, ON1. Pittsburgh, PA1. Ann Arbor, MI1. Chicago, IL1. Des Moines, IA1. Minneapolis, MN1. Bismarck, ND1. Billings, MT1. Denver, CO1. Salt Lake City, UT1. Boise, ID1. Seattle, WA1. Portland, OR1. San Francisco, CA1. Los Angeles, CA [via Amtrak]1. Las Vegas, NV1. Albuquerque, NM1. Oklahoma City, OK1. Memphis, TN1. Huntsville, AL

I’m still working on public transportation information for the places that have it so I can get around. I’m also building a list of places I need to see on my tour of America. I’m disappointed the bus doesn’t stop in Moab, UT. This is more planning than I think I’ve ever done for a trip.

Sunset in Huntsville, AL

This picture was taken 9/11/2004. I’d gone downtown to read in the park. As the sun was setting I ran up a municipal parking garage to get to the top and take the picture.

I’ve found Big Spring Park to be one of Huntsville’s greatest assets. It’s one of the few parts of the city that betrays the “cheaper and ugly is best” ethos. When I say that I’m talking about the over abundance of engineers in Huntsville. Engineers want to spend as little money as possible, and do not see asthetics or culture as worth paying extra for. Huntsville has paid the price as things have been maintained at just the base level.

A field in Montana

This picture was taken on a 8/12/2003 during a trip through North Dakota and Montana. I’d gone up there to take pictures of locations used in the movie Northfork. I found this field when I was driving a backroad between Pompey’s Pillar and the Battle of Little Bighorn Monument.

I wish I could have captured the fields swaying in the wind. It looked like waves on an ocean. This enormous, empty field is full of so much promise. Anything can happen there. That’s one of the things I really like about the West. No matter how messed up things get I always feel like there’s a fresh start waiting just in case I need it.

Great Sand Dunes now a National Park

The Great Sand Dunes now stand alongside Colorado’s other National Parks Mesa Verde (1906), Rocky Mountain (1915), and Black Canyon of the Gunnison (1999). Since 1980 only nine areas have received the National Park designation. Cuyahoga Valley NP in Ohio is the only other designee from 2000.

2004 Buffy Award Winner

Salon has created a new award for the most unjustly ignored TV show…The Buffy. Unsurprisingly the first award goes to The Wire. Thankfully a new companion guide to the show has been published for those lost in the dense material. Also the episode guide can be critical if you get a little lost.

The article cites the scene that got me watching the series. Bunk and McNulty investigate a crime scene. It has no dialogue except for the word “Fuck” repeated in various ways. (At the time this was about the only dialogue I understood!) The story elements are revealed through different camera angles and movement. I was surprised that the series would take a risk on losing the audience like that. It’s a complex scene and turns out to be pretty crucial to the series. Six episodes later they provide the conclusion for the scene during an interrogation of D’Angelo. The detectives utter the word “Refrigerator” and everything clicks into place for the audience.

Concentric Storms

I was somewhere around happy/alone when my 30 year old self began looking for happy/together. The results at this point are not pretty.

I feel wiped out. My limbs have a heaviness to them. Thoughts, once taut and crisp, feel fuzzy and dampened. “Don’t think about her. Don’t think about her.” I spend time forcing myself to think about other things but inevitably I come back to her.

I change tactics and decide to embrace thoughts of her. “Well she did this shitty thing, and this shitty thing.” Then my brain realigns all my memories of her in a new way. It finds a pattern of deceit and carelessness in her actions I didn’t see before. Then I stop trusting my clever little brain since it’ll just show me what I want to see. So I trust my feelings and I remember she hasn’t felt strongly about me for years now. It was dumb to get caught up in her.