It starts as a tickle. An itch. An inkling of a sensation so faint that he hardly recognizes it. When he finally notices it, this faint ghost of a feeling, it explodes. He suddenly feels his body again, and it is on fire. For a million eternities he has felt nothing, and now he relishes in the pain.

For the pain tells him that he lives. That he exists.

Through the pain, he feels his body rise.

Found this old quiz on DooRagGirl's 'blog. The image seems to be broken.

You are a sock. You are a cozy, fuzzy, warm-hearted person. A lot of your friends describe you as a hopeless romantic. You fall for the opposite sex very easily. But be careful, because usually you don't know what you are getting into, and because you are very sensitive, you can get hurt... especially in early relationships. Also, don't exclude the cold-hearted from your "want-list", because they just might be looking for a kind person to warm up their heart.... or a sock to warm up their feet. Most compatible with: Toilet Paper. Click here -- What Random Object Represents Your Inner Self?

Ran across this site the other day.

I'd say that the Internet has officially peaked.

I'd also say that if I had a better quality version of this picture:

I would enter it and it would be a champion.

Went to the TicketMaster site at about 9:50 and started hitting refresh, waiting somewhat impatiently for Kelly Clarkson tickets to go on sale.

10:00 passed...

10:01 passed...

10:02 passed...

Finally, at 10:03 it let me buy tickets.

Sort of.

The first seats it offered me were third row, on the floor, just to the left of center-stage. I quickly clicked through the screens to buy the tickets and...

Got a fucking error!

We're sorry for for inconvenience. Please try your order again later.

Okay, so I went back to the beginning and, after several attempts, the best seats I could find are in section 6, off the floor, back quite a bit from the stage.

Not exactly the nosebleed section, but nowhere near as good as the first seats would have been.

Didn't get the error message this time around so I have fucking Kelly Clarkson tickets!!!

Yay!

Just in case this was legit, though I really doubt that it was:

---

(Now the subject changes completely.)

Anyway, tonight I was supposed to go out to the BBC and help usher CanadianGirl out from Louisville. She's moving to Omaha, one of my all-time favorite places, and a bunch of people from work were supposed to meet there tonight to get her drunk and maybe talk her into dancing on the bar or something equally embarrassing.

Well I did make the longish drive out to Shelbyville Road, and I did (eventually) find my way to the BBC brewpub. What I didn't do was stay there for more than about five minutes.

I looked around for anyone I knew and didn't see anyone, so I left. I probably could have done a more thorough search, but there was this asswipe playing a guitar and if there's one thing I really wasn't in the mood for tonight it was live music.

So I left Louisville's East end and went to Rich O's.

The place was really crowded, and I ended up sitting at the bar all night. All I had to drink were a couple pints of Smithwick's and then I came home. I'm pretty fucking tired still from last night's supernap and the resulting sleep deprivation.

So now my plan is to go to sleep and get up before 10:00 so I can buy Kelly Clarkson tickets.

This week's Pisces horoscope from Free Will Astrology:

I invite you to try an exercise in creative pretending. Ready? In all the ways you can imagine, stop thinking that you're outside, and instead visualize yourself as inside. In other words, suppress your tendency to fantasize that the good stuff is out of reach and hard to get. Picture yourself as being right in the midst of it. End your sense of exile and come all the way in to the heart of every matter. If you do this meditation ten minutes a day for the next seven days, by this time next week the world will already be changing to match the vision you've been building.

Okay, so what Captain Tofu is basically saying here is that if I imagine good shit happening then good shit will happen.

The power of positive thinking, right?

What I want to know is: What about those times when your own internal definition of what constitutes "good shit" changes every 10 minutes?

If I fucking knew what I wanted, and if I could fucking hold on to that desire for any length of time, then maybe this mumbo jumbo bullshit would be worth a try. But as things stand, I'd hate to use my mental powers to veer the cosmos towards a particular goal only to realize 10 minutes later that it's no longer what I want at all, and that the cosmos has too much inertia to allow me to just keep steering it around.

Okay, I'm at my childhood home except it's present day and it's somehow my house now. My mom and my sister Dina and I are discussing arrangements to take care of my cats because I'm going somewhere for work or something.

There are somebody's kids running around interrupting that they don't like the front door - they want to come in another door while I'm gone. I try to explain that only some of the doors are designated as "entry doors" by my alarm system and any other doors being opened cause the alarm to go off immediately. The problem is that I cannot remember which doors, besides the front one, are designated as entry doors.

While I'm trying to recall my security schematics Dina is harping on and on about something coming up on TV that needs to be tivoed. She doesn't remember which channel for sure and I say that I think it's channel 25. She reads something that indicates that 25 is the wrong channel. This is apparently the closest that Dina's ever come to proving me wrong about anything in about a gazillion years so she starts gloating and rubbing it in. She even called me "Dumbass McStupid" at one point.

To get away from the gloating, and the screaming kids, I decide to take off for Lanesville. I start walking towards my grandmother's old house because for some reason that's where my truck is parked. As I leave my house I ponder the fact that there's a pretty nice deck and wheelchair ramp in front now.

Dina tries to follow me so she can keep taunting me, but I shuffle my feet on the driveway and pretend that it makes so much noise that I can't hear her and, eventually, I leave her behind.

Now, once I get to my grandmother's old house I for some reason decide to take my grandfather's old Plymouth something or other instead of my truck. The car's a complete piece of shit but I've been driving it every now and then. With my grandfather dead I figure that somebody should make use of the car. It might be a piece of shit, but it's a classic piece of shit.

One of the many things wrong with this car is that it's got baloney rinds for tires so it can't make it out of the driveway. The tires just spin in the loose gravel and walnut husks. While I'm trying to get enough speed built up to get out of the driveway my uncle Carl pulls up and I remember that he's been driving the car as well, and he kind of thinks of it as his own. I manage to put the car back into its parking place which is tough because the car has no brakes either.

What Carl is doing there is having somebody install this bright red girder about 15 feet up between two telephone poles. One of the guys has a very large hand tool that seems especially designed for this purpose - it allowed him to tighten the bolts at both ends of the girder at the same time.

My uncle Ron is there and he starts complaining about the cost of putting the giant red girder between the telephone poles, but Carl assures Ron that he'll take care of the costs himself.

So I get in my truck and turn right out of the driveway. I realize that I'm very thirsty and decide to stop at Polly's for a soda. There's something wrong with my headlights and while I'm adjusting them I see that the people who own Polly's have cut down all of their trees. This, plus fiddling with my lights, manages to distract me enough that I drive through Paul and Donna's front yard to get to Polly's.

I pull into a parking spot and Paul comes running out. He's just livid that somebody just drove though his yard, and he's beyond livid when he sees that it was me. This guy has spent millions of dollars putting up fences, signs, and sniper towers to keep Polly's customers off his property and then I, who should know better, drive my fucking truck across his front yard.

I don't blame Paul for being so angry. He tells me to leave and not come back until next Summer. I think that I'm lucky he didn't ban me for life. I try to explain that it was just an accident, but Paul is in such a rage of screaming and flailing about that I don't think he's even listening to me. I become afraid that Paul's going to have a heart attack or something he's so mad. Donna comes running out of the store to see what's wrong and Paul manages to sputter out what I've done. I tell Donna one last time that it was an accident and that I hope Paul calms down, then I leave.

As I'm leaving Polly's lot, I notice that it's closed and somebody has busted all of the windows out of the front like they're doing a massive remodeling project or something.

Then I wake up.

I read today in LEO that Kelly Clarkson is coming to Louisville!

VigilanteGirl and I are soooo going! I was actually surprised to find that she's a Kelly fan, but I'm sure she was more surprised to hear about how much I love Kelly. I think she had me pegged as more of a Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra fan.

Of course, tickets don't go on sale until Saturday, so I really need to be on the ball to make sure I buy two tickets at 10:00 AM before they sell out.

Also, the concert itself isn't until August 24th, and all sorts of things could happen between now and then, but for now I'm as excited as shit!

Does shit really get excited?

Just changed the beer page from a static page to a dynamically-generated one. Visitors shouldn't see any difference, but this will make it much easier for me to add new entries when I'm travelling.

I need to decide if I'm going to be concerned with the order of the entries. For now they're mostly alphabetical, but any new ones I add will just get stuck at the top.

If I decide that the order of the entries is actually important to me then I've got more work to do, and I'm not really sure where to begin.

(update: Okay, I've figured out how to keep the listing alphabetized. The beer page is actually a separate 'blog, specifically it's a single-page archive for all entries in a new "beer" 'blog.

Because this particular archive page doesn't include the date of the posting, I decided to use that posting date for sort order.

So what I did was go back and change the date on all of the entries to match their alphabetical order. I left plenty of blank dates between entries so that any new entries can just be added with the proper date to put it in its proper alphabetical place. Pretty snazzy.)