Eli | Mike | Mary - click for individual bio

September 23, 2003

First of all, I have to apologize for not posting this sooner. I spent almost all of last week being sick, really sick, and I'm just now feeling a little better. In fact, on Saturday night, after we played our show at Lush in Santa Monica, I was still running a fever, although just how badly remains in question since neither Mary nor I can recall the normal temperature of the human body. Oh, I suppose I could look it up right now, but I've been ill, and I'm tired. So I won't bother.*

The show actually wasn't bad, all things considered--just the day before I thought there was no way I could possibly get up and sing without passing out, but on Saturday I felt just all right enough to give it a try. My idea then was that I would bring a sleeping bag onstage with a pillow, and all my bottles of vitamins and such, and do the show lying down, perhaps napping between songs. But when I got there I couldn't really get the mic stand to re-adjust down to the ground, and I didn't really want to take the time to undo Mary's Snoopy sleeping bag, it having been last unrolled in, I think, 1982 when she was nine years old. So I scrapped that idea and played in the usual (upright) position, although admittedly with somewhat less energy than normal. I did try to perform "Office Drone" from a prone position on the stage floor, but I had to uncomfortably lift my head to reach the microphone, and playing the bass was kind of hard, and I got a cramp. You know what would have really worked best? A hammock.

So anyway, being sick last week, I spent a lot of time on the couch, watching movies. Here's what I discovered:

1. My Life As A Dog is still quite good, and Mary is an angel for renting that for me.

2. The Seventh Seal is also still quite good! Unfortunately our local Blockbuster doesn't have any more Bergman films. Or Fellini. Or Visconti. Or anything like that.

3. But it does have Indochine, which is a little...trashy. Mary said it was like the Blue Lagoon set in revolutionary Vietnam. Even in my compromised mental state I could see her point.

4. Hardware Wars isn't quite as brilliant as I remembered it from when I last saw it at age 11. Alas.

The sad thing is being sick gave me the only opportunity I've had lately to relax and catch up on my reading! Now that I'm well again I have to get back to doing stuff, like, oh, writing this diary, cleaning the house, going to work, things like that. And...I admit, I'm a lazy bastard. I think I liked being sick quite a bit more! This was revealed to me slowly: the first day I was so sick I didn't care, but the next day I felt kind of guilty and wrong because I wasn't at work. That passed very quickly and by the third day I was absolutely prepared for a life of indolence. Going back to work has not changed this sensation very much.

But back at work I am. Puh.

What else? Oh yeah, I was in my drawing class the other day when I noticed that a girl had done a sketch of my head on her paper. I could tell it was supposed to be me from the hair and the sideburns. "You look like Crispin Glover," she said. "Oh? Huh," I replied. I asked Mary about this: "you don't look like Crispin Glover! It's just that your hair kind of does." The other thing that happened recently that was kind of interesting is that I was driving into the parking lot at work and noticed that there was a very large spider climbing up the side of the truck and onto the hood. Then it fell off, like it was drunk. Then it crawled up again. And fell off. It did this several times before I parked and tried to shoo it away, but it only crawled under the hood. I don't know what happened to it after that.

Eli

*I'm still not sure, but I found out that the normal temperature for human urine (as it leaves the body) is 98.6 degrees. Surely that's useful for something, isn't it?