eggnotes - February 2000
29 februaryLast night after watching Lain: Navi and the end of Clerks, Amy wanted to watch the Exorcist. I rebuffed her and we lay in bed talking until she whipped out her new camera and had me stand over her holding a white sheet and flapping my arms while she taped me in nightvision mode.
28 february
Chatting with Timothy Burke, now-tenured Professor of History about gaming and our significant others
I've been trying to get Amy to play some games. At first I offered her the Sims but then I monopolized the game to write my review. I got "You Don't Know Jack: Movies" a trivia game, but the question-style threw her off and she was non-plussed at first glance.
She's generally resistent to computer recreation to begin with - Amy's arguement is that she works on the computer for a living all day long so it's not the site of leisure for her. It makes sense, tho i wish I could get her to play some games and analyze and compare with me, like we do films.
It's kind of amazing how electronically geared up we are - we have like 5 functional monitors/screens/TVs in our house as it is, and two more than aren't plugged in, in use. For her birthday this weekend we together bought her her first video camera - important for a filmmaker to have a "sketchpad" of sorts.
21 february
We live in such a beautiful state. It felt like a nice way to take advantage of the surroundings. This last weekend a few folks with February birthdays and their signifcant others visited a north coast rental overlooking the vast pacific. Nice cooking, walking, movie watching, scenery enjoying, long bath taking, trivial pursuiting, "the kind of vacation" eve remarked, "that you don't need a vacation from."
16 february
we've been having sex, it's strange. After three weeks or so of being tired and busy, we made time after I returned from Boston. It was fantastic. Then we did it again two nights later, it was like, better than DVDs!
We really are compatible in a physical way. And even tho we've been sparring over household issues and the car with some routine, I enjoy it. I hope she does - every once in a while I catch her mid-glare and we both have to laugh.
It's a time when the housing is nice - we have a working fireplace and a nice TV and we watch movies. We eat alright, and we're aspiring to exercise regularly. We each have a steady, job with good pay, and we're both standing in line with our stock options.
I think Amy feels a bit creatively stymied - like her work doesn't use her right brain so much, or that's not where she wants to put it necessarily - she'd rather be making films. So we talk of getting her a video camera ("I use a camera like a sketch pad" she says), but we need money for that, etc.
The cat, our first co-hosted semi-permanent lifeform (besides more temporary houseguests) has been having trouble. Here's a chat scroll with Joanne on the issue:
Sloth: SLIM! what the hell is wrong with my Fernando4 feburary
Fusty: you think.
Fusty: he's got crystals in his bladder.
Sloth: oh my god
Sloth: I know about that
Sloth: what did you do
Fusty: bummer like that! but we're working to increase the acidity of his urine, and we're feeding him only wet food now.
Fusty: it was from his old dry food!
Fusty: how do you know about that?
Sloth: you bastards
Sloth: from amy
Sloth: I can't believe you hurt my fernando
Fusty: hey, we didn't know why he was peeing on everything in sight.
Fusty: we reacted with fear and suspiscion. we talked about giving him up to a friend for adoption. we thought he didn't like us and our wacky schedules
Sloth: did he pee on my blanket???
Fusty: as it turned out, he was in pain.
Fusty: does that matter? he may have peed on your blanket as an expression of his suffering!
Sloth: i can't believe you going to give fernando away
Fusty: think of it as solidarity between you.
Sloth: yes it matters that he pees on my blanket
Sloth: i really l;ike that blanket
Sloth: i grew up with it
Fusty: matters like you feel more connected to him, or matters like you think there's more than one way to skin a cat?
Fusty: you know he shat on that blanket. every blanket in the house got hit a few weeks back.
Sloth: i'm hurt
Sloth: really hurt
Fusty: it came right out though, no smell, no stain. i swear - i cherish that blanket, i'm honoured to be borrowing it.
Fusty: it's a thing of great beauty.
Sloth: i'm hurt
Sloth: i'm really hurt
Fusty: i'm sorry joanne.
Fusty: you can have a one on one with him when you get here.
Fusty: if you get good vibes you can let him into the living room and hopefully we won't pee on the floor chairs and bed like he has been doing.
Fusty: he won't pee.
Sloth: where are keeping him???
Sloth: in the basement
Sloth: ????
Fusty: in the kitchen or outside. the linoleum is the easiest place to clean.
Sloth: oh my fernando
Fusty: yeah, times are tough. fortunately we didn't take out our sadness and agression on him, we took him to a vet, a cool hippy guy with a dragon belt buckle and he fixed fernando right up.
Fusty: he wrassled that cat into submission and diagnosed the situation.
Sloth: you took him to a hippie vet???
Sloth: oh my god
Fusty: hey, he prescribed pills and antibiotics and shit, not flowers or anything.
Sloth: oh my god
Sloth: my fernando is on pills
Sloth: good god
Fusty: yeah, he just chows them pills with great fervor. they're beef flavoured!
Sloth: good lord, he's going to get addicted
Fusty: we'll invite you to come up and detox him.
Sloth: justin
Sloth: the pain
Sloth: i just
Sloth: don't know what i'm gong to do
Fusty: come see him, talk to him, see what he says.
Sloth: I just
Sloth: I just
Sloth: I just can't
Fusty: it's not selling out for you to visit him in the kitchen.
Fusty: he may be confined, but his soul still sings.
Sloth: that was fucking lovely
Fusty: you should hear him.
Sloth: does he cry
Fusty: relentlessly.
Sloth: this hurts
Fusty: oh yes, just like crystals in your bladder.
Fusty: and the smell of cat pee all over the house.
Fusty: we do not want to be people whose house smells of cat pee.
Sloth: can't wait to sleep there
Fusty: hah hah
Fusty: we cleaned hard last night
After weeks of watching movies and participating in art shows, I asked Amy to play a computer game with me, or just to play a computer game. She wasn't going along with it until I got pissy that she never did anything I want to, so then she agreed. Thing is, I'm so excited about The Sims, it's such an unusual computer game, I want her to play it, to check it out with me so we can talk about some of the culture that I'm involved in.
So she sat down and played The Sims for over an hour - I left the room and did dishes while she designed a house. She spent all her money on landscaping so she ended up quitting in frustration, but that was after she said "Hey, it's time for bed" three times and kept on clicking at the game. I take that as a good sign - I think The Sims is an appropriate choice for her because it really provokes the imagination it seems. I'm early in my study of the game, but I was glad to have Amy's reactions to it as well. Notes for my FiringSquad.com review.
(She said she doesn't want to play computer games or video games because she sits at a computer all day and doesn't want to come home to plug in again just like that.)
1 feburary
Amy and I spent the weekend nesting further it seems.
At Urban Ore, an advanced junk shop in Berkeley, I found some video-replaying technology I'd never even heard of - Capacitance Electronic Disc System. Basically, it's a record player that plays video records. Dig that - weird huh?
RCA pioneered the technology from 1978 to 1984, it went nowhere. Why would you want something as tempermental as a stylus/needle driven video player when you could have the precision and durability of lasers? Laser disc players won that short battle I think. Now of course DVD players are crushing them all. And I have one of those too.
But I decided to buy the $20 Montgomery Ward GEN 10301 from 1981 and I spent another $100 on movies - mostly 70s and 80s classics like Raiders of the Lost Ark, CaddyShack, Survivors, 2001, Tron, Road Warrior, a few James Bond movies. The movies come as these foot and a half square sheathed platters - you insert the entire disc and cover into the machine and extract the cover, leaving the disk inside. As soon as I completed the insertion, in the test station in the back of the junk mart, with the player plugged into a krusty old temporary monitor piled high on top of old VCRs and betamax players patched with duct tape my eyes lit up - I was astounded at this crazy old technology - in large part because I'd never heard of it, and because it seemed like such an abberation - so cumbersome, so analog, so eclipsed.
So much to Amy's chagrin, I bought in on the spot - 20 of the heavy large disks and a player - she lamented the advent of "more crap" into our house.
We brought it all home, hooked up the CED player to the 20 year old Zenith TV and we now have a downstairs American late 70s viewing station next to the fireplace with a pillow covered futon. We spent the weekend watching Harrison Ford and Sean Connery position themselves as men of the world.
Earlier that day, before I'd come in contact with this dead tech, we had chased over the 510 looking for fireplace stuff, so by Saturday night we had our first crackling fire and a warm platter of movies to watch. Amy said she was just happy to have movies playing as an excuse to lay with me. It was nice - we've spent time curled up in our new nook every day since. It's nice to make nooks.
The other eventful happening of this weekend was Fernando - he somehow was overtaken by the liquid shits and made his illness felt on each of our three blankets. He's got a precision targeting ass that cat. Actually, he was pawing at our upstairs comforter (purchased by Amy for our anniversary to replace the cat-urinated one before it) and meowling in the most drawn out awful way and I whisked the new plush goose down out from under his butt at the last minute - he hit the sheet and new mattress pad instead.
Fortunately the cat doo came out quite readily but it's so tough to share your house with a poo-poo predator. So eventually after reading online that public defication is often a sign of illness, we took Fernando into the Berkeley Emergency Cat Clinic at 11pm. They said he was one of the most ornery cats they'd ever seen - his ears were back the whole time, hissing and making bad growling, deep rumblings and sounds of unhappiness. He wouldn't even let us touch him, which turned out to be fine because we saved the cost of an exam since the doctor couldn't get near him. She ordered us to quarantine the cat into an easily cleanable room and gave us some pills to feed the cat. On our way out, the receptionista told us that the pills were some of the most bitter things she'd ever tasted which made me feel that these were very dedicated feline health care professionals.