deep down i believe i really do love having houseguests.today we (we who pale face?)
we were walking down some street in berkeley and we saw mike sugarbaker and i invited him to accompany us to intermezzo to watch us eat and chat with us, etc, and he replied, sure he would come, and observed to my companions that i like an audience.
but now in this house i don't feel as though these people are gathered as an audience for myself, the lead singer of the red house painters is performing accoustically on the tv upstairs - svante's brother just videotaped him this morning. svante is using his new "norelco dial-a-brew" 70s coffee maker he bought at the Oakland Museum's White Elephant Sale - he's making coffee for most everyone. that's a fitting task actually because amy is finishing baking the batch of double chocolate chocolate chip cookies she whipped up last night - while the kitchen fills with the arousing roastaroma, she types i haven't looked what yet on a new orange contessa portable manual typewriter she bought this morning at the Oakland Museum's White Elephant Sale. Kathy is sitting next to me, on my right, using Amy's mac to read a phone script to people from a telnet window. they've applied for jobs through a voicemail box she checks and transcribes for some old woman and then tells them how to provide services for money. it's very strange.
i'm playing the old infocom battletech game, from 1988 or something, now and then. the game reminds me of sitting with the talking heads' little creatures album and maybe jesse kulp playing through this simulation. It's not intensely stimulation, or simulating, but it is nostalgic and repetative and exploratory. i leave it often though because there are so many little centers of exciting activity abounding about.
we might cook dinner for this group and more tonight - we're trying to decide what to prepare, because one potential guest-friend newly moved from sweden Jorgen is vegan. So roasted chicken again with appetizing vegan side dishes? I guess if I'm in a roasted chicken phase i should go with it. amy sure likes the sound of it. and i know how it goes. other than that I would do a leg of lamb like i remember my mama doing but it seems a rather large task to undertake, especially with a non-meat eater in attendance.
kathy's reading the same script again for the third time. did she write it? it seems to have a number of "inflections" in it - slang, moments for natural sounding spontaneous bursts of communication. but mostly it's just facts that i am now coming to understand and remember from sheer rote evesdropping.
somebody's answering machine just ran out on kathy reading her script and she swore in the midst of her reading and read a sentence over. it was a funny momentary lapse of reading.
i look forward to having a third computer. if we place it properly in the home, it might afford an extra workstation for friends to join us regularly when they need a place to check their email or write something or just surf the web and make art or whatever. especially when amy's friends graduate from college, this 144k dsl (thank you dsl networks) might be the fattest bandwidth around. or at least a usable computer. and it's nice to have people in the house. conversation - ready breaks. alternative points of view. ready additional content.
so svante is talking about building a shack in my backyard - just a bed and a stove and a bookshelf, maybe a chair. and not only building it, but maybe living in it a few days a week here. and I say sure! I'd love the company. we have real good chats. it would be like having an occasional partner. it would be like living with howard. but in this case the trouble of building the hangout rests on the interloper.
monica update: "the dance" (from, "it was part of the dance" - showing bill c. her ass in a g-string as a continuation of flirtation between the two). "the dance" as monica uses it, and now we too, refers to the mating game, relations between the sexes.
at about 2.15am a police car giving chase, lights but silently, speeds by in full attack mode. I run to the door and fling it open to spy a police car heading south just behind a two-door white old american car. they were both probably clocking 50 miles per hour on our 25 mph one lane street.. so i went to my office and tried apbonline and no oakland, and then i called police non-emergency and i described the circumstances as i saw them, that a cop was definitely acting outside the law on my street and i wanted to know what was going on and they said, after a serious moment or five pause, "a cop needed backup on a car stop." backup - something like that. I said that it looked to me as though a cop was in persuit of a suspect, and that there appeared to be something seriously amiss. "that's all the information i have at this time." also new to the vocab: "diet shasta arange" as george carlin said it in his "you are all diseased" comedy routine. diet shasta arange - the only thing left on a sunday night in a soda machine in a cheap motel after you've just had sex.
thinking i want to have a talkshow so tonight i broke out the camera as svante was waxing philosophical about future data scructures and freedom of communication and sat next to him and chatted with him into an PAL Digital Camera Po brought with him.
