got to work and they sent me home because i had earned too many vacation days so they told me to burn one.

i didnt know what to do.

so i went to the new target in hollywood.

all i needed was toilet paper and some sticky grip tape stuff for the bathtub so no one slips when theyre taking a shower.

and maybe some two liters.

left there with a receipt that said $180. i remembered that my dvd + vcr had stopped dvding months ago and the vcr had begun to eat tapes.

got a combo for $110. go video.

there was a time when i would buy nothing but relatively high end audio and video: mitsubishi video, denon and sony audio. but when you can get a dvd/hi fi vcr for $110, i really cant afford Not to buy two a year.

what i can never do, however, is throw away the broken machines. i have a problem.

my baseball card collection closet is being upstaged by what is begining to look like a dvd mausoleum.

theres a jvc first gen dvd player, the apex one that had the macrovision mod chip in there, a mits hifi vcr with jog shuttle remote, a panasonic hi fi, two direct tv receivers one with the first gen access card, and my brother in laws powerbook.

and now a magnavox dvd + vcr combo that my ma got me from target when we all hung in palm springs.

after target i went to the good guys and tried to get my camera fixed for free since i had bought the extra warranty.

they said they couldnt fix it for free because dropping it on the ground is not covered.

looked at the big screen tvs. huge. two grand. its amazing.

then i went to beverages and more and got some tequila, some sam adams cuz i think im hanging out with karisa tomorrow, and a huge thing of sour mix for amaretto sours which i crave because i havent been to vegas in far too long.

i almost bought gasoline on the way home, but it was two dollars and eleven cents at the cheapest place i noticed and i at least want a free carwash if its gonna have to be like that.

when i got home some guy said he’d paypal me ten bucks under two conditions:

1. it didnt go to the car fund

2. i put up a new picture of ashley

and then i got caught up talking to the 91 year old lady upstairs and now i cant go to the rock show.

now im printing out your pot stories cuz i was explaining to her what four twenty meant and then that led to this and that and whatever.

she was watching celebrities uncensored.

lick bush + bill gillespie + noah glass

i would have thought of this earlier.

so maybe you at home can play along.

this will be the first time that i have encouraged anonymous commenting, but as clipper girls cousin told me last night, i need to mellow the fuck out.

and what a better day to start than today?

since today is four twenty i’m going to write about the first time i smoked pot and if youre so inclined, youre going to tell your first time, anonymously if you like, in the comments.

but tell the truth.

or you can tell a funny story or an interesting fact.

but before i do that, tonight at the derby outright genius Mark Antonides at 9pm, The C at 10, and the debut record release of Shapes of Race Cars, dylans new band.

or you can see cypress hill at the henry fonda which is sold out cuz its four twenty.

the first time i smoked pot was in scott speidens garage in seventh grade. i have very few memories of seventh grade but this one is crystal clear. we were standing in a circle. it was fall. we were listening to ted nugents dog eat dog. i got the joint and i inhaled and passed it around and got it again and inhaled and i didnt get stoned.

i thought there was something wrong with me or maybe i hadnt done it right, but i walked around and tried to pretend i was stoned for a few minutes but then i went back to the party.

the first time i got stoned was with a big titted bisexual punk rock girl named myra at her place in westwood. she rode me there on her vespa.

we watched late night music videos and made out and smoked out of a beer can.

in those days you could just make out all night smoke out of a can make out and watch videos and everyone was happy.

then i went to uc santa barbara. ucsb. u can study buzzed.

before i went there i really thought that if i was at college there i would be able to study more because it was on the beach and away from the city.

i studied alright. once while camping my hippie friends thought it would be funny if they put some acid on my breakfast graham cracker.

i woke up and had no sense of time dimension distance or reason.

i stared at my hand for maybe a half hour.

late late late that night someone passed around a joint.

it was so late that it had become early.

and the sun came up and we passed out listening to pink floyds wish you were here.

and it wouldnt have been the same without that natural herb.

mark antonides + shapes of race cars + dylan + monty

reminded the world of the cold hard fact that alas i am not one of the vaunted members of the technorati top 100 blogger club, but said i should be considered an a-lister nevertheless.

with all due respect to the learned gentleman of letters, and a fine example of the gentle wisdom of californias central coast, i will have to disagree with him on this particular point.

one must draw the line at some point. i love technorati. i am saddened by the brutal truth. but the fact remains that in blogging, just like in life, i am merely above average, and by no means excellent.

the scoreboard doesnt lie and in a blogosphere where fark is #10, metafilter is #17, wil wheaton is #20, the smoking gun is #43, lileks is #50, belle du jour is #65, rolling stone is #70, ev the president of blogger is #97, and wonkette barely squeaks in at #100 – where the heck do you think dumbass tonypierce.com + busblog is going to fit in?

not that i care much, the only reason i do this is to get laid, create lies, and have an outlet to remind whoever will listen that not everyone in america is buying the bullshit thats being shoveled on us from washington, but there are several forces aligning against the busblog having a better rating in the links and the hits columns.

my peers, for the lack of a better word, are hipsters. smart, creative, independently minded cynics who do things like think about the politics of linking a “popular” blog like this one. some think, why link tony, everyone else does. why link the busblog, thats like giving into the establishment. or why encourage tony, it’ll only feed to his misogynistic ego.

then there are the firewalls who think that theres porn on the busblog and wont let their employees access this r-rated (but not x-rated) flurry of swear words, misspellings, but rarely nude photographs. which is ironic because if this page did focus on nude photographs odds are itd be as popular as the 6 suicide girls pages that are rightfully in the technorati top 100, not to mention their news page which ranks #4.

i could go full bore politics during the stretch of this next election and start linking and kissing the asses of the quote unquote a-listers whose occasional links would inflate my currently respectable, but ultimately failing numbers

but at what cost?

and what sort of example would i be leading?

underneath every good blog is a theory and an experiment.

on drudge’s the theory is “we can convince smart people that this is the real news of the day” and the experiment is “how long will it take the republicans to realize that their #1 radio voice is a druggie, their #1 blogger likes men, and their #1 tv host is al franken’s best publicist.”

on this blog the theory is “wordy prose and pictures of hot chicks will outweigh the fact that the author is neither good-looking, successful, or talented” and the experiment is “despite that, after years of panhandling, a dedicated blogger will be able to have his readers paypal him the equivalent of a new car and he wouldnt have had to sell out an iota.”

yes i would like this blog to be read as much as wil wheaton’s, but he was in stand by me, people love him in stand by me.

i cant compete with the kid in stand by me.

how the fuck am i supposed

to compete

with the kid

not cory feldman and not the other one who dated guiliana depali

and not river phoenix

and not the fat kid who barfed

in stand by me.

dirty fez + lick blog + blogging.la