after talking about sex to an ex and eating dinner while watching someshit on tv i dont know what.

fucked up because i woke up around 11:30p with South Park on and i didnt run straight to my bedroom to continue my slumber. so now i’ll be awake all night.

when you wake up after a late night nap, refreshed, stoney, dreamy, lucid, sometimes waves of euphoria mixed with an unnatural sadness envelope you. thats what happens to you. what happens to me is i get all the above minus the euphoria. all i get is this bizarre sadness and it makes me think that the devil himself caught me dreaming and laid on his side right next to me to whisper sour nothings.

and as the fireplace crackled the last bits of ember he woke up not realizing that he too had slipped off into a nap, checked his pocketwatch and realized he was running late, and sped off into the night taking his warmth with him.

the sudden change of temperature and lack of whispers woke me. i was cold and cartman’s cranky voice seemed so loud that i wondered how i could sleep through it. but now i know. and now i know why the first things ringing in my head when i woke was, “youre a failure because you never became a journalist. youre a failure because you never became a columnist. youre a failure because look at you youre alone.”

i do a pretty good job of fighting off the negative thoughts that seep into my conciousness. and i have a little help from my friends, the angels. so its always interesting when a few of them get behind the defense shields. like hearing french being spoken in compton. its more curious than alarming.

truth is i am a failure because i never acheived the goals i had in my life. and ironically enough i didnt get there because i didnt practice enough.

you practice plenty the angels argue, flickering shiny things out of the corner of my eye so i dont dwell on the not-so-swell, reminding me of the newest shipment of xxx on the pile of mail.

trouble is, i have practiced. ive practiced at being precisely the columnist ive always wanted to be. the one royko was and caen and rooney and king and hunter. men who werent ashamed to be themselves. men who got paid to write or say whatever it is that they wanted in a way that was like no one else but them. men who did it so well that anyone else would look like theives if they tried it, so no one tried it. and now you dont see younger men try it, and you dont see women even think it.

being a gigantic fan of charles bukowski has its plusses and minuses. the plus is he taught us how to keep our voice no matter what the consequence, no matter who rejects us, no matter how poor and ugly and fat and miserable you get.

the minus is he gave us all the hope that success isnt something that can be determined at 20 or 30 or even 40. that your train might not leave the station until youre, dare i say it, old.

but at least your time comes.

and although pablo picasso was never called an asshole

vincent van never got his baby grand.

the pants + shane’s writing project + famous guitarous

On Wednesday Morning,
which is Tuesday night – tonight
at two minutes
and three seconds
after 1:00 A.M.,
the time and date
will be 01:02:03 04/05/06

and even if it doesnt pour in LA when it rains here its the lead story on tv and its on the cover of the paper and theres Team Coverage and people crash into each other more than usual on the freeways

and its the talk of the town and i blog about how stupid everyone is talking about it.

when it rains my directv doesnt work because i have it set up all horrible and my mailbox is connected to the wooden crate that its attatched to and it gets wet so today i just said fuckit and moved the crate under some shelter so when the mailman comes my magazines and lust letters dont get soaked.

they’ll still get soaked cuz as tom waits said its raining hammers its raining nails and my mailman doesnt love me. do you love me? i love me.

better that it rains now instead of a month from now when we will all be at coachella and a bird on the line tells me that the suprise that was supposed to happen once upon a time got leaked out and thats too bad. but maybe its for the best.

im wearing my amsterdam soccer warmup jersey listening to the good tunes that the young people are playing here in the office and not long ago i was the cool young kid playing the sweet jams but time passes quickly and before you know it youre the oldest dude in the whole room, and it makes you wonder if you still have the biggest dick.

can we talk about the sopranos yet? two guys on the howard stern show gave it A+ and id have to give it that too. classic episode. they kept saying how funny it was but i thought it was deep, not funny, maybe it was funny. i will watch it again tonight as i make a tape of it for Danielle.

dear readers in san diego. why arent you all banging down danielles door? is everyone homosexual down there? theres nothing wrong with that but seriously, wtf. if she wasnt the wrong sign id be all up in that blonde shit but Brezney doesnt lie.

ok its lunchtime i heart you, i need you, i want you.

please dont ever change. except in san diego.

change everything in the 619.

except for the gaslight district.

and dick’s.

and TJ

and baja.

as soon as i got home from work i wanted to curl up and fall asleep but i had some home-work to do, and i wanted to revisit a really nice xxx dvd that was sent to me, plus i wanted to eat my leftovers from last night – rib tips mashed potatoes and green beans from the pantry, and i wanted to watch the cubs destroy the reds on tivo, and i wanted to write you.

my job at buzznet this month includes having to write two articles a day about bands playing at coachella and even though most journalists only have to write one article a day tops i like to write if you havent figured out and i can write two articles and several blog posts and a love letter to africa and still have time to chat with a girl in canada on msn.

my chair smells of a terrible combination of sourdough bread farts and Endust. my floor is littered with dozens of used kleenexes. theyre mostly congregated around the fireplace but theyre strewn in such a way that they appear to be running out of the fireplace into the safety of my writing closet.

my clothes need washing, my beard needs shaving, my head has had the same cap on for four days, and my table is a collection of soup bowls and plastic cups that once held water.

its now 152 and i didnt watch the porno i only enjoyed half of the cubs game which i didnt know would be preceeded by a who-me-worry president bush throwing out the first pitch as dozens of secret service men stood on top of the roof of the ballpark in cincy, i didnt chat with anyone on msn, i did watch countdown with keith oberman, and i did view half of Crash which i enjoyed a great deal.

i did read 50 blogs, i did do my home-work, i did eat my sickness pill, i did cough a lot less this evening, and i do wish that i had a girl half my age beckoning me from my bedroom so i could do her before retiring for the night.

strangely once upon a time i had such an angel. stranger still, more than once the fates blessed me so. and strangest yet, each time i did appreciate it because i knew my luck would be fleeting, and sure enough, as always, i was right.

living in los angeles for twenty one years has taught me many lessons and one of them is you do not have to be handsome to end up with beautiful women, or better, willing girls. you dont have to be funny, you dont have to be rich, you dont even have to own an automobile.

living in los angeles has taught me that women may have their faults, but men for the most part are laughable boors who barely know the rules of chess, let alone its inner strategies, therefore dont hold your breath waiting for them to find a g spot or learn how to dance.

i arrived home to phone messages from two incredibly beautiful women this evening with amazing bodies and clever minds, both of whom had sexual appetites that i wouldnt have believed if you whispered in my ear as a highschooler “not only do such creatures exist, but you will witness them in action.” both hotter and more real than these two. somehow.

my mailbox stored one magazine upon my inspection. the week. published by maxim.

and my television was tuned to a station informing me that the senate majority leader who had earlier stepped down in shame had announced that he would not be seeking re-election. indeed, the hammer had been broken.

ants had made themselves curious around a gift my mother had sent me for christmas, peach scented liquid soap that she had marked for your kitchen so i let the hot water run and i took a sponge and made the countertop a wonderland of soapy scalding water which i shall never dry.

and since now it is 237am and i havent coughed in an hour i creep to my room, whisper my prayers in the dark as the electric blanket heats up, then slide under the overstuffed comforter and fall asleep within minutes wondering what on earth the next girl who will share my bed be like, as the hallucinetic mood music of mogwai’s mr beast sends me peacefully on my way while soft raindrops tap against the window pane.

im not happy. im not sad. im not sleepy.

im just far too quickly at the end of this day.

coachella blog + every single batman caption + via gorilla mask + i took the picture thats #3

guero
interscope

lets get the formalities out of the way, im not here to make any friends.

friends is what you get when you go on a date and there isnt a love connection and you try to make something happen and maybe some of it happens and maybe shes really good at head and has a hot tattoo or a tounge ring or a shitload of weed or has the sexiest voice and loves to talk dirty or is super kinky as in whoa or has the cutest barest pussy that you just want to stare at it because from every angle its just fucking perfect as in its an oddity as in you want to take a picture but you cant just tell some new ho damn can i take a picture of that shit

but the sum doesnt equal the whole or something and it doesnt work out even if you try to change or start shaving more or stop buying clothes at target or quit eating taco bell every day. what you have is a failed good thing and now you have a nothing bu you want to keep it on the backburner just incase hell does freeze over so you have a friend.

friends are people who will help you move like no problem. friends are who you give your keys to water the plants to when youre going to aruba. friends are who you buy three dollar liscense plates for while in aruba while baked and drunk and bored so you figure let me find something here that no way in hell they can find here in america, something better than a hard rock cafe aruba visor, something better than a cowboy hat with a bandana tied around it that says aruba in cursive, something less illegal than a nervous iguana stowed away in your baggage.

i have enough friends.

a friend is someone who offers to take you across town on a sunday afternoon to get your directv tivo fixed even though it means that shes gotta drive uptown first to get your busriding black ass.

a friend is someone who makes you salmon steaks as youre doing laundry at their place.

a friend remembers that you really like beck and while shopping for garters with her girlfriend because theyre iswear going to have a girls night garter party buys you the new beck cd.

a friend remembers you after you hooked him up with a great stock deal and cuts you a generous slice after he cashes some of it out.

and heres what else a friend does, a friend calls bullshit on your last few records for being whiny and glum and cheerless and olde. a friend says if i wanted gordon lightfoot i would have dug his ass out of the dirt and got me some gordon lightfood. a friend says this new record of yours is a step in the right direction (“scarecrow”) but not a full step (“rental car”), a half step.

a friend says someones half stepping me and crosses his arms and furrows his brows (“missing”) and whispers bitch and goes back to chewing on his toothpick.

a good friend might even say this sounds like all the leftovers from odelay which wouldnta been bad leftovers if they werent thirteen years old and whereas some things age gracefully some things just stink after theyve turned.

word is the dustbrothers got dug up and their dirty bones were mushed together and their vaults were plundered and beck snuck out of there with some of the junk that hes been looking for (“Que’ Onda Guero”) over all these years and there are some layers in here that are promising. tom waits meets pearl jam (“farewell ride”) and didnt i tell you parts of it stink? but the last few slices were pearl jam meets pearl jam and if i put my name on that id be depressed too.

i barely treat the friends that i have good why should i come here to try to make new ones, my only job if you can call it that is call em like i see em and if im gonna call it not earthshattering not impressive not inspiring not fabulous not roadtrip worthy not better than even the donnas last record then thats what im gonna do

and some people would be all hell man why dont you use your blogger influence to be more positive why you gotta kick a man when hes down and im all shaddup. im all why do you come here if not to have a time out from the blahblahblah bullshit that everyone else seems to love to sing along to?

hey i know the dudes down, i can read!

from “scarecrow”
Walking to the other side / With the devil trying to take my mind
And my soul’s just a silhouette / On the ashes of a cigarette

from “black tambourine”
My baby runs to me / She lives in broken-down buildings
Can’t pay the rent again / These spider webs are my home now
And when the sun is down / We’ll shake and rattle our bodies
To keep it warm at night/ My tambourine is still shaking

because im a friend ive played the guero drinking game where you take a shot every time he mentions bones or death or the devil or dust or being buryied and im still fucking wasted

so i know what sort of shape he must be in and is and what an accomplishment it is to have hit rock bottom, find the scrapbook of past grandeur which is doubling as a treasure map out but to use it you have to put on a silly hat and try not to be embarrassing and dirivitive so good luck

and its nice to see that guero isnt either of those things.

this is a record from a friend to a friend

at christmas

if you were gonna get them three cds and a scarf.

and one day we’ll get a whole cd of this:

from “go it alone”

I’m coming over
See me down at the station
By the lane
With my hands in my pocket
Jingling a wish coin
That I stole from a fountain
That was drownin’

All the cares in the world
When I get older
Climbing up on the back porch fence
Just to see the dogs runnin’
With a ring and a question
And my shivering voice is singing
Through a crack in the window

oak park mastermind + muscle68 + streetcar blog + sk smith deserved better + lindsays ass

i miss you. i miss you a lot. every time the phone rings i think of you. every time i want to pick up the phone i think of you.

you know i dont call anyone on the phone and you know i dont pick up the phone unless its you or my momma.

im so sorry i havent written you earlier. im horrible. and ive been sick. and ive been traveling like a mad man.

i got your email and your letter and your card and your smoke signals. i think i got your carrier pigeon but i kept shooing him away and finally he just pooped on my porch.

i think ive been sick because i miss you. i know i have been traveling and staying out late so as to not think about you. i know that there is something wrong with me because youre not here but dont take that the wrong way, im just adjusting, and you know Libras have a hard time adjusting to new things.

today is opening day and if you were here id have taken you to dodger stadium. you would have tried to go to work but i would have worked out something with your boss so she’d know to give you today off.

lately ive been going to movies a lot. plus the academy girls have been servicing me with dvds while ive been ill so ive probably seen more movies in the month that youve been away than i saw all year.

spikes film was great, and your girl natalie portman was in a movie that made me cry.

i cant imagine what life is like in africa for you. i cant imagine sleeping in the dirt or in the cold or having to walk places for water. i cant imagine not being able to eat fast food, or watch people suffer, or knowing that theres massive violence happening a hundred miles away.

you really are an angel and i cannot imagine anyone better to represent america than you and i cant imagine anyone who id rather meet if i was a dirt poor human being in the most impoverished country in the world than you.

i promise that i will write more. i dont know if you want to be in touch with the “real world” but if you do im here for you, not that my life is real, if anything its the most unreal anywhere. but if you want to know whats happening outside of the impenetrable forrest i will let you know.

barry bonds had a book written about him saying that he was taking steriods and now the commissioner of baseball is launching a full blown investigation. as if baseball didnt know that steriods was happening.

howard stern got 30% of his listeners, like me, to pay for radio. meanwhile david lee roth is doing so badly in nyc that theyre probably going to fire him after just 2 months, and adam corrola is doing so bad in LA that hes in dead last place. both markets were #1 for howard for years. things are so bad for CBS that theyre now trying to sue howard in an act of desperation, but all its done is keep howard in the news and make more people want to buy radios to hear wtf hes doing.

what hes doing is great. people are allowed to talk normally. there are far fewer commercials and last week these girls demonstrated the fucking machines.

i miss you so much that i really will visit you in africa this christmas.

i promise,

tony

ps im soooo happy i didnt loan you my ipod, it broke, and after i told my readers they donated enough money for me to get a new one. i had a new one within two days. so crazy! i told you things are unreal.

pps i took a picture of luke wilson in texas at a buzznet party and he was all pissed off and i told him to save that shit for hollywood.

If you’d like to send a nice letter to our friend in Uganda here is her address

Chris Spurny
P.O. Box 29348
Kampala, Uganda

when i was a kid i’d always fight with my mom to let me have Opening Day off from school. and sometimes she would tell me i was crazy but later she realized that i was crazy and let me stay at home.

opening day for a Cub fan is one of the few days where our hopes and idealism and dreams were strong. you start fresh, the uniforms are bright and clean, the ivy is brown and there might even still be snow on the ground but there was spring and life and growth just around the corner.

so here i am now a grown man and i would have loved to ask my boss to let me work from home but since ive been sick the last few weeks ive sorta run out of days where i can do that, but the desires and hopes and dreams of that little kid are still inside me, and here i am looking at the clock seeing that its 1153am Pacific knowing that something is happening at Wrigley Field for the first time and even though i know i could just log on to ESPN and find out, its far better to just imagine that Derrick Lee has bashed a few into the bleachers already, and that Aramis Ramirez has lined a few doubles off the bricks in left.

Cubs fans are cursed with a love that will never be returned, and its ok. we learn to appreciate the smaller things, like the taste of a cold beer and a good conversation while applying long lines of mustard to our vienna all beef hotdogs.

i hear the bleachers cost $25 now and the Tribune Corp sold the rights to name the bleachers to Bud Light. which is fine with me because after i bang marilyn monroe and Venus and cleopatra when im in Heaven, i will ask to go to the special place in Hell where those Tribune execs who brokered that deal are tied up and i will poke their eyes out with spears and chop up their naughty bits.

i dont have any children but when i do i will take them to the bleachers and because i have been bitten by the curse i will fork over the $50 a ticket or however much it costs in the future and i will tell them about Babe Ruth pointing to center field at Wrigley, and i will tell them about Bill Veeck and how he planted the ivy out there as a young man and as an old man sat in the bleachrs with his shirt off and his one leg, and i will tell them about Harry Caray and how he took a chest of beer out there once a year when he broadcasted from the best place in the world – the bleachers of wrigley field.

and they will probably not understand, and if they dont, good. curses shouldnt be passed along from generation to generation. but if they do get it then they wont have to fight with anyone if they want to take opening day off and watch it on tv instead of going to school.

at least not from this cub fan.

unless of course they end up yankee fans.

the coachella blog + buzzmachine + alecia

hi tony, wassup g?

cold, youve been all up in me for close to two weeks now, and im sorry but youve worn out your welcome.

t-man i hear what youre saying but no-can-do my man. im loving the hotties who come over with their big pots of soup, im loving your satelite dish, and you play the BEST music. shit man, im never gonna leave.

im not going to eat any of that soup.

fine, im sick of soup anyways.

im not going to watch any more tv then.

good, i wanted to take a little nap.

im going to crank Gwar for the next eight hours.

see what i care tony America Must Be Destroyed is a freaking classic.

all i have is This Toilet Earth

works for me, lets dance.

cold, seriously, youve become annoying. last night you woke me up at 4am with a dry hacking cough. i dry heaved in the bathroom and woke my neighbors. they were obviously disgusted at what they were hearing and turned on classical music to drown out my sick noises.

i love these stories tony.

then you made me projectile vomit. it was cartoonish. i hurled five times in a row in less than a minute. it was like Stand By Me. all the soup all day left me. one bowl after another. it was like a beer bong in reverse. i saw my meals fsplash infront of my eyes.

yeah, what i did was seal off the large intenstine at noon with a barricade of bacteria and then i scratched your throat while you were sleeping. i was trying to choke you to death but what woulda been the fun of that? plus i had to pee.

you must die, cold,.

im not gonna die, tony.

how do i get rid of you then?

how did you get me? and hey is that a picture of you in the 80s?

i made out with a hot girl. and yes thats me my first year at ucsb. and yes thats a teal leather tie.

ah, k, now arent the sopranos on?

so ive gotta make out with a new hot girl who you havent invaded yet, huh?

or a dude, but you dont go that way. or do you?

hmmmm i might if it would get rid of you.

whatever. see what having a closed mind gets you?

what if i just vomit every night? surely you’ll get barfed out.

no, you’ll just get a sore throat and lose weight.

ive already lost a belt size.

see, and youre complaining.

i hate you cold.

well i love you tony, now flip on hbo, lets see if tony soprano can talk this week.

fine.

wait a damn minute, did you take a picture with that girl while holding a spare rib? i fucking love you man!

oceanaria + cityrag + matt good

tomorrow is opening day, play ball

and im glad it came on a saturday cuz theres always one joker at work who puts vodka in your water glass, or shoves a fish head in your briefcase, or calls your babys momma and tells her you want her back.

because i paid my rent early, a few days ago when my landlord was inspecting my home, i would have forgotten that today was april first if it hadnt been for an email from the one and only mr matthew good, jokester.

the reason i hate april fools so much is because im hypersensitive to the issue of Trust which is what practical jokes feed off of.

in any relationship there are three equally important foundations: honest communication, the desire to keep the relationship alive, and trust. if you remove even one of those the relationship is in deep shit. its like taking one leg off a stool and trying to sit on it.

practical jokes actually take advantage of two of those legs because youre not communicating honestly and youre betraying trust. sure it can be funny, but being punk’d is no fun when youre in it and for some people it can make them untrusting for years to come.

one of the biggest concerns that people have of this current administration is that it has lied to us repeatedly, so much that not only can we not trust it any more but in order to defend itself it has taken the mass media down with them. depending on who your kids learn about this period of time, it might sound like dan rather forged documents, or that US propaganda was an important element in exposing the iraqi links to 9/11, that the press was liberal, or that michael moore’s most popular film was full of lies.

when you cant trust your president, or the congress, when people get caught lipsyncing on snl, when gay male hookers get let into the white house press room day after day for a year, when pro journalists get paid by the ruling party to keep writing good news, when baseball players look at the camera and swear they arent shooting up and then fail drug tests shortly afterward, ashton kutcher’s mtv show just seems like another reality show.

ive had people trust me for no good reason, and ive had people not trust me for no good reason. in my last days of selling tvs on commission i would yell at people who were showing signs of not trusting me as i took it very personally when they told me they were going to shop around or consult consumers reports magazine. of course they shouldnt trust me, i was a freaking sears tv salesguy.

similarily ive had the most innocent young girls strip within minutes of entering my home, or readers of my blog write me the longest emails, or strangers on a train tell me their deepest darkest secrets for no apparent reason other than i appeared trustworthy.

and to keep that appearance alive, as trusting me is the highest compliment i can receive, i place my disclaimer atop my most prized possession, the busblog: dont trust this shit – it’s the interweb.

but alas, people rarely listen to me. and they go right ahead and trust me anyways. and even though they shouldnt, they do, and that makes us all happy because some of whats in here is true, including this list of people who flowed the busblog and got me my new ipod in about 30 hours of me asking for it.

youre all very sweet and i promise to get you what i promised before the fourth of july. gravitas.

james
mr. orange
katherine
f smith
e. kemp
prufrock
debbie
philippe
carolyn
leck
jeneane
peter
tank
dan
jozjozjoz
anita
goose
wild bell
lisa
ian
ian
ian
ian
shellen

if i left anyone off, please please please email me asap.