Watering: Food Backlog, Comments, Invitations

Watering entries are personal diaries, alluding to this post's conclusion. They are a potpourri of recent thoughts and experiences (one might even call them a blog, if one were to be so common), published when I have no other projects to work on, in order to ensure I've written something for the day.

Too much to cover. I'd like to get the pictures in first.

One egg over a toasted slice of peanut butter bread. The way the light of my lamp hits my plate in this picture makes it the closest I've come to food porn or at least reminiscent of a Deus Ex: Human Revolution screenshot.

Far less tantalizing, canned chicken with mayonnaise and pickles over toasted peanut butter bread. Tasted nicer and more in-focus than it looks.

This morning's breakfast. Two Gordon Ramsay eggs (sour cream gone off) over toasted peanut butter bread.

The bread. See it a lot on r/keto and finally made it. I believe I screwed up the preparation by mixing all the ingredients at once until it simply became a slightly eggier peanut butter, which was so adhesive that I ended up eating too much off of my fingers while trying to get it in the pan. Possibly made myself sick ingesting so much raw egg, possibly placebo. Should mix the peanut butter and eggs until liquid, not further to thickening, then add rest. Should look thin and with sediments. I am not a sedimental man, but it might have helped in this case.

It rose more than I expected it to, but not enough to function for sandwiches. Good as a little plate for servings like this. Nice taste and texture contrast. Got a baker's dozen slices from it, could have narrowed them even further.

Last Player Character column got hotter than I could have imagined on N4G, which was a double-edged sword. It drew some comments and one was pretty negative, although the person who wrote it clearly didn't read the article carefully or fully. I am pleased with how I responded. Remember: priority in running my site is accessibility. I must pride myself on taking criticism, even kowtowing to it. My ego wasn't too bruised. Then linked the comments to the chat chums; Ben's criticism of the column, while mostly fair and polite, was too difficult to swallow.

Couple of nights ago, dreamed of Shiva. Very odd, that. I remembered her exactly as she looked at fourteen. Perfectly beautiful, in a bright blue shirt. Dreamed that I had tried to blackmail or threaten her, then was trying to avoid her in the streets of Forest Hills, walking with Serj.

Found her on Facebook. Friends with Serj. Amazingly, I always knew her last name - I was never certain. She's married now, possibly a mother.

Perhaps I dreamed of her because it was 4/20, and my earliest memory of the day was having Serj tell me that she had been saying "Love you plenty, happy 4/20" to people. I quoted that on Sans Pants. I've never forgotten it. Don't know. Tangential.

Two nights ago sucked badly. Then the love affair which dare not speak its name became more engrossing with the introduction of sexual pictures sent to my phone; you know, like what happens in the movies. Then it sucked amazingly.

Reviewing the pictures this morning, they were adjacent to old pictures of Verse. Trying to find her screen name, I made the minatory mistake of venturing into my AIM logs. Some conversations later, I found myself reading through always painfully pleasant chats I had with Mary. My memory of us barely speaking in 2004 is wrong. We spoke, then and afterwards, and were close.

Two things:

Autumn 2005.

Mary: Dude

Mary: Bella came out

Jason: Just now?

Mary: Well, I dunno when. Clark told me

Jason: I see.

Mary: HAHAHA, I SO KNEW IT

Jason: Fucking Charles made me gay too.

Mary: OH MAN

Mary: hahahaha

Mary: you're funny

Jason: It was a very easy joke.

Mary: I know, but you executed it with such panache

That was a good joke. I don't know if I knew it at the time and just played miserable to be distant or if I've fallen so far by now that my standards for myself have lowered. I had to stop reading there. I feel as though I've let so much slip through my fingers.

To whit:

Spring 2004.

Mary: Hey, you doing anything tonight?

Mary: Robin and Charles and Bella and Lenny and I are all going out to party. Wanna come?

Jason: No.

Mary: Ya sure?

Jason: Very.

Mary: Dammit, Jason!

Mary: You would totally have fun

Mary: Probablly

Jason: First: I wouldn't. Second: I already have a date for tonight.

Mary: Oooooh...

Mary: Nice.

Mary: Have fun, okay? I'm signing off. Bye.

I notice myself acting very cold to her in these conversations. Could be lover's spurn. Could be depression. Could be confidence. I would never act like that to someone now, and I wonder if that's a good thing. I do sound cool, but only by her grace was I tolerated.

As for the invitation, I'd completely forgotten that. I remember Oswald asking me, noncommittally, once if I'd be interested in going to a party. That's mostly all I think of when I reference turning down invitations back then. Apparently, I did better than that. There was no date, obviously. I got to fard myself in fantasy instead of partaking in an experience which could have been pivotal. I wonder what would have happened if I'd gone. If I'd still know them now. If it would have gotten me closer to Allison.

When I still pine for Allison, I wonder what I could have done to break through to her back then. Obviously, there's the old stalwarts of not being fat and being more outgoing. This is something concrete. I could have tried to mingle, to party. I could have gotten invited more often.

But it's a lie to say I still don't feel a certain pride that I didn't. Pride, along with a pain of missed opportunities and forsaken memories that almost has me in tears.

Perhaps it was a lie to say I am not sedimental.

Watering: Pressures, Scene of the Crime

Watering entries are personal diaries, alluding to this post's conclusion. They are a potpourri of recent thoughts and experiences (one might even call them a blog, if one were to be so common), published when I have no other projects to work on, in order to ensure I've written something for the day.


You know, talking about the banality of social media is extremely tired. Despite having never partaken in it until this month, I never found stand-up comedy jokes about the uselessness of "twittering" very funny or relatable. What is fertile ground: the utter anxiety of it. Wondering if you're saying too much, too frequently. Trying to glean the best way to acknowledge another person without feeling like an encumbrance on their feed. Reconnoitering the appropriate etiquette is made all the more difficult by those people who probably feel similarly cavalier when it comes to actual socialization, who insist that there's nothing to worry about.

Yeah, that'll keep Sarah from thinking I'm a big ol' goof.

Head is clearer today than yesterday, in which it was clearer than the day before. Weight stalled, teased lower. Dinner plans have changed for tonight. Could improvise portion adjustment? Dinner past two nights has been good: chicken coated reasonably well and a complete meal.

The spinach has made a commendable comeback in taste. And while it will never truly bedizen my plate, it doesn't necessarily look disgusting.

Dreamed last night of confirmation that CM Punk is a Republican. It's probably moot at this point. Whether he is or isn't, he's good friends with a devout one. Speaks ill of his character either way. And it's not like he was as admirable as I ever wished him to be in the first place.

In boarding school, we had an English assignment to write a week's journal entries for a fictional character. I attempted to write a man who had committed a murder. A really insightful take on the criminal mind, I'd intended. It was garbage, and I had to go with something else, but I remember one entry. It read, probably exclusively: "Don't return to the scene of the crime. Don't return to the scene of the crime. Don't return to the scene of the crime."

Follow by the next day's "I returned to the scene of the crime."

I remember when Jon's website was discovered, because he'd tweeted a Dragon Ball Z reference. He said he understood criminals now, how they make the mistakes they make, how maybe they want to get caught.

I don't want to get caught, but I also want to write down that I recently had a conversation turn sexual in slow motion. I should have stopped it, but I didn't, and it was a mistake. That's the funny thing about trying to actually do that thing people are supposed to do, ceasing flirtation. It's really difficult, not only on account of one's libido, but also just out of care for the partner. You don't want to hurt them by doing the right thing. He or she must have felt the same way too. It is so sensitive that I can't even use the person's alias. A lot of fears are hovering. It would be silly to expect that this will remain forever a secret. How wonderful it is to be such a weak-willed toy of consanguineous lust.

I must update this blog tomorrow in order to push this entry from prime viewing.

Funny how getting involved in a terrible situation like this makes the sexual aspects of the media I watch seem so much more empathetic. Maybe this is how everyone feels, and why people don't mind them as much as I do. The last Mad Men was just something else. It makes me think of that one episode of Sopranos I watched in bed in college, which will someday be recounted in Life in Song.

Wardrox was helpful in correspondence regarding The Player Character, which I am currently neglecting. News is going to get harder the longer I put it off. I'll go check my feeds now.

Life in Song: The Everglow

Life in Song is a series which will likely never finish. It is not, as originally conceived, a span of my hundred favorite songs; rather, each post covers one song randomly selected from a list of those which immediately evoke a memory or other emotional response. Entries will likely be uncomfortably candid and melancholic, as they attempt to recount a song's personal significance and also its context in my psychotically detailed fantasy life.


Song: Mae - The Everglow

Thoughts: This song, and the whole album, is deeply collegiate, so it's coincidental that it came up today, as I've been recuperating from a strong dream of college this morning, featuring Billy and, more distressingly, Sally. The Everglow predates my love for her, as I was still transfixed by my high school idols (more on that with future Mae songs). The dream involved me forgetting lines and screwing up in a musical theater performance. Billy comforted without dulling the truth, and Victoria (and, curiously, Andrea [Mary's friend]) entered my room while I was alone, still the laughingstock of campus. Both were naked. It was both a consolation and a taunt. "Can I take a picture?" I asked. They refused. Victoria's breasts looked worse than I believe they would in reality.


Defining Era: 2005, spring.


Vital Lyric: "I think that we've got what it takes to get this heart to start beating again."


First Exposure: The title track to Mae's second album, which I discovered when Jay is Games covered the Flash game made to promote it. I'd heard earlier Mae songs, probably what prompted me to investigate, and was instantly taken with the album.


Prominent Memory: Jay is Games was a constant in the latter half of my freshman year, not merely as a tool of procrastination or unoccupied satiation but eventually a companion during generally bleak emotional periods. I've never been able to reunite with it since. It's difficult to pinpoint which Everglow songs were which nights, as the album was a caparison for a couple of weeks, but the title track vaguely covers all.


Alternate Memories: I remember walking down my home street, the path from the bus, on my way home. This memory could easily be fabricated. It would have had to occur in the early winter of 2006, during that year's museum internship. I was thinking about its place in the Night at H Street set, see below.


Fantasy: "The Everglow" isn't firmly within our song roster anymore, but for a moment it seemed crucial. A Night at H Street (or One Night in H Street) is the six or more hour special aired on a premium cable channel that launches Artist on Artist into mainstream consciousness. Our set becomes legendary. The encore is usually a combination of "The Buzz Kill," "The World You Love" (perhaps in the first set), and "Searching for a Former Clarity." For at least one day, I considered "The Everglow" for the big, blow-away number immediately preceding or following "Searching." This is now likely the position of "The World You Love," as I could never tease enough meaning into "Everglow"'s lyrics to give the big chorus as much impact.


Out of Ten: 5.4


Audiosurf Score: 116,956 (Nearby: 2, Global: 2)


Some Levity: Spring of 2005, then. Let's see. I can summon one which I need to save for another song. Instead, I'll retrieve one of my more cherished memories, a talk I gave in that semester's computer science class for which I was completely unprepared. I relied on humor and, maybe, charm instead and for once it worked. I impressed and was commended, was almost picaresque. I can remember one joke, a complaint about Frogger (having no actual computing insight, I talked about games on the Mac II) which I excused with the thought that, as it was made in the eighties, people weren't as highly evolved back then. Derivative, and I thought so at the time, but it went over.

Give anything to get that morning back.

Watering: The A.V. Club, Patrick Klepek

Watering entries are personal diaries, alluding to this post's conclusion. They are a potpourri of recent thoughts and experiences (one might even call them a blog, if one were to be so common), published when I have no other projects to work on, in order to ensure I've written something for the day.

I wonder if I should create a "Fuck The A.V. Club" post label. It's a sentence I think disproportionately often compared to how much of their stuff I actually read. I don't know if it will come up regularly.

Can't quite tease that last sentence into a joke about their staff having trendy bouts of New York City bulimia, so I'll just move on.

I am open to correction, but The A.V. Club bothers me initially because I find something pretentiously indulgent about its genesis. While yes, it existed nominally prior to The Onion's Internet presence and installation in the mainstream, it didn't earn its sententious identity until it finally came to fruition in the last decade. And that was seemingly only a result of funneling the well-meaning hip, young audience of The Onion into a charmlessly sincere and ostentatious cesspool of yuppie bohemia. I've seen the site refer to The Onion as its sister, rather than its parent. That's the sort of thing that gets my goat, and I'm not even an Onion fan.

So, I bring this up because I was searching for information on what is happening between Chevy Chase and Community, hoping to find confirmation that his character was being killed off. I was led to this article, which prompted yet another Watering entry, meaning I probably won't actually get to another Life in Song before the countdown to realizing it was a rash and very bad idea reaches zero.

I want someone to tell Sean O'Neil that putting the word "feud" in quotation marks doesn't actually spare you the indignity of covering a Hollywood feud. I know that after Rachel Maddow criticized chest-beating, pugilistic political headlines it's unfashionably masculine to treat an animosity between two people as an animosity between two people but you don't get to have your cake and eat it while writing an incendiary gossip column and maintaining the prideful insistence that "no one really feuds, this isn't pro wrestling," just because you threw down some dissociative punctuation.

In the article, O'Neal uses the "feud" once normally (must have slipped by the editor) and twice thereafter in quotes. He uses it, in quotes, a further two times in his follow-up. Who is he ostensibly quoting? Deadline? Himself, having allowed the word to originally escape naked, shivering the cold winter without its protective coat of irony? To hell with that. He admits further down that he perpetuates (I'd say "peddles") gossip, but with the same textual smirk of nonconfrontational nonconformity.

Fuck The A.V. Club.

Dreamed the other night about Patrick Klepek of Giant Bomb. A lot of issues there, although in finding that link I did see that he is a year older than me, so that's one issue resolved? I had dreams, years ago, about Anthony Burch. This probably isn't normal. Can't decide whether these unrequited astral connections are more or less emotionally harrowing with male gaming journalists than with the standard imaginary night sylphs. Dreams about those I envy make me feel sycophantic, insecurely reverent. Patrick was nice to me, we shared a chocolate pastry.

There's projection and other problems in this post, hovering like flies over my forthcoming Player Character column. I accused Sean O'Neil of being incendiary and not copping to it - a very apparent theme in Rebel Yell, in which I reiterate a number of times that I hope not to offend (most of) the people I mention, then proceed to indict them from my little computer chair. As well, admitting to envying the "them" about whom I write might not be any sort of revelation, but it could undermine the point I try to make.

I hope the column stands.