3/31/2001

The reason I'm up at 6am? I just woke up from a dream where I had parked my truck in the parking lot of a bar in Austin (SxSW, natch) where you had to walk through a metal detector to enter, and C@rl had replaced it with a life-size plastic replica. So, caught in an excellent, if disturbing, practical joke, but still unable to find my truck, and denied the possibility of revenge (as C@rl was inside the bar, with all of my friends, so just walking in and shooting him would have been more difficult, and of course was ruled out completely by the metal detector) I woke up sweating, my heart pounding so hard that the resonance was knocking the headboard of the bed against the wall, in perfect time with my heartbeat. Sometimes I worry that my imagination is completely shot. I mean, how much more transparent could the symbolism be? And what became of that Maker on the rocks I ordered before I found my truck had been replaced by a plastic replica? Why was I driving my truck in Austin, anyway? I always fly and stay in hotels. Why was it that my wallet was stuffed above the visor of a truck I didn't even recognize? Why did we rush to finish our drinks before two o'clock? Why wasn't C@rl even in the dream? Who was that little girl that everyone kept handing around like a handbag, and why was she smarter than everyone there? So many questions, but my heart has calmed down enough that I'm going to try to go back to sleep.
posted 6:52 AM

3/30/2001

Main Entry: 1trust
Pronunciation: 'tr&st
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, probably of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse traust trust; akin to Old English trEowe faithful -- more at TRUE
Date: 13th century
1 a : assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something
b : one in which confidence is placed
posted 1:22 PM

3/29/2001

Hey, weblogs are just decentralized geocities and angelfire!
posted 7:01 PM

3/26/2001

In the spirit of such things, I offer you my very own failed McSweeny's submission:

Dear McSweeney's:

Things just get weirder as time goes on. And, to serve as fodder for those who believe that the whole mess is some grand government conspiracy, I offer the following tale. Even though the post office is not, properly so-called, a governmental organization anymore, the FBI is, and that's how I can get away with making the foregoing comparison.

I was born in upstate New York, at the Onondaga Community General Hospital, to Maine parents, in 1970. We returned to Maine in 1974, (there's a whole lot of autobiographical nonsense missing here, including the birth of my younger brother, three years spent in Indiana, and a funny story about my mother being solicited at her front door by a grave plot salesman, but I will spare you the details as they are not particularly cogent nor are they applicable to the story I'm trying to tell.)

When we moved into our new house, in Maine, our mailing address was Rural Route 2, Box 194G, although we were the third house on what was then a dead-end subdivision road. I've never been able to figure that 'G' out. After a few years of this madness, the Post Office decided that it would be funnier if we had mailing addresses that mapped more or less directly to the location of the house (and/or mailbox, which is an important detail, not to be overlooked) so we became 3 Fairwind Drive for all intents and purpose, practical or otherwise. Mostly, it was a way of guaranteeing that our mail would be delivered properly, but we used it for other things as well, and dutifully painted out the old "194G" adhesive stickers (or peeled them off, I don't remember - I was still pretty young and unconcerned with such worldly things) and painted "3 Champeon" on the box. Or maybe we bought a new mailbox. At any rate, this was the longest we lived at the same mailing address.

Some time later, when I was in high school, no, wait.

I should mention for those to whom the blindingly obvious is obscured by drink or short attention spans that the house hadn't moved an inch, nor had we moved from it.

There. Some time later, when I was in high school, the Town got a new Postmaster, and it was decreed that the practice of having mailing addresses that corresponded to the:
was limiting and made it difficult for those who sorted the mail to keep up with all the changes, additions, and so forth. I should add that the town in which I lived has had a population of somewhere in the neighborhood (heh) of 2200 people for as long as I've kept track.

Not much changes in the town but the addresses (and the mailboxes, which are sometimes run over by snowplows).

But back to my story. The new Postmaster with his high-falutin ideas decreed that our slumbering town would return to the Rural Route system, abandoning the well-liked and sensible "number, street" scheme for one in which our address was redefined as "Rural Route 2, Box 524". This, in itself, was inoffensive, though confusing, as now we had a mailing address and a street address (which we continued to give out for the purposes of pizza delivery, for example), and they were different. We decided to keep the "Three" we'd nailed to the side of our house, in any case, as it made more sense to us, and was a lot cheaper than "Rural Route Two Box Five Two Four", which would have taken up most of the available space on the side of the house nearest our front door, which nobody uses anyway, but still, out of the principle of the thing we refused obstinately to embrace such unwelcome changes.

Those of you who have had your address change for less onerous and bureaucratic reasons will sympathize with us at this point, as you will no doubt be familiar with the process of filling out Change of Address forms, having to check the box on the back of envelopes that says "address change", supplying your new address, and waiting two or three months for the changes to filter through billing, to shipping, and so on, in the meantime raising holy old Hell with your magazine subscriptions. I don't think Boy's Life magazine ever caught up, but that's okay, as it was a gift from a grandparent and I never did like it much anyway.

So, things continued on in this manner for a few years, and life had returned more or less to normal when, last year, it was decided that the Rural Route approach was not going to work with the new 911 system, though it was never explained why. So, a suitable board was convened, and my mother invited to participate, to discuss the renumbering of the streets in a manner that would appease the FBI and other powers that be. My mother did her best, but it was clear from the outset that the board was led by insane people with no regard for the sensible.

One proposal involved renaming every street in town; another suggested the use of GPS systems and students to measure the frontage of lots along each road, assigning a number every fifty yards, or feet, or something. The upshot was that the venerable mailing address of my old home in Maine changed again, from Rural Route 2 Box 524 to 27 Fairwind Drive. As we had been using the "3 Fairwind Drive" address as a street address over and against the mailing address for years, this caused no end of heartache for mom. Now we had a mailing address that conflicted with established notions of our street address, and there didn't appear to be any way around it.

My grandmother died (she was old) a few weeks ago, and out of respect and possibly concern for her everlasting soul, my mother's next-door neighbor Mary purchased a year's worth of prayer from the Vatican. My grandmother wasn't Catholic, except in the sense that we all are, but we figured it'd do no harm to have some Monsignor pray for her, especially given that the prayers have already been paid for, check cashed, and so forth. Thing is, Mary had the official notice from the Holy See sent to what she thought was our mailing address: 33 Fairwind Drive. When the notice was returned to her (Mary), by a humorless Post Office, marked "Undeliverable: No Such Address", she called my mom and said that she (Mary) would drop it off in her (my Mother's) mailbox after the mailman came by. Mary's been living there for twenty-five years, and takes a daily walk around the subdivision. So it wasn't a big deal.

It's a funny world.

Regards &c.,
Steve

P.S.: This is all true, with the possible exception of the thing about Boy's Life magazine, which I may have simply cancelled when I dropped out of Cub Scouts.
posted 4:38 PM