Once again, I find myself in the last half of a year and with insane amounts of stuff going on in the months leading up ’till the end. What is this all about, anyway? Why is time going so fast and why is there so much going on all the time? Even when I’m not doing anything, it still exhausts me. Like tonight I am not doing anything really, just throwing some stuff on ebay and looking at websites about Malta. Pretty mellow stuff. To make things easier I am going to eat a baked potato. The ultimate low-stress meal. I can’t figure it out, this being tired when nothing is going on/being tired when there is too much going on thing. Maybe it is all the dreaming I do at night. Maybe my dreams are a parallel universe so really, I’m not getting any sleep at all. Maybe, I am suffering from sleep deprivation because there isn’t really a thing like sleep anymore, because the mind reels with dreams because the days are so insane that the mind can’t cope.

I dream about merry-go-rounds and ferris wheels spinning manically. Colors fly off of them. I simply don’t get any rest, this way. But I love my dreams, even if they are sick and twisted and full of sex and violence. (Except for the ones where people are trying to kill me. I hate those.) Maybe I am Quentin Tarantino in a parallel universe? Or maybe Todd Solondz. No, that is too suburban weirdo. I was never living in the suburbs. Was I? Hmm… maybe I did, in a dream once. I suppose my nighttime visions are all mine. Daytime seems pretty boring, when you get right down to it. All that barreling down freeways one second from death, threats of terrorism and disaster everywhere you look, disease, mean people, etc etc. It’s all pretty boring these days, since we get so much of it. But dreams! They are different every night! (Well, for me, but I’m not one of those people who dreams the same dream. Though I think it would be really cool if the dreams were good.)

Sometimes when I go to sleep I try to ask for a certain kind of dream, but I never get it. I read that in a dream book, that you could ask for the answer to a problem, and the dream would tell you the solution. Sadly I have never been that “in-tune” that I could figure out the symbolism. Plus, the symbolism is different, depending on what book you read. And really when you get right down to it, if you are trying to read all this shit into it, that takes the fun out of it. Then dreams become as severe and boring as being awake! Now that is a frightening thought.

OK I’ll stop now. Sorry.

It’s 10:15 PM on a Sunday night, and my neighbor Neil, who may or may not be gay, is having a party. I’ve never seen him entertain, but tonight he’s got some dudes in the back and they are all drumming on stuff. Man, it’s all primal and shit. Like, I am so thinking I am ready to die. Go back to the earth, as it were. The drumming is making me crazy.

I’m probably ready to die, not only from the drumming, but from the excess. Yesterday I excessed to the point of frenzy. It was only slightly out of control, though. The day left me wondering, in this order: What? Why? How? When? But in the end, the highest power redeemed everything.

I’ll leave it to ya’all to figure out the one thing that slays me. If you can’t figure it out well, you don’t really know me at all, also you haven’t been paying attention.

There are some questions that have been haunting me for the last fifteen minutes.

1) Is it just me or are the a) the drug experiences and b) the sex scenes in Six Feet Under totally contrived? Were they written by people who only write dialogue and who have never really smoked crack or screwed guys that work at Paintball fields?

2) Is it really necessary to crowd-surf at every single show, even to the slow songs? Doesn’t anyone remember why crowd-surfing started? Do I?

3) When my liver fails, will there be new technology that will rebuild it?

4) Why does everyone love the pizza at Pizza Port in Solana Beach? That pizza is nasty. It’s like white bread with sugar and tomato sauce on top. That shit is rank. And I am an expert, I swear.

5) Why are there drumming circles?

Maybe the answers to all these questions will come to me someday. In the meantime, I will probably sleep a little and have bizarre dreams of ex-husbands and murder and stuff.

I am going to cook for a friend’s party in Venice in September. We’ve been emailing back and forth about things to eat, what to do, etc. etc. It’s like jumping into a black hole, cooking for a party in Italy, especially since I have not been there in eighteen months. Mostly, because of Euro-inflation. What little surprises have I to look forward to? Chicken wings at 8 Euro a pound? A pound of pasta twice the price of what I remember?

It used to be cheaper, buying groceries in Italy. I think those days may be over. But even here in the States, where prices were never super low (unless you buy in mega-lots meant for restaurants or families of 10, or buy and throw half of what you bought in the garbage because there is no way you could consume all that, which sort of defeats the purpose of buying more to save money) food prices are rising even higher.

This is pretty frightening. Gas is going up, up, up. It’s easy to say, well fuck you big Escalade or Esplanade (or whatever that mammoth vehicle is) driver, you are well up it without a paddle now! It’s easy to see how the mammoth vehicle drivers have it REALLY bad. But the simple fact is, they probably are as “who gives a shit” to the fact that they are paying $158 more a week in gas as the rest of us are that butter costs a buck a pound more these days. Even worse, the grocery chains are training people to eat their own cheap label crap, squishy English muffins and poison injected yogurts, by offering it at a lower price.

It is 2004 and I am 39 years old. Somehow, this all sounds like 1974 when my mom was 29 years old. She went all health foody and co-opy. Me and my brothers grew up on dry wheat bread and peanut butter sandwiches that would glue your mouth shut. (Perhaps this was intentional?) I think it is time for another revolution, but this time a price revolution too. Everyone has got to make money, but also, childen need to eat, and something besides a four dollar peach on the one end, or a lifeless cheap bagel, on the other. There has got to be a middle ground, and one for everybody to stand on.

Once, about a year ago, I tried a no-carb diet. I made it about five days, but then I started to feel really awful. My body was doing something funky. It’s hard to explain, but it was sort of like wanting to jump out of your skin. An uncomfortable pressure. I think it might be sort of like coming off heroin, which I’ve never done but I’ve seen it happen in the movies. It was a horrible feeling and the next day I ate a sandwich and some rolled tacos.

Yesterday, I was feeling very depressed because, once again, my horrible luck proved to be, well, horrible. Even the promise of the upcoming meet at Del Mar Racetrack next week couldn’t ease my sadness. I was just totally glum.

The day picked up a bit when I played Bocce Ball with friends and went out for a pizza after. We ate a bunch of pizza and drank a bunch of wine. Walking home, since the weather was hot and balmy, I decided to nurse my broken spirit with an ice cream.

Got home, and that feeling came back again. The no-carb feeling. But, I had eaten mega-carbs. The only thing that was missing was a Big-Gulp. I couldn?t sleep in bed, I couldn’t sleep on the couch. Some weird chemicals were going off in my bloodstream.

I finally slept, but I want to know what causes this. Am I just getting to the point age-wise where pizza and ice cream will cause me great pain and anxiety? Because if it is, I might as well hang it up.

I’ve become a sort-of slave to my blog. That is, I feel I need to write in it every two or three days, to keep it going, to keep me going. This is all fine and good when there are things going on to write about. But what of those days when you are in Valium mode? When you’ve got no visions popping into your head that you could write about?

So I just sit here and write. It’s possible that I am all written out, as I am trying to finish various projects before a certain June 30 deadline. I am way behind, bit off more than I can chew, and also, am worried that it all will be lame. I live in fear of being boring.

So now I’m in the In-Between. In between scattered and grounded, in between flying and bedridden. In between planning and doing. In between words pouring out, and words hiding. Somewhere in there, is where I am at.

I’m not on Valium – I wish I had some though.

On a happier note, yes, it is true, Wilco’s “A Ghost is Born” is the #1 seller in the amazon.com CD department. Yes, it is true, it is a brilliant record. Everyone else I listen to is turning out less than stellar albums. But Wilco… thank you for making 2004 a better place to visit.

Bill Clinton has the #1 book, Wilco the #1 CD. So fantastically American! It makes me very happy that this completely deserving, incredibly talented band is getting the recognition they deserve.

It’s the only place I’m not In-Between. “A Ghost is Born” is my church right now, and the guitar solo in the song “Muzzle of Bees” is the sermon. I pray that these moments continue to lift me.

Where do I begin? It’s been a bit of a crazy time the past few days. So I think I’ll start at the end, and go backwards.

Last night I spoke at the Distant Lands Bookstore in Pasadena. Odd that I would be speaking in front of a group (at least one that I do not know) in the same town that I was born in. I only lived there for the first year of my life, but I think I must have viewed the Castle Green Apartments at a very young age, and the viewing of these apartments directly affected my view on life. The Castle Green is a giant structure covering at least one city block, all stucco and crazy Arabic windows. It is bleeping fantastic. It’s the kind of building you drive by and say What the Hell is That and How do I Get In. I have a crazy fantasy that I was conceived there.

So before I went to speak at Distant Lands, I stopped in one of my Pasadena accounts, a wine store with a tasting bar. This was a good move as I was able to kill a couple of pre-talk hours there and therefore, feel less nervous. There were a couple of older, rich, wine-drinking dudes at the bar, and me. There was a girl and a sort of schizo dude working at the shop/bar. Between the four of them there was enough stimulus that I could effectively not think about the speaking in public thing. I drank a glass of New Zealand Riesling, and one of the older wine-drinking dudes told me about his life. He reminded me of my dad – a guy who is aging yet, he still thinks he has a way with the ladies. He actually said to me – “stick around – I’ll wine, dine and line you.” Dude. 1985 is over, nobody is packing an eightball in the glovebox of their Datsun 300ZX any more. Those days are gone. The girl working behind the bar told me how stressed she was and how her co-workers and her customers were treating her. Her life is a living hell, pretty much. It was an odd couple of hours and then I left and checked into the Pasadena Inn, changed and walked to the bookstore where I was to speak.

I was shocked to find that there were over sixty people coming to hear me talk, that it was the largest crowd in many a moon, according to the bookstore personnel. I was worried about people looking at my toenails! I did not have to worry about that. The crowd gathered, I was announced, and we were on.

I started out talking about the way Venice has two parts, the tourist part and the local part, and how they were invisible to each other. It didn’t take long before the crowd began asking questions, and then it was easy – they asked, and I answered. This went on for some time until the bookstore staff made us stop. Some of the questions were good (“what do the Venetians drink?”) and some not so good (“I went to a restaurant on an island that served all you can eat seafood, we were part of a tour, do you know that restaurant?”) It all moved quickly, only one guy fell asleep, two people left early, but the other sixty-two seemed to enjoy themselves.

It was a good night. Tomorrow I will write about a fantastic 36 hours in New York City.

Tonight, in a rare moment away from the computer, I flipped through the free San Diego rag, the San Diego Reader. What I saw there shocked and horrified me.

Aren’t these free papers suppose to be all left-wing and PC and shit? At least that was the way they were, back in the day when I use to read them (San Francisco, circa 1991.) Of course I remember the large number of personal ads that I suppose paid for said papers. But… with the advent of internet dating, I guess the free liberal papers have had to look for their income elsewhere.

Times, they are a changin’. Used to be that with a paid personal ad in one of these papers, the possibility of getting laid from placing a simple ad calmed people down and they were able to realize that no one is really getting laid, not really. Now, everything has moved past getting laid into some crazy no-mans land of depression and other disturbing afflictions (besides not-getting-laid), which of course keeps one from getting laid, even though that person probably would not have gotten laid anyway.

I fear I am not making sense, but the number of horrific messages flying off the page into my sensitive brain are befuddling me. The messages are as such (and off just a scant few of the pages of the free paper:)

Unable to ENJOY the things you use to do? Sad? Depressed? Is Lack of Sleep Making it Hard for you to Face the Day? Angry & Irritable? Is Your Mind Like A Storm? (Kind of liked that one…) Shift Work, Sleep Disorder? Tired of Being Criticized for Smoking? Lack of Concentration? Bi Polar? Drinking? Smoking? Hepatitis? Bad Knees? Bad Hips?

This totally frightening part of the paper moves on into ads that offer “Mexico’s Premier Plastic Surgeon” and “Get Ready for Summer – Start your Plastic Surgery Now.” Complete with some nice Before and After Pictures.

Oh, my. It would be nice if we could just go back to those days where it was just “am I getting laid, am I the one everyone wants to lay, or do I have no chance, ever, of getting laid. ” Now, our worlds are controlled by sinister forces – people who want you to think it doesn’t all come down to that.

All that I’m asking tonight, is that I make it back home alive. No explosions, no crashes, no fights. I want to get back home tonight.

Jason from Grandaddy

I remember, in the early days of my travelin’ years, I was oh so happy with Destinations like Las Vegas. I was in my early 20’s, and really, Vegas was a pretty cool destination in those days. In 1991 Vegas, the Sands was still there, they still had $4.99 prime rib and you could still envision Doris Day being thrown into the pool. The MGM Grand was the hip and happening new spot then, and now the MGM seems as has-been as the Riviera did then. Vegas was a different place in 1991, full of bad wigs and nickle slots, and I loved it.

Here we are fifteen years later, and my scope has broadened just a bit. First, lots of trips to Vermont and Chicago, both places I love enough to live in, and then finally, in 1998, my first trip to Italy.

Damn. (Swear word. Swear word.) I touched down on that tarmac in Rome and I was a goner. I mean, really gone, like a (swear word) slave. If I had thought weekend trips to Vegas were addicting, I was not prepared for what Italy would do to me.

For a few years, I was a slave to Italy. Then the pull was too great, and I pushed myself by sheer will into an apartment in Venice. There, I tired of my master and moved on to other lovers, by way of the St. Lucia Train Station. How I loved them all.

Amsterdam, Copenhagen. Budapest, where I spent a sick and twisted yet colorful summer month. Strasborg, Vienna… the blood of the nomad was in me, and Europe was the flying carpet on which I rode.

Now. I am in a place I love, an ocean community full of freaks. It is truly beautiful here, and very, very free. But I can’t calm myself, the thought of unseen cities makes me scratch the mosquito bite on my chest a bit too hard. I am a nomad of the 21st century – I can have it all, so why isn’t it here, now?

So I have been playing the lottery, and waiting, waiting. Thinking of writing to the Icelandic Tourist Board to see if they perhaps need someone to write a restaurant book. I don’t know. It’s the bleeping trouble with travel.

I am not handling this getting back to the real world very well. Work; guys in large trucks, passing me on residential roads; the election news, just the news in general, all seem to be tidbits of life that seem hard to swallow. Everything is irritating me. Everything is like a lover that you are done with, when there is someone newer and more glamorous on the horizon. When a lover is done with you, they are done with you. That is just the way it is.

Anyhow, one of the really irritating things, even more irritating than normal life things that are like lovers you are done with, is that I am getting a lot of pharmacutical companies advertising in my blog. In the comment area. I keep deleting them, they keep posting them. They seem to be focusing on my entry entitled “Guys Who Drive SUVs and the Women Who Hate Them.” Is there some kind of drug magnet text in there? Golly knows I could use a sedative once in a while, but why are they honing in on this topic? If you can see, please advise.

Other than this sad by-product of travel (my inability to cope with the real world) I am working hard on my trip journal. I am now on day 2 of Madrid, so sometime in August I should be almost finished.

Hope you all are tuning in, the journey is far from over.