the addictive qualities of life

Eric Volz persued a successful Ex-Pat career in Nicaragua.

A few months ago, his girlfriend was found murdered. The government prosecuted him in a show trial of anti-Americanisms and wrongly convicted him of first degree rape and murder.

Eric Volz now survives day-to-day brushes with death in a maximum security Nicaraguan prison. 

This is the story of a friend of a very good friend.

I want to do something to help, but there’s little more than a pervasive helpless feeling. If you know of anything that can be done, make it happen.

Chris Peters’ Band Household Names will be featured on tonite’s ABC show “What About Brian?”. You all need to watch this. Go into it knowing this isn’t some 10 second sound bite: this is a full 2 minute feature of their soon-to-be hit song: Only One.

I remember when these guys were playing Travis’ bedroom for beer… 

Is this the reminder you needed to finally get your clocks re-set? Just because I’m reminding you to reset your clocks, don’t let that fool you into thinking I actually know what time it is. Some of my clocks set themselves without my interference, others needed a little kick to the pants to get things going in high gear again. Now the problem is I don’t remember which clocks I’ve reset, which clocks my roomates have reset (if any), and which clocks set themselves. Damn this high technology. My cellphone (Sprint — Sanyo — not exactly high technology I suppose) needed the entire morning to figure out that daylights saving was 12 hours ago, and as I mentioned above, I’m still not 100% sure which clock is right (if any actually are).

It’s amazing how technologically dependent we’ve grown, and my big question is: what have we gained from it? Was it really too much to manually set our clocks back before global positioning crowned itself king in the cell phone trade? Wouldn’t it be nice to gain some sense of control again, allowing us to laugh at our bedroom clocks which were never re-adjusted — it always seemed much easier to do the math and convert that into the alarm clock time — instead of having to double-guess the genius that is Bill Gates?

I love daylights savings time though. I’ll be out in the city till dusk tomorrow! 

New York City is dirty. It’s the rats. I can’t get over the rats. I stand there in the underground, waiting on a train, and without fail a rat will peek his head out and scurry amongst the trash in the tracks. I saw some old man actually feeding a rat the other day. I was beside myself. “Listen man, if you want to die of some Middle Ages disease, that’s your own thing. Bring the rats home with you and let them feast on Plague. But me personally, I kinda dig the whole ‘living in the 21st century’ aspect of my life. That means no Plague. So don’t go around feeding your rats here.”

I didn’t really say that. I didn’t even think about saying it until now. It makes for a good story though.

There’s trash hanging from the trees out our front door. It looks as if flood waters rushed down and left their residue for all to acknowledge in wonder — “The water came this high”. It didn’t though. Snow drifts didn’t even make it half as high. The trash is still out there though. I see it as a positive thing: it keeps my rent lower.

I put quite a bit of work into beautifying the innards of our apartment this weekend though. I secured the loft / bed, built a little shelf, and crooned old Willie Nelson songs while doing it (much to the delight of my roomates and neighbors). What is it about working with tools that feels so good? Maybe that’s just the testosterone speaking but it’s the dadgum truth.

Next up is the bathroom. I’m gonna bleach it. Then paint it. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to fixing up the city though. Maybe it’s better that way — dirty. How else should New York be?