lightheaded

The non-smoking continues, though to what overall, lasting benefit I remain unsure. Is it really worth all this mess? Living the rest of my life constantly denying myself cigarettes. Cause I still want them, a lot. It's a feeling that, while it fades, never entirely died in the 5 months constituting my first quit.

Argh, what else? I'm putting 8 bucks in the bank every day i don't smoke, which is a tremendously unsatisfying substitute for smoking. Matt described it as like an advent calendar, and I noted that it was like an escalating countdown from what was the last good day of your life to each successively worst one from there on in.

So, while I think I'm through the worst of the chemical hell side of things, it's triggered some, uh, curiously ugly stuff in my brain that's taking some getting used to. And until then, I struggle.

Be back soon.

P.S. You can sorta see my beard in this picture. I totally grew a beard for the winter. Moustache and all. Go team me.

This (widescreen!) American Life

"New Beginnings, Part Two:

"In mid-January, Showtime made it official: we're going to produce a series for them, a television version of This American Life. We shot a pilot last year, and the full series will begin broadcasting in the fall or winter of 2006. We'll continue making the radio show while we do the TV show. Again: the radio show will stay on the air.

"What we can say about the series: It doesn't look a TV newsmagazine. It's shot to look like a movie. Widescreen. Beautiful lighting. And the stories feel just like the stories on the radio show. When we started the pilot, we weren't sure that'd be possible. Now we're convinced it is. We'll give more details – and hopefully some previews – in the coming months."

graveyard

things

• I'm learning to play Für Elise, the song I crudely taught myself to convince myself to take lessons in the first place. Only now I'm playing both parts, using both hands, and reading it. Full circle, yo.

• More Murphy Hall nonsense later this week.

• I'm going to try selling some photos through here, exploring my options and trying to make things, y'know, actually desirable. This is a bit frightening as it may confirm my deepest, worst fears. Or, it may work and I can actually pay my rent in a timely fashion thanks to the art-loving public. More on that next week.

• I've been doing some smoking math lately, which has been an entirely different brand of frightening than the whole nest of tumors, iron lung side of things. If I quit for just 5 months, I could afford a G5 iMac. That said, I quit smoking (again) tomorrow. It occurs to me nothing is more boring than someone talking about quitting smoking, so I'll keep mum on the subject, which helps avoid the ensuing embarrassment when I slip like the weak little man I am.

• Have you seen the ITT commercial with the guy with the fruity ponytail who talks about wanting to be a poet, except that when he majored in English, he found out he was scared about the prospects and decided that becoming an IT specialist was the closest amalgalm to being a poet he could find in the corporate world and that he loves riding his boat and flouncing his ponytail and that now his poetry is even more personal? I don't have a point, just wondering.

• Jack and Rexella Van Impe are the greatest newscasters ever, with the make-up-less Elvira reading headlines and her shellacked husband firing off biblical scriptures that reference it. Sometimes he goes off on these tangents, hands all waving in the air and grinning like mad while his crazy-eyed wife looks on with her fake smile, stopping to ask "Do you ever wonder what the trumpet of god would sound like?"

• I'm clearly out of ideas.

hello mr. smith

This came in the same envelope as the Ebert missive, but somehow tops it with complete lack of coherence, sense, logic and legibility. Also, more swearing and more pop culture references to keep the kids engaged. Enjoy.

from kurt eichenwald's 'conspiracy of fools'

p. 290-291 from Kurt Eichenwald's massive, compulsively readable rundown of the entire Enron debacle:

On December 20, Collins was ready to throw in the towel. He was weeks from quitting in frustration, but before he did, he wanted somebody to hear the truth. He banged out an e-mail to one of his supervisors. Enron's ballyhooed effort to develop a software-driven network was fizzling, he wrote, with no market share, no purchasers, and no users. Enron talked a good game but wasn't playing one.

"I don't care what lipstick and rouge you paint that bitch up with," he typed. "She's still just dead meat lying on the sofa."

the hobo's medicine chest