9:00pm :: I think that the end is coming soon. I hear it in the small Cesnas buzzing overhead, and the sirens of the ambulances moving west towards the trauma centers. I see it in the sunsets, how the cascades of the colors blend with the light air of carbon monoxide and heavy breathing. Go outside and you can feel it: that uncomfortable sense of just being silent and listening to the world around you, like staring into the sun. Something is certainly going to end, and it may just be this paragraph.

So the insane half-country drive looms closer, and I can only drink King Cobra and attempt solemn reflections on society and the world around us. The quiet is only broken by the squealing breaks of trucks on Granada Avenue, and the click of my ceiling fan. Otherwise, the night is mine and I can only admire it silently. With every breath, the earth is sucked in further, like a balloon, collapsing under its own permeability: crushing.
what?

7:22pm :: So my internet is down for the time being, and now I have very little to do except think about how I should be cleaning and throwing boxes away. My internet is out of order, the trash chute is out of order, the water machine is out of order, and I'm thinking that I should be out of order as well, just to keep the qi in tact.
Whatever that means. I've got this Tecate can that I've been using as an ashtray sitting on my desk and it smells like absolute ass. I'm like 2 feet from it and I can smell it very clearly. Something disturbing about that. I think that I should either smoke one cigarette or drink one beer tonight. I think it will be the former just because I don't feel like trudging to Circle K and fighting with the bums. That's not important though.

I'm walking down the Congress Street this evening to get some sushi, since the place is only open nights on Thursdays and I have to show my support, and of all things there was a silent anti-war picket going on in front of the federal building. I was tempted to pick up a sign and join, but I wanted to get home for King of the Hill. I'm too tired to go over there now, but I'm definitely tempted. Of course, I do worry about being seen by a co-worker. That wouldn't sit too well with the conservative, Bush-loving mainstream who sit in the top ranks of SCI. But fuck it.
So where is this singer? She never seems to be home and we have to arrange things with her. Everyone always has too much going on. We have to keep our days full so that we won't feel the true hollowness of our lives. That's stupid. Maybe I should just eat some allergy medicine, or go to that coffee shop on Congress that I keep saying I'll try. Maybe not. Piebald is Sunday. They're coming to Tucson but not Phoenix. At least I think they are. Normally I'd be able to find out, but my fucking internet is still out; the light blinking randomly. I can't complain though, I used to bitch about the people who would call me and start going off about how they're paying for the service and it's crappy and they want a re-imbursement. Like I give a damn. Anyway, I can't go back to dial-up, and there's no fucking way I'm going to DSL. Internet is not a necessity anyway, unless you need it.

6:41pm :: Sometimes I wonder why all of this beer is on my desk. But then I stop thinking and things get better. I saw two cops pull up next to some bum on I-10 begging for money today in one of those glorified golf carts. I think they were breaking the law driving that damn thing on the service road in the first place, and they're going to bother some guy standing out in the 105 degree heat, under the Tucson sun, just trying to make some money.
It bothers me that there are all of these cafes practically across the street from me and none of them are open after 2pm. Even the C-store on Stone closes at 5pm. What kind of hour is that? I guess they get nothing but bums after that, but still, the wanna-be bums like me who wander Downtown streets at night searching for beer need places to go too.

What a dull evening. I probably should have stayed at work. At least I have Heineken and a place to go eventually. But not a C-store. Maybe just not yet anyway.
So I was at the Yo La Tengo show on Wednesday, and someone in the crowd requested a song that they apparently rarely play anymore. They agreed to play it, but it required rigging up a new percussive instrument, which consisted of two drum cases bound in masking tape with a tamborine on top. This was strange, yes, but when the roadie when to create it the guitarist made the remark "He had to go down to Chicago Music" when it took him a while to come back. Now, earlier he had said that they had not been to Tucson in 9 years. My question is, how did they know about Chicago Music? It just bothers me.
With fingernails that shine like justice. Enough of this...for now.

9:26pm :: Right. So I was going to sleep at like 6:30, but then got this new and sudden flavor burst of energy and have decided to stay up late tonight so that I can sleep when I get home tomorrow. Yo La Tengo is tomorrow night and they played them on the radio this afternoon, much to my delight.
I've decided to go on a healthy kick. For one reason, I realized that even though I haven't been a college student for a year now, I'm still eating like one: Burger King, Jack in the Box, cheap frozen pizzas, basically: crap. I bought some lettuce and carrots and salad dressing after work, but I've been through this about three times before, but the difference is that now I have money.
So I bought a Priceline vacation to NYC for $526 for three days, but I got a 6am flight out. I thought this would be okay at first, because it was either leave at 6am or get back at 11pm. I thought harder after I bought it, and decided that I'd rather be on the later flight, but of course, these are VERY non-refundable, even after just 24 hours. I called them today, having come up with the story that my kid had gotten a hold of my credit card and bought the vacation in my name. The customer service representative apologized vehemently, but stated that she could not do anything since they were non-refundable. I wasn't too upset about it, I just wonder how the hell I'm going to get from Downtown Manhattan to La Guardia by 5am, but I do feel bad for anyone who genuinely has a situation as bad the one I had composed. $500 gone. I don't think I'd take that. The next step would have been to call the credit card people to demand a stop of payment, but that gets into the territory of fraud, or at least a black eye on the ol' credit report, and it's just not worth that risk, especially when my new truck hangs in the balance over a canyon of piñon pines and aspens. But shit, NYC is going to be awesome. I'm staying like at the east end of Wall Street right on the East River at some touristy seaport. The hotel is like $200/night regularly, which is just middle-range for New York standards of course. I suppose I could have just taken that LA trip that I've always wanted to do, or just driven to SF, or flown to Seattle, but they're just not NYC in any way. I have to experience it before I meet that fucking bitch that's going to tie me down, whether it be a general resignment, or a more tangible threat wearing tight shirts and agreeing with everything that I even begin to think of.
Fuck that though. It's a good night. I got my car title in the mail, and it's from TX, I finally met a promising-sounding guitarist and I have not drank a drop of alcohol in two days. I did the latter purposely because I woke up this morning feeling better than I had in quite a while, maybe because of finally having close to the full 8 hour sleep. I don't know why I'm not sleeping, I have nothing to do, it makes no sense. If I had places to go and people to see, maybe I could justify sleeping 6 hours. But what do I do? I go to the supermarket, I do laundry, I stare out the window as the colors of the Big A blend into an under-illuminated black. Is this the life a 20-something? Definitely. I meet other 20-somethings, and they talk just as adamantly about their lack of what they would consider an adequate social life. They usually speak with a hint of resentment, but mostly typical sarcasm and cynicism. This is just the shedding of yet another layer of skin, I believe. We have to begin to accept that we no longer have those dumb college friends to follow us around to the houses of people we barely know, to sit around uncomfortably and try to make small talk with people who try to marvel us with their knowledge of video games. Go Tekken!
Regardless of this, I need to go do the things I intended to do: see the sunset at Gates Pass, hike Pima Canyon and Douglas Spring, hang out at coffee shops and type aimlessly on this over-sized calculator. That's the beauty of it though: the freedom of life, REAL life. I can do whatever the fuck I want. If I want to sit around for the entire day Saturday in my underwear and watch Telemundo, THAT'S FINE. There is no one here to tell me otherwise, just my own conscience. But I have plenty of time here, at least 5 years, right? Right. By the time I leave I'll have seen everything in Tucson, every single St. Mary's Safeway shopper, every twinkle of the lights of Altar Valley, every car exiting onto Congress Street, every cottonwood in every riparian canyon in every Pima, Cochise and Santa Cruz County mountain range. I guess that's being a little unrealistic, but I figure that I'll know the city well.
Tucson was voted the 9th "nicest" place to live in the country. I don't really listen to this because these rankings are always completely arbitrary; just a bunch of people sitting around a table talking about the cities they've been to in the past: "I was at the Dallas airport once on a 2 hour layover and it, like, totally sucked. I ate at this Chili's and got SO sick off of the Extreme Fajitas." #1 was Boulder. I'm sure that's a nice place, at least if you're a rich wanna-be hippie kid. I gotta make it to the big CO one time or another, go see all of those over-developed plots of pristine national forest. WTF, WTC?
Wake up little eyes...