long time no whatever

ok, so I haven't written here in like a bazillion years.

brief summary: I left for cambodia and made it as far as delaware. delaware was weird. I haven't lived there since 1994 and have only visited a few times since 1996. I felt like a strange sort of pederastic revenant. everyone at the school looked really young. I wasn't that young even when I was that young. some old friends were still around and it was really great spending time with them again, but the geography of memory and the memory of the geography really gave me the screeming heebie-jeebies.

anyway, long story short: I couldn't find a good job in delaware and if I stayed there more than 6 months, I'd have started drinking at 22-year-old levels again and would probably never have emerged.

so...it was back to seattle. I wasn't sure it was a good idea, but it seems to have turned out to be. I have a new job, I'm living with becca again (and sorta brian) which is really great, and life is so much more interesting here. also, the dating pool is much larger and more appealing so that I can choose not to date, rather than having no good prospects.

in two specific contexts (dating and "what to do" on saturday night), I like having lots of options so that I can choose to do none of them. selecting just one would collapse the waveform, whereas staying home and simply considering the possibilities leaves all of the options in a half-realized quantum flux that is almost as if I'm simultaneously doing all of them. and I don't even have to leave my living room.

that's me. schroedinger's hipster.

anyway, a lot of other stuff has happened which I will try to cover in short entries over the next few days.

slam stuff

roxane said I should post a summary of last night's Slam semi-finals for morris.

so here's the story:
the competitors were roberto ascelon, coy king, chris holmok, shon c, christa bell, james whiton, marsha marsha marsha, and rajnii edans.

rajnii's mom read on the open mike. it was weird. she sang her entire piece. it must be genetic. also on the open mike was someone named kristin (I think) who had been on dallas team that won at Nationals two years ago. just happened to be passing through town.

long story short, roberto and shon c won themselves spots in the Grand Slam. shon c had the higher cumulative score from round 1 and 2, but rob came back and kicked his ass in the final round. both were really good. the judges seemed to really hate rob's second round piece. I'm not sure if it was because the Bad Juju is such a crappy venue, or because it was a little too emotionally raw, or because they were just starting to get tired after hearing 6 open mikers, a features, and a dozen competition pieces before him.

otherwise, I pretty much agreed with the judge's decisions. coy and rajnii both did a fine job, but everyone in the room had heard their pieces a dozen or more times and wasn't very enthused about hearing them again. christa bell is a really good writer, but her delivery is a little too flat. the same is true, to a lesser extent, for james whiton, who opened with a very page-oriented piece that just didn't fly competitively.

marsha marsha marsha and holmok both could (and possibly should) easily have won the night. if the draw order had been different, I think either or both of them might have gone all the way. marsha is a recent arrival on the slam scene, I think, and cracks me the fuck up. her performance is totally over-the-top, crazy-go-nuts funny and she's so unself-conscious and sincere that I can't help but love her. she ended up in third or fourth for the evening and I'd like to see more from her, even if doing so risks giving me a brain aneurism.

holmok was the real tragedy of the evening. he performed the best I've ever seen him, and his Drill Press piece in round two was one of the couple best of the evening, but he drew the #1 slot in round one and got a undeserved 22.3, then had to go last in round two, which seems like it should be good, but by the middle of round two, the audience and judges were obviously fatigued and just wanted to go the hell home. score creep did a bit of a bell curve and poor chris got shafted coming and going.

oh well. they'll probably all be back for the Wild Card next week.

so the line-up for the Grand Slam now is: Roberto, Shon C, Karyna, Greg Hischak, Kristin Aurora, and Jeremy Richards. any combination of those six would make a fantastic team, but damn...that much concentrated goofiness on one stage makes me worry that the Grand Slam will undergo goofitational collapse and become a Goofy Hole. three goofy white guys, two goofy (and lanky) white girls, and a rob, who definitely has goofy-nature as well.

ah, seattle.

anyway, operating on the premise that Slam will only fully come into its own as a competitive activity when people start placing bets, I'm going to start taking entries for my Grand Slam pool as soon as the wild card results are in. entries will consist of a list of four winners, one champ, and one alternate. for every one of the top four that you correctly predict, you get a point. if you correctly predict the champ, you get three points. picking the alternate correctly gets two points, since it's really freakin' hard to guess who's going to come in fifth out of a field of eight. I guess it'll cost two dollars to enter, and the highest score will receive the pot. in the event of a tie, the winners will either split the money or do head-to-head haiku for it.

other quick slam news

I'm featuring at the wild card slam next wednesday.
it's my first feature, so I have no idea how it's going to go.
I have a few cool ideas in mind.
but it might suck.

anyway, if you're in seattle next wednesday night and aren't going to that Fischerspooner show at the Showbox, come on by the Bad Juju and watch me go bonkers in front of an audience.