28.03.01 - 6:43 p.m.

Misc. things I was too lazy to enter in the past:

_saw the Yonder Mountain String Band @ the fillmore. a buncha sapient people were there. also onscene were Elio, Elio's friend with crazy hair David (who likes Bob Dylan), Shawn, and Shawn's friend Micah (who does alternative energy engineering). it was the first time i'd tried vegetable jalfraze (not bad), @ that indian restaurant near the fillmore that is never quite full and you wonder: health code violations? terrible food? but it was actually quite good.

it was raining that day, as it so often does. at the fillmore you can only buy one drink at a time. lots of hippies were dancing unselfconsciously, which made me feel less selfconscious myself and i danced too.

the y.m.s.b. = 4 young bluegrassy guys. mandolin player was amazing, banjo player was good, the others were good. hell it was all good. the magical communal mystical vibe when musicians hit their stride & communicate telepathically, and channel something thru themselves... no i wasn't smoking up. i meant to tell mattorb & rusty about it but forgot.

it was aaron's idea. good job aaron.

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st. paddy's weekend came and went.

fri: we went to club 6 to hear advent. rolling, rolling, rolling thru the night... i remember spinning around the lantern in the red room on the lower floor, watching patterns of light flicker on the wall. i called every person in my cell phonebook. crazy msgs, i was "burning twice as brightly" as bladerunner by way of jwz would have it. the advent pounded it, very nice hard techno. we talked of many things & afterwards spent far too long at the lucky penny diner on masonic & geary. not because we wanted to, but the service was glacial. catch the waitresses eye? ha! you have to throw things at the waitress and throw them hard, because she's got a thick skin from too many nights serving zoned out club-goers like ourselves.

the plan conceived and (surprisingly) executed: on saturday shawn & i met at golden gate to play raquetball & drink beer. it was a beautiful day. the trees in the plaza with all foilage hacked off, skeletal, it was like a tree graveyard... soundly trounced in the first two games but after i paused to down a guinness it all came back. loose and fluid, it feels so GOOD to smack a racquet into a raquetball in the dead sweet spot, hear it "thwock" and whiz at the wall, bouncing back alarmingly fast as you twist out of the way and wait for the inevitable return. and drink your beer. :P

we tried to go drink more beer at the various irish pubs in my neighborhood but lines out the door, drunken sots taking up every molecule of space, drove us away. dinner was @ katia's, an ideal russian restaurant owned and operated by the vivacious & vexing Katia. no she's not what you'd call a "looker", but she's very nice & has a charming glint in her eyes. she sits down at your table when taking your order.

an accordian player plays at katia's, every night i suppose. he has an insane grin on his face that never leaves. he takes requests. he plays "stairway to heaven" and "ymca" and old russian standards. he aims to please & i cannot help but tip him absurdly well. he wears a beret and a vest.

when i see such people i can't help imagining stories... he migrated from his homeland, now so far away. driven away by war? by poverty? romantic fictions conjured by too many movies & too little reality. i don't know him at all.

the restaurant was filled with the sounds of soft weeping as diners had their first spoonfuls of rich red borscht. the tears in turn gave it a flavor ineffable. i can't describe it with my faulty language.

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obsession #442: catchphrases, in particular the amazing viral infection "all your base are belong to us". found zany video game quotes galore. i love broken english, badly translated english, the english of children. they say things in unexpected ways. plus it's damn funny.

so many other things have happened. i work hard because it's the easiest thing to do. i stay late at work because it's a simple way to avoid harder questions and tougher decisions. i find it strange that staying at work is my way of being lazy.