I often dream of trains

Cel phones are the fucking instruments of the Devil. They are singlehandedly responsible for all that is wrong with the world today. They should all be destroyed through spontaneous combustion. I think I might buy one.

Another insomniac morning today. Not getting to bed until 12:15, not getting to sleep until maybe 1, and then waking up at 5 and failing to get back to sleep, except for maybe half an hour before my alarm went off at 7:45. Thinking, how much better than four hours' sleep is four and a half hours' sleep? And answering myself, half an hour better, that's how much.

As far as the job search is concerned: staring into the abyss can be a lot of fun. The abyss is friendly. I think I saw it staring back the other day. 

Looks like my home computer is finally starting to crap out, after almost seven years. Getting really slow; heats up quickly and I can hear the fan running all the time. It starts to whine, literally, after it's been on for less than an hour. And the "hard disk is full" message now appears every few days, instead of every few weeks as it did before. 

Decided to start a blog on ... oh, hell, how the fuck do you do hyperlinks here? They make it look like it's simple, but I've tried and it's just not working. Anyway, it's at http://underwatermoonlight.blogspot.com. Might try writing there for a while instead of here.

That's who Art Bergmann reminds me of. Warren Zevon. In their skewed sense of the world, but also their singing voices, ranging from wry to raw to world-weary.

Would've made a killer double bill, although I think Art was even better. Sort of a Coleridge of rock, in that he was uncommonly brilliant and did keep making records at least for a while, some of which were amazing (Crawl With Me in particular), but he seemed to be cursed by problems ranging from addiction to record companies suddenly collapsing underneath him. 

Unlike Syd Barrett, he didn't walk away from it all, at least not as quickly. And unlike Kurt Cobain, he survived, although maybe not becoming spectacularly famous helped in that regard.

Art's last record was over ten years ago, which I understand coincides with when he kicked his heroin habit. So if no music is the price we have to pay for Art staying clean, it's worth it. At least he's still around.

At least, not as far as the weather is concerned. Why do people like to say "the weather's getting nicer" as it gets hotter? 

Hell would be no torment for these people. I'd be sweating bullets and they'd walk up to me and say, "Nice, eh?" The more appropriate form of eternal damnation for them would be to go to heaven, where it's a nice, reasonable springtime temperature, but where they'd stand around shivering, wondering when it was going to get "nice." Meanwhile, I'd accept the torture of the summery weather in hell, where at least we'd have all the cool musicians.

Here's hoping that climate change doesn't just involve "global warming." If it does, the "I-want-to-be-able-to-fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk-year-round Party" will win a string of majority governments on its platform of giving every man, woman and child an SUV free of charge. If it involves other forms of extreme weather, you might start to get people saying, "What? You mean I might have to wear a sweater in Vancouver? In FEBRUARY? Good god, man, this is serious!"