Happy Halloween, everybody~!

Borrowed from the GuthrieLJ...

5 songs rocking my world at the moment:

Morrissey - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (Live)
System Of A Down - BYOB
Steve Burns - Mighty Little Man
Iron Maiden - Aces High
Oingo Boingo - Flesh and Blood

Nano starts in a little over 24 hours. I don't know where I'm going with it yet, but I'll know sometime on Tuesday, hopefully.

Does this thing still work?

Just kidding.

Busy, busy, busy with work. Got promoted at the new job already, and have been buried in work since. Plus I took some more hours at the video store, so I'm not doing much but working and sleeping.

Nano starts Tuesday, and I'm not sure how I'm gonna get it all in, but I'm gonna try.

Substance may come sooner or later, but November will probably be just as fallow post-wise as October's been.

R.I.P. Charles Rocket

A suicide, oddly enough, though with strange circumstances. I always enjoyed his appearances as David Addison's ne'er-do-well brother, and he was also legendary for dropping an F-bomb during the first "lost season" of Saturday Night Live(the '80-'81 season).

Weird.

Flipping channels, landed on NESN(the Red Sox network), and saw a guy that I used to play softball with when I worked at Wiggin and Dana acting in a Red Sox docudrama. The movie was called "Wait Till This Year", and Ges Selmont, the guy that I played ball with, was playing the husband of a husband/wife team making a year-in-the-life movie about being a Sox fan.

Unfortunately, I missed most of the movie, and my digital box is acting up, so I don't know if the movie's going to be on again. Hopefully it will be, because I'd like to see the whole thing.

Small world.

I haven't forgotten(a post of randomness)

I've just been busy the last few days.

- November is coming quickly, and if you look down the page to the right, you'll see that I'm participating in National Novel Writing Month again this year. If you think you've got a novel in you, and you're willing to try to yank it out in 30 days, then go to the site and check it out.

- Pictures from the wedding are still forthcoming, as I haven't had an opportunity to get the throwaway over to the Mart of Wal to get them processed.

- Too bad Jose Luis Castillo couldn't make weight, but he apparently gave Diego Corrales a sound thrashing last night. Hopefully he'll make weight for the rubber match, so that it will actually mean something instead of just being a glorified exhibition. (Glad I didn't pay $35 for the PPV, but it'll be on Saturday night at 9 on Showtime, so I can at least actually see it.)

- I'm having a really good fantasy football year, which is making up for the Jekyll and Hyde performance of my actual teams (Pats and Eagles, if you're wondering.)

- Hockey's back, which is nice, though their national TV deal is with the freakin' Outdoor Life Network, and OLN's graphics and studio set leave a little something to be desired. Go Flyers~!

- Well, at least the Braves and the Rot Sox aren't going to the World Series either. (It's 2-0 Angels in the bottom of 6, and I'm a pessimist.)

- WWE stepped on their collective johnsons this week. After having a spectacular return to USA Monday night(complete with mid-4 ratings), they were all set to have Jim Ross get canned tommorow night in favor of some guy from UFC, but he got cold feet and is staying in UFC, so JR's staying on Raw for the time being. Whoops.

- Raw was a mostly good show Monday night, with only two really big missteps. To borrow a page from my boy Swift:
The Good: Angle and Shawn had a good 30-minute Iron Man match, very thrilling; Edge and Matt Hardy had a great ladder match as well, and Matt should show up on SD~! shortly; HHH returns and heels out on Flair in spectacular fashion; A great old-time everyone out of the back brawl to end the show and potentially set up something interesting for Survivor Series.
The Bad: They open the show with Foley and Piper in a segment that has almost nothing to do with Raw; Austin stuns the entire McMahon family in a entirely overlong sequence that squanders the appearance of the only McMahon I actually wanted to see on Raw(Shane-O-Mac, who ate a stunner in 20 seconds.); Hulk Hogan attempting to get a feud going with Austin, who isn't interested from all accounts.
The Ugly: The fact that the lame Austin segment ran so long that they had to cut down the rest of the show to keep things on time; Mae Young running around in her bra.

It was entertaining to see the old guys, including the only surviving Von Erich(Kevin, who looked very out of sorts with the rest of the superstars), but unfortunately, they got somewhat short shrift as opposed to McMahonamania.

- Joe just brought in Al Leiter in a 2-1 game, and I'm at peace with our fate.

- My boy Air Guthrie has reactivated his Blogger blog. Go read him. He talks real good.

Well, the wedding was very nice.

But the pre-game fender-bender was not. Just a minor accident at the 287/87 merge. After an hour of waiting for the police to show because the guy I bumped refused to call it insurance and go, we managed to make the wedding with 20 minutes to spare.

Lara looked lovely, John looked handsome, and everybody at Table 7 had a heck of a time, especially my daughter, who spent every spare moment dancing.

Pictures to come later in the week, since the digital ran out of batteries, and so did the gift shop of the Hyatt. So we had to go the old-school tossaway camera route to get the job done.

Maybe a post later, after the Raw return to USA, otherwise something of substance tomorrow.

One last bit of nostalgia...

and then it's back to boxing reviews and the latest memes.



Poughkeepsie, Spring 1990. We stood outside Leo Hall on a gorgeous spring day, figuring this was going to be one of the last days we'd all be together during freshman year. By this point, I probably knew I wasn't going to be back in September, and Peter probably knew he wasn't either, but we were still enjoying the time we had together. By this point, Lara had started to slide out of the group a little bit, because she was still concerned with actually studying, rather then participating in the full-time RPG that Peter and Lee had created out of their own heads. But we were still the Kool-Aid Club, regardless of what happened with grades.

If I remember correctly, it started with Lara and I hanging out in the lounge at Leo, watching NextGen and SNL and not going out drinking. Eventually, it expanded to the five of us. We acquired the name thanks to a regular cab driver who used to drive us to the movie theater at the Poughkeepsie Galleria. He observed that we were the only ones he wasn't taking to off-campus parties, and coined the name, which stuck.

For 6 months, we all spent as much time together as we could when we weren't in class. We took the train to New York a few times, spent nights hanging out down by the Hudson, running around the lumberyard next to the school's crew dock, and generally avoiding educational pursuits as much as humanly possible. We played an amalgam of Robotech, Cyberpunk, Aliens, and whatever else popped into Peter's head as he wove the thread of a seemingly endless RPG that more or less filled all of our off-hours. But mostly, we just spent a lot of time together, being good kids who didn't get drunk and stumble back to the dorms to try to con our way past Marc, the badass security guard who worked the front desk of Leo Hall.

But all good things must come to an end, as they say, and shortly after that picture was taken, reality set in. Peter and I both completely washed out of school, and Lee left Marist also. Lara and Kathy stayed, and both graduated. After a summer reunion at Lara's house minus Peter, who was locked down at home, the Kool-Aid Club dissolved.

Peter more or less vanished off the face of the Earth. He had problems with his parents over washing out of Marist(to the point of running away from home that summer), and last I'd heard, was attending Duchess Community College under the thumb of his father. Kathy and I mailed each other on and off for a while, but that just sort of petered out(so to speak) before too long. Lee and I stayed in contact for quite a while. I visited her in New York City a number of times over 4 or 5 years, but then we lost contact also. Last I heard, she was in the Air Force, married with a kid.

Lara and I, though, have remained friends for over 15 years now. She is my best female friend in the entire world, and she's also my harshest critic and editrix(sorry, Thom.) We've gotten drunk together, we've watched some really terrible movies together, we've even been in a car accident together. Tomorrow morning, I will wake up, get the girls up, and we'll drive to Princeton to watch Lara walk down the aisle and get married to one hell of a nice guy. This post is dedicated to you, Lara. Mazel Tov~!