Ticktockman

My watch reads March 17th, but I think it's getting ambitious. I don't know why it reset itself, but we had a thunderstorm last night and maybe my wrist got struck by lightning, just a little.

I had a tough time getting up this morning. All the flashes and booming sounded like somebody targeted Chicago for an airstrike. All the red states finally decided to gang up and get rid of those pesky blues dotting the edges of the map. The madness spreads until it becomes the de facto status quo, and that's just way too much Latin for anyone.

I meant to swim this morning. Nothing doing. It felt too good to lay in bed for the extra hour. Rather than do work today, I learned how to count to thirty-one on one hand. It's actually pretty easy if you do it in binary. Add another hand and you can count to more than a thousand. You have to have pretty flexible fingers to do it, but you can do it.

I played referee at a ComedySportz show last night. I kept forgetting key elements, like how the players were going to play their games. I blame it on a pre-emptive lightning strike on my brain. The best improv feels like surfing the information pool in your brain. The worst feels like you got caught in the eddies and all your paddling just gets you more tangled in the rushes. Also, it makes your metaphors really intricate. Twice in the last month, I've found myself in scenes trying to remember what Dean Kamen invented that was supposed to revolutionize the world of transportation by zipping people around on two self-balancing wheels. Hint: not a bicycle. Second hint: it's a Segway. Third hint: get a bicycle.

Last November, I wrote a novel called "Greater Than". It still needs finishing, but one of the characters deliberately downs aspartame to make himself more stupid and to drown out the voices of an alien consortium controlling him and the destiny of humankind. I think a lot of novel writing is wishful thinking, but that might be wishful thinking.

In a moment of panic last night, I thought I had a second ComedySportz show, so after my first show I dropped Brandi off at her rehearsal and zipped back up to the theatre. My friend and fellow performer Tara showed up to ref and I wish I could say we had a ref off, but I just left to hit the Target.

Tara is amazing. When she plays games she's just great. When she screws up she's even better. I use her as my gold standard for why failure should not bother you. Audiences love it when you a) acknowledge that what they saw and what you saw were both out of whack with what you intended and b) get over yourself and play to your strengths. Speaking of strengths, the hilarious thing about Tara is that, maybe sixty percent of the time she does an impression of everybody's dropped-out-of-high-school uncle, with a voice that sounds like she drinks a case of beer to fall asleep and a half a pack of cigarettes to wake up. You can see her face in the dictionary next to, "Heeeeeeyyyyyyyyy!" Thirty percent of the time, she sounds like a grandmother who has been carefully preserved in Oil of Olay and makes cooing sounds at each and every precious widdle thing you do. "Isn't that the most precious thing?" she'll say and then pile on the hugs. Ten percent of the time she sounds like Kathleen Turner, you know, when she was awesome, which is hot.

So, off to Target I went, where I tried to take a picture of our car, parked opposite another Scion XA, Scion a Scion, battle to the death, or at least better gas mileage. I couldn't get a good angle. You have to picture it. It's amazing. Some day, I need to get a wide angle lense for my cameraphone, or turn my eyes into cameras like they promised us all the Cyberpunk street punks would get in any William Gibson novel. Someday.

I take comfort in the knowledge that my watch will get there first.