ATM CARD FIXED, MIND BROKEN

I got my shiny new ATM card in the mail yesterday, so I can finally start having cash in my wallet again. Not that I feel the need to impress people with my dollars, it's just that cash is necessary for bars, little hole-in-the-wall food joints, and for when you're out to dinner with a bunch of friends and the check arrives.

Also, I use $20 bills to roll perfect joints every time. I'll admit it. The green ink gets you hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

In other news, there are way more people reading the Dogblog than I knew, who found it in ways I would never have anticipated. I think my previous entry broke Haloscan's comment-counting system, and I say that striving for a non-ego-stroking pat-on-the-back tone. I thought I knew how big the internet was, but I was incorrect. I've set up a new Gmail account (dogblogSF) if anyone has anything to say to me from now on. You all continue to surprise me, you know that?

WELCOME DOGBLOG READERS

Hi there, how's it goin'. I just realized that I know some of you, but not all of you, and I'm curious to know how many of the latter there are and where you came from. So for those of you I don't know, I just have a quick question for you: How did you find out about the Dogblog?* Email me at dogblogSF(snabel)gmail.com -- I think we broke Haloscan.

(I haven't enabled comments on the Dogblog itself because of a reason)

THANKS

* Bonus question: Were you already reading this main blog anyway?

SPAY NAY CHAY?

Not having an ATM card is proving to be one of the most annoying things about modern life for people who used to have ATM cards. I am sort of glad the weekend is done just because I was starting to feel like a mooch. Hopefully the new one will arrive in the next couple of days and I can go back to using the money that's currently locked up inside the bank.*

The title of this post comes from a particularly memorable homeless white dude back in Pittsburgh's Oakland region who would stand on the street wearing an enormous festive sombrero and ask passersby in a nasal, barely-intelligible bray, "Spare any change?" What you see above is the most accurate phonetic rendering of what he actually sounded like.

* I realize I could just go to a branch and physically withdraw some money from the teller person, but the amount of hassle that entails is too great to contemplate at any length.

I PUSH MY BARROW ALL THE DAY

Sorry I haven't been around much, people. I'm not gonna lie to you: There has been some mischief surrounding a couple of concerts by much-beloved band the Decemberists. Events have occurred and deeds were done. I will have some sort of writeup on this in the days to come, but right now I am buried under a snowdrift of work. When next you hear from me, I will have clawed my way out from under it to breathe once again the bracing air of freedom.

THE THING I WAS TALKING ABOUT

The reason I was out of touch for the weekend was that I was in Chicago with my mom and my brother. She said she wanted to see us and talk about something, which to me sounded serious -- it turns out it wasn't. That was it. I didn't say anything to anyone because I thought it'd be really stupid; I knew I wouldn't get a chance to see anybody, so it seemed better not to bring it up. You know? "Hey, I'm going to be in Chicago this weekend, but it's some family thing, so I can't hang out at all. Okay, talk to you later!" Pfeh.

In other news, my ATM card got eaten last night by a Bank of America machine, so now I have to be careful about what I do with this precious tiny supply of cash I've got.

AWW JEAH

So I'm back from my thing and I bring with me this Dogblog update and not much else. I feel as though I have returned fully to normal health, but I'm going to keep taking the penicillin until it's gone because that's the way antibiotics get rocked. I am not into the notion of breeding resistant strains of anything, you know what I'm sayin'?

You pickin' up what I'm layin' down?

That is swell.

OUT FOR A BIT

For the next couple of days, starting tonight, I will be away from the internet because of a reason. So nobody worry about me if you don't hear a peep for a while. The microbes did not suddenly rally -- in fact, I feel pretty much back to my old self again -- I'm just "off the grid." Be good to each other, and continue to stare at the picture in my previous entry, because come on.

PIECES BACK TOGETHER MY WAY

I am feeling really close to normal again and it is so, so sweet. The air itself is made of sugar. I've still got a bit of a throat thing, but for the most part I'm going to call myself over it.

In celebration, I give you this picture my friend Jenny took of Bizzle and Gremlin together, just chillin':



I cannot imagine what it must be like to live with those animals. I would never leave the apartment. Although if you look at it for a while, doesn't it seem like they're talking to each other? Sharing secrets?

Also there is new Pokey the Penguin.

THIS BETTER NOT BE A HABIT

I have some reason to believe I may be coming out on the other side of this thing -- finally, thank fuck -- but one thing I need to make sure of is that my body doesn't adopt my sleep pattern of the past five nights as the new norm. I'll be honest with you: I'm not all that into waking up at 1 or 2 AM and staying awake for no apparent reason for two and a half hours. It's just not something I can get behind.

Once I know I'm completely over it, this can stop being my SicknessBlog and we can go back to talking about all the weighty political issues, album and book reviews, Creative Commons discussion, uplifting stories about angels, open source software debate, and strident sociocultural indignation this blog is known for.

One thing I do have to tell you about is that I got my aftershave balm from the website the other day -- it had been shipped (for free, I might add) from Hong Kong and had not taken long at all. Also, the external box had a purple ribbon on it, and the aftershave itself had been very meticulously wrapped in classy silver paper. That was the most elaborately-prepared thing I've ever received from the internet.

UPDATUM

Well, it's not strep, as it turns out, or at least not strep A. This goes some way toward explaining why the penicillin seems to be doing sweet fuck-all. Possibilities are:

A - It's some other strain of strep (and there is still a chance it will respond to the penicillin, I just have to keep taking it)
B - It's viral
C - It's some whole other shit

I'm hoping it's A and not B or C. Or if it's C, I hope it's something bacterial that the proper drug will kill. I still swivel between feeling within 60% of normal to just terrible. That usually happens at night, actually. I am advancing my ice pack technology even as we speak.

SUFFER, RINSE, REPEAT

My entire existence has been reduced to a series of tight cycles of what I'm going to have to call suffering for lack of a better term. It goes something like this:

- Take penicillin
- Within the next hour or so, fever ramps up for some reason
- Stagger to ibuprofen and handy ice pack
- Take ibuprofen
- Tie ice pack to head*
- Wait

Eventually the fever dies back down and I feel like a human being again. But what the hell. Also, I've quit taking the ibuprofen because it doesn't seem to do anything for the fever and I wish to not destroy my stomach lining. I'm not trying acetaminophen because of a reason.

I WOULD LIKE FOR THIS TO BE DONE PLEASE

* This icepack is currently my most precious possession. It has ties on it that enable you to affix it to your head and walk around.

ONLY MY SECOND HOSPITAL MOMENT

So this cold I had did not, in fact, get any better over the weekend and actually prompted me to visit the ER about five hours ago. None too soon, I might add, because soon after I got there and received some Tylenol for my 102-degree fever, the strange tingly feeling in my face and limbs got a thousand times worse and I started pouring sweat. It was ... unnerving to say the least. I seriously think that the ice pack they put on my head after getting me to a bed (via wheelchair) was the deciding factor. Ice! WHO KNEW.

They're treating it as strep. I've got some antibiotics and I feel much, much better. So there you go! That's what I've been up to.

O FRAIL AND MUTINOUS IMMUNE SYSTEM

Microbes have attacked and rendered my entire body a shrine to the concept of achiness. It basically hurts to move. Which is not good because I need to take Whistler for a w-a-l-k* and I think he might end up having to drag me home on a sled. I should buy a sled.

Standard anti-cold herbals and chicken soups are being deployed, so hopefully this will be a dim memory by the time Sunday or even Saturday rolls around. I was actually feeling better at like 5:00 this morning, and then WHAM -- this.

What in the chicken is that all about.

* He can understand the word "walk" so I either spell it out or tell Laurel/Jim/David that I'm taking him for a "perambulation." I know he's not reading this blog, but JUST IN CASE.

THE 8TH-GRADE FOREVER WAR

I don't usually like to blog about movies I've seen -- it just doesn't seem like a very useful thing for me to do -- but I need to tell you guys about this 30-minute anime feature I just saw called Voices of a Distant Star that was really good. All the more surprising because it was apparently made by just one dude, on a Mac G4 in his apartment or something. It's kind of amazing. The story is a quick epistolary crossbreed of The Forever War and Ender's Game filtered through anime: There are two characters who are about to go into high school -- a guy, who's on Earth, and a girl, who's been picked to be a mecha pilot in a UN armada launched to attack a faraway alien race who destroyed our Martian exploration group. She sends him missives via cellphone text messages, but because of the increasing distance, it takes progressively longer and longer for those messages to traverse the void. This could be really cheesy, and on some level it probably is, but this movie affected me to such a surprising degree that I don't really care. Neither should you. I was torn at the end between wanting more and being like "That was basically perfect." I don't know. Just watch it. You can get it from Netflix. I hear that's what everyone's doing these days.

SMELL UPDATE

I have developed an affinity for the Hugo Boss stuff that comes in the gray sphere. Trouble is, I would like it in its aftershave balm form, and of the roughly seven department stores and Sephora locations I've visited, not one has it. I would buy it online -- there's an eBay seller who's got it for ridiculously cheap -- but eBay's registration process sends me in a tight little circle from which there is no apparent exit. I cannot register for eBay and I can't find this stuff in its proper form in physical stores, and I refuse to pay fifty damn dollars on sephora.com.

There is, funnily enough, a scent made by some dude named Alfred or Albert (it's some A-name) Sung that's not bad. Ha ha! If I can't find that Hugo-Boss-in-a-sphere in its aftershave form by, say, Thursday, then I am probably going to just get that.

BRIEF ANNOUNCEMENT

"Doing nothing on Friday night" is the new "doing something on Friday night." This has been verified by me as a thing that is true. Every day during the day I'm out doing something somewhere, and man, there is nothing like getting some time to just chill out and sleep.

Also, "staring at Bizzle" is the new "working at the office." You can tell your boss I said that if s/he wonders what you're doing.

BYPRODUCT

Item for the list of "things you should have foreseen but for some reason failed to" -- vodka, tequila, and Red Bull will leave you awake and kind of hollowed-out-feeling at nearly 3am when what really should be occurring is sleep. Great. A mistake was made somewhere, but precisely where it happened lies too far back in the decision tree to pinpoint with any accuracy. This entire post is a sign that I should really be in bed, unconscious. Going to try my damndest. I know that doesn't look quite right, but "damnedest" looks too much like a dactyl to be right either.

FUCKIN' A

WORLD'S GREATEST CHEF

Today's dinner was two expertly-reheated hot dogs and an entire can of sliced peaches. I bought four of those a while ago on special and forgot about 'em until this week. Don't you love that? It's like a present you give to yourself.

I updated the Dogblog again -- it's up to 160 now. That is total madness right there.

Suggestions received so far point to me looking into this Hugo Boss stuff as the next aftershave, although I'm going to give everything mentioned at least a once-over, if I can handle it. I have one of those senses of smell where if I do something wrong -- like, say, take some really deep, serious whiffs of a newspaper -- I might end up with a headache that could kill a whole flock of pigeons. I learned early on not to do that with newspapers.

NEW SCENT NEEDED

Given the success I've had with previous clothing-related posts, I would be a fool not to ask for advice on the following.

I am almost out of my aftershave. I seem to excel at picking aftershaves that completely disappear from the market after I buy them. My first was a Jil Sander balm, and now there's this Escada stuff that an admittedly cursory search of whatever department store I was in failed to yield.

So. Lady-type people, I am putting this in your hands. What sort of aftershave should I buy next? I tend to use aftershave not only for its intended purpose, but also as a kind of subtle (I hope) cologne from time to time. What should I be smelling like, is the question I'm asking. Go nuts.

ERRATA

- Does anyone know of a place that will do same-day shipping? The lady at the Postal Annex shop-type location told me that neither UPS nor FedEx does it, and I'm pretty sure the USPS is not set up for that sort of thing. Am I making up same-day shipping? Is that something I've seen only in dreams?

- Speaking of dreams, what was going on with that dream I had last night? I require a quorum on whether it's more or less hot to have a sex dream involving someone you have never seen before in your life (this one was a brunette). That makes at least two in a two-week period. Actually, they were both brunettes (the first one had lip piercings, which I know is an odd detail to remember, but that is why my brain is awesome). Or maybe that's not interesting.

- Why is my Gmail account getting spam now. That never used to happen. Now it happens once or twice a day. That seems like a 100-200% increase from two weeks ago.