And what did I do with this information? This knowledge that my little brother (the one I like the most) spends 3-4 days a week getting drunk in bars? I called his cell phone and mocked him for one minute and 48 seconds before he hung up on me.

Apparently he’s an angry drunk who screams at people for “disrespecting” him and trying to hide his car keys from him. Oh, yes. He also likes to drive drunk.

I should be worried about him, I suppose… But if he’s not going to be responsible for his own actions, why the fuck should I worry about him? I just think it’s funny. Not “funny-ha ha” of course, it’s “funny-you’re a waste of oxygen just like Matthew and you’re going to end up dead in a ditch.”

I guess that makes me a horrible person… But fuck it. Daniel deserves to be mocked.

Currently, I’m reading “13 Bullets” by David Wellington.

It’s a charming tale about an old man, and the blood thirsty killers with sharks’ teeth he has hunted for 20 years.

Lisa bought me Vampire Zero on Friday, not realizing that it is part of a series. After reading the back, I immediately ordered the first two books in Wellington’s series and now I’m reading 13 Bullets, the first book.

I’m a little over halfway through with it and it’s great. It’s not a hard read, full of action, and the characters are interesting. But what makes this a great book is something that happens in the three opening chapters of the novel… As a young man, one of our protagonists is about to be fed to a group of crippled vampires by the only vampire in the room currently capable of movement… And he has to rip the vampire’s heart out with his bare hands as the wound is closing up from the ineffectual bullets he had previously tried.

Ripped. Its. Heart. Out. WITH HIS BARE HANDS!

I’m in love with this book.

In the To Read Pile:

I have the worst case of senioritis ever in recorded history.

So with an application to fill out, three articles to write, my first final on Tuesday night, what did I do yesterday? I went to Best Buy and bought a game for the Xbox.

(Maybe I’ll resist the urge to take it out of the shrink wrap until next week.)

(I’ve been getting a ton of spam since my two posts yesterday. I think that’s a sign that I need to update my list of words that trigger a small electrical shock to the genitals of an actor from a herpes commercial every time I get a comment telling me to buy insurance.)

A couple of the posts I’ve made there haven’t exactly been in the mainstreaming-geek theme, and probably should have just been posted here, but what are you gonna do?

Here’s a story on one of their blogs that caught my eye today:

The City of Austin is looking at a $30 million budget gap next year, city budget staffers told the City Council at a work session this morning.

That gap in revenue assumes that the City Council will adopt the rollback property tax rate, which is the highest rate the city can charge without requiring voter permission. It also assumes that the hiring freezes and other cuts the city has already made will stay in place.

Isn’t that wonderful? $30 million in the hole for the year DESPITE raising taxes and freezing salaries and new hires. Awesome.

Austin has been doing comparatively well in this “downturn” so far, we had SXSW to help with March revenue, but even that wasn’t enough to dig the city out of it’s financial hole.

It’s probably just going to get worse, too. Isn’t that a cheerful thought? Read the comments on that link. The local nutjobs always make a good showing on these sorts of blog posts.

I was thinking of setting my neighbor’s dog on fire.

Subject: [Malks] Saint Harlequin’s annual rant

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 00:35:46 EST From: “Saint Harlequin Grimaldi”

To: malks@thehub.com.au

It’s that time. Let’s talk about love, shall we?

What the hell IS love, anyway? Encarta Dictionary has eleven noun and five verb entries for the word. I love my mother. I love my cat. I love my best friend. One word, all these uses! And the emotions are only superficially similar towards each. Five hundred thousand words in the damned language, and we reuse one too many times. Typical. But for our purposes, love can be defined as; “The emotional state in which another’s well-being becomes more important than one’s own”.

But the love discussed during this time of year is a deeper, more abiding, more passionate variety, geared towards coupling.So what IS this Love thing, anyway?

Some people point towards beauty and joy and utter compassion, towards majestic, sweeping emotions seen in DeBeers diamond commercials and such.This, they reason, is this great thing that the poets wrote of. This is this great thing that Shakespere created passion and tragedy from. This is Love.

These people are absolutely right.

Some people point towards lighter, happier emotions, towards lighthearted romantic comedy and happy carefree times. Shakespere also created, they explain, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, did he not?

They’re also absolutely right.

Whatever you want to consider it, though, here’s the sad fact about modern society. We’ve become a society about compartmentalizing things, of buying things presanitized for our protection. And we NEED protection, don’t we, boys and girls? We NEED protection against the fact that it’s a hard world, that there are people out there who will hurt us, that the world owes us nothing, nothing whatsoever, and even our so highly self-appraised society or societies guarantees each and every human being NOTHING MORE THAN A NAME AND A COUNTRY OF ORIGIN. We need to be PROTECTED against the Bad Men, yes, protected and kept safe and clean and pure, and the only way to do that, because WE are the Bad Men, is to tell us how to feel and when. It’s almost February 14th. This tells us it’s time to allow ourselves to feel Love.

Bah.

Bah and humbug, I say. Spittle and shit all over your protection, and see if you can protect yourself from THAT. I don’t WANT to be protected from Love. I want it to EXPLODE and be DANGEROUS and MESSY and I want to see people swept under and drown in the outpourings of my emotions, and if I get swept under in theirs, SO BE IT, I took my chances by waking up in the morning.

So bah on your St. Valentine’s day. I will not wish anyone a happy Valentine’s day, nor will I accept any happy Valentine’s days from anyone. I will not allow myself to be compartmentalized.

I have felt Love. I didn’t show it on Valentine’s Day any different than I showed it every other day I felt it. February or October, I’d show it the same way, through tenderness and care and attention to my partner’s happiness and well-being.

But there are those of you out there who WANT this compartmentalization, who WANT to be protected against your own emotions. So be it. So, in the interests of fair play, I offer you once again………

SAINT HARLEQUIN’S DAY!

That’s right! The Patron Saint of Bitterness, Rage, and Hate has procaimed February 15th as his day! It’s a day for SANCTIONED HATE!

As you all may recall, I, Harlequin Grimaldi, have long since declared myself the Saint of Hate. (Saints, for the record, are the cosmic middlemen. If you have a lost cause, pray to St. Jude, and he’ll plead your case to the Boss, and so forth.) I represent the bitter, the lonely, the hurt, the hate-filled, the enraged, the ugly, the too intelligent, the too nice, the “like a brother”s, the “such good friends”, and all other unwanteds, undesirables, undatables, and unfortunates littering the world who remain in a seeming perpetual state of being single. Poor souls, how we suffer this time of year, watching our friends who have this great thing, this Wonderful Emotion, this Love, deserved or otherwise.

And the bitterness grows, doesn’t it? They look at us with pity, we return the gaze with contempt. We pretend to not want what they have, but we do, we do, and the jealousy grows. Or we remember times past, old loves, having none current to entertain our affections, and we remember the fights, and cheating, the lies, the bad times, the bad blood, the bad breakups, and all the agony afterwards.

Now is our time.

So go on! Kick your pets! Kick your neighbors! Kill the mailman! Let the HATE flow. Lower your inhibitions on it. Speak openly of your hate and your pain. It’s YOURS, it’s UNIQUELY YOURS, there are many in the world with similar hate and only one with YOUR hate, you are FREE TO USE IT.

And use it you should.Why? Because it’s THERE, and it’s REAL, and because you are YOU, and because you are ALIVE. Try it. One day. February 15th. If you like it, try it a little more the next day. Let it FLOW, let the REALITY of the emotion consume you. If you escape being lost in your bitterness (and it took me YEARS to do so), you will never, ever see the world through the same eyes again. You’ll see the REAL more acutely, you’ll see what’s prepackaged and what’s REAL, and you’ll never, I predict, be quite willing to settle for anything less than dangerous reality again.

So go. Release your hate. I’ll hear your prayers.

This is my sig. Bite me. **Saint Harlequin Grimaldi**

Some brimstone-baritone anti-cyclone Rolling Stone

Preacher from the East

Says dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone, That’s where they expect it least. ****************************

– A mass of disjointed and drugged thoughts who had something to say and didn’t do a good job of saying it.

Interesting saints and patronages; Saint Dymphna (insanity), Saint Maria Goretti (teenage girls), Saint Agatha (volcanic eruptions), Saint Bona (flight attendants), and Erasmus (abdominal pains). There is no saint of stories or storytellers. I claim this patronage into my fold.

This is a day of rememberance and rage. Harlequin died several years ago, but his hate lives and grows thanks to the wonders of the internet.

Remember. Feb. 15th. Piss on a stranger.

I love them so much I even watch crap like Zombie Strippers. That’s right. Zombie. Strippers.

The two zombie movies I just finished were shot in the same style, with much the same premise… There’s a zombie outbreak and the survivors are chronicling their struggles. The first one was The Zombie Diaries about an outbreak in England… It was filmed in 2006 and shows three groups of survivors and how their stories are intertwined. ZD ultimately shows you that you have more to fear from your fellow “humans” than anything the walking dead is capable of. The second movie was George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, which is the story of a group of film students documenting the zombie apocalypse along with spiffy video downloads of people around the world reacting to the crisis. It was filmed in 2007 and with it’s bigger budget and CGI, it fails in a way that was depressing.

The first zombie movie I ever saw was Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. It was a Halloween tradition. After trick-or-treating, my family would watch it until us kids fell asleep (usually around the time the little girl comes back to life and starts crawling up the stairs). So I was expecting Romero’s take on hand-held zombie awesomeness to be, well, awesome. It wasn’t. There wasn’t anything terribly wrong with the movie other than the film students being a bit to whiney with each other, but it just didn’t deliver the same punch in the gut impact as the final scenes of ZD or even the ending of Night of the Living Dead.

I need sleep.

Cant. Stop. Clicking!