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Man I ain't too sure what's up with RayMay 24

Dude just came in here all needin' me to do up some computer help, particularly graphics. I ain't too much for Photoshop but after I calmed him down and got his basic wants clarified I was able to teach myself the program fairly quickly as it is pretty intuitive (you have to mentally navigate with the awareness that this is a very old program with a massive feature set yet also has had teams trying to dumb it down for years -- it's like dancing with a beautiful woman, but a church lady is holding a ruler between you the whole time).

Anyhow this is what he wanted me to make:

It is Not WinterApril 5

There is I guess an apricot tree or something and its branches sort of stick past the window where I sit and type. Today it completely exploded with white little flowers, like every four inches along, looking straight-up like a popcorn tree. A lot of other plants are acting up now too, and it's that time of year where the gray seems to be gone and cool air pushes like star jasmine and lily fragrances all around. In my brain I get kind of a *click* and I turn some sort of corner out of winter. I need to sit down and figure out what the trigger is so I can pull it earlier in the year.

Trees are kind of like dinosaurs: ancient as all hell, just way slow to adapt, and tough. You can tell how primitive a thing is by how many children it makes, like how spiders and sea turtles make like a thousand babies just to get one or six to survive. Apricot trees are the same way. They make a thousand apricots a year and if every single one took root where it fell, they would kill the mother tree and each other. However, apricot trees exist because they "know" a raccoon and a badger will see *most* of the fruit on the ground and go all NOM NOM NOM...no, this is bad reasoning. Does an apricot seed need the fruit surrounding it in order to germinate, or does it count on an animal eating the fruit and dispersing the seed somewhere else, like in a pile of fresh nutritious poop? I need to go to college. This is like real basic horticulture or botany or something. I wish I had any kind o

New Italian Place that Ray made me goDecember 14 2008

Dang but they shoehorned this new Martha Stewart-type Italian place into the old Letty's Taqueria space, that old dingy F-minus "what in the hell empty since six years where do they get a dollar" taco shop on the drag on Benson. I never really saw how they stayed in business since if you ordered a chicken burrito you could really tell that the chicken was sittin' around in a cold steel tray for five days developin' grain. I ate there twice and got the read and freaked hard each time on dreams of pump skitters and doin' the fetus pinwheel in sweated-up sheets.

Ray totally loves this new place, mainly based on the Italian dude Vito who runs it and is all friends with every customer pretty hard. I don't know. I get that read on Vito like, "The man who is friends with everyone is friends with no one." Ray eats it up like the bread, actin' all "made" when the dude says, "Is a special lasagna today for you Ray, I bring it to you special." He don't give it to Ray for any kind of deal and the only thing special about it is that the word "special" got said twice. I think he's just sellin' it to Ray 'cause he knows Ray would buy anything he talked about and it's one of those casserole-based dishes that you can scrape outta the pan corner and dump some red sauce on. Ray pays twenty-nine dollars for stuff Vito's dishwasher would put his cigarette butt in.

Here are the following categories of dude accents that can sell things to dumb American guys, graded by power of

First Rain.October 4 2008

Alright so the deal with first rain is that I like to bundle all up in this preposterous old North Face "ski rescue"-type thigh-length jacket that I lifted outta Ray's car one time (it has like seventeen zippers and three drawstrings and a thermal-lined waterproof hood that stuffs down into one of the collars) and put on some shorts and my crispiest Chucks and walk the town for a good half day or so. I smell the creek and look at the gutters run (kind of foamy since it's the first) and listen to the drops fall on my lid when I go under the cedars by the high school. I always make a little pass by a storm drain we used to skate; it's all broken up by time and throbbin' ground now and crammed with roots. I run kind of fast and sideways up where the edge of the bank was and jump over the gap where we would ollie. I doubt I could even ollie any more. I doubt anyone would care if I did. I certainly don't think anyone needs me to.

After I did my big long walk today, all miles and miles, I stopped into a calzone place and got a pretty good do-up. Then I hoofed it home and Molly was on the TV and I just read my sites for a good long bit. I hope you had a good first rain too or that you have one soon. I don't realize it but it's probably the center of my year.

Why did I get screamed atMarch 27 2008

Man I was down at Lucky Go getting the wrong printer cable for Molly and when I was out in the parking lot with my cheap little plastic bag this forty five year-old gutty dude with real flat wet combed hair got out of his car (a pretty bad old Nissan that a man his age should be beyond) and started over at me. He kept patting down his hair and running his thumbs around the inside of his waistband, you know, and when he got like ten feet from me he had a pretty good lather on, just screaming that I was a son of a bitch. It gave me the feeling that I hadn't noticed him earlier when he drove by and he thought I had flipped him off (I had not just errantly done any flipping off that morning so that seems unlikely). Maybe he reasoned me for another dude who had done him over with some cash or parts. I just started to back away because I didn't have much anger at the time and when he advanced I actually ran fifteen feet. When I saw that he didn't chase after me I started to walk again. It was a pretty basic "weird scene," like might make sense if you were looking at two fairly sophisticated beetles in a terrarium but man was this guy coming off the whiskey or something. Or is it whisky? No wonder people who drink whiskey are always so mad, they're like WHAT THE HELL AM I DRINKING WHISKY OR WHISKEY and that just makes them drink more. This guy was like that, a man who would drink to excess because his beverage had an outmoded spelling distinction, and then yell at people by the chea