I have the best job in the world. No doubt about it. I get paid to sit here in the store, watching over hundreds of books and barely have to lift a finger. It's spectacular. I'm also listening to S-K too. Nothing could go wrong.

call the doctor!

Amy Sedaris on a recent episode of the The Late Show with David Letterman. She's absolutely freaking hysterical. I cannot wait to see Strangers With Candy.

Sometimes, I guess there's just not enough rocks.

Okay, okay, correction.. S-K's last show is in Oregon, not Chi-town. Okay, second to last show..

I'm still going to learn everything.

one last thing...

Oh yeah, I watched Amelie the other night with Mel. Audrey Tautou is MUCH cuter in the Da Vinci Code.

Amelie, 2001

Da Vinci Code, 2006

See what I mean?

grumble grumble bitch grumble

I also don't like how The Hot Rock is skipping on me. C'mon guys, this is digital music here. You don't skip. You play nicely. Or freeze up on me.

nothing left me to feel

I spend many a night wondering if the lightning storm in my head will stay long enough so I can translate these thoughts to page. I actuallly attempt it but it bothers me that I still have to log in and press a couple buttons before I can start moving my fingers. I'd write it in my moleskine but my hands can't move as fast as my brain can. I wish I could just spout off some beautiful prose but I think I'm starting to understand and trying to get comfortable with the fact that I don't have that talent, that my writing is certainly more grounded, real, formed, not necessarily like beautifully, carelessly constructed.

I don't read enough books. I think that's why I think so many people write better than me. It's because they read more. I don't feel like I can pay enough attention to anything for a long time. I'm wondering if it's because I'm bored, or it's because I have attention-deficet disorder or something. Maybe I should get tested. Yeah, maybe I'll do that. Wait, no, I'm too lazy. Effin a.

I'm trying to learn the entire Sleater-Kinney catalog before Lolla. I want to know everything so I can sing along with every last fucking note at their final show. I liked them before and now I just want to.. rock out.. And I'm a guy. So If I started a sentence with "And". Blow me.

It's time to go to bed. But I'm not tired. I just keep rocking side to side as If I'm on some kind of drug or like a toddler trying to entertain themselves.

I'll never be as good as the rest of you so I'll settle for this.

Love,

Brendo

my heart, your skin, this love i'm in

I'm beginning to think why I don't want to post on this is because of what it looks like. So, I'm changing it.

"Sam" is still a work in progress.

Sam

As I'm getting older, I feel that many of my childhood memories are condensing, and fine details I could recall easily just a few years ago are breaking off into smaller pieces and creating this mosaic of my life.

One thing I still remember quite clearly is this iconic figure that drifted into my life as a little kid, and just as quickly, vanished. I used to know him as Sam.

Sam was like a cartoon character. You could always rely on him to never change. Just like a cartoon character, every time you'd see him, he'd be wearing the same thing, and acting the same way you saw him last.

Sam was a contractor my dad befriended around the time our house was built in the late 1980's. Reeking of tobacco, he had ruggedness of John Wayne if he had been through a meat grinder with an impenetrable dome of slicked black silvery hair. If this was a product of not showering, or some sort of gel or cream, I'll never know. It seemed if every time I saw him he wore one of those cheapo teamster style jackets. Sam drove a black pickup truck with a white tool box fixed behind the cab's back window. (From this point on, I've judged every pickup if it had a tool box behind the cab or not. Even at the age of three, I had standards.) I remember him being very stoic. When he talked with that gravelly voice, you listened. It was like he had the knowledge of living a hundred previous lives before he found himself in the suburbs in the late 1900's.

I can remember riding in that pickup truck, sandwiched between Sam and my father, and on occasion, my little brother, crusing through Hickory Hollow. What strikes me most vividly is the beer cans and crushed up Marlboro boxes sliding back and forth across the dashboard. This was normal.

The relationship I had with him paled in comparison to the one he had with my father. They were the Lennon and McCartney of construction - both had radically different personalities, but had some connection that seemed to click.

Looking at photographs of the two standing next to each other, it's hard to imagine that they ever became friends. Sam was this sixty-something grizzled old man with grown children and a storied past while Kevin Hilliard was a thirtysomething businessman who was moving to the suburbs with his wife and two young children. What they had in common was easy to figure out: they both liked to build shit. I could expect to see Sam's black pickup truck come down our driveway when my dad started one of his 'projects'.

Just as curiously as he drifted into my life, he drifted out of it.

Sam died on May 7, 1995 of a heart attack.

When my parents told me the next morning, I couldn't believe it. My dad was quivering. I had never seen him so upset before. It was such a hard pill to swallow. I couldn't really imagine Sam not being around anymore. He was ever-present, someone you could depend on to be there.

When a "Sam story" comes up, the mood seems to shift with a tinge of sadness. Every "Sam story" ends the same way. The quiver in his voice returns and the same, sincere line always follows:

"Sam was my buddy. I miss him."