Where the fuck were you all last night, as I sat in my living room watching the video for R. Kelly's Trapped In The Closet Chapter One? I wished in my mind that pretty much all my friends would show up, the funny ones, at least one of them, and none of you magically teleported in. It sucked.

I haven't written in this thing for ages, and there are some people reading it who have no idea what I've been up to. I stayed with friends for much longer than I expected, moving out on July 2nd, to across the street. I got screwed out of a roommate and am paying a lot of rent until September, when Alex'll show up and reduce the cost by half. I got a job, but it was a horrible scam, selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door. I didn't get paid, my coworkers were horrible, and then I quit. Now I look for work.

I just got cable installed on Monday. I don't have internet access at my house, and probably won't until shortly before Alex arrives, because of the expense. I go to the school library for computer access every day. Before there was cable, I read a lot. I still do, I don't watch a lot of TV, but there was a lot of reading. I bought some books when I had a job I thought would pay me: Borges' Collected Fictions, and Franz Kafka's The Complete Stories. I had a friend who said I could buy stuff at one book store using his credit while he was gone for the summer: This is how I got Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. Also I steal books from Barnes And Noble, which I'd been doing for awhile, then stopped, but started again and got copies of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying Of Lot 49 and James Joyce's Ulysses, as well as a copy of Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven. Plus there were the last two issues of McSweeney's, as well as a backlog of stuff- I've now read The Sound & The Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress Of Solitude. I'll limit my opinions to saying that The Crying Of Lot 49 was much better and easier to read than Gravity's Rainbow, and that the Collected Fictions translation of Borges by Andrew Hurley is much better than that of Anthony Kerrigan found in the copy of Ficciones I bought and read last summer.

Without internet access, I don't hear as much new music. There's a lot of things leaking that I'd like to hear, but might just have to wait until they're released, when hopefully I'll have money. This is stuff like the new Silver Jews, Deerhoof, Animal Collective records. Also Wolf Parade. There's lot of stuff. I have two Clap Your Hands Say Yeah songs off an mp3 blog that I really like.

There's shows and parties and the feeling of getting ever closer to a scene which just confirms my suspicions more and more: That these are people who don't actually like music. It makes me uncomfortable, although the girls are pretty, which is to be expected. Sometimes I find myself at random parties which suck completely, or are good but the decent people have terrible friends. I saw a Mount Eerie show that was awesome: Electric guitars and backing rhythm section. I bought No Flashlight. The other new music I've heard was the Prefuse 73 Reads The Books EP, paid for by trading in CDs that mostly I forgot I owned, like a Mogwai EP.

The movies I've seen have been limited- Went to the Capitol Theater for free because someone didn't show up so I did their job and saw Kontroll and Steamboy, neither of which were particularly good. And I saw Batman Begins, and wished the same wish I had during the R. Kelly video, although for completely different reasons- Well, not completely different, I was there early and ended up seeing all twenty minutes of The Twenty, and wished for friends and sarcasm.

Oh I wanted to talk about Sports Night. I like that show, which is something of a joke out here in Olympia with all the people who heard that one mostly-accurate joke on Family Guy but have never watched the show, or at least not at length. My point was that not only do I like Sports Night, I like it enough to be happy when I see those people in other things- the one dude with the Six Feet Under success, Felicity Huffman was in Magnolia, and just last night I saw the other anchor dude making an appearance on an episode of Stella- The first I'd seen due to my lack of cable. Speaking of which, in my absence from the world of TV I missed that Comedy Central's hired a new racist working-man type, only this one's Spanish. I also missed Jon Stewart taking some asshole to school on The Daily Show, which saddens me for different reasons.

Most things are lame. I think a good deal about the apocalypse, and how the possibility that enlightenment would happen on December 22nd 2012 that it seems that most people familar with that date are hoping for could very well just mean the end of all life on earth, since everything's just going to get worse and worse up to that point.

Also I do some writing, short stories and a novel and a screenplay for a comedy. All slow-going. I really need a job. I got hired technically by this temp agency but that only kind of counts. On the fifth there's this job fair for this big movie theater opening in Lacey. That's the job I'm hoping for.

My family's been keeping me alive by sending me checks and stuff. I have mixed feelings towards this, but mostly it just tempts me to give up. I signed up for a class in the fall mostly so I can get financial aid and credit. I'll try to make films on my own on the school's dime, using their equipment. Speaking of the school's dime: I saw a website listing professor's salaries. Almost all of them are overpaid. Or in reality, all of them are overpaid, but I don't resent all of them for this.