Okay, so there's this commercial on American television right now that uses the Cars' "You're Just What I Needed" as background music. And I can't hear a song like that anymore without immediately thinking of this girl whose name I can't even remember, but who I used to have this big overwhelming crush on a number of years ago. I met her in Albuquerque, in fact, where she was a citizen in the late '90s, not a writer herself but someone who hung out with writers, which is why I met her while I was there for the Albuquerque Poetry Festival. And since I can't remember her name, I'll just call her Nina 'cause that's as good a name as anything else.

Ah, Albuquerque! If you've never been to this small New Mexico city yourself, you'll be as surprised to learn as I was on my first trip of just what a great, artistic, slacker-friendly little place Albuquerque actually is, with lots of coffeehouses and indie-rock clubs, and this reallly cohesive artistic community that's much larger than you would expect from a small city in the middle of the desert. Every year back in the '90s, this coalition of literary groups and retail businesses would put on this big poetry festival in Albuquerque, which because of its strong slam ties and other alt-lit connections ended up attracting some pretty big national attention, and luring all these great writers out every winter. I was lucky enough to get invited the last two years of the festival, before the coalition sorta fell apart, and man, what a great charge that used to be every February when us Chicagoans always needed it the most; hot sunny days, poetry events an entire city would come out for, people treating you like a rock star, making money hand over fist, having sex with cute local undergrads, oh, it just went on and on out there!

Nina was one of those people in one of those kinds of cities that you're just always running into - at many of the events during the festival itself, of course, but also at the hipster cafe during the day, and all the late-night hipster parties after the shows were over, etc etc. Nina was almost as tall as me, bisexual but mostly lesbian, with this short blonde haircut and always wearing men's clothes, who happened to be a punk-rock musician too. Well, is there any question really of why I developed such a heavy crush on her? And this was...1998, I think, that Nina and I first met each other, and just had one of those situations where our conversations just kept getting the tiniest bit longer each time we saw each other - 5 minutes in the morning, 7 minutes that afternoon, 10 minutes before the first poetry show of the evening.

The big capper of every festival back then was this invitational poetry slam they'd hold on Saturday night - where something like 20 of the festival's headliners were invited to be in this big slam with some ridiculous first prize, like a thousand bucks or something, which they'd hold in this thousand-seat venue that would sell out each year, and which paid for most of the smaller events held throughout the week. And Nina couldn't make the show that year, I remember, because her band had a gig down the street at the same time. But if I just happened to want to cut out of the slam early and come see them, she mentioned, she could easily put my name on the guest list.

And of course I wasn't going to pass up an invitation like this from a girl I had such a big crush on, so I indeed skipped out of the slam early that year and made my way down to this dingy indie-rock club on the other side of downtown from where I was. And this is why Cars songs always remind me of Nina - because her band was in fact one of those popular late-'90s retro-'80s-sounding indie-rock bands, and specifically mirroring that great sound from that period when traditional rock bands started incorporating synthesizers, like the Cars and the Romantics and the J. Geils Band and Journey and Styx and others. Hell, the band members were even all dressed in black early-'80s suits, with red shirts underneath and skinny black ties, and instead of guitars three of the band members even had '80s-style keyboards strapped around their necks. And they rocked my world, needless to say, and of course I already love that kind of music because that stuff was originally popular right when I entered high school, so of course my crush on her just deepened that much more.

And even seven years later, I can still remember just standing there in that club, drunk and high off my ass, and thinking with this sorta reckless glee, "I'm a touring writer in some city I've never been, and if my friends ditched me at this point I'd have no idea how to get back to where I'm staying, and I'm getting fucked up every night for free, laying out in 82-degree weather when it's 16 back home, having strangely flirtatious conversations with hot local indie-rock heroes, getting asked for my autograph while I'm out at bars with my friends. Life doesn't get any better than this." (And it really doesn't, man, if you're lucky enough to ever find yourself in that position. Which is why ultimately I don't regret any of the time I spent in my twenties pursuing a career as a writer, even though I'm not anymore, because I had an entire decade full of experiences like that.)

And then of course Nina was surprised as hell that I actually made it to the show, and she and I and the bandmates all hauled ass back to her place after the show, and drank more and smoked more and did yet more drugs, and had this really bizarre conversation about self-image and reflections and this weird art project Nina had done concerning the subject. And once again, I was struck heavily by the fact that here I was, in some slacker living room in the middle of the desert somewhere, all fucked up and with no idea where I was, having the most enthralling conversations with people I didn't know, and that people were paying me to have this experience. And when you're 27, 28 years old, having such an experience for the first time, a week of that can easily motivate you to get through an entire year of endless crap back at home.

So it's been nice, I think, to have this commercial running on the airwaves so much these days, and to think back to Albuquerque each time I see it, because I literally have nothing but good memories of both the festivals I attended there in the '90s, and to wonder whatever happened to my lovely ass-kicking punk-rock queen Nina. And well, actually, I do know that she moved to Chicago herself not that much later, but the last time I saw her was at some Quimby's Bookstore party way back in 2000 or 2001, so I have no idea if she's still in town or really what the hell's happened to her. I'm sure wherever she is, she's continuing to break hearts and take names.

So yeah, can you tell that my life continues to be dominated these days by such nerdy things as learning new software, leading to me not really having anything of interest to share in my journal right now? I keep putting off and putting off entries, in fact, because it seems I just have so little to actually report: "Monday. Woke up. Worked on computer for 14 hours. Ate. Smoked. Went to bed." Bleh - do you really want to tune in every day for that? This becomes a problem for me every autumn, in fact, as my life in Chicago naturally transitions from going out a lot to staying in a lot; for the last three years, in fact, I've simply shut down my journal altogether from late October to the new year, because I've really had that little to say.

But unlike those years, this autumn I'm going to have the ability to update my journal from my mobile device, at home or on the go without having to pay an extra fee at an internet cafe; and I worked really hard earlier this year to establish this ability, so it seems a shame to put it all into sleeper mode for three months just because I can't think of interesting things to talk about each day. So I guess I'll just post stuff here whenever I've got enough collected to warrant doing so, and hope that an increasing amount of you are taking advantage of my web feeds, and having your news reader tell you when I've updated instead of you having to manually check each day and getting sick of it after a week of no updates. (My feeds are found in the bottom left of the page on the desktop/laptop version of my site; I have a feed just for headlines and summaries, one for the full text of each entry, one just for my audio files, one just for my photos, and even one just for news concerning my South Africa tour, coming May 2006.)

And actually, I don't have that much space left today - because of software limitations I can only publish 2,000 words a day here, and I've got about 500 left as of this sentence. So I guess I'll end today by posting a couple of the random notes I've jotted down on my Treo this week. Enjoy.

--A disturbing thought a couple of afternoons ago - that with just the slightest adjustment (say, one turn of one knob on a soundboard), the desperate, shrill screams of the Tyra studio audience would sound exactly like that horrific noise the Wraiths make in Lord of the Rings. Dude, I don't know why that particular afternoon talk show grates on my nerves just so much more than any of the other afternoon talk shows...but it does, man. Maybe because every second of the show just screams, "The only reason this made it on the air is because we focus-grouped it to death." Or maybe the fact that they don't even hide this, because they just assume that their audience is too stupid to know what a focus group even is. Maybe it's the blind arrogance of this utterly vapid supermodel, who got a TV show for no other reason than that she's a supermodel, who spends the majority of each show talking about how unfair it is that certain people get things handed to them because of their looks. And God, that fucking "People's Runway" or whatever they call it, where "normal" women get to strut their flabby, yellow-ribbon-festooned suburban bodies to the tortured supernatural screams of other flabby suburban women. You know, just like a supermodel usually gets to do!, except you don't have to be a supermodel on Tyra!, because we here at Tyra celebrate the inner beauty of every woman! Now give us money, give us money, give us money, give us money, you poor pathetic slobs, so Tyra can continue paying $10,000 a month for her dog's personal chef!

Ugh! Tell me, ladies, seriously, doesn't this shit sometimes just piss you off to the breaking point? If I was a woman, I'd be complaining every single day about what a traitor to their gender the female staff members of Tyra are, and how shamelessly they're exploiting women's most vulnerable inner fears in order to make yet another nickel of profit. So, you know, thank God I'm not a woman, I guess.

--Well, it's official - in last week's 300-gazillion-dollar Powerball drawing, around 860 people nationwide played the mysterious numbers from the hit television show Lost. And the irony, of course, is not a single one of the numbers appeared in the eventual drawing, so so much for art imitating life, I guess. By the way, has anyone else been pissed off recently over how slow the last two episodes have been, and how not a single thing about the plot was revealed besides that the mysterious pirate-ship crew are in fact members of the Others? What happened? The first three episodes of the season were just chock-full of solutions to mysteries and answers to questions, so it's doubly frustrating to have them go back to their season-one modus operandi (i.e. "don't answer any questions, and raise five more questions in each new episode"). C'mon, Lost creative staff - less pointless metaphorical backstories in an attempt to prove that you're a "serious" show, more info on whether or not they're all standing on top of a crashed UFO! You're killing me here!

--And finally, I learned a new word this week! Hooray for continual expansion of our everyday vocabularies! It's 'qualia,' to be specific, which is an overall term for "the full range of all human subjective experiences," which includes most of what we classify as "emotions," as well as such things as our ability to be self-sentient, our ability to understand our own mortality, etc. I learned the word, by the way, because I'm reading a book by Ray Kurzweil right now, who is just this CRAZY-ASS scientist-futurist-inventor guy, who among other things believes in that in the year 2029 we will build the first computer to be bigger and smarter than a human brain, which will then immediately trigger what he calls "The Singularity," where biological and mechanical intelligence will merge and kickstart the next step of human evolution.

Needless to say, it's pretty heavy stuff that's just blowing my mind right now, and needless to say that there will be an entire journal entry soon devoted to just his theories and whether or not I think they hold any water. I did come across an interesting statistic in the book the other day, though, that I thought I'd just throw up here for now, because it's something I didn't realize and that you will probably find interesting as well - that now that the Human Genome project is finally complete, we now know that an uncompressed human genome consists of around 800 million bytes of information. But the interesting thing is that when you strip away all the genetic redundancies and duplications, the average human genome actually has only 23 million bytes of unique information, which is actually less than the source code for Microsoft Word. And it's facts like these that Kurzweil uses to support his Singularity theory; but like I said, a lot more on this in a future entry.

Bye!