Well, so, greetings from somewhere over southern Illinois, where I am currently flying my way back to Chicago from my recent week spent with my family in suburban St. Louis, for the Thanksgiving holiday. My original plan, to tell you the truth, was to actually type this entry into my Treo on the plane ride itself, using the cool-ass little foldup keyboard I've had for about a year now, and then to actually post the entry on the train ride back to my apartment, making it the first entry of mine in seven years to be both completely written and published while in transit from one city to another. But alas, I'm sitting in the front row of the airplane, where there is no flip-down tray to hold my keyboard; so I'm instead writing the first draft of this in my paper notebook (Luddite shmuck!) and will be getting it typed in and posted back at my apartment later today, like I've often done in the past.

So as you could probably tell from last week's entries, my holiday trip ended up going pretty well, although like always I found myself awfully stir-crazy by the end of it all. See, for those who don't know, I don't have access to a car when I'm in Missouri; I don't even own a driver's license, to tell you the truth, much less insurance, and in fact haven't actually been behind the wheel of a car myself since December 1989. (And this is by choice, I should explain; in fact, one of the main reasons I decided to move to Chicago in the first place is because you can easily get around here without needing a car.)

But anyway, the problem with all this is that my parents live on the edge of a suburban/rural area out there in St. Charles, where it's a two-mile hike even to get to the nearest commercial building in existence (which in fact is a gas station, so not exactly worth making that two-mile hike in the first place). So as much as I enjoy visiting my family, I always end up being a bit of a prisoner while there as well; and boy, let me tell you, after a week in a row where your only form of entertainment is watching hour after endless hour of cable television, you can just imagine how badly I'm always ready to get back to Chicago, back to my bike and access to public transporation, back where destinations are measured in terms of blocks instead of dozens of miles.

Still, though, I do occasionally get a chance to go out while in the St. Louis area; this past Saturday, for example, my old childhood buddy Tom was in town as well (who is actually a fellow Chicagoan like me most of the year), and he does drive, so we ended up heading down to the St. Charles riverfront to see what kind of trouble we might be able to find. Ah, the St. Charles riverfront! For those who don't know, the two blocks of downtown St. Charles that run next to the river have both significant regional and national importance; it was the site of Missouri's first state capitol, for example, right after statehood when the government was trying to figure out where to locate the permanent state capitol, and it also happens to have been the launching point for the various expeditions Lewis and Clark undertook in the early 1800s. (In fact, last year I went back to St. Charles to help celebrate the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark's first expedition; and if my archives were up at this point, I could now link you to those entries I wrote when it happened. Sigh - soon, I swear to God, soon.)

So anyway, unbelievably enough most of the original Colonial-era buildings from that period were still standing by the 1970s, back when the Missouri government decided to turn the whole area into a historical district, and restore the buildings back into what they actually looked like during Colonial times. And so this had already happened by the time I was a teenager, although back then there wasn't a whole hell of a lot for young people to actually do down there; it mostly consisted of antique stores and craft stores back then, to tell you the truth. But then in the '80s, a group of private developers came into the north section of the riverfront district (where most of the original Colonial buildings had been torn down a century previous), and in the years since have turned the whole area into an entertainment district for young adults, with a dozen bars, restaurants and live-music clubs now in place.

And so, any holiday now where Tom and I find ourselves in town at the same time, we usually end up having at least one night where we go down to the riverfront for a little pub-crawling. And, you know, make no mistake - it's redneck pub-crawling to be sure, just a whole night of cheesy cover bands and drunk fat girls wearing too much makeup and midriff-exposing shirts that they really shouldn't be wearing. And sure enough, Saturday's outing was no exception, and we ended up spending the majority of the evening listening to this horrible cover band who actually thought it would be a good idea (and I shit you not about this) to name themselves The Money Shot. Yeah, I know! (And tell me, when did the following phrase become a requirement among all cheesy cover bands on the entire planet? "Make sure to check out our page at MySpace.com!" Ugh.)

So imagine our surprise, then, when a guy ended up approaching us at the bar, because of him actually recognizing Tom from up in Chicago; and not only that, but with it turning out that this guy wasn't even from St. Charles himself! He was in town, in fact, to visit an old buddy of his from when they both lived in the Pacific Northwest, who just had a kid with his wife; and his wife, I guess, grew up in St. Charles herself, and wanted to move back there while the kid was a newborn, to be close to her family during those tough first years of raising one of those little things. And so his buddy was out with him as well, and wow, who would've ever guessed - turns out he's a fellow spoken-word artist like me, who had a bunch of experiences with the poetry slam in the '90s like me (Portland in his case), who ended up quitting the scene in disgust like me, for the same exact reasons that I got disgusted with the scene as well. In St. Charles! At a redneck bar! Will the random connective moments that happen in my life ever end, man?!

So this St. Charles spoken-word guy (whose name I think was Michael but I'm not sure - but more on that in a bit) decided that we all needed to go somewhere more fun, so ended up dragging the rest of us to this place called Charlie's, just this horrifically cheesy little dive bar in a strip mall of all places, on First Capitol Drive across the street from Lindenwood University. (And in fact, the old version of Charlie's down the street was where my brother used to go drink back in high school, during his 'little hellraiser' days.) So, you know, who would've ever guessed that this is in fact the place where the 50 cool indie-rockers in the entire county of St. Charles hang out on Saturday nights? Certainly not me, that's for sure, so I'm extremely glad this guy finally clued me in.

And I guess this guy's a pretty regular customer, because the next thing you know we're getting served just round after round of beers and not getting charged for them, which of course is always a cool thing even when it's fucking crap like Budweiser, which you pretty much have to drink in St. Louis to avoid getting your ass kicked. (You do know, by the way, why American beer is like making love in a canoe, right? They're both fucking close to water. Thank you - I'll be here all week, folks!) And then it turned out that there was a karaoke night going on that evening (of course), so then this spoken-word guy ends up jumping on stage and suddenly starts channeling the spirit of Jack Black (who he even looks like as well) - singing AC/DC, jumping up on people's tables, gyrating his crotch in the faces of female customers, the whole bit.

So needless to say, we all got wasted and had a grand ol' time, and then this guy decided that all four of us needed to dance with some ladies during the last song of the night, so we ran over to this table that had four single women and asked them all to dance at once, and three of them immediately said yes and jumped up, but the woman I asked said no, so I slunk back to the table mightily embarrassed. And then ten seconds later she came over and said, "No, sorry, I'll dance with you, it's just that I don't know how to dance and I'm embarrassed by it," so I said, "Oh, no problem, we can just sway back and forth for five minutes and no one will know the difference," which in fact is exactly what we ended up doing. And then I actually thought that she was really cute, so gave her my contact info in the hopes that we might get a chance to get together again over Christmas, so we'll see I guess if she ends up contacting me or not. And then the bar closed, so we were all going to meet up at the riverboat casino down the street for a final drink, and that was when I was going to finally get these guys' names and contact information; but then Tom and I got down there and couldn't find the guys, and the bars at the casino were closed anyway, so I ended up going home without ever really knowing who these guys were in the first place. (Do any of you readers out there in the Pacific Northwest have any fucking clue who I'm talking about, by the way? This guy ended up performing one of his poems for me earlier in the evening and it was just so great, and now I really want to keep in contact with him about his writing. Like I said, he's a white guy who looks vaguely like Jack Black, is pretty loud and boisterous, is a recovered drug addict who's very public about it, and also has some words in italic script tattooed on the side of his neck.)

So that was my Saturday! And then the next evening I ended up going down to the Delmar Loop in University City, to meet up with my old college buddies Tim and Beth, who are in fact regular readers of this journal as well, and who I always try to get together with at least once each holiday. And we met at Cicero's, because according to the newspaper Cicero's has a poetry open mic themselves every Sunday night; but then we got down there and it turned out that their open mic is only once a month, and that particular Sunday was not it. But it was all for the best, I suppose, because the three of us ended up in just this really interesting conversation that lasted for hours, talking about JRR Tolkien (again) and the complicated relationship he had with CS Lewis; and about utopian societies (again), and how it is that every 19-year-old in existence has their three-week Objectivist phase as an undergraduate, until they finally meet some full-time Objectivists and realize just how creepy those people actually are; and then it turns out that Tim finally had a chance to go over the business plan for this arts center I'm trying to open in Chicago these days, so then we spent a half-hour just talking about that as well, and where he thinks I'm currently getting thigns right and where he thinks I should change things. And that's just always great, because Tim and Beth are just so much fun to hang out with, so I'm glad I got the chance to do so again.

And so now here it is, Tuesday afternoon, and I'm finally back in my apartment here in Chicago, sitting around in my underwear for the first time in a week and a half and finally ready to post this thing. And I'm almost out of space for today, to tell you the truth, but thought I'd try to get a couple of short random notes up as well, which you'll find below. So enjoy, and I'll speak with you again tomorrow.

--Dude! CBS cancelled Threshold! But oh well, I guess, I find it difficult to really be that upset about it; I mean, despite how much I wanted to be a supporter of the show (it coming, after all, from most of the same creative team responsible for Star Trek: Enterprise), it's hard to deny that the writing was awfully weak a whole lot of the time, and that many of the characters were so two-dimensional that they threatened to blow away if they stood sideways in a strong wind. So, I think that marks the first cancellation of the six new science-fiction television shows that debuted on network TV this fall (because of all those stupid executives, of course, running around this summer like chickens with their heads cut off, screaming, "Why don't we have a Lost? I want a Lost! For fuck's sake, someone give me a goddamn Lost!"); and I guess we'll see if those other five SF shows suffer the same fate by the end of the year or not.

--I keep forgetting to mention this, by the way, but Bloglines.com has a new feature that is just so great for us mobile-device owners, and I wanted to mention it for all your fellow mobile-device owners who could benefit from such a thing. Bloglines in general is what's called a "news reader" or "feed reader," basically an online application that can accept RSS and Atom feeds and then deliver it back to you in a way so that it's easy to keep up with them all. And Bloglines in particular is really great, because they offer a free mobile version as well that works just flawlessly, and even detects if you're browsing from a mobile device and sends the mobile version automatically, without you having to remember a special URL; and if it wasn't for this mobile version, frankly, I wouldn't get to read web feeds at all, so that's been an extremely cool addition to my life in the last year. So now Bloglines gives you the option of having all your feeds hidden from the interface unless they currently have new items that are ready to be checked out; and boy, let me tell ya, when you're someone like me who actually subscribes to something like 2,500 feeds, and are forced to interact with them all through a teeny-tiny little cellphone screen, just this little feature alone can literally cut hours out of checking your feeds for the latest news. And did I mention that it's all free? Free, free, free!

--Okay, goddamnit - I finally joined Friendster. Are you people fucking happy now? And I swear, I've had so many readers now beg me to join Friendster, you all better start linking me to your networks, or else I'm going to track you all down and start kicking all your asses, one "Buffy"-watching asshole at a time. You've been warned!