so yeah, we’re back. it was overall a pretty decent weekend, actually. friday night my dad picked gundam and myself up at south station in boston and we drove to my parents’ house. every time i go back to essex it all seems smaller than i remember, which is i suppose a function of living in brooklyn.

gundam met my parents and their dog (who is insane) and we all sat around having lemonade on the porch for a while, then read until we went to sleep. gundam’s only the second boy i’ve introduced to my parents, the first being adam, way back in the day. i think it all went pretty well.

saturday we slept in late, had toast and coffee, visited my grandparents and then headed over to gloucester to take a walk on the breakwater, which was really nice. that’s one of my favorite spots on the north shore and i hadn’t been in over two years.

on the way back we rented some movies and spent the evening watching them - slc punk which cracked me up because i couldn’t stop thinking of that actor’s character in hackers, and snatch. we also rented run lola run but ended up not watching it. not a big deal. i have a copy of it here and i’ve already seen it way too many times.

sunday morning we got up relatively early and packed up our stuff, then took the commuter rail into boston/cambridge so i could show gundam a little of the city. we spent a few hours bumming around harvard square, which i found sort of depressing. i spent so much time there when i was a scruffy high school kid, hanging out with the punks in the pit and whatnot, but now it’s turning into something else entirely - this really cool old german restaurant is now an abercrombie and fitch, a diner and a couple of other places have given way to a pacific sunwear, etc. there are police-sanctioned street performers playing classic rock in the pit now, so the punks don’t really want to hang out there which is, i suppose, the point. oh well. we still hit a couple of cool old places i used to go to and then headed back to south station and caught our train.

i’m listening to the downward spiral right now. i haven’t listened to it all the way through in years, and it’s a really weird experience. this was such a formative album for me in high school that i can’t listen to it without remembering that time. the first time i dyed my hair, the first nin shirt i bought, being the only kid in my honors classes who didn’t shop at j crew. i didn’t even have it on cd until i was maybe a senior - becky taped me a copy of hers that i lstened to in my car until it wore out. i remember listening to this on my walkman in the cafeteria during study nicki rodoloski, the only real goth i knew for a couple of years. that was only maybe four or five years ago but it seems impossibly far away. i don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

i know it’s not supposed to be cool to listen to nin anymore, since it’s too mainstream or whatever, but fuck it. i still like nin. pretty hate machine and the downward spiral were the soundtrack to some of the most turbulent, interesting, weird years of my life, and it was through nin that i started listening to the other stuff i listen to now. it’s good shit, regardless of how many other people listen to it.

anyway. i don’t know if i mentioned this before, so i will now: i’m going back to nyu in january. i’m actually starting to look forward to it, and i really wouldn’t mind finishing my degree. so yeah. hooray.

gundam and i are heading off to massachusetts today to get out of the city for a weekend and visit my parents and all that good stuff. we’ll be back sunday night.

i got a package in the mail yesterday from unamerican; this is good shit. i have a bunch of their pins on my bag now, and i got a couple of stickers also - ‘dsl is lsd backwards’ for gundam and ‘what would ozzy do?’ for matt. there’s a few t-shirts and mug i’ll probably wind up gettin gat some point - the ‘fuck decaf’ mug in particular appeals to me.

anyway it’s ass-early right now and i’m at gundam’s house - he’s getting ready for werk. he gets out early so we can take the four hour train ride to south station later this afternoon. i’m probably just going to hole up in a coffee shop or a bookstore or something until he gets out of work and read - i’m trying to finish the diamond age before i leave because the stupid, ugly edition i have is really heavy and i don’t want to carry it around all weekend. i’m maybe 4/5 of the way through it, so i figure with a couple of hours i might be able to finish it off. i’m really liking it, thanks to everyone who recommended it after i read cryptonomicon and snow crash.

anyway. so yeah. see you sunday night, probably, unless i steal my mother’s laptop for a while sometime this weekend. ta.

adventures in long island again over the long weekend. sunday night gundam and i went to see GASR/neuroticfish at downtime; hellraver comped us, so that was nice. it got pretty crowded between gasr and neuroticfish; we ran into spencer and snarf and a couple of other people, so that was cool. the show was pretty good - i’m not a huge neuroticfish fan, but i was entertained and they played the three songs of theirs i actually like. we were pretty tired, so we headed back to li after the show rather than hang around for the clubby portion of the evening.

monday we woke up late and went for breakfast/lunch at the diner. hooray for waffle fries. it was actually pretty nice out - not too humid or anything, so the walk back wasn’t bad at all. watched movies with matty, killah, and rob. a miniature labor day party. it was fun.

your task for today: what should i do with the coffee can pictured above? besides wearing it as a hat, i mean.

a couple of interesting dates this week. the 28th marked the two year anniversary of my move to new york, which completely slipped my mind. it’s amazing; it both seems like it can’t possibly have been two years already but at the same time it feels like it’s been forever.

the 30th was a different sort of anniversary - one month with gundam. well, one month officially. in reality it’s been rather longer than that. the first month of many, i hope.

hellraver and his girlfriend came over last night for movies and beer and music and all that good stuff. we watched predator and o brother where art thou. a very odd combination but both pretty cool flicks. the god damned music from the latter is i think permanently stuck in my head now, however.

today is going to be kind of a lazy day, which is nice. gundam’s here, we watched harold & maude and had bagels and whatnot. tomorrow we’re going out with hellraver and his gf again probably to see jay and silent bob strike back and then to the gasr/neuroticfish show at downtime. hooray for holiday weekends.

4:32 pm update: the esteemed killfile just alerted me to the presence of this little gem. too funny. i love it.