This is my Harvey Pekar moment.

Does anyone else read the Missed Connections on Craigs list? For the last year or two, some one has been pining over an ex that has almost the exact same name as one of my exes. They're from the same area as me. Every time I read it I cringe at how much it looks like me posting for her.

Then there's this other guy who apparently has an ex with the same initials, from the same area, and he's thinking the same thing too! He thinks it's his ex posting missed connections for herself. So he'll post angry replies, trying to save face.

This stopped for about six months, then just today I see another missed connection for my ex's doppelganger. I don't believe in numerology or astrology. Or even astronomy for that matter. But I do think it's weird how many dudes from my city are pining over exes with the same name and last initial.

It's DM Magic.

I've been realizing more and more how much I don't enjoy drinking. Every time, the come down is such a huge downer. It's purely a chemical depression. I think I'm going to start drinking coffee at parties. I'm more talkative when awake anyway.

I've had a corpse of a spider on my window sill for the last two years. I wanted to see it biodegrade. The chitin in it's exoskeleton is really all that's left. How long does it take a finger nail to decompose? I suppose it's time to toss my friend out.

I saw a video about twitter that made me think of all the empty communication going on through social networks. But then I thought what else is there? It didn't replace friendship or seeing people in the flesh. What is there to talk about in a status update? The original literary style of stream-of-conscious was just a respect for the little thoughts and associations floating through our head at any given moment. Just a departure from dramatic story telling. When we're not telling stories, that's what we're doing.

My jaw is popping and locking like Shabadoo.

Do you ever just wonder why sometimes events happen so easily?

The opposite of that is that things happen with great difficulty, a lot of input for little to no output. The last few years, I've been mystified by how things just won't happen. The same odds throughout life, and invisible forces just seem to agree with you one year and don't another. Then one day you wake up and realize you've got a stack of chips again. Just enough to give you a little thrill at what might come next.

Like market fluctuations, one year of a bear market followed by four years of a bull. A sharp downswing in life and it's called a buyers market. This is what we do in the face of disappointment and loss, invest our optimism in new ventures and hope for a return. A bear hibernates in the winter and dreams of the spring. It wakes up a bull instead.

Interesting fact, Ted Turner owns most of the buffalo in North America. He's trying to convince ranchers to raise herds of their own. Buffalo do quite well in a cold North American winter. Their hump acts as a snow plow while they lower their head and graze the flat grasses below.

Unlike the bear to bull, I'm always surprised to not wake up something different when life is going my way. Hopes are high but enjoyably so.

I'm playing devil's advocate for gratuitous sex and violence in movies (TV too to some extent though it's harder to defend). They're worried that it'll warp kids, so I'm taking the stance on those disturbing images being culturally beneficial. The journey I've undertaken to understand that argument has been intense.

First off, there is no benefit to it. It's entertainment. If there's no causal negatives, there's no positives.

But there are some personal benefits. Art wouldn't exist otherwise. So where do I go from there...

Altogether, the best I can come up with is that these images force us to debate if we are to understand. We can study, debate, discuss, argue, critique. It gets us talking. One of the most disturbing books ever written, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, called upon the defense of free speech. Burroughs was almost jailed for ideas alone. They were forced to defend his disturbing images. What they came up with was that the offending content called for a new definition of the sexual psychopath. Mental illness, drug addiction and sexual deviancy were all lumped together in under a few titles which halted a deeper understanding of the conditions they condemned. New definitions and studies were required. That's a good enough reason for anything to be allowed to be exposed to the general public.

But then I think about the kids. I was exposed to massive amounts of violence from an early age. Didn't hurt me any. I'm still a big baby when it comes to seeing people fall of skate boards and hurt themselves. Not to mention evil comes from within -- just read Lord of the Flies.

A friend of mine sent me a link to some blogs for the new Langley scene kids. I was reading one graphic entry by a girl who wrote about being a whore (her words). She said she fucked some guy, had sex with him too, crawled all over him, and finally tonight after getting wasted she kissed him -- because she had inhibitions about kissing and needed booze. That is how a whore talks, oddly enough. Don't kiss the johns.

Always drunk, always talking about being drunk, every entry had to involve boys and sexual tension. But the thing that really struck me was that this from an 18 year old girl. Did TV make her grow up too fast? Probably not. Why would a kid rush to cast off their innocence so quickly. I just can't help but think that there's still time to be young and not give a fuck about these things. Once you've bought in you can't go back.

It just seems sad to go from being an innocent little kid to an all out adult without any idea of what you take on as an adult. You spend most of your life dealing with those problems. It seriously seems worth it to steal a few extra years of innocence if possible. It's so under-valued.

I've been having the weirdest dreams.

I had a dream my Dad was going in for a heart transplant in two days. But he really wanted to keep working and pushing himself. He couldn't rest two days, and was most likely going to die because of this. So me and my brother decided to beat him up and keep him locked up inside the house. We'd force him to wait for that new heart.

I keep having dreams about unstable structures, like crumbling bridges in between mountains. Driving my car over them and trying to get to the other side before it falls. Or going to visit some one in a building, built upon a building, built upon an above ground parking garage (I always think they're going to collapse). And that's my new dorm room, where I need to check my email.

Carl Jung could interpret those messages from the universal subconscious. He'd say they're just me wanting to play dungeons and dragons.

My livejournal is all fucked up. It looks like I'm posting to an angelfire forum from 1995. Everything is weird looking on my screen, in other words.

University is fun. I like being a student. I can't believe how fast the work load picks up. Maybe it's because I have a staggered semester with another school, so I'm just coming into finals in one school and just starting another. I appreciate how they arranged that.

I'm in one fluff class, one medium class, and one class that'll let you hang yourself in between classes if you step out of line. The one that'll kill your ass is my favourite, at least for now. If I didn't have two night school classes on top of this I'd be cruising.

One random factiod from each of my classes:

- Estrogen is the primary hormone in a woman's 28 day cycle until the 15th day, when it becomes Progesterone.

- Y=A(1/2)^t/h is the formula to calculate the half life of a radioactive isotope.

- Crows have colours that are only reflected in the ultraviolet spectrum, crows know this but we don't.

- In essay writing, a citation of your source doesn't mean you're at liberty to use the same words, phrases or structure. That's still plagarism.

- The first computer took up 1800 square feet, ran on vaccuum tubes and broke down every seven minutes.

This is going to be a landmark year for me. I can't drink my way through the holidays like I have for the last half of my 20's. I've lost my tolerance for booze. I don't get drunk anymore, I get a throbbing head ache and a hangover first. So what the fuck am I going to do when I have to talk about myself to my family.

The booze made it really easy to be enthusiastic about what I was doing. I'd pick something impressive and do a little strutting around about it. I was a camera man, or I was an indie filmmaker, or I was whatever. Now I don't have anything to wank myself over. I'm a student. I do school. I'm not naturally gifted in the area I picked either. I picked it out of respect and interest, not because I was already the best.

Maybe I should just be honest with them. Though I've made some good choices to go for things I want and can earn my way towards, I'm depressed. It's not uncommon for me to go an entire day without talking to anyone. It's lonely. Going this way might be nothing but loneliness. I picked it; not many people pick their path, let alone pick one that takes sacrifice of things you want right now for things you want later in life. There isn't much scenery now, but I'm sure this is the right road.

I haven't posted in a long time. I realized after logging in that I'm really bummed I killed my "zanity" blog. I killed it out of spite. It was part of my heritage. Oh well.

Currently I'm in bio 12, physics 11 and math 12. I just failed a math test. It was the first test I've ever failed. I failed because I have too many responsibilities and they're starting to spill over into others. I just ran out of time and energy to do better. Should be piss easy because it's high school but math 12 is tough. I work full time too, so these courses are stacked on top of a full schedule. I don't have a lot of brain power by the time I get to class. And by the time I get home, it's not brain juice anymore but brain spittle. I flick spittle at the homework.

I put in my two weeks at a veterinary lab I work at. It was a brutal choice and I'm going to miss that job. But it'll be gone in four or five months anyways, so I'm not exactly missing out on a future career. Just stability. But it's my chance to actually do good with my courses.

This has been a plentiful year, to the point where I can't wait to close it. Kinda feels like the last few years have really changed me and this is where it's finally solidified. It's finally a done deal. I'm really this guy, he's going in this direction, and if I change it I'm still this guy. There are no other guys. I only have to stay the course.

New Amazing Award Winning Green-Energy Lamp doesn't exist

This article is great. First off, I totally bought it when I first read about this lamp. Being a layman in science, I didn't even question it. It's a light that you flip upside down, and gravity pulls a weight down to the floor charging the lamp and lighting the LEDs. Apparently, even the designer hasn't made one. It doesn't exist. It's so easy to get sucked in.

I had a weird dream that there was an evil artifact inside a pouch hanging in my closet. It looked like a piece of playdoh on Mr. Potatohead legs. I was mocking it because some one told me how evil it was. I wanted to see the full extent of it's evil. So the next day it comes back wearing the skin of some small animal's head turned inside out, with huge white eyes bugging out. I screamed like a cartoon.

Then I had a dream there was a million David Cross' walking down the street. People shaved their heads and put on black glasses, and marched for him. I think that dream needs to be born into the real world.

Working full time is a haul. You get home and you're too tired to do anything but sprawl out on the couch. I hit the gym tonight to try and start building up the energy reservoirs again.

It's mostly ladies at the job. Apparently that's how most vet labs are, home to the ladies of science. They're trying to talk me into going back to school to get my med tech. A little muslim woman almost has me sold on the idea.

Might be donning my director's hat again, for the first time in two years. Links to come if that happens.

The band! It's... dead. I just got word yesterday through an email. I still don't know exactly whats going on, but at this point that's my favourite place to be -- in the dark.

A little bit of a loss to me, though I only joined because I thought one of the singers was cute. But in terms of talent broken up, this is a goddamn shame. Those girls were hilarious and sounded so good together. Sounds like in-band dating took it's toll on the band. After a while everything hinged on that relationship. Band aside, I'd rather just see everyone happy and friendly with each other. Though I'll miss those jams. I hope there'll be a reunion jam when everyone has cooled off and is friendly again.

I talked to a cinematographer about the writer's strike. He was talking about how five month shows are the best to get into, because nine month ones are like flushing a year of your life away. It just reaffirmed what I've been struggling with all along, I don't really want to work in the film industry. All the fun stuff is in the free projects with my friends anyways. It's different when it's one of our babies, but I've got some new priorities.

Lately I've been really restless and wanting a new career direction. The idea of doing another McJob just makes me want to go headlong into something better. It's been a week of trying on various career hats just to see if I can picture myself being a police man, fire man, mechanic, or anything I've never really thought about before. I'd call it settling if I stopped doing anything else, but I've got plans.

This Christmas I drank like a centurion. Christmas eve and Christmas day are blurs. It was fun aside for feeling like crap garbage death on boxing day.

My four year old cousin talked me into playing Star Wars with him. Not a video game. He'd pretend to be R2D2 and would laser me, and I'd die. His R2D2 was really good. Then we were onto Level 2; I was supposed to throw a bomb at him then he'd die. Then he was C3PO and would run around me.

I'm looking forward to getting back into the big people world. I'm gonna end up working full time soon. It's weird but I'm looking forward to it. Maybe it's because I really want that xbox 360.

Jammin' with the High Kicks tomorrow. The High Kicks blind sided me at a party, charmed me with their talk of staying real, and then gave me the immense honor of asking me to come jam. I want to do good with this. So I'm learning Joey by Concrete Blonde. I'm gonna have to get over my singing voice, which breaks in amusing prepubescent ways. But there may come a day where I need to sing. Possibly to win a contest. Possibly for all the chips in the pot.

One time I was in a guitar lesson, and the strap broke on my guitar. It was on my knee but not held up by anything, so it came like an axe right across my face. More than the pain of having guitar tuning pegs and strings clawed across my face, I was embarrassed my guitar teacher saw the whole thing. He was really mellow about it.

This other time during a lesson I was fixing my sock or something, and he kept going "oop." Like three times, "oop." Then I looked up and my guitar was spearing his knee. And that was his only defense. "Oop."

He tried to get me to solo once but I choked. I didn't know where solos came from. So he said, "use these four notes." So I soloed over four notes. Then he was like, "now add these two." Then he jumped it up another two. Next thing you know, I'm rocking the worst solo known to man. I was proud.

And one time I was getting out of the car to go to a lesson, and closed the car door on my finger. It hurt immensely. I wasn't looking so I just feel this pain, then I'm leaping across the drive-way. So for the lesson he taught me how to keep time while playing guitar, tapping a pen on the back of my guitar.

The most metal gift of all. NOTHING.

I was really enjoying The Game with Michael Douglas. Then the fucker freezes. It's 3 AM. I'm Whoopi Goldberg. Deep in the dark with the art.

It's the shopping season. This year I want to do something different, but I'm flat out of ideas and money. Making presents always seems like a good idea until it looks like crap and you realize they didn't even take it home with them. Fuckers.

So what's a bum like me to do. I have two weeks to show people I care in a free and sentimental fashion. I could set up my camera, pick out a song that reminds me of that person, and dance to it. Then each dance will be how that person makes me feel.

Or I could do slam poetry for each person. STOP.

I was thinking I'd bring in a ringer to help me make something. I only have one artist friend unstuck up enough to actually help some one else. Maybe I should wait and see if that's true first.

Free gifts.

I forgot how amazing the X-Files were.

I now know how to file for arbitration against a landlord. So if you ever have any problems renting, ol B-money knows exactly where to stand in line for three hours waiting to get a piece of paper filed. I had time to go to the IHOP and eat a stack of pancakes. No lie.

Harley's ashes are back at home in an urn with an oily pearl finish. We got a certificate of cremation -- Nov 9, 2007. If you've never seen ashes before, they look like white, shard filled sand. I was expecting campfire ashes I guess.

They attached a little story about the rainbow bridge. That's what they stick in with the dead dog package so you feel better. Oh, it's online. The Rainbow Bridge.

I had a really glib review written up of it but it felt like I was treading on some sacred ground. I'm all up for knocking the rainbow bridge, but I want to sort of put this all away neatly and let it remain respectable. Adding the story was part of the human touch to that transaction.

I had a dream Harley was still alive but sick. I was talking with my Mom about how good it'll be to nurse her back to health so we can put her back into doggy school. She had a little back pack full of books and everything. Then suddenly she was outside on the road, edging too closely to the tires of a moving van.

I thought I lost my list of story ideas from the last year. It was awesome to find it again. There were a few ideas so nonsensical that I had to laugh at my own unbridled genius. One of my favourites is "a town that doesn't talk about their problems." I don't remember writing that or what exactly I had in mind, but most towns don't. Until some footloose kid comes and teaches everyone to dance, or some lady teaches the village to love chocolate, or it's Twin Peaks.

Your daughter's advances on my husband. Another site for you post secret bums.

It was a fucking sad morning. The doctor wasn't there and they didn't write down our appointment. We went for a lap around the block, got some coffee and shot the breeze. Harley ran for a little bit but got too tired, and dragged ass the rest of the way. In a weird way we needed to see her look sick and miserable so we wouldn't feel horrible about this. Now that she was off the antibiotics she was going to have more energy and be a little happier, though she was just as sick.

To be honest it was hard to have a moment. I was exhausted, stressed out, on the brink. So the conversation was light, mostly sympathy directed to Harley. She tried to sneak out the front door of the office whenever it'd open.

I made a last minute decision to go into the room to be with her while she got put down. She was pretty nervous. Randy scooped her up and put her on the table, which was good because everyone else tries to pick her up and she yelps. All these hands descend on her and keep her still. I go around to the front so she can look at me for some support.

They injected her. She panted for a bit, then calmed down a little. Then she made this face like she spotted something. Then it slumped onto the arm of the assistant, and she was gone. It took 30 seconds. We cried.

I didn't want her to be alone when she died. She was a great pet and deserved the people who were making the decisions to be there and see her off. They wanted to perform an autopsy to look for the cancerous tumor. If it was me alone, I probably would've said okay. But Randy didn't want it done. So I said no.

No dogs for another five years at least. I'm gonna miss her.

I showed up for work at 9:00 AM, though I didn't start till 1. So I went to the library to be a good writer and study up some stuff for a story. After a paragraph of notes I fell asleep face down in the book. I woke up almost two hours later to get breakfast with Jeremy.

It's been a weird week. The countdown to putting Harley down. I'm feeling pretty bad about it. I didn't want it to become something I had to worry about, but there was a date set and looming over her. She didn't really stand a chance with the cancer, even if she beat the kidney infection.

It's been a weird year. I'm a weird boy. I listen to Weird Al. And this is a weird world.

"It made me feel weird," - Matt.

Remember that cartoon the Family Dog?

I put in my two weeks at the video store.

I'm going to miss the casting sessions for Safety Glass. That movie is really going to kill it. There was something truly charming about seeing what every one brought to the roles. Each character was pretty quirky and messed up. It's sweet to see how a person applies their own baggage to a baggage laden character. It's like hearing a dozen covers of a song and seeing who does it the best.

Being in a busy stupor seems to keep my mind well greased. I don't get much done -- but happily. Though there's word of a lot of downtime to come with writer's guild strike. Maybe it's time to hack out the great Canadian novel.

This is a first. Since I've been working at the casting agency I've been able to hear the Canadian accent. It gets shot down pretty fast by Americans, them being facists and all. A cartoony caricature of the Canadian accent would compare itself to the mid-western Fargo accent. But since we've been watching the same TV shows all our lives our accent can usually only be detected in a few words.

Here's a quick list of things Canadians say differently from the US.

1) Bury. In the US it's BURR-EE, as in Burr I'm cold. In Canada it's Barry, as in sexy Barry White. Bury that dude next to Barry White.
2) About. In the US it's AB-OW-T. As in 'ow my ass.' In Canada it's Abou... the T falls off somewhere.
3) Oh yeah. This one comes out like a mid-western Wisconson kind of nasal drawl if said with a Canadian accent -- almost like 'no yaw.'
4) Against. Emphasis on the GAIN in Canada. Agenst. A-GAIN-st.
5) Been. America: I've bin chillin. Canada: I've bean chillin.
6) NASA. In the US it's NA-SAH. In Canada it's NAH-SAW.
7) Mazda. Same as NASA, Maz-dah in the US, Mazdaw in Canada.

So watch those heavy A's and E's, Canadian actors.

I want to learn that navy seal deep jungle operative sleeping technique where they fall into a coma for 20 minutes and get all the rest they need. Though nothing can wake you when you're in that state. So don't get caught, Joe.

If I'm not at a computer or standing up I'll fall asleep. Guess it's a sign that I've been shirking my restful sleep for too long. Me and Jeremy were editing a documentary that slid me down that slippery slope into being half comatose for the rest of the night. So I will pay handsomely for some one to teach me how to sleep properly for eight full hours.

Henry Rollins was a trip. It felt like I woke up and suddenly I was sitting with Leigh's family, watching Henry Rollins talk about horse anus. I was really stoked to see the man live. The amount of energy it must take to just stand there and talk intensely on any subject is baffling. He doesn't even stop to breathe.

Time to turn in my quests.