News You Can Bruise for 2001 January 23 (entry 0)

Tue Jan 23 2001 21:59: Forgive my silence, but exhaustion and the revelation of a crippling architectural problem in Helm (easy but time-consuming to fix) have conspired to deprive you, the people who read this crap, of your rightful due (ie., the aforementioned crap). I will therefore take a few moments to bring you up to speed on one of the pressing issues of our time (my time): the tape I sent to Jake last week.

Jake loves the tape, while simultaneously feeling that it is "rife with personal attacks on [his] character". On the face of it, this is a perfectly reasonable position for him to take. One of my most pronounced character flaws is the tendency to see as good clean fun what the person on the receiving end of the good clean fun sees as vitriolic assaults on his or her character. However, let it be known that the only missives on that tape which were intended to rile his Jakeness were My Complaint About Jacob P. Berendes and Rain of Rain (a.k.a. Disposable Napkin Rag). My Complaint... was generated using Dada Engine-esque software and was just done to be goofy, so the only track actually intended to mock Jake (again, good clean fun) was Rain of Rain.

Nonetheless, a track with a name like Jake's Betrayal shows, in retrospect, that I did occasionally cross some line or another. In that particular case, I actually intended the song to boost Jake's street cred by presenting such a scenario as unthinkable, but the damage is done, as it is by songs that are personal attacks on myself (Mud and Alien Nature Documentary), but which have Jake applicability. I could bow out using the cop-out "C'mon, can't you take a joke?" technique, but Jake has shown himself quite capable of taking a joke, and still I feel the need to justify myself. Indeed, now that my apparant maliciousness has been revealed, I feel a bit like the confused speaker in Kris' roast skit, who, no matter how vicious he gets, never manages to elicit anything from his audience but appreciative laughter.

Anyway.

One of my longstanding minor obsessions has been advanced significantly this day. In particular, a question I asked over a year ago has been answered, but the method by which it was answered opened up more questions (as is always the case with obsessions). I'd go into more detail, but I promised Celeste I'd go to sleep at 10, and the old clock on the wall is rapidly approaching such a state. Tomorrow [and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps at its petty pace toward the last syllable of recorded time -ed.].