Hello, Lovine.com

I got you, babe.

There is this heaviness in my heart that I can't reconcile, and I'm resigned to the fact that the answers may forever elude me. Each day, I think about you, each morning that I wake up, each night before I succumb to slumber. The longest two months of my life, and how can I say that it'll ever be better when I know that our catching up will be at the end of our lives?

I miss you, Alexis. I hope you and Nika are finally home.

My favorite picture from the weekend, up in Carmel, CA.

I miss writing with careless abandon, like the pseudo stream of thoughts that I'd occasionally fart. I'm not sure if the obvious transition away from verbal diarrhea towards more half-assed philosophies of the moment with the requisite photo op is doing me any good. I kind of like the cleaner slate that goes along with the layout, but there is something missing from where I come from as compared to years past. Granted I hardly sit down and think about what I want to write anymore, but I am also starting to think that the responsibilities and stress of living in this linear world is starting to take me away from the corners of my mind where my curious cat is fed.

This is, my empty space. All who wander are not lost, and not all that are lost want to be found.

Debating if I should get a GPS photo tagger. I also just installed Picasa 3.5, and it's parsing through 171 gigs of data, a total of 116,667 images for faces of friends and random fools. Pretty damn cool. Pretty soon we'll find out who has the most pictures! And I have a feeling it'll be Ate Pat. :)

I'm not complaining that my week went by quickly - Fridays are always the start of something fun. :)

Off to San Francisco to see the Flaming Lips!!

I just saw a spectacular crash on Laurel Canyon and Sherman Way a few minutes ago, on my way back to the office from the dealer. I was a few cars behind the line turning left, when all the traffic lights at the intersection disappeared. So everyone was doing the stop and go routine, when all of a sudden the lights turned back on to indicate east-west was red, and north-south was go. So cars start obeying the rules like they should, except for the two cards beside me that for some reason start to inch closer towards the center of the intersection, as if to assert their intentions of passing the stop. The white pickup truck beside me stopped, but the idiot van beside him pushed on forward, just as a silver SUV made its way through the intersection. Did the van stop? No, it rolled so slowly, so surely, and clipped the rear end of the SUV. And then it was slow motion as the car started turning diagonally, yet still going straight across the slick pavement, making a complete 180, jumping the opposite median divider on the other side of the intersection, popping his tire, and crashing into two unsuspecting cars on the opposite lane while his SUV sat on the median divider facing the wrong direction.

It was a bit surreal yet lucid, how it happens in slow motion and the tragic grace of watching it all unfold. I make my left when my light turned green, and stopped to check on the guy. He was still sitting in the car in utter disbelief, mutter "WTF!!!" and confirmed with me that the guy totally ran through the red light. I felt bad cos he kinda reminded me of my brother-in-law Fil's brother (who is incidentally my favorite, and not because he has a cockroach tattooed on his chest).

Stay safe on the roads, everyone. You might be careful behind the wheel, but others are not. And if shit happens, just hope it don't land in 'yo pants.

A little time-lapse video I took this weekend while camping at Big Sur. First things first, I need to get a timer-remote. I sat on my ass for an hour, taking pictures every ten seconds to come up with a spotty rendering. I can't say it does any justice to the real thing, not that having equipment to automate pressing a button would make any difference - I just like complaining a lot. And I just slapped on a similarly shoddy track I made a few years ago, since the piracy police at YouTube flagged the original Led Zep song I wanted on it. :P

Now I'm also in the process of trying to determine if I should revive my internal photo gallery or re-new my Flickr subscription. I can't wait to upload the photos from this trip, but it's a well known fact that there's an very good chance they'll never make it online if I don't get my act together. Soon. Ah, life.

I always feel like I want to run away.  From something.  Anything.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations.  In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

- Bill Safire

My favorite shot from this weekend's Red Bull Soapbox race in downtown Los Angeles. :)

    /\___/\
   /       \
  |  #    # |
  \     @   |
   \   _|_ /
   /       \______
  / _______ ___   \
  |_____   \   \__/
   |    \__/
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   |       |
   /        \
  /   ____   \
  |  /    \  |
  | |      | |
 /  |      |  \
 \__/      \__/

Here's a truncated ASCII long cat. He will keep you company this Friday, until we all make it through to Caturday, OK? :)

I miss you, and I love you Alexis.

I try so hard to make this pain concrete, but it eludes me. Perhaps akin to the same phantom pain that amputees experience. A remedy, they found, was a mirror placed strategically against the undamaged symmetrical part of the body that tricks the mind into thinking that you are complete. When it is, in fact just a mirror-image placebo. And that's good enough to temporarily thwart the pain of something that is not there. A pain of something that is vivid in your memory, that you want so badly to wake up from.

I wish I could look into a mirror and quantify the completeness of my life, but everyday is a struggle to find that empty spot that needs to be filled. The day is full of distractions, full of chatter with no meaning. A lot of times you succeed in playing through the motions that the 'real' world prescribes you, the routine that allows you to function outside of your mind. Disconnect me from the bullshit. What makes the pain worse is not just the past; the real pain lies in imagining a world without you in it. I miss you, and I love you, Alexis and Nika.

Climbing out of a parking lot is a lot harder than it looks. Don't believe the obvious!

I don't mean to be a jackass, but the next time someone shows up to a small gig using a dSLR and kit lens, taking an obnoxious number of pictures using the pop-up flash... I will ask how their pictures went, and gush about how they must be so awesome!

Seriously. There's a reason why flash photography is not allowed in venues. Not to blind the band, but to prevent people from taking crap pictures. Remember, on-board flash = crap! And if you can obviously see on the playback screen that your pictures look like crap, taking another one (and 40 more thereafter) using the same technique must probably give you better photographs. What's that saying about teaching the pig to fly? Something about annoying the pig.

Time to get some pho and clear out my head.

/end rant.