I am coming to Santa Fe on March 31st. I will not be painting the town red, because it is already excessively red. Perhaps I will paint it silver.

Wow, I must not have been thinking about much for the last two months.

Today, someone came to the DVD recording room and told us that a truck had arrived at bay five and they wanted to know if we could help them unload. I went down there and found three-fourths of the men who work here walking onto the truck and lifting bright orange shelf sections, each one ten feet long, then placing them in a pile inside the storage room. I lifted a few myself until the group decided to form a line to pass the shelves down. Two of the men took it upon themselves to break from the line to do the piling, and every time we got one of the parts to them we had to wait as they set it down, three of us still holding the next piece of frigid metal in our rapidly reddening palms. There were probably sixty of these shelf parts. I don't know what QAI is plainning to store on them, but at this place, for all I know it could be in preparation for the predicted surge of warrant applications to the secret FISA courts. Guys, this is such a weird office, you have no idea.

When the orange shelf parts were done, we moved on to the eight massive bookend-like shelf holders, five feet tall and crossed with support bars. Each of them were so heavy and large that they took two men to carry, and we had to lift the next one progressively higher as they piled up, eventually to shoulder level. These parts were unloaded rather quickly, after which we all stood around and watched as two guys, one the son of the company owner and the other who looked like he came with the truck (work gloves, checkered white and black flannel jacket) moved yet more orange ten-foot shelf parts off of the truck and into the storage room. We were all wearing business clothes: dress pants, button-down shirts, a few ties. We took no precautions against injury; were we to keep this up, eighty percent of us would probably be taken out within a month. I wonder if I was the only one who felt absurd imagining the job of construction workers and moving men, thinking of the cheesy, metal guitar-filled music they listen to, the kind of food they eat, the way they probably interact with each other, the way they see the world. My arm muscles felt slightly sore, like after going to the gym, and my back ever so slightly strained. I could imagine the effects of time and repetition, causing the upper body muscles to grow taut, and eventually causing the back to go out. I imagined how, the next day I came in to a job like that, I would have my gloves, and shortly thereafter, upgrade to work gloves as I noticed tears in the leather of my more bougie ones. Maybe I'd even get a flannel jacket myself after awhile, though not black and white checks; and work boots and jeans.

When I came back inside, I went to the lunch room and couldn't help but classify the workers by age and strength. I, a pack a day smoker who works out maybe once a week, felt myself having scorn for the weak people I saw all around me, the results of sedentary work and automobile travel. I sat back and watched my psychology as it took masculine pride in a job well done, felt a love and attachement to the "foreman" son of the owner as he walked into the breakroom, wondered what the 'oomen thought.

And now I go to buy a pack of Camels and then return to my office chair and newspaper, perfectly happy to be doing so.

The Washington Post's top story continues to be the existence of an incredibly cute baby panda in the National Zoo. This time, it is on the front page. I have been unable to find the picture online, but trust me, it is very cute. Awww.

I have "Jeff's iPod" (those words just look so wrong together) back in my pocket, where it belongs, so we can make the switch anytime you want, Scott. It's waiting for you with all its Fresh-Seam, Untroubled-Hardrive glory. Also, if you're reading this, Scott, why don't you sign in to your old blog and post something? Even just random keyboard strokes, or part of a Hypinion thread. Your fans are patient, but throw us a bone, here.

Today, one of my coworkers, a puzzling and nauseating rube named Billy, turned to the supervisor and said, "Okay, I want to test your acting ability. I'll give you an emotion and you try to--"

"What are you talking about?"

I turned to Billy and explained this normal human reaction, as I so often have to do. I chose to explain the simplest of the many reasons what he had just said was absurd. "It's considered polite to ask permission before making a request like that."

The other reasons for the absurdity are that even if he had posed this "test" as a request, it would be inexplicable, since he had given no introduction; that, as soon became clear, he was seriously looking for us to portray deep emotions as accurately as possible, which would erode the defensive wall between public self and work self; that his uninvited request, without reason or warning, disrupted whatever each of us had been doing; and that Billy is himself absurd.

He is the newest worker in the office, and ever since he came, there has been a noticable increase in the already present tension caused by cabin fever and bizarre activity. He is both a childlike simpleton and an extrovert, which leads him to break into every conversation in the most painfully awkward and uninformed manner possible, while at the same time being entirly unaware of why people don't like it when he does this. Example: two people were talking about politics yesterday, and how they think there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats (a harmful illusion which originated with the rhetoric of Ralph Nader and the Green Party, and from there made its way into the discourse of ignorant people everywhere). Cindy Sheehan came up, favorably as this is, thank god, at least a room full of Bush haters; Seun (yes, S-E-U-N "shawn", a black guy from New York and the smartest of my coworkers) asked if Bush ever talked to her, and Billy nitpicked that he had already met with her, along with other mothers who had lost children. "Come on," Seun called out, "they were prepped! They were probably telling them what they could ask for weeks!" This was met with astonishment. "I'm telling you, they were prepped, just like everyone else he talks to." Billy took this opportunity to steer the discussion toward whether he himself would be allowed to express his thoughts to Bush, asserting that surely he would be able to. He could just walk up to him and tell him how mad he was, and nothing would happen to him since we have free speech.

If this is hard to follow, it's because I'm finding it hard to recreate the situation. It was so absurd. Maybe you get some idea of it.

Another example of Billy's eerie annoyingness: three weeks ago, I was walking back to the office after buying cigarettes when a car drove by me and honked its horn. After I got back to the parking lot, I was standing on the sidewalk smoking when Billy walked up to me and said, "You didn't even jump!"

Another example: today he held up a sheet of paper and asked us each in turn, "do you think you could solve this?" I squinted to see what was on the paper. It was a maze. Billy had just created it and he wanted one of us to try it. He gave it to Matt (who has a highschool mentality and acts as though he's in a perpetual Will Farrell movie), and then told him, "and don't try starting from the finish, either. Start from the start."

Another example: At any given time, Billy is liable to look up from whatever he's reading and ask me (me specifically, because the room has decided that I'm a genius; no, really, they have said so many times and without irony, it's really embarrassing) to explain a concept, define a word, give a history, provide a fact. The questions are usually phrased in a manner so unclear that I can't tell exactly what he's asking.

"Can we see other galaxies?"

"What's so bad about marijuanna that they've made it illegal?"

"Is it better to buy a house and fix it up and then sell it, or to build a house and sell it?"

Another example: Billy has mainly read entertainment magazines since he's come, although recently he's started reading novels. I think he has a gay friend, who has been recommending stuff he can read to figure out what it means to be homosexual, because two of them were written with a gay narrator and, when asked, he said a friend had recommended them. I asked him what one of them was about, and he said, looking defensive and weary, "well, it's not necessarily work safe."

"What do you mean?"

"You have to be a . . . you have to have liberal views not to think it's offensive. It's about a gay kid."

I wish I were making all this stuff up, I really do. I don't think I could invent Billy if I tried.

I have finally set up a chair in front of Elliott. For those who don’t know, Elliott is a six-year-old blue iMac, which Anne gave to me after she got a Power Book. The placement of the chair was harder than it sounds. I have a rather sizeable room, at least comparatively--it’s bigger than any dorm room I’ve seen, anyway--but I’ve somehow managed to nearly fill it with stuff. The bed is rather meager, just a twin bed, and the only two areas that have to remain furniture-free are the closet and the door. The remaining sections of wall are covered by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, both of which are overflowing with books. I haven’t read most of the books, and I’ve read even fewer of the books in the large box underneath my school-style desk. I’ve placed this desk behind what used to be the family’s kitchen table, until its ugliness and bulkiness caused my parents to put it in the basement. I took the table into my room when I got Elliott, so that he’d have somewhere to sit. Now tonight, as a result of a newfound desire to use Elliott for writing, I’ve placed one of the former kitchen chairs by the table. The head of my bed is right next to the smaller of the two bookshelves, and to the right of the bed is this window-schooldesk-table-chair setup. A few feet behind my chair, I have a dressing table which has been with my family since, well, since I was dressed on it as a baby. This leaves roughly three square feet of floorspace, and part of that is covered by notebooks, shoes, cords and such. I have all these things for two reasons. The first is that I am a compulsive buyer of books and CDs (which, like the books, have gone mostly unused since I got them), because they fill the hole. The second, and the reason that they’re all in my room, taking up living space, is that it is somehow more comfortable to have such restricted movement options. I suppose I have the opposite of claustrophobia, at least when it comes to my private rooms. The only time constricted spaces are a burden to me is when those spaces also contain other people. Then I begin to get antsy. That’s what it’s like at work, by the way: five people in an area only slightly larger than my room, along with eleven computers and desks along every part of the wall. What’s worse is that the people have gradually gotten more insistent about talking to me, even though I could never be real friends with any of them. When they aren’t talking to me, they’re talking to each other, which is slightly more comfortable and far more entertaining. They often discuss matters of some importance, only they’re all of average intelligence. It’s like watching people with severe cataracts compulsively running into each other in an art museum, talking about how beautiful they’ve heard the paintings are. As I write this, I'm slowly losing bloodflow to my feet, because the chair is rather high and the leaves of the kitchen table hang down rather low.

Scott White, I approve of you. I hereby affirm your existence and state my wish that it continues unchecked.

I am still in a state of disbelief that I woke up this morning and went to work. Not effectively--I know I am here, after all--but spiritually, I suppose. You know how I roll. I roll spiritual.

In four and a half hours, I've read only one and a half articles of WaPo. My coworkers appear more monsterous even than they usually do. Also, I really want to rise from this computer and go get some coffee, but my body is saying "no." I think it really means "yes."

The temp computers here sound like old lawnmower engines with sawdust in them. Also, I just heard a guy tell someone named Paul that he could just call his voicemail because "we're gonna jump into the Conference Room". I'm going to go check whether the Conference Room has been converted into a pool.

How many people has Bush called "a man of character and integrity"? Add one: Jerry Kilgore, who has been running for governor of Virginia almost exclusively on attack adds. Tangentially, to what kind of person does the word "character" mean "good repute"? To me, one would have to say "of good character" to have the meaning Bush intended to communicate.

Two Crocodiles on a Boat

Having finished the 36-month "3 Boxes" tapes, we are now recording "36-month Self Control". They are awesome. The setup is as follows: parent and child walk into a bland random standard-issue government room, decorated in early nineties style with ugly, rough carpet and light-toned wall with dark-toned paneling. The interviewer follows them in and tells the parent to sit down, take a load off and fill out these beurocratic forms. This is a government study, after all. What are the forms? I don't know. Maybe they're for declaring bankruptcy, or requesting to change their legal name to "Chuck(le)". Whatever. It seems to be a ploy to keep the parent occupied so as not to interrupt the awesome.

The interviewer then tells the child, "woo, chile, has I got a special toy for you! Why don't you jes' sit yoself down over yonder whiles I gets it out 'a this here shoe-bag." The child fidgets, or runs back to the parent, or sits down obediently, or whatever. This part is up to the child. Once the child is sitting, though, the same awesome thing happens each time: the interview pulls out the toy and says, "Look at my special toy! It's two crocodiles on a boat! Hot damn!"

Except for the "hot damn" part. That part is merely implied.

It's a small plastic boat on wheels with a blue crocodile steering and a green crocodile behind him. The interviewer pulls the green crocodile, which is attached to a string, and then the string pulls the crocodile back up onto the boat so it looks like it's climbing and then wheeeeeeeeeeeee! the boat jives its merry way across the room over to the child. "Now your turn!"

The children usually take a good minute to figure out the mechanics of the green crocodile, and how it has to be pulled back in the center like an arrow from a bow, and how the boat has to be on the ground to go anywhere, but then the boat jives on over to the interviewer. They trade the boat one more time, and then comes the self-control part. The interviewer says, "gee, I sure am glad you liked my toy, but hey guys, right now I have some work to finish up. Don't touch my toy until I'm done, okay?" The interviewer then places the two crocodiles on a boat inches from the child, and then sits down to fill out some more random beurocratic forms, perhaps filing taxes or sueing Philip Seymour Hoffman for indecent exposure. Anyway, it takes about three minutes to fill out these particular forms, and meanwhile the camera focuses on the child. Some immediately lean over and put the tips of their fingers to the two crocodiles on a boat. Some just pull the green crocodile and start 'er up. Some run over to their mother and stand under her dress. Some sit and wait patiently for a few minutes, then begin soundlessly crying at the immensity of the universe. That part is up to the child.

Once the interviewer is done applying for permisison to build a really big tree house, or teach English to turnips, or wear chaps without pants underneath them in polite company, the interviewer and the child end the clip happily by playing with the two crocodiles on a boat and eating ice cream and pizza and singing Belle and Sebastian.

Last night was covered in fog. It had seeped in from the breath of wolves on the outskirts of town while I wasn't looking, and now I had to go 45 on the highway. All the trees by the side of Arrundel Mills, their grisly forms lit up by the mall lights the only thing showing through the gray, made it look like the set of Macbeth. I could only see ten feet of white lines to know when the road curved. My energy was entirely focused on what was in front of me, a situation so rare that Yugoslavia declared last night a holiday and Nature sent a bulletin to the AP. Fog-driving music was Scary Monsters.

After I got home, I went for a cigarette walk in the fog. The cigarette walk, by the way, is a distinct entity. It is different from, say, the two-cigarette walk, which is halfway up Patapsco River Road, or the is-the-world-still-there walk, which has no defined limit but is generally at least to the train tracks at the end of Main Street. You there in Santa Fe, you can look it up on mapquest if it interests you for some reason. I live on Chapel View Dr in Ellicott City. Anyway, one of the neighbors has a light trained on a tall tree in their front yard, a decoration strangely out of place and bourgeois in this middle class suburb. It is a little like the "beams of light" memorial to the World Trade Center, only with a tree. I thought of light pollution. I thought of how, if there were no light, I wouldn't have been able to tell that there was fog, unless it fogged my glasses. Then I realized that didn't cut it, for obvious reasons. Perhaps I would know if I stood in it long enough that it began to condense on my hair and clothing. Perhaps I would never know.

I went back inside, still not to sleep. There was still so much Bob Dylan to get onto iTunes. So very much Bob Dylan. By the time of the next cigarette, it was 7 a.m. and the fog had returned to the steam vents of The Block in Baltimore, or it was recaptured by the UFO from which it had escaped, or perhaps the light of the sun had evaporated the excess water in the lower atmosphere. Take your pick.

The disorientation of watching babies for eight hours a day has dissipated over the last four weeks as the actions involved in the job become increasingly habitual. Roughly every fifteen minutes I briefly have to pay attention to the VCR and the DVD recorder as a clip ends. Without looking up from my book, I push the stop button on the recorder and then the VCR, rewind the tape, remove it put it into its case, take the next tape out of its case, insert it into the VCR, briefly look up to preview the tape to make sure it's at the beginning, push record, push play . . . and then look down again and lose all touch with my surroundings. The disconnect between abstract analysis of human thought and the monkey work of this (admittedly fairly exotic) job could not be more complete. Right now I am reading After Virtue, given to me by Tha Unstoppable J-Nutz. I lose my physical form and stroll through mental space, pausing to take a closer look at a portrait of Kierkegaard and the deep neon of his literary genius, turning toward a portrait of Kant, who is colorless and magnificent, then briefly standing in awe at the feet of the statue of Cultural Structure, which is grimy and rusted but whose head soars in the clouds. Now, even when I do come back to my surroundings when the other workers talk to me (and one in particular is fully convinced that talking makes the time go by faster, whereas it most certainly does not), I am still caught up in abstract analysis. Every statement and gesture and inclination coming from others gets filtered into categories, associations, lines of thought. There are no particulars here. All is general.

It is rainy out there, and also cold and wet, and so cloudy that if the sky were always this way, only educated people would know of the existence of the sun. Gorgeous.

Kirillov, from Demons:

There are seconds, they come only five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. It is nothing earthly; not that it's heavenly, but man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must change physically or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true. God, when he was creating the world, said at the end of each day of creation: 'Yes, this is true, this is good.' This . . . this is not tenderheartedness, but simply joy. You don't forgive anything, because there's no longer anything to forgive. You don't really love--oh, what is here is higher than love! What's most frightening is that it's so terribly clear, and there's such joy. If it were longer than five seconds--the soul couldn't endure it and would vanish. In those five seconds I live my life through, and for them I would give my whole life, because it's worth it. To endure ten seconds one would have to change physically.

From the ice age to the dole age, there is but one concern. I have just discovered: I have to remove the tinting from my car windows before I can get it registered. Damn.

Flagg is kvetching like he was born to whine. He goes from pressing his nose against the glass door and staring as if God Himself were descending from heaven into my back yard, to looking back at me imploringly with all the passion of a mother pleading for the life of her child, to calling out with a voice like that of a man who is dying of thirst, to rushing over to my chair and jumping on the back and pawing at my face and pointing at the door and saying, "let me out, let me out, let me out. Bee-yitch." He kvetches like he got a doctorate in the subject. Little user. Why couldn't he be more like his brother Mulder, Best Cat in World?

I'm almost certainly asking the wrong people, but has anyone who reads this seen the show Six Feet Under? And if so, do you happen to agree that it's an excellent drama, but that dramas make for bad television? By the way, if you read this, please comment "yes" or "no", just so I can tell for sure. It's important, goddamit.

For anyone who cares, the All Music Guide review of Bright Eyes' two 2005 albums is the first honest assesment of his carreer that I've seen. He's been getting a free ride so far: immediately placed on NPR's "All Songs Considered" list of best songs of 2005, glorified by critics both indie and mainstream, and eaten up by unthinking indie rock fans (Febbie Steve, Josh Kazmin, that chick Elise from Barnes and Noble who Scott met). And he isn't even . . . talented. It's a long review, and I give you permission to scan it or, hell, not read it; but one that made me feel deeply pleased at finally seeing an independent and intelligent reviewer say that it's reasonable to disdain the dude. Ah, nothing like a good hatchet job of someone I sense I don't like.

Rather than simply say he's no Dylan or Springsteen, the review says why: ". . . Oberst is as precious as Paul Simon, but without any sense of rhyme or meter or gift for imagery, puking out lines filled with cheap metaphors and clumsy words that don't scan." Ah, yes, lyrical vomit. In this instance, I think, it was the right choice to go with the puking image rather than fall back on the tired diarrhea metaphor. My favorite line, for its disdainful implication and astute cultural criticism: "He's leapfrogged over Chris Carrabba in Dashboard Confessional to be the figurehead for how certain strands of modern rock is judged solely on whether it's a personal emotional expression or not, never taking into account such niceties as craft, in either music or lyrics, or in the sheer impact of the music." Truth! Just look at all that truth. Craft is exactly what Bright Eyes lacks, and it would be ok if he were at least intelligent, but he isn't. The two star ratings might be excessively low, but then again, they might not. Would anyone be hearing these albums if Oberst weren't a master of marketing?