everyone likes universal experiences, don't they? we may have stumbled upon another one: have you ever taken a shower in continental europe without getting water on everything in the room? you haven't, have you, tell the truth . . .

not sure whether to train for a marathon or drink beer? why not do both.

when i get my hair cut, i just walk in and ask to get it cut, and i find that that transaction makes me feel fairly stupid: "what can we do for you?" "i'd like to get my hair cut." like they couldn't figure that out. it's true, i could be the bike messenger dropping off an emergency delivery of scissors, but then i'd probably have on some sunglasses or something.

so i walk in: "what can we do for you?" "i'd like a haircut. a woman, please." see, i pretend i am ordering off a menu, and it reads as follows.

Type of hair dresser
Old Man: no matter what you say, i will cut all that off, you hippie.

Gay Man: i have lots of gel, and i will try to make you look like the sex slave i dream of.

Woman: i will yell at someone in ukranian while not paying a damn bit of attention to cutting your hair.

and the final choice produces the best result every time. and i have some sort of instruction to give at the "may i help you?" moment.

so one time, when i was living in new orleans, i was reading war and peace, which became sort of a second job all in itself. i would come home from work and putter around for a while, and then go to the bar and try to get fifty pages or so done for the day. back then, i tended to read with a dictionary with me, to deal with words i didn't really know.

so i'm at the bar one day, and there's a joe lunchbox type sitting next to me--looks like a nice guy, probably a carpenter or something like that. he says, "hey, can i borrow your dictionary?" i say sure, and he grabs it and starts to--very clumsily--look something up. he says, "i just found out today that my wife is . . . bipolar. i don't know what that means, so i need to find out. you probably already know what it means, don't you?"

i have this nightmare vision where i wake up and everyone in the world is wearing a shirt that says Ithaca is Gorges.

while in cleveland last weekend, i saw that the paperback of douglas coupland's newest book had come out. unfortunately, i was inside a barnes and noble at the time. (and hearing wilco's new record playing softly and conservatively on the mu-zak system.) no problem, i said. no problem at all, i'll just go pick it up at my favorite independent bookstore. so i went to a place i like in cleveland. they didn't have it, but at least the girl working there seemed to know who douglas coupland was. no problem, i said. i'll wait till i'm back in new york. so when i got back, i went to labyrinth books, and not only did they not have it, but the dude there was puzzled. no problem, i said. so i went to the morningside bookshop. nothing. i told the woman there how badly i wanted to buy it from her. sorry, she said.

i sort of can't believe none of those places had it. i wonder if coupland is out of style, like maybe there is a late-gen-X backlash against the corrupt tastes of early-gen-X, or some other paranoid hipsteresque ultracalculated reason that the black-shirt, black-pants, black-shoes bookstores don't seem to be bothering with it. who knows.

in fact, wouldn't he be a book-displayed-in-the-window type of writer for those places? someone must not think so. it's true he's an erratic writer, and that the previous two books were very sort of just there--not good, not really bad--but it's douglas coupland, so i have to read them. i was too young to experience my shot of clarity by reading Generation X, but his little book with the ambiguous swimming kid on the cover, Life After God, got me at just the right time. i think i was twenty, and reading it made me realize that people grow up. what a revelation, you say. ah yes, but it was. so, forever after, he will remain a reason for a trip to the bookstore.

so, yeppers. i bought it at barnes and noble on broadway. oh well, i tried.

i would like to point out that this website looks great on mozilla and looks like total shit on internet explorer. i'm just saying. a real man would probably be able to do something about that, but i am a total hosebag as far as the internet or computers or flashlights or whatever goes, so i'm lucky i've gotten this far.

i should put up one of those "best viewed with" things that says best viewed with mosiac 1.0. or best viewed through a glass of cheap gin.

in cleveland this weekend, i did a lot of driving around aimlessly (in a big green buick, no less) and listening to cleveland radio stations. despite the new rule that all radio stations in all cities have to sound identical, it's still easy to tell it's cleveland because of all the loud guitar stuff on every station. so, even through all the bullshit, the cleveland sound still kind of comes through. no, i don't particularly like spending a lot of time listening to it, but i'm happy it exists.

clear channel is the esteemed entity you can thank for much of cleveland radio, just like everywhere else. i heard a little bit of wmms, which they own, and it was running the same promos over the july fourth weekend as all the other clear channel stations--george w. bush and donald rumsfeld talking about how the troops are in their prayers. now of course no one wants soldiers to get hurt, but does the station that used to say its name stood for "weed makes me smile" have to be a mouthpiece for the republican party? a break, gimme.

incidentally, back when wmms was coming into being in the seventies, they called it "the buzzard" because the city was dying. now that is cool. even taking into account wmms's general non-excellence for the rememberable past, i will always respect it to some extent just for the name.

the humble protagonist is in cleveland for the holiday, staying with mia's family. i woke up at 4:30 this morning, which gave me the opportunity to wander around aimlessly like a zombie until i finally thought i'd sit down and watch tv. my so-called life was on. typical, as what better time for a good television program than a time when no one but zombies see it? god bless the zombies.

i quite like that show, meaning that i apparently have a well-developed inner teenage girl. hey whatever--it is better than having a well-developed inner teenage boy. my only regret vis-a-vis inner-teenage-anythings is that when i actually was a teenage boy, that's pretty much what i was through and through, dooming me to complete immaturity. teenage boys who could appreciate my so-called life or something like it--they were probably mature and sensitive types. i'm not sure i knew any of those, or even if there were any in my high school, but being one might have been all right. but come on. that would be cheating at life, as basically i am saying it would have been good to be the eighteen-year-old josh with the mind of thirty-year-old josh. who knows, such a person might have exploded.

now that i look at it, with two posts with two pictures in two spaces right next to each other, i get claustrophobia. so, consider this, this right here, this, as a bit of nothing separating them. like nothing. like nothing nothing. nada our nada who art in nada.