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October 14, 2002
mark thomas I have decided to grow my beard back. I am thinking of growing back the beard and letting the hair on my head grow straight up. I want to look like a cross between Jesus Christ and Eraserhead. Mention of Eraserhead always reminds me of a funny joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Viagra with Rogaine? Hahahahahaha.
My thinking about buying a car has evolved. At first I more or less assumed I would either buy a new car outright, or lease a new car for 3 years. Now I am leaning toward buying something used, probably a Saturn of some sort or a Volkswagen Passat. But I don't know yet. Leasing seemed to make sense at first, but on further analysis it seems that leasing a car can easily end up costing more than buying. I do not want to deal with monthly payments, and the limited mileage combined with potential costs for early-return penalties and other things make leasing seem too pesky for me. So now I'm leaning toward buying a new or used car, most likely used. The used car market seems like a quagmire, but I'm told that a lot has changed in the used car business over the last many years. Last night I was talking to a bartender about all this. We were discussing the many ways in which one can obtain a car. Lease, buy, new, used ... He mentioned police auctions of drug-seized vehicles, which is something I've heard about. There is said to be a racket of sorts in buying such cars down in Miami, driving them up to New York and selling them for about 200 time what you paid for them at auction. So I said to the bartender "I could just steal one." He said "That's an option." I said "No down payment. But what about insurance?" He looks at me and says "I got a couple of friends who could help you out." He talked for a few minutes about how it works. You make arrangements with certain of the paid parking garages around town. You go shopping at some of those garages. Then you hire a couple of lookout guys to deal with the cops or security or whatever while you motor out of town. He already lost me back at "I got a couple of friends who could help you out," and I still don't know if he was serious. He is probably thinking the same thing about me. As far as buying a car, I'll figure something out one of these days. No big rush, you know.
I finally sorted out what was wrong with my piano set-up. I have my Roland digital piano (and a bunch of other audio contraptions) connected to the Internet through a Mackie CFX12 Mixer that plugs into my computer. I can usually reverse-engineer anything related to software or code. My theory about this is that I pick up code quickly because I am a musician. Musicians (those who can actually read music, at least) already know how to read code, because music notation is code. So if you can read music than you already have a mental facility at work which makes picking up other types of code easier than it might be. But that's just a theory. For some reason I have a mental block when it comes to hardware. This might come from all those agonizing hours I used to spend trying to configure modems for dialup in the early and mid 1990s before someone somewhere made it easy to slap a modem into shape. My aversion to working with hardware may also stem from the recalcitrance of the physical objects. I can work with and manipulate software any way I please. But something like a lawn mower is a delivered product. If a lawn mower conks out then I have to work around its inflexibilities, and I have to work with its limitations and requirements. Ultimately, the same is true of software (which relies on hardware), but as far as I'm concerned the connection is usually remote. At any rate, there was a buzzing noise coming out of the piano, but it seems to be gone. Let the rejoicing begin. I was able to fix it by buying more and more cables from Radio Shack. All together I bought 36 feet of cables today, bringing to about 1000 miles the total length of cables I've bought from Radio Shack in the last few years. When I put all those cables on the counter today the cashier joked "You think you got enough cables?" I said "Well, I'm always looking for new ways to strangle myself." It was the perfect opportunity to use a joke that's been sitting in my mind for years. Damn, it was satisfying. I've been waiting and waiting and waiting to use that joke, and the cashier laughed just about as much as I had imagined someone would laugh when I finally got a chance to say it at just the right time. I remember once in high school, a friend made a silly joke and I absolutely went ape shit with laughter. I nearly threw up from laughing so hard, and my stomach and guts were sore for days afterward. My friend's joke just was not that funny. It was worth a snicker, perhaps. It was just an offhand amusement signifying nothing. But I laughed and laughed and laughed, provoking obvious discomfort in the person who made the comment. I've been on both sides of this situation. I've made lightweight jokes that drew guffaws and chortling fits that led to coughing and near-seizures among those who heard me. It's about as strange and uncomfortable a situation as I can ever remember. It's not always jokes, either. Once in a while I'll make what seems like either a perfectly serious or simply innocuous comment, and the reaction will be as if I'd told the funniest joke in the world.
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