right on bro!

Okay, so the marching band only lasted for about 30 minutes. I have no idea what the hell they were doing out on the street. Obviously some sort of parade, but for what?

Spent today cleaning apartment, doing laundry, handling bills. Got my car washed for the first time this month - it still had dust from Twentynine Palms on it.

Speaking of Twentynine Palms, I spent part of today looking into real estate out there. Apparently you can buy about five acres with an old post-WWI abandoned shack for about $10,000-$15,000. Like, there are lots of these around, all around the Navy base. If it doesn’t cost too much to renovate the shack, I’m thinking about building a small house for weekend retreats, since I’m pretty much priced out of the market here in Los Angeles. We’ll see.

I have officially not smoked any cigarettes for one week now. The cravings really eased up late this week, and I stopped popping Nicorette on a regular basis. But they’re back tonight with a vengeance, and I wonder if that’s because I don’t regular amounts of nicotine coming through my system. Ouch.

There’s a marching band outside of my window…please make it stop…

Feeling better. The sore throat is pretty much gone. I have a slight cough and my voice is still cracked like an OC housewife who smokes too much. (You guys know….that chick who was playing blackjack with us at the Sahara.)

Not smoking for the first few days was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Today, however, was a different story. The urge kept popping up all afternoon and evening. It’s mostly in situations that I’ve found myself smoking before - after dinner, at a bar, in between rounds of Socom. I ended up chewing quite a bit of Nicorette gum today, but managed to make it through. This is six days straight.

The more days that pass, the more that I feel embarrassed, like a recovering addict, except I don’t have any real addiction like heroin or whatever. Nice work.

Went to Hollywood Thai Cafe with a friend tonight. It’s only one of two places that I know of where you can get tom yum soup, but with fish, which is, like, my favorite Thai dish in, like, the entire universe. The other place that has the soup is Vim, which is also a fantastic restaurant. But besides the soup, Hollywood Thai wasn’t quite as good as I remember from the last time I was there.

Oh….Comcast upgraded my cable modem service to from 1.5mbps to 3.3mbps down, for free. It’s real dope. However, they also seemed to have reduced my upstream from 256k to about 180k. That’s not real dope.

Weekend’s coming…thank god.

I ran into Regul on Sunset tonight while on my way to the Well. It looked like he was out pimping. What exactly does Regul do in his new job in Hollywood? He’s a pimp, I think. A pimp who eats at Baja Fresh.

Meanwhile, I’m out drinking while I’m still sick. But a co-worker is quitting, so I had to attend her going-away party. Still, Hollywood is chock fuckin’ full of bent-up fools. Fools asking you for change, asking for cigarettes, asking for twenty bucks. Ummm…don’t think so.

Five days of not smoking and I haven’t assaulted anyone yet. That’s pretty amazing.

I learned that two people I hung out with over the past week also got sick with the same thing. I am the Spreader of Sickness and Disease. Ooops.

I’m still pretty worked by this cold or flu or whatever it is. I actually feel relatively OK except for a massively sore throat and a cough that doesn’t end. I’m sure I annoyed the fuck out of my co-workers by my constant coughing over the past week. Now that my work projects have seemed to calm down slightly, I might take off tomorrow.

Who the hell is John Kerry? I’m unprepared for this…

I called my doctor’s office today to schedule an appointment. My regular doctor was not in today, and the receptionist suggested I take a 4:30 appointment with “Dr. Borg.” I was like, “You mean like the Star Trek Borg?” She said, “Yes.”

So I saw Dr. Borg today. He made no attempts to assimilate me. Rather, he stuck a tongue depressor in my mouth, asked me what kind of symptoms I’ve been having, and then wrote me a prescription for some antibiotics.

Maybe I should be suspicious about the antibiotics.

Been glued to the computer the entire weekend, trying to crank this Website out.

My throat is still killing me. Gonna go see the doctor this week. Nice work!

Went on a quick trip to Vegas over the past day with some friends. Left Thursday night, and came back last night. It was really fun, despite that I’m still not over this retarded-ass cough, and the dry desert air and lots of alcohol & cigarettes just made it worse.

I did, however, get absolutely slaughtered at the tables this time. These guys I went with are pretty gambling-oriented, and we played a lot of blackjack. Usually I walk away with paying for part of the trip, or maybe a few bucks down at the most. But I couldn’t catch a break at all this time. I think I had maybe four blackjacks total in about eight hours of play. Ouch.

Stayed at the Sahara for the first time. It’s not bad for the rate that we paid for it. We were in the recently renovated (in 2002 I think) towers. It was pretty much a standard hotel room, better than, say, the Tropicana or Excalibur, but not as nice as Caesar’s Palace or the Palms. The room had a really great view of east Vegas. I took a couple of 6 A.M. photos from my disposable camera of the sun below the mountains, so when I get them developed I’ll probably put one up.

Now that I’m back in L.A….I’m going to take an extended break from smoking cigarettes for awhile. It’s pretty hard not to believe that smoking had nothing to do with me getting sick over the past two months, and if anything, the amount of cigarettes I’ve smoked per day has gone up quite a bit lately. I’ve pretty much been feeling like crap for the past two months so it’s probably time to put a leash on some of the self-destructive behaviors. I doubt I’ll ever quit completely but it would be good to at least not smoke on a daily basis.

There may be a lot of things I hate about this world, but I’m not quite ready to leave it yet.

This week has gone by relatively painlessly, thank God.

I heard a story on NPR that tigers attack you from behind - they never attack from the front. So, fools in India who are trying to count tigers, they wear masks on their backs of their heads so it looks like they’re looking at the tigers at all times.

State of the Union, whatever.

Three-day weekends fly by when you spend most of it drugged up on NyQuil. I hardly felt like doing anything at all, but here’s a quick summary of what I did do: