11.23.1993

It's fucking cold right now. I haven't gotten around to replacing the heater core in my car so each night when I drive home from the factory, I freeze. One afternoon on my drive into the plant my whole windshield suddenly clouded up with steam. Hot green water puked out of my dashboard from behind the glove box and instantly I knew the damned heater core ruptured. It was gonna happen sooner or later, the car was approaching 30 years of age. I limped the car the rest of the way to work with all the windows down and the heater set to full blast on a beautiful summer day. It was the only way to make sure I didn't overheat the engine block. Later on I bypassed the heater core by cutting the hoses off of it and splicing them in a closed loop elsewhere. I've been lazy about replacing the core even though I already bought a brand new one. It's still in the box. Now I shiver with the cold every night on the way home and I ask myself the same question. Why didn't I fix the car this afternoon? I think I'll just buy some warm gloves tomorrow and keep them in my coat pocket.

The temperature inside the factory where I work gets really hot. I'm on the second floor of the main building and it seems the air conditioning on the second floor doesn't work all that great. Heat rises from the floor below and collects in my department all day long. So at the end of my shift when I walk outside in the parking lot I look forward to cooling off. That was during the end of summer though so it was always nice outside in the evening. Now it's a fuckin' drag. It's so cold that my nose starts to run as soon as I step out the door. I sniffle my way out to the car. Then I have to sit there like a chump while I warm up the engine and defrost the windshield ghetto style so I don't drive off a cliff or drive into someone's house. No heater core means I put my hands on the inside of the windshield about eye level. Takes a while to get a see-through spot burned in the frost but at least it works. In the coming weeks I'll probably have to scrape ice off the windshield with my library card. I should fix that heater core. Yup.

Other negative developments include my other car breaking down on me (motor seized), got my first ever speeding ticket, and my room mates at the B Street house decided I have a drinking problem. They came to that conclusion when I broke a bunch of windows in the back of the house because at the time it seemed like a cool thing to do. I repaired them all the next day while I was hung over. I had to measure the frames, get the new glass cut at the local shop, come back to the house, clean and disassemble the wooden frames, put the new glass in, caulk it, and reassemble the wooden frames. I have never worked on anything like that before so I didn't have a clue as to what I was doing but you know what? I did a kick ass repair job.

On the positive side, I bought a copy of Negativland's banned U2 single along with a couple Nurse With Wound boxed sets. One of the NWW boxed sets I've been after for a long time but just couldn't find it anywhere. It's called "Soliloquy For Lilith". It's good shit. The best news of all is my scumbag hippie room mate Jerry is moving out in January. Jerry is a retro 1970s loser slob dead-head pot smokin' no good organic looking grease ball. He has no job, fills the house with slimy white trash hippie kids, and drives a seventies rapist van. That's one of those boxes on wheels with no windows. Every time he starts up the motor out back our yard fills up with smoke. Hippies sure do show a love for our environment. I have discovered this. They'll go to endless protests to fight for environmental issues and get to and from the protests in vehicles that spew burnt oil smoke into the air. Way to go, geniuses.

Jerry has a hippie band called "Zag". I despise them. I finally got the chance to hear them play live this last weekend- in my house. Boy, they sucked. Hopefully they will never become popular or successful and I will pray to Satan every day to make sure they fail. Zag is a motley crew of burned out grease balls. When they played the house our livingrooms were sparsely filled with poorly dressed homely girls. Not a single one of them wore any makeup and they all smelled funny. Most of them had clothes on that appeared to be made out of rope. I mingled with this crowd of miscreants as a scientist might if he were to study a foreign race of humans while being invisible.

Zag was playing far too loud in our middle livingroom against the back wall. At one point I lit up a good cigar and continued to observe them pound and pluck away at their instruments like a bunch of apes. Shortly after I got a good cherry on the tip of my stogie a particularly unattractive hippie girl came up to me and started saying things. I had no idea what those things were because of the music. Her lips moved but no sound came out. She was confused when I pointed to my ear and I slightly stooped over so she could repeat whatever she had just babbled at me. "I don't think Jerry likes you to smoke that in the house." She said into my ear. I stood back up, took a good puff on the cigar, and blew it up towards the ceiling. Then I knocked the cherry off the end and she watched, horrified, as the glowing ash hit the livingroom carpet. I ground it into the rug with the toe of my wingtip. Her eyes were as white and as big as saucers. She didn't know what to do. I gently leaned over so my mouth was close to her ear and I said, "This is my house. Fuck that guy." She quickly fled the room.

If there's one thing in this world that I hate, it's a hippie.