The Joel Train

now im all for pornography. but there's this guy that comes into the media center, "mr softcore". he cant be more than 20, but already theres kind of a sleazy skittish vibe to him.

so he comes in and picks through the movies with naughty covers. we have private viewing rooms, and this guy always get one. last week his choice was a bad 70's movie called "the libertine." I dont even know why the library owns it. The movie is about this young house wife who finds her husbands swinger pad, after he croaks. The acting is horrible, and the dialouge is two dimensional and predictable...not that i've seen it. ha ha.

i think next time im going to ask him what his major is. i bet its computer science.

i dont know if i told you. that creative writing class that i'm in, the one i wrote the poem for, has turned into a real nightmare. i thought it would be a cuddly place where we as budding writers could bare the soft underbelly of our souls. I think our professor was counting on that. thats the place where he plans to jab us with criticism and all around meanness.

anywho, im off to class

how is it possible that 11 days have passed since my last entry? well, i only have a few minutes before class, so i have to make it short.

i've stopped paying attention in my humanities class. the teacher, while very smart, spends more time proving to the class that he's hip and with it. what bothers me more than anything, more than the dumb argumentitive papers that we have to write (which i have not been writing), is that i can no longer tell if he's actually telling us the truth.

now i know that sounds alittle paranoid, but really, whats to say that he didnt just decide to make some shit up? i say this because i've caught him blurring his facts. what he does is combine a couple of people and try and boil what they did and said down into digestable chunks. i can understand why that would be helpful, but its also a big fat lie. and when you know that Crackacities didnt actually invent the cascading file cabinet, how can you really trust your teacher when he tells you that its true?

teachers here, gotta go...

the storm wasnt as bad as everyone thought it would be, lots of people are without power but water supplies for most of the area stayed intact. i drove down to the mall where the usually tiny Swannanowa River spilled over its banks and flooded the parking lot of a Lowes (the hardware store, we dont have those grocery stores here.). there were cars left stranded in the lot with water up to their windshields. biltmore village flooded too. that's the wealthy shopping center that was, at one time, literally the village where the folks who worked up at the bilmore house first lived more than a hundred years ago. now its the place to be if you want to by a hat.
except for sections like these in the river district, the rest of asheville was soggy but unharmed.


i started a new job a few weeks ago. im now doing books for a local restaurant. so now im juggling this job, the media center and a full load at school. speaking of full load, i keep crapping my pants whenever i think all this work. how do i do this to myself?

on the bright side, this is a great opportunity to figure out if i like accounting or if i need to pick something else in a hurry. right now im slowly learning Quickbooks and trying to develop a system that works for me and keeps me from loosing stuff. like my mind.

i'll keep you posted

City Driving


I wrote this poem driving down Merrimon.
I put the pen in my mouth
While I merged onto 240.
Or, I tried to
But a man in a cheap, red, mercury convertible
Cut me off.

As he passed I saw two little girls
One on top of the other,
Crammed into the passenger seat,
No seatbelt, no car seat.

Spitting out the pen,
Pressing my thumb against my notebook,
Steering with the friction
I managed to keep from killing anyone.

There should be a law against people who drive like that.

we've been under strict water restriction here in asheville since wednesday. huricane francis (that bastard!) brought almost 20 inches or rain to some parts of western north carolina. The french broad river crested to something like 10 feet above flood levels on wednesday, covering industrial plants and gas mains. the city water supply was totally shot. we got out of school early on wednesday and then they cancelled classes for the rest of the week. they shut water off at the school completely and brought in port-a-potties for students. i havent bathed in days, and while that isnt uncommon for me, now that i cant shower, i want to really bad.

wednesday there was a mad rush to the grocery store for water. there is mixed information as to if our supply is contaminated, but the city asked that folks only use water in an emergency. when i got to the grocery store they were totally cleaned out. its amazing how hysteria sweeps through the cheap grocery stores first. when ana and i went to the ritzy grocery store down the street they had plenty of water.

anyway, were fine, smelly but fine. with school on hold, i'll actually get caught up (hopefully) on all my homework.

looking forward to ivan.

the strangest thing happened to me last night, but i have to set it up alittle before i can tell you.

many of you know that asheville is located in the mountains of western north carolina. when they built the town, if they ran into an especially hilly spot that was in their way, nine times out of ten they'd bulldoze it flat, or create a twisty winding road up and over it. there's only one place i can think of where they couldnt do either and just blasted a tunnel right through the middle. This spot is the tunnel through beaucatcher mountain, about 100 yards long, it connects beautiful downtown asheville to a greyhound bus depot, fast food chains, a wal-mart, and anything else you might need.

so it was 9:45 at night i went through the tunnel to get to dairy queen. i get my cone and ana's blizzard and like a fool i told guy at the window "oh, no sir, i dont need a lid on that blizzard"
leaving the parking lot, i realized the blizzard wouldnt sit up-right in my car without making a mess. so now im driving back to the house holding the cone in one hand, blizzard in the other and steering with my wrists.

as i headed back toward the tunnel and i saw a grey hound bus lurching toward the depot. the greyhound station is the last thing on the right before the tunnel and as the bus crossed in front of me, i saw this huge plume of white smoke trailing behind it, the smoke was bigger than the bus.

so there i was, ice cream in each hand, big smokey bus in front of me. i drove past it and into the tunnel. the tunnel was filled with white smoke. at first i thought i could just keep going and push through it, like nascar, but i couldnt see anything.

i decided to roll my window down and crane my head out. i couldnt see the yellow line. so i started back towards the wall. in just a few feet i'd already wandered way into the other lane. i found the yellow line again, and slowly, 5 miles an hour, crept forward.

i felt the icecream rolling down my arms. suddenly i was watching the yellow line with my head out the window, driving with my forearms and licking my wrist all at once. it was like juggling. i gave up chocolate for new years, so i couldnt lick my right arm at all.

cars kept appearing and disappearing in the other lane. i could only see a few feet in front of me, and even with their headlights on the cars were covered up by the fog. i kept waiting to slam into something. strangely the smoke was so thick that i was actually a few yards outside the tunnel before i realized i'd made it through.

thankfully there was more icecream in the cup than on me by the time i got home, so things worked out pretty well, smoke inhalation aside.

well folks,

its 8:22 by my watch. here i am sitting at the media center circulation desk. listening to the low thoughtful tones of a charlie parker cd slowly fading away into the night. aww yeah.

wouldnt that have been sexy if barry white said it? i bet he could have said anything and it'd still come out sexy.

i've been thinking about sexy lately. i want more of it. i've thought about studying the great antonio banderas, he's got the sexy thing goin on, but i think talking with a lisp might work to decrease my level of sexy and thats not what im going for.

this is probably a conversation i should have with my wife, she's ultimately the benefactor of any increase in sexy i might manage. i kind of want to suprise her with it though. i mean carefully planned sexy is never as sexy as "i never thought he had it in him" sexy.

well, media centers about to close. just in the nic of time it seems...

im trying to shock my body into fitness. not literally mind you, but by asking it to do stuff its not really capable of doing and then piling some more stuff on top of that. so far so good. all this running and working out hasnt helped me loose weight, but i do feel healthier. my teeth and backhair practically glow.

classes are in full swing. i plan to start doing homework very soon. one assignment that seems to give me a hard time is this reoccuring humanities lecture critique.

so every monday we go and sit in this big lecture hall and listen to a professor give an hour long speach on whatever we happen to be studying. then, im supposed to look back over my notes, and write a little critique of a major point, arguing for or against it. i know this may be misconstrued as whining, but wholy crap! how am i supposed to take a lecture, rooted in fact, and pick it apart? I got an 80 on the first one. my teacher said i needed to be more assertive in my argument. this time around i took a small point the lecturer made, it was really just an aside, and i pounced on it. Just ripped it to shreads.

i dont think i called the lecturer a bold faced liar, but its implied in my paper. how's that for assertiveness. also, i tried to use the word "BOO-YAH!" after every main point.

i'll let you know how i do.