Keith is not here. He died. He ate some bad food at Denny's last night and blew up. It didn't help that he tried to sleep it off and was woken up at 7, 8 and 9:30am by the entire family who appears to have moved in next door with the Annoying Fuckwad Neighbors (which, while immediately inconvenient due to the screaming of their baby on this particular schedule, may actually prove useful in the long run, because it's against the lease of that apartment and we can report them for it and possibly get them finally all kicked out). There's more, but I just don't feel like writing right now.

Among the reasons: - I've got stuff to say, dammit, and I feel better having put forth my insanity upon some other hapless souls who are either happy to read it or unwittingly stumble upon it. It's like what Lewis Black says about when you hear someone say the dumbest thing in the world -- it goes in your ear and it rattles around in your brain and if you could just talk to someone else about what the asshole said, it'd be out of your brain and you wouldn't die in your bathtub from an aneurysm two days later. I've got to get this stuff out of my brain before my head blows up. - My creativity doesn't come in giant torrential floods that last for days, it usually only comes in bits and pieces. And my job requires me to write creatively (basic job description: I get paid to be a funny smartass), so I use up a fair amount of it at work. By the time I get home, I have enough creativity left for clever conversation with others, but not enough to write the Great American Novel. So I write here. - I don't have the patience to write the Great American Novel. Do you know how many unfinished stories there are sitting on my hard drive because I started writing and then just lost interest after a few days or a week? Here, I can write witty one-liners and leave it at that if that's all I feel like writing for the day, and then the next day, I can write something completely unrelated. - Because the voices in my head tell me to. (Had you going there for a second, didn't I?) - There's just way too much insanity out there begging to be chronicled and mocked. How could I pass up the opportunity to do that?

There is a general malaise in the air that I can't quite put my finger on. Something's wrong, and I don't know what. But I do know something's wrong by the way I -- within the course of 45 minutes -- dropped my dinner on the floor... twice (once before I cooked it and once after)... scalded myself with boiling water and then exploded a container of ice cream sandwiches and dropped all six of the sandwiches on the kitchen floor as well. Something's rotten in the United States of Keith, because I always turn into a klutz when something is rotten in the United States of Keith. And it would be all so tragic if I didn't know that all of you were laughing at me because of it. You bastards. You heartless, heartless bastards.

I can't decide if they're serious, poking fun or just being stupid and putting up the site as a frat prank, but... for your reading, uhhh, enjoyment (?), may I present... Rent-A-Negro.

A friend of mine once lived in Hawaii for several months and told me about his experiences upon his return -- he wanted to stay longer, but the culture shock was just too much and he couldn't take it, he had to return to the mainland. He said that basically, the entire place seemed to operate under the motto of "dowutchyalike." No one wore watches, so people just showed up to work whenever. Everyone got paid on Monday and then proceeded to blow all their cash, so by the time the weekend rolled around, they were spending Saturdays and Sundays in their apartments and homes, watching TV and eating pizza crusts because they didn't have enough money for anything else and had to scrounge to make it to the next payday, then they'd do it all over again. Bills got paid whenever. I honestly don't think I'd survive in that kind of environment. Relaxing and carefree as it might be for a week or two, I need some kind of structure to keep me going and on track with my life. Otherwise, the wonders of DirecTV, TiVo and the Internet might keep me so enthralled that I'd never leave my apartment.

One of the strange things about DirecTV is that on all the basic cable channels, we get the East Coast feed. So I can watch the stuff at midnight that's really run at 3am on the East Coast before I go to bed, which means I also get to see all the really bad commercials that run at 3am on the East Coast. So tonight, I saw an ad for Hollywood's Hottest: 30 Sexiest Nude Scenes. Will someone please tell me what the point of this video is? Half the promos they run in the ad are for topless shots that are less than 10 seconds long, like Halle Berry's fleeting topless flash in Swordfish or the scene in Titanic where Leo draws the absolutely gorgeous Kate Winslet. Hell, it's probably more worth it for me to just go buy a couple of porn films for the cost of that video, but the only rewarding quality of the video is that it shows you the good scenes of probably 25 movies that just aren't worth watching at all.

Treasure today did not come in the form of the amazing thunder and lightning storm that my parents and I sat out and watched for an hour and a half -- never mind the fact that the skies opened and it poured and lightning bolts lit up the sky and thunder boomed loud enough to shake the house and it all combined with the fog over the mountains to make it look like Mordor come to life. No, treasure today was an unexpected discovery. It was digging through my parents' cabinets, looking for the phone book, and finding some of my old records. LPs that I thought had been tossed years ago are now back in my possession. Folks, I am once again the proud owner of A-Ha's Hunting High and Low, Prince's soundtrack to Purple Rain and the USA For Africa We Are the World album, among others. Now I need to find myself a record player so I can actually play them. Hell, I don't even have a cassette deck set up in my room to play all my old tapes! Since I'll be on the road on my way back home to Los Angeles tomorrow, here's my Sunday Most Listened-To Song o' the Week, albeit a bit early. I'm going a bit old-school on you... The Jesus & Mary Chain - "Head On" As soon as I get my head 'round you I come around catching sparks off you I get an electric charge from you This second-hand living, it just won't do And the way I feel tonight I could die and I wouldn't mind And there's something going on inside Makes you want to feel Makes you want to try Makes you want to blow the stars from the sky I can't stand up I can't cool down I can't get my head off the ground As soon as I get my head 'round you I come around catching sparks off you And all I ever got from you Was all I ever took from you And the world could die in pain And I wouldn't feel no shame And there's nothing holding me to blame Makes you want to feel Makes you want to try Makes you want to blow the stars from the sky And I'll take myself to the dirty part of town Where all my troubles can't be found Makes you want to feel Makes you want to try Makes you want to blow the stars from the sky I can't stand up I can't cool down I can't get my head off the ground Makes you want to feel Makes you want to try Makes you want to feel Makes you want to try...

This is funny but scary. And a little apropos, considering Sledge's recent credit card mishap. Current temperature: 108 -- in the shade. I cannot believe people live here of their own free will. To quote Incubus, "Pardon me while I burst into flames."

Okay, so will someone please explain to me the popularity driving the sudden explosion in sexblogs? And the thing that kills me is that Kristanna Loken, the really really hot chick who plays the female Terminator... is only 23 years old. Hollywood has completely screwed with my internal age calculator to the point where I can not look at someone and be able to accurately judge their age. At all.

The fear of inevitability consumes me. I went to see Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines today (and, by the way, while I'll try not to give away any spoilers, you kind of have to see the movie in order to really understand where I'm coming from on this). And while I've always had this morbid fascination with the apocalypse and post-apocalyptic stories, it's always gone hand-in-hand with my innate fear of nuclear war/holocaust. I find it odd, since my generation really never had to deal with it all that much -- it's my parents' generation who did, they're the ones who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and a time when the world was brought to the brink of nuclear war. My mom still has the dogtags that they issued to all New York City schoolchildren at the time -- so they could identify the remains of the children after the bombs dropped -- and she tells me stories of drills in her school of "duck and cover" and running to the fallout shelter. The closest I've come to this was the fact that I grew up less than 10 miles from the largest U.S. Navy submarine base on the East Coast, so we knew we had a Russian warhead with our names written all over it. I don't quite know what it is that I fear the most about nuclear war -- the fact that life as I know it will be disastrously over, the fact that I probably will not survive it (given that I live in a major metropolitan area that is definitely a target) or the horrors that might await me after it's over. The fears had abated during the '90s when the Soviet Union collapsed and the world really seemed finally to cool off a bit -- the main trouble spots weren't as inflamed anymore. Now, who knows? Everyone seems to have their nukes, and it's no longer just a matter of U.S. vs. Them, it's a matter of us vs. Them and Them and Them and Them and Them and some other small groups and factions who bought them from the Russians. The film disturbed me because in the second installment of the series, the whole Skynet scenario was put out of the picture because John and Sarah Connor destroyed Cyberdyne. And I know it's silly because it's only a movie and they can make whatever plotlines they want, but it just seems that with T3, the future is inevitable and we will be destroyed no matter what we do (which, again, is silly since I don't really believe in fate). But in any event, I think it's safe to say that I'll be having some nightmares tonight. Maybe if I knock back a few before going to bed, I won't remember them. Funny, though, that as I sit here typing this, a storm grows outside -- the first real one that Tucson has had in months. I can feel the anger in the hot gusting winds, see the wrath in the lightning strikes. It's coming.

Late-night tidbits for your enjoyment: 1. Forecast for Tucson and surrounding areas: Hotter than fuck. Tonight, a tad cooler, but still hotter than most other places on Earth except Hell (which, it turns out, may or may not be Hoboken, New Jersey). Tomorrow, hotter than a record-breaking fuck, but not nearly as pleasant as a record-breaking fuck. 2. Most Obscure Reference of the Day™: an ocelot. And the hell of it all is that I don't even know what an ocelot is. I think it's some kind of mythical animal that may or may not resemble a llama. (And if you really want to amuse yourself, try saying "llama" slowly. Llllllllllaaaaaammmmaaaa... it just makes you giggle like a schoolgirl when you say it.) 3. I was watching the news tonight here in Tucson, and they had some portable MP3 hard drive called a Phatbox. The anchors and reporters could not say the word "phat" enough. But they were white! So funkless! Lacking in the funk department! Like Peter Jennings reciting 50 Cent lyrics funkless! And the hell of it all was, of all the footage they could have showed of someone driving down the freeway listening to this thing, they showed someone driving down the 405 freeway right at the exit onto Wilshire Boulevard that I take to get to my apartment in Los Angeles. I can't get away. 4. Word.

Yes, it's really 4am. Yes, I've really been on the road since 7:30pm. And I'll be damned if it's not freakin' hot here -- I thought the desert was supposed to be hot only during the day and cool at night! Instead, it just seems that it's hot at night and set to broil during the daytime. In other news, some funny stuff happened at work that I wanted to share with you all before I crashed hard in bed. 1. We have a small cafeteria in our building. It's not gourmet, but it fills the bill and it's convenient. So I went down there for lunch today with a co-worker, and a few minutes after we get on line, our company's CFO walks in. We chat briefly and then get our food and pay for it, and we're on our way out when the CFO sheepishly tells us he just realized that he doesn't have any money in his wallet and can he borrow $5 for lunch? I ponied up the fiver, and he promised to pay me back later that afternoon, which he did. Okay, how secure am I supposed to feel in the financial status of my company when the Chief Financial Officer doesn't have $5 in his wallet and has to borrow cash from me? 2. I was talking with one of the other editors in his office when the CEO walks in and said, "Hey, I wanted to ask you guys if you had any ideas for our upcoming Christian music convention." I looked at her and asked her, "You do realize you're asking this of two Jews, right?" Laugh heartily, then wipe the tears away and enjoy the memories. I'm going to sleep now.

Oh my freakin God, people. I'm MOLTING. I mean, really, folks. This is bloody well ridiculous. And if that wasn't bad enough, someone saw me at work today -- someone who had played the role of Captain Obvious yesterday and asked me if I was sunburned -- and asked me again if I was sunburned. Apparently, she had absolutely no recollection of asking me yesterday. This scares me. Now I have to pack. Tomorrow, I make the overnight run to fire-laden Tucson, with only the late-night truckers and my radio to accompany me. Ahh, sweet sweet open road. At least it'll give me time to steel myself for the inevitable fight with my father that will occur at some point over this weekend because I'm not living my life to the letter of the Gospel of Dad.

There were about six people at work competing for the title of Captain Obvious today. Each time I was asked, "Hey, did you get sunburned?", I was tempted to reply, "No, I just dipped my head in red paint." I restrained myself, lest I really be perceived as the sarcastic bastard I am. However, I did also get several compliments -- apparently, I look better with some skin tone. And, oddly enough, I also got compliments on my scruff -- I haven't shaved since Saturday (mostly out of laziness), and some people think it makes me look rugged and manly. Pardon me while I go in the corner and make noises like Tim Allen now. In other news, I appear to slowly be getting my groove back. I'm happy about this.

People of Earth, please halt what you're doing. Sit down if you're not already, for I have news of great importance that will shock and stagger you. Are you sitting? Have you steeled yourselves? In the next issue of W magazine, Britney Spears admits she is not a virgin and that she had sex with Justin Timberlake two years into their relationship, which basically means she's a big fat liar liar pleather pants on fire since she's maintained that she's a virgin up until very recently and also blatantly said she never slept with Justin. People of Earth, your apathy is overwhelming. And yeah, I think I care about her as little as you do.