5/25/02, 12:36 am

Have you ever had a day you wished you could just start over? Today was one of those.

I made a dentist appointment a couple of week ago because one of my teeth has been sensitive to temperature lately. On occasion, it hurts like, well, like getting a cavity filled. This morning was the appointment.

I hopped the train downtown and got there early. Nice place. Friendly vibe. I filled out the paperwork and tried to relax. For most of my life, I've had problems with medical situations. I wrote about it a few months back in the context of my foot injury.

I thought I was doing OK when, 6 x-rays into 16, I started feeling woozy. I asked the hygienist to wait for a moment and tried to pull myself together. I remember asking her to take the heavy lead apron from me and then I lost consciousness. It's very disorienting coming back to the world after a seizure. It takes a moment to realize where you are, why you're there and piece together what must have happened.

The staff there was very kind, concerned about me and asking questions. One dentist, the only male doctor there I think, described it as "white coat syndrome," not uncommon in 20-30-year-old men, who don't admit to their doctor (or themselves I'd guess) that they're uncomfortable or scared, so their body takes responsibility for the mind's failing and throws an off switch.

It's nice to know that other people have that experience, but that doesn't really fit for me. This has happened for my whole life, from before I knew enough to be scared and past when I knew too much to be scared.

The sensation is like this: chemical, the steadily progressing coursing of something through my body, though my mind. I feel disconnected to the biology, but scared by it because I know it can take me out. I try to gain control of it, and either my body wins or my mind wins. This morning, my body won.

After I recovered and talked things through with the dentist, they offered to continue the x-rays and exam. I wanted to take them up on it. I really did. I'm a big believer in getting back on the horse after you fall off.

But I didn't have the heart this morning. Instead I walked out, thanking my dentist and putting her questions for my doctor to answer in my bag. I got in the back of the first cab I saw and asked the cabbie to take me home.

I curled up in bed, safe, sad and tired and went back to sleep.

I started the day over a few hours later.

It went a lot better the second time around.

5/23/02, 2:21 am

Up late blogging when I ought to be getting my volleyball beauty sleep. Ah well, I'll try to make it quick.

I saw a play tonight with Mary (a wise, zen friend), Judy (the two-time Emmy Award winner) and Dani (my favorite teenage girl in New York city). The play, at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village, is called "Sixteen Wounded." It's very well-written, well-acted and extraordinarily timely, dealing with a Palistinean and a Jew and their friendship in Amsterdam. Judy's partner, Ed, is in it and does an excellent job. It's on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7 pm. See it if you can. (If you need pushing over the edge, it's only $15.)

Caught up with Elbert last night over tacos, and retrieved Singapore Devi, the guitar that Aji's girlfriend gave me. It's sharing my plane ticket to South America.

I listened to Moby's new album a lot today and when I got home tonight, I was inspired to do some recording. Came up with a drum track on the drum machine (tried to steal the patter from "We Are All Made of Stars"), converted it to a keyboard MIDI drum track ('cause I can't figure out single-note MIDI playback with the drum machine), then added some etherial organ melody as a MIDI track. Recorded some lead guitar over that. Found a poem in a notebook of mine from the summer 1996 and adapted some lyrics.

Wake up in a bed no longer your own
you don't feel right
you don't feel at home
oh no

I recorded a bunch of variations of that, then a simple bass guitar track. The cool thing is that it's unlike any music I've made before. The not cool thing is that it's more of a riff or a jam than a song at this point. It has no shape or ending or tension really. Hopefully, I can incorporate it into song sometime.

That's it. Bedtime for Bonzo...

5/22/02, 8:54 am

A New York Times reporter discovered the my favorite food find from my trip to Laos. Florence Fabricant (which seems to be an unfortunate name for a reporter seeking accuracy!) writes about kaipen in today's Times.

I'm excited about the opportunity to try kaipen in New York, but I doubt it will never taste as good as it did that first night at the Cold River Guesthouse in Lunag Phabang where Elbert and I ate it freshly flash-fried with some sticky rice and a shot of lao-lao.

5/20/02, 9:58 pm

Arrived home to a nice postcard from Bri in West Virginia, via PostcardX. Fun!

Three new CD purchases recently. Rusted Root's Welcome To My Party, Moby's 18, and an album of the Dead covering Dylan tunes. Super-different and all enjoyable.

There's a fascinating look into corporate IT culture in general and Microsoft specifically in this transcript from a meeting that preceded the end of RealNames. My favorite quote is "...this was really a fundamental and forward looking decision about us going forward." Just another reminder that Dilbert is mild compared to reality.

The front page of this site sports a new little box which shows a random link from my frequently surfed list. I rigged it up with blogrolling.com's RSS feed, a shell script, and a PHP xml parser. Anthony asked me about it this morning, wondering if it was real-time like the iTunes listening box is. It's not, but I seem to be sometimes unable to differentiate between curiosity and a challenge so... I did some experiments and wrote a parser for the IE history file, which is maintained in by the app as HTML in real-time. The parser is smart enough to identify sites visited in the last ten minutes. (Gotta love having perl ship with your desktop system!) From here it should be fairly straightforward to make it update the site. I need to think through the implications a bit first though...

5/20/02, 1:06 am

Exhausted. Drained by the sun, five hours of volleyball and a trips to both Long Island and New Jersey.

On Saturday, I went out to help Nana set up a cable modem and give her a lesson on using the internet and email. Yes, my eighty-year-old grandmother has joined the internet age. She and I had lunch at Mother Kelly's, a family-operated Italian joint with great food and congenial service.

Later, I hopped in the back of the yet-to-be-named VW bus and went down to to the Jersey Shore with Anthony and Liz. We saw a beautiful sunset, ate Mexican food and watched Spiderman in the suburbs. It was fun. The movie was only eight bucks (it's ten here in NYC). Still, I'm glad I don't live in the suburbs.

Spiderman was fantastic, BTW. Really captured the best of the comic book.

We slept in the bus at a family campground. (I guess I was Jr. in the family...) In the morning we headed for the beach and arrived in plenty of time to sign-in for the beach volleyball tournament and pick up Matt from the train station.

We played four-on-four and did ok for our first tournament of the summer. Matt has played beach tourneys before, but none of the rest of us had, so there was a lot of adjustments to make, especially to serving. We went 2-6 in pool play, missing a playoff berth but having a lot of fun and improving as the day went on. Definitely want to do that a bunch more this summer!