One of the most amazing things about music is how individual songs can carry with them deep personal meaning, how simply hearing one can trigger the most specific and powerful sense-memories.  For example, I can't hear "House of the Rising Sun" without thinking about the time I spent in New Orleans hanging around in a bordello; or "Folsom Prison Blues" without recalling how I once shot a man in Reno just to watch him die; or "Hot for Teacher" without remembering how I was once the lead guitarist of Van Halen for over fifteen years.  And yet, for someone else, those songs might mean something totally different.
 
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The church near my home has a big marquee in the front where they put little messages that are supposed to be funny and insightful, just these various pieces of advice about how to lead your life in a more spiritually fulfilling way.  Usually they're quite comforting, but this week, it said "GOD HAS A BIG ERASER".  I don't know about you, but that completely creeps me out.  I guess it's supposed to mean than God can just wipe clean any mistake you make, but since it's God, what if he just decides to erase the whole universe?  Also, and I don't want to seem like I'm second-guessing God here, especially now that I know that he has a big eraser, but this is 2007.  Shouldn't God have a big delete key by this point?  There's a lot going on in the world and I feel like he shouldn't be spending a lot of time manually going through all of his records.  When I tried to ask the minister about this, he told me to come back during the daytime when the door to his house wasn't locked.

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People are always asking me why I called this site the "Ludic Log".  Or for my social security number.

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My brother Ray and I have a lot in common, but the one thing I've never been able to understand is why he doesn't share my love of the open road.  Just the other day, I was talking about how much I love to just pile into the car, load up on some road food, and hit the highway, driving off in any direction at any time of day with no destination in mind, just to see what the day reveals to me.  He said he didn't quite see it that way, and I told him that we'd just have to agree to disagree.  I think that's when he asked me if I could untie him from the front bumper, but it was hard to hear over the roar of the wind.

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One thing that really bugs me is when people use meaningless, trendy, psycho-babble buzzwords when they can't think of anything intelligent to say.  I mean, I guess if your definition of a so-called "alcoholic" is someone who can't stop drinking no matter how much it harmfully effects his health, family and ability to earn a living, then fine, I'm an "alcoholic".  And I guess if your idea of a good time is to label every single person who ties up a drifter and sets them on fire in an abandoned Plymouth a "murderer", then I guess I'm that too, Professor Freud.

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You know what I really miss?  Coca-Cola.  Does anyone else remember that?  How come you can't get that stuff anymore?

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I always like to help out my co-workers, especially when they're doing stuff like writing their self-evaluations come review time.  It's really hard to honestly appraise your own talents without seeming either too self-deprecating or too egotistical, so I give them little bits of advice on how to write a good one.  Management, for example, really likes 'metrics' -- cold, hard numbers that allow them to objectively measure your job performance.  So, to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, you could say "The dollar value of company property I steal on a quarterly basis is down 34% from this time last year."  They also really like it when you show your progress on a given goal, but make it clear that you still want to improve towards an acheivable end  results.  So you could say "I have my compulsion to steal company property almost completely under control, and I believe I can eliminate it completely by 2015."

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Evolution is something I don't think should be taught in schools, because I just find it too difficult to believe that humanity could possibly have evolved from monkeys.  I do believe, however, that moneys evolved from laser-eyed space lizards, and that horses have vestigal dolphin fins hidden inside a third stomach.  And that's why I'm suing the Department of Education for three trillion dollars.

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"Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and the half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin." (Frank Moore Colby)