9/21/04 5:16 AM: "If anything in life is certain, if history has taught us anything ... it's that you can kill anyone." -- Michael Corleone

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE: So I've been choosing evil, and it's been feeling like the right thing to do. Moreover, I've been so much happier. There's a quote in Outsiders #13 that comes to mind, courtesy of Judd Winick writing Dr. Thaddeus Sivana, speaking to the reformed supervillain group the Fearsome Five (emphasis his): "You all have to realize that ... well ... we're ... just no damn good. We're evil. Each of us, for a variety of reasons, whether its greed, narcissism, a chemical imbalance, poor upbringing, you name it ... we have felt the need to do what is commonly thought of as bad. I gotta tell you, campers, when you accept that fact, it's all so much easier. Certainly a lot less stressful." For instance, I know that on a regular basis I'm doing something horrible and insidious to someone who cares a great deal about me, and I don't in any way care. My girl Dana says I'm just passing along the savings, given the hell I've been through. I got no argument with that.

LOVE NOTES: In an earlier version of this site, I ran a "column" called "love notes," where I would discuss the hard and dirty details of my love life with a kind of scrutiny that could almost be considered forensic. Recently, with my newly revamped love life, I'm debating bringing it back, pseudonyms and all. If you think that's a good idea, let me know. If you think it's a bad idea, also, let me know.

Once, on the old version, years before I was even married, a woman I was dating recognized details about our date on one page and threw a hissy fit. I stopped talking about (and dating) her, but I kept on doing the "proto-blog." I've been feeling the itch again. Mmm. Developing ...

VOCALIZE: Despite some songs meaning a lot to me, or loving the way I sing them in the car, I'm letting some material go and taking it out of my repertoire. "I Wanna Sex You Up" by Color Me Badd. "Every Breath You Take" by the Police. Even "Best I Ever Had" by Vertical Horizon and "Ascension" by Maxwell. Now that I'm recording more, I get to listen to how my voice adapts to these songs, and I'm trying to cut any song where I sound strained. I'm getting older, and I need to think long term about the stability of my voice and singing things I can do well and sustainably.

Meanwhile, the songs I actually do well (in my opinion, such as George Michael's "Kissing a Fool," 3 Doors Down's "When I'm Gone," Coldplay's "The Scientist," etc., all available in the MP3 folder of my Yahoo! Briefcase) are -- according to people who hear me sing a lot -- in really fine form and sounding really good. I'm finding my voice is very similar to Morrissey, and his whimsical stalker music in particular sounds like stuff I want to sing. Honestly, I'd love a body of work like his in terms of writing as well, but I have a ways to go, and some more ambitious auditory goals in terms of multiple genres.

Strange mild digression: According to his site, Latin people seem to love Morrisey, and he loves Latin people. Likewise, I love Morrissey and I love Latin people (especially the females, especially the cuter ones with nice shapes). There's gotta be a connection there somewhere ...

I'VE GOT THE MUSIC IN ME: Speaking of music, in listening to the songs I like to sing and the ones I don't, I noticed a really odd dichotomy in music coming out these days. Black songs will happilly loop a chorus throughout the "end" of a song and do runs over it, exhibiting virtuosity. White songs would rather write variations on the theme, almost like a jazz track. Examples from today's listening:

Bobby Valentino's "Slow Down" has what's called an "A-B-A-B" songs structure (verse, chorus, verse, chorus), with a kind of two tiered bridge (a "c" section") and then the kind of ending I mentioned, the chorus looping as he kind of plays vocally over it. I'm not so good with that kind of song. Jill Scott's "Golden" also does it, now I think about it.

Conversely, Morrissey's "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get" off his 1994 album Vauxhall and I (It's Morrissey Day on the Operative Network! "I'm whimsically bitter, beyotch!" -- this song started the phrase "whimsical stalker music" for its insistent tone and pep) the close of the song is a long and extended bridge, whereas he kind of downward spirals towards an ending. Coldplay's "The Scientist" does the same (and I've even further enhanced it by adding a specialized refrain and echoing some stuff from the first verse).

I know I'm gonna catch beef with Black listeners, but I wanna write more like the latter. Only partially because my vocal acrobatics are less than impressive. I don't really care about that kind of static. TTD and Len Kravitz would understand. Whadda ya gonna do, you are who you are, unless you do a lot of work to make it otherwise.

THE JOLLY ROGER: So I saw that this little software company made a cool thing called iPodDownload, that works as a plug in to iTunes and lets you download the contents of your iPod on to a Mac. I rushed out and downloaded a copy, and it's a good thing I did. Within a day, Apple's deadly team of legal ninjas invaded the guy's ISP, wielding katanas and cease-and-desist orders, and talked his sysadmin into yanking his domain. Note: he found out about this after logging on to find his site down.

Now, I'm one of the biggest Apple zealots alive, and I've purchased or helped in the purchase of more than 40 Macs and easily a half dozen iPods. But I think that was just plain rude -- you talk to the guy, not his ISP.

However, I have no desire to get my domain bonked, as my desire to fight the power is not what it once was. So I posted the thing to my Yahoo! Briefcase and left it there, soon finding that it spread into some other mirrors. Information wants to be free, and unless Apple's legal ninjas are gonna break into my house and have a kung fu fight with me like Jet Li in Hero (oh my God, that movie is so freaking amazing), they can shove it. Dat's my word.

FIESTA: So Saturday marked the third annual Virgo Birthday Bash, held this year at the house of our good pal Daniel Ruiz, his wife Ana and their baby girl Xiomara. Coincidentally, our brother Denzil celebrated the birth of his third child, a healthy baby boy named Fiwasaye Surulere Sondjata Xavier (I'm sure there's a big story behind that) so he and his clan were MIA, with good reason. The party, despite an invite list that rivaled previous years, ended up kind of intimate. It kind of shot itself in the foot in a variety of ways -- first the Hopkins/De La Hoya fight sandbagged a lot of it by front-loading the house with a phalanx of guys, who then largely dissipated. The latter half of the party had too many females, and a DJ (according to the six I was sitting with) who wasn't catering to their tastes. I noted the food ran out really early, but Daniel was fine with that anyway. There was nobody there who completely captivated my attention, and I ran at the basket without making any real shots just to keep my game up. I met Inpu's new girl, who was crazy cool and who I really like as a compliment for him.

Which brings me to an interesting situation, which further indicates to me I'm on the downswing of a cycle with Inpu and the "old crew," who are largely domestic and non-nocturnal. My old karaoke pal McGowan was at last year's party, and ... well, this year's host Ana wasn't terribly fond of him. So, by way of courtesy, I "forgot" to include his email address on the sizeable invite list. However, our sister Brandi (for reasons that remained inscrutable at press time) reached out to him about it anyway. So he messaged me via MySpace.com, which was a good thing for me. I'm very rarely on MySpace, so by the time I heard at all, it was virtually too late. So I simply messaged back, "you didn't get the invite?" and forgot about it until Tuesday or so. No fallout as of yet, but in the thick of it, it hung over my head.

So I called Inpu for advice. He leaps into some self-absorbed crap about how he thinks its more work this year, and it never was before. As a guy who "worked" the last two years, as everything from security coordinator to DJ, from pre-flight to clean-up, I was deeply insulted by this. Daniel later pointed out to me, "there's more of a distribution of work this year, and he has to do more than 'make booze' so he may think it's more work." Regardless, I listened to his concerns. Then, patiently, I waited and presented mine, which he began to mock and openly laughed at, marginalizing them. I had enough of that kind of Virgo treatment when I was married, so I said, "I'm done talking with you now, as there's no need for me to get angry at you," and hung up. I forgot about it for a while.

At Daniel's, he's coming at me with pointed comments and I'm sniping back, as we've done for years. "Do you want to take this outside," Daniel asked, "because I'd like you two to take it outside." I said I had nothing to talk about, but he asked me out on to the deck anyway. He then (I swear) got in my face and said, "Don't you ever hang up on me again." I replied, "what are you gonna do about it? I have no need to sit and have you mock me right after I listened to your self-absorbed, melodramatric whining." He of course then tried to deny doing what he specifically said he was doing -- mocking the concerns of his "younger brother" -- so I said, "look, you can take your concerns and your talk and shove it. Either jump or shut up, because I'm like 'whatever' on you in any case, 'accepting you as you are.'" He kind of backed off and said, "well, if that's it, that's all I needed to hear." Walking back in, I said, "shut up," and barely spoke a word to him the rest of the day.

Despite that, while his girl patiently waited for him, I offered to swap out and clean up so he could be with her. Even if I can't stand his stankin' ass right now, he's still my brother, and she was cute and fun and didn't deserve to be stuck with me, as I was getting progressively more surly. He declined, and finished up shortly after.

Through the latter half of the '90s, I had next to no contact on a real "friend" level with him nor any of my other rites of passage people, and those times may be back. Daniel, somehow, is still compatible with me, because he's not compromised the venom in his belly just because he's married. His wife is a lot more of a team player than ... well, any woman any of the rest of us have ever had the blessing of being with. I can't say enough how much I respect Ana, and in a day and age when my opinion of the female gender is pretty piss poor, that's a remarkable statement about the woman she is, despite her need for self-delusion about me.

UPDATED 10:04 PM: So one of the people who RSVPed for the party, a woman I'd never met who's worked with Daniel, started flirting with me via email. I flirt, I'd never seen her, I saw no harm in it. Just for informational purposes, I forwarded every single word of the emails to Daniel to let him know what was going on. Common courtesy, and all that. So she sent me an email today, saying, "May I inquire as to what the ratio of eligible bachelors was? I myself am part of something called, 'The Player's Club.'" Thinking this funny, I forwarded that to Daniel. His response ... well, I'll just include it here, for the sake of clarity ...

HT - since you didn't want to be part of a debriefing meeting, I will say this now, in print fashion, with both you and Inpu able to read it, so that you will both be able to take it for what it says witout one of you repeating it to the other without the proper context.

I take great offense to you using the RSVP thing to start hitting on people that you have never met. When I agreed to invite some friends, and have them RSVP through your system, I failed to realize that the reason you wanted to control the RSVP's is so that you could satisfy your undying lust for pussy. Did you try picking up on guys who RSVP'd? I think not, so don't act like you didn't have a personal agenda as to why you wanted to be in control of the RSVP crap.

Don't complain about working when your version of working is completely different then mine - this is bullsh*t. You have no idea who this girl is - she is a business contact of mine, one who is involved professionally with not just myself, but many individuals that I work with at my company, including my supervisor, my VP and my CEO. If there was a dialog between you two that happens to offend her, and she should happen to get pissed at me because you got access to her e-mail simply because she RSVP'd to a party that I invited her too, well, obviously you won't see a problem with this issue.

I have a huge problem with all of this. There are 3 girls in particular that I am "acquainted" with that I know RSVP'd through your system, because they e-mailed/called me to tell me they had. None of tem showed up. Is it possible that you sent them similar e-mails that offended them? I don't know, and I am going to spend the next couple of days trying to find out. If I find out that anybody, and I mean anybody, was offended by you..... well, we will deal with that should it happen.

Ana has similarily asked me about her friend Elizabeth, who had originally told us she would be going. Any chance she got an e-mail from you?

Now, I didn't get the girl's email and say, "hey, how are you, blah blah blah?" It had a direct question, phrased humorously, which I answered. She began trading emails with me in the same tone. Instead of, oh, I dunno, respecting the friendship and brotherhood that had me as one of the only people to actually devote my spare time to helping remodel his house in his hour of need, Daniel chose to level accusations and vitriol at me, making a personal attack. Which, sadly, is about par for the course when I actually let myself care about somebody. So I said, "If it would satisfy your delusional, over-reactionary, hair-trigger, cockamamie need for information, I can email you every single email I received and every single email I sent back to those addresses. Not that I should care what you think one way or another, but seeing you overreact this way really puts some things in their ... proper perspective. Thank you for not coming to me as your f**king brother and asking me what happened in a mature fashion, but instead leveling groundless accusations and vitriol my way. It's really educational to see how people I value really feel about me."

Would the ones I care about ever hurt or betray me?

Who else would?

It is clearly a time in my life when I am cycling away from the people I've been close to in the past, until I forget whatever horrible things they've done and am ready for more punishment. Oh, wait, I am writing this stuff down. I guess I won't forget this time! How freakin' helpful.

UPDATED 2:11 AM, 9/22/04: I wasn't in much of a mood to do my newspaper or my web column (I'm still stalling, honestly -- I'll be up all night at this rate), so I watched TV -- I had an hour and a half taped this week, (including an amazing episode of Two and a Half Men where Charlie is in a support group with Sean Penn and Elvis Costello, and a solid episode of Scrubs). As I was making some food, I reflected on how much good TV there is for me to watch, even with just an antenna. I even caught some of Jill Scott on The Tavis Smiley Show on PBS, and she's so happy in her marriage (which I wish her the best of luck with while believing that it will all end in tears, like everything else) and such a beautiful, giving spirit that I found myself smiling at the screen, happy to see her being such a force of good.

Then I stopped, in virtually the same spot I danced in last week (see "Golden" under No Matter), and realized that despite this real kind of punch in the face, I am in a really good place. Even with the car worry, which is kind of "eh, whadda ya gonna do?" I realized how happy my everyday life makes me, and how little of that involves the people I have chosen as my family (and who I theorized chose me, but whatever). I started singing "That I Would Be Good" by Alanis Morrisette, which often makes me smile. yes, I like having them around and in a still-deluded way wish we could all pool resources and ability to accomplish things, but truth be told, I don't need these people. I don't need much of anybody outside of people to keep paying me, and "that I would be good/ whether with or without you." I've built an amazing life for myself by the sweat of my brow and the force of my will, and even though it slips my mind sometimes, that's living well, and it really is a rather bloody good revenge.

... and I do so love revenge.

SOUTHSIDE: I'm now the regular Friday night KJ at Palos Verdes Bowl in Torrance. It's a very different show than my former one in Hollywood. First of all, I show up and people are there, ready to sing. On my debut night, I only sang the first song. Which is kind of cool, as I run a decently tight show. The odd part is that people there are kind of "rotation Nazis." As in, "Last time I sang after X, but this time I was after Y, what's up with that?" So I was asked to (and this is hilarious to me) write down the rotation so I could keep it straight. My old modus operandi was, "people hand me slips, I let them sing, and try not to let one person sing too close to anybody else." That kind of laissez-faire hosting won't fly in the South Bay. Which was an adjustment -- as a singer, I hated that as it could affect when I sang. As a host ... it freed me from a lot of thinking, and made the show a lot more mechanical. Which, properly managed, could give me a lot more free time to screw around. Which would be a shock. A good shock, I think, if anyone interesting is around to talk to, or I have my laptop. We'll stay on top of this story as it develops.

ROUGH RIDER: The car has more issues than i expected. According to Santa Monica Midas, where I got my oil changed (and front brakes fixed) I need two fairly major repairs done. First of all, my "oil pan gasket" needs replacing. This requires disassembling the front of the car and putting it back together with a new $50 part. That makes me sad. The cost is around $500. Ow. Then, fun of fun, my power steering is close to giving out. I don't have the money for this mess, with my registration due this month and a need for insurance to get that going. Even without that, it'd be tight. Vexing. Luckily, it looks like I can pick up some extra shifts with Star Light, as the boss Tony is headed out for knee surgery. Another developing story ...

BLOWING UP BRIDGES: Last Thursday was my first "post-cancellaton" show at Mel's, and it was weird. Like Bill Maher rolling into the ABC commissary after Politically Incorrect got shafted. I was no longer a co-worker, but here I was, still around. Weird. Anyhoo, there's this jackass named Lowell who comes in, literally orders water (sometimes with lemon), and signs up for a score of songs, nagging endlessly to find out when he's gonna sing. He doesn't tip. He doesn't buy food to support the venue. He's just an irritant, hitting on everything around. On my last show, I spiked him singing because of it (i.e. denied him the right to sing). This irked him, but what was he gonna do? So, this week he comes in and does the same, and again, now I don't care since I'm not working. It's, sadly, Dana's problem. So I largely ignore him. As I'm helping Dana pack, he foolishly approaches me and asks about Fridays, which is sure to irk me, so I give him very curt answers. Then he foolishly asks me, "Why don't you like me, Hannibal?"

Remember -- I don't work there anymore, I'm just standing around, helping a friend. So I have no need for diplomacy, and kind of channeled my inner Red Forman. I respond, "you're freakin' irritating, coming in here and not buying anything or contributing to the business at all, while being a pain in the butt and nagging 'When am I gonna sing? When am I gonna sing? When am I gonna sing? When am I gonna sing? When am I gonna sing? When am I gonna sing?' You screwed with the way I do my job, and that bothers me, and people like you are part of why I don't work here anymore." As I'm doing this, Dana is cracking up.

"Okay, that was that once," he said. "I'm really a nice guy, and if you get to know me ..."

"First impressions are normally not far off," I said, cutting him off. "If you start out irritating me, chances are you're going to continue irritating me, and I'm not having it."

Stuck, he had to leave (especially since the joint was closed and he had bought nothing again). Dana looked to me and said, "You're my hero!"

If he wanted to "make up," he'd have sought atonement, not to negotiate me out of my anger. That almost never freakin' works. Ask Bush.

THERAPY: So I'm really unhappy about how much I've had my failed marriage on my mind. Not the ex-wife herself (despite the possibility she could have popped up at the Virgo Birthday Bash, a party she originated, surely helped keep her in mind as well). No, it's more the idea of her and how crappy a choice she was that haunts me. On the Tavis Smiley show, a debt management counselor talked about how refinancing money on mortgages could be used to clear up debt. I was reminded of an early morning session signing off on a refi, saying I had no stake in the house to avoid my credit bonking the deal. Community property law would have still said i was in, but whatever. But on the refi, the money was used for more house enhancements, not the clearing of my credit that she said was so important (all while I was struggling to recreate my career in the shadow of the dot com industry imploding). Now, when it came to money, I turned over thousands of bucks at a moment's notice without ever even asking about it. Her, not so much. Maybe she was reacting to blowing several thousand on a guy's Jeep (which I remember every time I drive down Verdun, as a Jeep just like the one she fixed up is parked on the west side of the street) years before we met, and having the relationship go nowhere. Given how unlikely I am to mix finances with anyone now, I can understand that kind of "passing the savings on" philosophy. Still, I chose that sister, ignoring several warning signs because I wanted to be married. Nobody to blame there but me.

There was this sister last year, a Leo/Virgo mix who told me very quickly that she "loved" me and then proceeded to pressure me endlessly to act in ways I was not inclined to act. Even on a date recently, when asked why she was attracted to me, the sister said, "you have a lot of qualities that I am looking for." Not "I find you fascinating" or "I'm entranced by your eyes," or anything. More like, "You'll fit the role I'm looking to fill." These people can't "love" me. The girl last year, the ex-wife, and more ... they love what they want me to be. That person is fictional, and somebody I really don't want to be. Which makes me all the more resolute in my generally mercenary attitude towards them. They sing these "Ready for Love" songs and postulate about how they wanna commit, but they're just casting for TV show scenes they grew up on, not a real relationship. Which brings me back to my somewhat pessimistic view of the whole gender, but according to my "fan" Chinedum in Boston, I'm like Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone -- "not hopeless... hopeful. A hopeful romantic."

Still I'm heavily reminded of the likes of that Leo/Virgo, or this "ruthless career b*tch" who I've known for years, dated for a week before she said, "I'm not looking for anything," despite saying exactly the opposite to me on numerous occassions. Or a girl who got me home and, in a drunken attempt at foreplay, almost pulled a very important part of my anatomy out of its socket before kicking me off of her for wanting to try and pleasure her before insertion (and I quote, "I just want to screw you, I don't wanna spend any time on it"), which was only a problem because I had actually started to like her a little (that rarely goes well for me).

What is enough for them to prove they are ready for love, real love where "it's not always rainbows and butterflies/ it's compromise that moves us along?" Time. Time, hard evidence, and the ability to run headlong into the possibility of failure without a parachute or even the desire for one. And in my case, a specific jones for me and a desire to convince me of it. I ain't no easy win, Cletus.

Yeah, I want "love notes" back ... I think ...

CRAZY: Late one night, I've got the TV on and they play an episode of Dateline with Jane Pauley, who -- essentially -- went nuts. Funniest of all, right before she's diagnosed with depression, she was interviewing a clinically depressed teen who was describing things Pauley herself was experiencing. The reason why it was so zany, she was sitting there and looking at the girl with this kind of vapid grin, bipolar disorders churning away in her brain and ticking away like a mid-thirties Black woman's biological clock. So every time they show her, that same grin plastered on her pasty grill as she now knowingly discusses her mental illness, I just kept laughing. Despite the insistence of a psychological professional, would I ever really know if there wee anything wrong? How would it be differerent? Would I care, on either side of the lithium or prozac or what have you? It's all pretty funny, and laughing at a crazy, rich white lady makes it all the funnier.