willhines.net

They cats will not stop splashing water. They refuse to drink it right out of the bowl. Maggie dips her paw in the bowl and then licks her paw. Hopey splashes the water out of the bowl onto the floor, chases the stream and bats at it as it spreads across the floor, and then begrudgingly sips at it. There is an entire bowl’s worth of water spread out across my kitchen floor right now like a lake, with two cats staring at it from afar, proud of their work. Good job, cats! You’ve killed and flattened a bowl of water!

They’re going to die of dehydration and, I think it’s fair to say, stupidity.

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Recent milestones:

• I turned 35.
• My improv group started making preparations for its last show.
• A smattering of exes got married, had extra babies and bought houses.

Also, I defeated Werdna.

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persnickety
willfully
elegant
economical
somnambulism
ostensibly
quotidian
resonate
mollified
natural

Grab onto them and feel safe.

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Saw the play The Pillowman yesterday. I don’t see many plays. But the night before, I was at McManus with Eliza, Tanouye, Thunder, Birch, and Gavin. Gavin and Eliza were raving about The Pillowman, and how it was closing this Sunday. So Tanouye and I, the unemployed, drunkenly swore to wake up the next morning, go to the half-price ticket booth and see the matinee showing. Which we did.

As far as drunken promises go, that’s a pretty highbrow one — to go see a critically-praised play. Usually drunken promises involve Atlantic City, or always being friends forever, or moving to Austin, Texas. But at 12:30 I stepped out of the train station, and Tanouye and I waited in [...]

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I’m heading out now to buy an egg and cheese on a whole wheat bagel.

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The most difficult part, by far, of my purge of apartment clutter is done. I have thrown out my jewel cases and most liner notes.

“Good God!” I can hear my fellow music-lovers gasp. “The jewel cases, maybe — and that’s only MAYBE — but the LINER NOTES?”

You got it. I THREW THEM OUT. With rare exception (I kept the recent Elvis Costello releases with his cool behind-the-music ramblings, and the booklet to Smile) , I plucked out the cover art that has kept me company for sometimes 15 years (in the case of the photo of the “old” Beatles on the Blue Greatest Hits album) or maybe just a matter of months (the freaky picture of the waving radish-slice-head woman [...]

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I missed a lot of great albums recommended to me. I’m now keeping a list of them here, so I can proceed down the list systematically:

http://www.willhines.net/albums.html

Good God, check out that list! That’s huge! Yet my obsessive nature commands me to listen to everything.

The only way I’m getting through it is if someone hands me a bunch of these on discs. Purnell listed like 700 albums, but then again he DID give me copies of them, and I listened to them. If anyone can help me out — especially if you recommended something to me and really want me to hear it:

The red rows I don’t have copies of.
The white rows I already had or already [...]

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All right, I’m feeling restless, and getting a bit lower on savings than I’d like. There’s only one reasonable solution: I have to get a job.

Computer programming job. If you guys know of any, let me know. My general skills are web programming: PHP, Perl, ASP, Cold Fusion. I’m also good with MySQL, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server databases. I’m strong with Microsoft Access. And most of all, I’m good at tying together lots of different applications and making things work. And figuring things out. I’m a workaholic obsessive, too. So that’s nice.

I have a few leads, so maybe this search won’t take that long. But consider the word put out that Will Hines is trying to be a [...]

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I was watching an improv show last week. 10 minutes into the set, a couple sat down next to me. Soon, the guy leaned over, pointed at the stage and asked: “What’s going on?”
I summed up the scene that was in progress: “That man has a real bird. The other guy has a mechanical bird, and they’re competing.”

The guy nodded and started watching.

About four scenes later, the guy asked “What’s happening now? Does THAT guy have the mechanical bird now?”

And I said. “It’s a different scene. They’re doing a series of scenes. When someone runs along the front it means a new scene is starting.” The scene that was occuring at this time involved a man with a fission [...]

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Most of the members of Monkeydick decided to grab some dinner before what would be our third-to-last show. We watched Andy Rocco’s hilarious “How To Go Down On Women The Andy Rocco Way” and then trudged two blocks to Dallas BBQ on 8th Avenue and 23rd. Now I’m going to allow here that it was my suggestion to go there, and I’m also going to allow that the food was very good and service quick and polite — but I feel compelled to point out that you’d have a hard time finding a larger and more appalling example of debaucherousness unbound than a Dallas BBQ.

On an island of tiny cramped restaurants, Dallas BBQ in Manhattan is a cavern [...]

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