matthearn.com

My popularity is without end, apparently. My comrade-in-arms Tim, husband of Jenny, last year’s Illustrious CostarTM, sent me an email the other day to alert me to my presence in the phonebook.

Of course I’m in the phone book, I replied. Most folks are listed in the whitepages, with the exception of people like my parents, who wish to remain unlisted and below the radar so the government doesn’t find out about their basement meth lab.

Did I say meth lab? I meant free puppy counseling center. That’s it.

Tim says, no dude, you need to check out page 8. So I checked out page 8. Here it is, in all its glory, along with page 9:

(You can click it and see it even bigger!)

It may be a little hard to tell, so here’s the detail:

(Again, click it for the SUPER closeup.)

Yesh, that’s me and Jenny. In the Verizon phonebook for New Castle County, Delaware.

Big ups to the Brandywiners for being brave enough to use a picture of my scary self as an advertisement. Whoof. (My face makes baby Jesus cry.)

Okay, here be the pictures and amusing captions from my trip to Dover International Jaunpiece on 6/4. Yeah, it took me 11 days to post them. THAT IS JUST HOW IT IS. EASE UP OFFS.

Oh, and thanks for stopping by.

Okay, if you can read this, I think the migration from omnis.com to sjtech.net went as planned. I’m still fixing a few issues here and there, but things went remarkably well considering I realized on 6/4 that my current hosting contract would be expiring on 6/9. Muchas gracias to Other Matt for his help setting me up.

Now I have to start getting pictures edited and uploaded, so expect to see them later this week. Hopefully today I can get most of the pictures from the Dover races edited, and ready to post tomorrow, and then by the end of the week I can put up the pictures from Craig and Mel’s wedding, at which there was much revelry, and at which I got to do a lengthy James Brown impression.

As it turns out, I am freakin’ sweet.

IMP0RTENT INFOMASHAN LOL WTF!!1!1!111!!

I’m migrating to a new hosting service since omnis is mildly irksome to me. I’ll have more room, and a bit more access to the system and thusly freedom to do def and rad things, as I am wont to do.

As a result, access to teh m@tthearn.com may be a bit spotty over the next few days. Sure, I could do this on the weekend, but as I’m sure you understand, that is just now how I roll.

This week I do plan to get some of the roughly 300+ pictures I took at the racetrack this weekend, including closeups of Tony Stewart in which he looks like the devil! Good times for allz.

Stay loose killers.

I’d just like to take this space to publicly thank my wife for not being very picky about the toilet seat. Partially this is because I leave the whole seat and cover down (I read that every time you flush an open toilet you’re spraying fecal matter into the air, and I keep my toothbrush a mere 4 feet from the bowl), but even when I was a little less Obsessive-Compulsive, she was pretty chill about the whole thing.

Which, from what I’ve seen, is not the norm. When I was in college I had a friend named Emily who was downright militant about the whole thing. She and her roommates left a little sign on the toilet, the exact verbiage of which I don’t quite recall, but the gist of which was that people who stand up to pee are evil, and if we don’t put the seat back down we can expect to be admonished. I was usually in full compliance, but once I forgot, and Emily nearly kicked me out of the house. She was screaming at me like I’d taken a dump in her shampoo bottle or peed in the soy milk or something. I was totally blown away. (This was clearly a larger issue for her and her roommates than things that I would have considered far more pressing, such as the fact that their bathtub never truly drained, so if you wished to shower, you had to stand ankle deep in murky water, portions of which were up to a week old. Just nasty.)

After that escapade, I got around the issue by just leaving the toilet seat down when I peed. I didn’t TRY to get any on the seat, but accidents do happen, you know.

Even my mother gets into the act a bit. She’s an extremely rational person, so she justifies her attitude on the matter in this way:

1. When women use the toilet, the seat will always be down.
2. When men use the toilet, half the time the seat will be down, and half the time the seat will be up.
3. Ergo, the toilet seat is down for 75% of all toilet-related functions.
4. Thusly, it makes more sense to just leave it down except in the 25% of uses, and then immediately it should be put back down.

I guess I can understand her reasoning, except for a few problems:

1. Everyone pees more frequently than they “drop the chalupa.” At least, most folks do, I think. If you poop every time you pee, you should see a doctor. Particularly if it’s some kind of thin gruel-ish substance.
2. By their own admission, girls do not poop at all.
3. I pee about twice as often as everyone else.

By my calculations, if I poop once a day, and a girl pees 4 times a day, and I pee 8-9 times a day (which is my norm), then the toilet seat has been down roughly half the times it’s been used. Just a thought.

However, all of this discussion is sadly just tapdancing around the true fact that I want to get across, which is this: any time a woman comes out of the bathroom, ranting and screaming about you always leaving the toilet seat up, it may sound like she’s saying this:

“Thanks for leaving the seat up again, you jerk! Why won’t you ever learn?”

But in reality, she is saying this:

“I am too stupid to remember to check and see if the seat is down before I plop my ass on the john!”

And the fact that my wife doesn’t do this indicates that she is one of the smart ones. Even if she can’t read.

Er, won’t read. Won’t. Not can’t. She can definitely read. I think.

This conversation between Milo and myself has me chortling uncontrollably. I’m sure it’s not that funny to the outside reader, but I’m posting it here anyway.

BTW: To understand the last bit about paintball, you need to watch this. And trust me, it’s worth the download. Guaranteed.

MiloBloom34: her getting you will be easier because if I’m not ready to go by the time my wife gets home I’ll likely be riding on the roof.
MattHearnCSC: “riding on the roof?”
MattHearnCSC: Oh, of the car.
MiloBloom34: yes.
MattHearnCSC: I get it.
MattHearnCSC: I thought you meant that you would manifest your displeasure with our inability to fix your fence by climbing onto your house and riding it a la Slim Pickens in “Dr. Strangelove.”
MattHearnCSC: If there is any chance that that might happen, please inform me now so that I can remember to bring my camera.
MiloBloom34: my house is high.
MattHearnCSC: Contact high from the drug dealer next door?
MiloBloom34: High above the ground.
MiloBloom34: hence the reason I can’t get the satellite dish off my roof.
MattHearnCSC: Just tape a bunch of your fence timbers together until you have something long enough to swat at it until it falls off.
MattHearnCSC: heehee The mental image of you waving a 40 foot pole made of fence rails, periodically banging the [bad word] out of your gutters, is amusing the [bad word] out of me.
MiloBloom34: heheheheheh
MiloBloom34: damn
MiloBloom34: m ycd burner eats up an icredible amount of resources
MattHearnCSC: hehehehe It’s even more amusing if, in the mental image, I show up and shoot you twice with a paintball gun, causing you to scream like a girl and drop the fence-rail-pole on a neighbor’s new grill
MattHearnCSC: I’m quite seriously sitting here giggling uncontrollably
MattHearnCSC: IQSSHGU
MattHearnCSC: heeheehee

Last night I dreamt about James Lileks, but I want to make it clear that in my dream, I did not attempt to sex him up. That is an important point that needs to be clearly enunciated. I DID NOT ATTEMPT RELATIONS WITH JAMES LILEKS. AND EVEN IF I DID, HE TURNED ME DOWN. That is, assuming I had attempted to get with him, WHICH I DID NOT DO.

Anyway. So I guess because he’s so awesome, which he is, in my dream I decided I’d like to give him a gift.

Personally.

So I wrapped something (I don’t remember what, exactly), and flew out to Minneapolis, and knocked on his door. No answer for a minute, and then oddly enough my cellphone rings, and it’s James. Huh? I don’t know. Anyway, he asks me what’s up, and I say, “Hi bud, I’m just here to give you a present ’cause you’re rad,” or something to that effect. So he comes down and lets me in.

Just then I realize that I no longer have his present. All I have is one of his books, unwrapped, which would be a strange thing to give him, as one would suspect he probably already had a copy lying around somewhere. Then he informs me that the package I sent him arrived yesterday, and sure enough, there’s my wrapped present, sitting on his kitchen table. To sum up:

1. I flew to Minneapolis to give Lileks a gift that apparently I had already shipped to his home.
2. He thought nothing wrong with this, and had even waited until I showed up to open the package.

The package was about the size of a recipe box, and yet it contained a large wall calendar. A used one. I have no idea what else was in the box, but apparently as a whole, the present was satisfactory, because James and I decided it would be fun to go out for a ride and smoke small cigars. At a gas station. With my parents.

Huh? What in the brightly-colored horse apples?

Then, we decided it would be fun to go to some hotel bar, where we met up with Sean Patrick Thomas (A Delaware native, I’ll have you know!) and his posse, where I did a bit of dancing, and made Sean angry at me for calling him “B,” which apparently in my bizarre dream world is akin to using the “N” word. I apologized profusely.

After the party died down, James took me upstairs into some kind of hotel ballroom, where they were going to have a Doom3 demonstration on a large screen. At this point, I woke up and said very mean things to my wife. I DON’T KNOW WHY. I WAS HALF-ASLEEP. I MAY ALSO HAVE KICKED A CAT IN THE RIBS.

My wakeful life feels so empty now.

In honor of the 262nd anniversary of French Revolutionaire Jean-Paul Marat, I have written a poem.

I call it: Ode to (Hopefully) Never Being Stabbed In A Bathtub.

My name is Jean-Paul.
Some folks call me JP.
Some folks say I’m a terrific athlete.
That may have once been true.
But now I’m dead in a bathtub.

I’m not gonna lie to you; it stung. A lot.
Being stabbed, I mean. In a bathtub.
It was kinda like that tattoo I got on spring break in Nice that year, remember?
Except that in the case of the tattoo
(It was the Chinese character for “Shark,” in case you forgot),
The bleeding eventually stopped.
And I got a nice lotion to rub on to prevent sagging, or some such nonsense.

I’ll never quite get how all these white rags are supposed help my skin.
Stupid doctors.
All this treatment for lesions, and some wild bitch just cuts me.
Weak. HELL of weak.
Ah, screw it. I’m gonna go read ALP. Call me when a spot opens in heaven for victims of poor head coverings.

Fin.

Wednesday I was supposed to have a doctor’s appointment, and thank God they cancelled it due to retarded receptionists overbooking the poor MD. It meant HW and I got a chance to rest at home a bit before our usual Wednesday evening rehearsal, and the added fun bonus is that we detected Pete’s issue before he got too sick.

I was sitting playing a video game, motionless but for my thumbs, unblinking and drooling, when I hear a caterwauling from downstairs that rouses me from my reverie. There’s yowling and hissing and spitting, so I figure Pete and Veronichort are having a triple-X throwdown of some kind, and yell at them to cut it out. The unseen violence stops, and I go back to playing GTA: San Andreas, in which I believe I have killed 274 peace officers.

After a few minutes, the feline yelling began yet again, but this time Pete had come upstairs. I turned around to see what his problem was, and he was lying on one haunch, his legs splayed out, with his little thorny cat wang pointing at me and waving. He was alternating screaming at the top of his lungs with periodically reaching down to gnaw on his junk, and anytime any of the other cats went near him he hissed at them. (As a result, of course, the other three cats wouldn’t leave him alone, and kept wandering over to see what the big deal was.)

So I went over and took a look at his “area,” (©2002 Liz Hearn) and noticed that there was a small amount of dark yellow goo leaking out of it. This did not seem healthy, so I called our vet friend Tolly, who said, “Better get him to a hospital right away, he might be blocked up.”

So we called Pike Creek Animal Hospital, and they said they could take him, so we stuffed him in a carrier (he doesn’t like those; I’m still bleeding in a few places) and drove him over. The technician weighed him (almost 15 pounds. He’s a monstrous animal), and took his temperature (rectally. He was absolutely THRILLED with this turn of events, but at least the temperature was normal). Then the vet came in and laid hands on him, pressing on the poor guy’s belly to try and squeeze out some pee. She got a drop or two, but not much, and she said, “He’s blocked. I’m gonna have to unblock him.”

I winced a bit at this.

“Hopefully it’s just at the tip, in which case I won’t have to use anesthetic.”

My first thought was, if anybody ever tries to “unblock” my junk without completely knocking me unconscious and supplying me with a minimum of 1000 grams of uncut heroin for my recovery period, I will plunge a scalpel into their taint, but I remained silent.

“If it’s deeper,” [big wince] “I’ll have to knock him out.”

Lovely. The technician brought us a form to sign (I honestly haven’t the least clue what it says), and then picked him up, and he did his usual death-defyingly cute move of just flopping into her arms and resting his head on her shoulder. It was so pathetic, we almost got choked up.

Yesterday afternoon I called to check on him, and he still hadn’t peed yet, so they wanted to keep him for more observation. Apparently he would sit in the litter box and just stare at the technician. I can’t say I blame him though, since I would imagine trying to pee through his ravaged manmeat would be just about the worst pain of all times. So hopefully we’ll hear from the vet this afternoon and we can go pick him up.

Everybody pray for the health of the wang of Pete, aka His Holiness Pope Peter II, aka Kreplach, aka Krepiss, aka Furdiß, aka Dog.

I entered a Vocal competition! It’s run by the Center for Contemporary Opera in La Grande Pomme (New York, you hillbillies), and was pretty easy to enter, due to the power of modern technology. Long gone are the days when you had to sing in front of a bunch of people to audition for something. Now they only do that when they intend to have mediocre has-beens make fun of you and put you on TV. For this audition, all I had to do was make a CD of songs fitting certain requirements, fill out a form, and send it all in with a check for forty smackers (ow).

Making the CD was a bit of a trial because I only had a few weeks to get it done. Adding to the complexity was the fact that their song requirements were rather stringent:

• Two songs from the standard repertory
• Two arias written after 1950, at least one of which is in English
• Three 20th or 21st century songs, at least one of which is in English

Finding that stuff was a challenge, since most of my vocal music is in foreign tongues. So I had to spend a lot of time at the library, going through scores and photocopying tunes, until I found 7 pieces that would suit. (Even so, I ended up replacing one of them.)

So then I rolled up on my parents’ phatty criznib and with the able assistance of my father (who, despite having torn a muscle in his right calf, can still play the piano similarly to how you or I might ring a bell), laid down mad trackz, doggle, onto my homewok Jill‘s extremely rad DAT playa.

Then it was home to begin the horrifically painful process of listening to multiple recordings of myself and figure out which is the “best,” which is a lot like choosing between being shot and being stabbed. Throw a little reverb on, remove the dog barking in the background, and I give you:

Songs In The Key of RIGHTEOUS
Matt Hearn

Two arias from the Standard Repertoire:

• Quia fecit mihi magna, from Magnificat by J. S. Bach, aka “MC BaroQ.” This is actually not one I got from the library, but Dad and I decided to throw it in ’cause I knew it already, having learneded it for auditions back in high school, which admittedly was 10 years ago, thanks for making us feel old. (Punk.)
• Papageno’s Aria from The Magic Flute. It’s a little long, but it’s worth it, mostly because the piano part is bitchin’ hard and Pops nailed it like he was putting up siding.

Two arias written after 1950:

• Little Elegy, by Ned Rorem. Short, sweet, and not too weird, for Rorem. (Listening to him is a lot like drinking bongwater and then hanging out at a construction site.)
• One Hand, One Heart, an old favorite by Leonard Bernstein. From West Side Story. I’m sure even YOU have heard this one, you uneducated riff-raff. How did you get in here, anyway? Shoo!

Three 20th century songs:

• When I Am Dead My Dearest, by John Ireland. Yes, it’s as depressing as it sounds. Pretty rad, though, and the piano part is easy enough that even I can play it. (I am not a very good pianist.)
• On A Quiet Conscience, by Paul Bowles. It’s mad weird, but extremely enjoyable. Not too long, either, so you can put up with the strange tones coming from your cheap headphones for a while, and dream of kings and starlets and fire.
• O Mistress Mine, by Roger Quilter, words from Shakespeare. This is a personal fave of mine, and as such of course I don’t think I sound very grood on it. Still, worth a listen.

So I threw all that crap on a CD and sent it off on Saturday. According to the US Postal Service, ’twas delivered on Monday afternoon. I wonder if anyone’s listened to it yet and wept bitterly.