and here's to you mrs. robinson

We're running out of room here at the red and black is the new black and red memorial gardens. You've all heard by now. Anne Bancroft. 73. Uterine cancer. I won't make a big stink about it.

I'm fearful that I'm heading into another one of my insomnic phases. Monday night, I didn't sleep very much. Actually, after struggling with it all night, I was finally getting some decent sleep, but I had a dream that I was at my parents house, and my mother woke me up to tell me I was going to be late to my sister's wedding. Never mind that my only sister has been married for 13 years. It's just a dream. But even in the dream, I wasn't able to sleep. That's a bit of a bad break.
Last night, I actually stayed up all damn night. No sleep. Not one wink. I wasn't sleepy when it was time for me to go to bed, so I played PlayStation hockey. I was able to improve my Hurricanes season to something like 27-0-0-0. I've been experimenting with different strategies and taking deliberate penalties to practice penalty killing. Even after upping the difficulty setting, I'm winning every game by at least 20 goals. So I played a few more games in the season, then since I still wasn't tired, I decided to play some exhibition games as the US National team. France was much tougher than they seemed like they should have been. Same with Japan. Then the strangest thing happened, and made me make the decision to forgo the bed-going portion of the night. I lost to Italy. And it wasn't even close. I was frustrated as hell because there aren't even any NHL'ers on the Italian national team. Should've been a cake walk. Again and again, they would beat me.
After getting pummeled by Italy like three times, I just gave up. 5:45 am. Then I had the choice of going to sleep and risking sleeping through the alarm clock, or just staying up. I chose the latter. I finally got around to watching Into the Arms of Strangers, which I've had from Netflix for probably two weeks. It's a documentary about the 10,000 Jewish children who in 1938-9 were transported from central Europe (mostly Czechoslovakia) to England to escape Nazi persecution and gain refugee status. There were several people who are in their 70's or 80's who told their first-hand stories. Most were warmly taken in by foster families who treated them like their own. I didn't even know that there was such an effort to grant refugee status, so it was nice to learn that historical information. Also to learn that there was such a display of magnanimity in such wretched times. I'm not doing it justice, but it really is worth a watch.

One of the glorious things about having a pig sty for a car is that sometimes you find stuff you forgot about or gave up on. Today, I found my one and only Lucksmiths record (Why that Doesn't Surprise Me) in there. I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, but I couldn't find it anywhere. What a sweet, sweet feeling that was. Like when you find the $20 bill you left in your suit pants last time you wore them. See, I've been listening to Badly Drawn Boy a lot lately, and he has this one song that sounds like it ought to be the Lucksmiths. You prolly wouldn't think so if you heard it, but I do. And that's all that matters.

By the way, feel free to make your donations to send me to Reno for the Scrabble Nationals. I won't win anything, so I can't reimburse you right away. In fact, I'll probably never pay you back. I'll accept cash, check, money order, coins, paypal. No barter system. No "gifts in kind".

I'm getting rather tired. I hope I sleep like a motherfucker tonight.

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