Alright, I guess I haven’t been posting as much I as should be. And I don’t know if there’s much more to tell than nothing. Driving back and forth from home to davis every week has put miles on my car and eaten a sizable hole in my income. Home’s fun sometimes, when I find a friend. Davis is hot, too hot sometimes. I think god hates this city.

It’s late and there’s work to be done, most of my clothes are dirty, and my room smells like feet. I guess I’ll clean for the coming school year, maybe the gods will be gracious.

I’ve been having pretty vivid dreams this past week. Normally I can’t remember any of my dreams, and I almost never take naps, but four out of the five past business days I returned from campus and passed out on my bed from fatigue. I’d wake up slowly each time and find myself in a semi-lucid fantasy. In one, I was in a crazy restaurant and everyone was eating massive pancakes with lots of butter. I got in on the pancake action too, but gave up shortly and ordered pita bread stuffed with seafood chow mein. It was mighty tasty. During my last nap—on Thursday—I found myself driving under the influence and was pulled over by the police. Despite the fact that I was more intoxicated than I’ve been in ages, the cop only cared about the guitar I had in my lap (how I drove with a huge acoustic in my lap is beyond me). He explained that the wood of the guitar was known to harbor parasites which were dangerous to the local flora. Somehow, both the police officer and I ended up back at my place. He took a nap on the couch while I fixed myself dinner. At one point I got all maternal and put a blanket over him because he looked cold. What the fuck? At least the dream cop didn’t give me a dream ticket.

Christ, I must sound retarded.

In more coherent news, I just bought more plants for the house, plus some live mint and cilantro for the kitchen. I also got around to replacing the light bulbs outside our front door, inside the ceiling fan, and above the washer and dryer in the garage. This is boring, I understand, but let me have my victories, no matter how small.

Hey Bush, Condi, et. al., don’t let the smoking gun come in the shape of a mushroom cloud, mmkay?

I won’t be apologizing for the scarcity of updates here at Duolab anymore. I’m a busy boy, and 10-15 daily visitors aren’t really enough to inspire the prolific writer in me. Maybe y’all should bitch at Mazer more; he hasn’t posted in three months.

I was in NorCal visiting my home town from 8/28 to 9/2, and it was pleasant. My mom makes awesome BBQ chicken just the way I like and I made sure to stop by Mikuni (my favorite sushi in the world) before I drove back south. I’m going to try to recap a bit now, but I doubt I’ll get everything in the right order.

After eight and a half hours of driving, I arrived at my place around 10 at night, ate quickly, then went to go hang out with Mazer by 11:30. We had nothing to do, so we went to Ralph’s and bought economy-sized packs of non-dairy creamer and started a small camp fire down the hill from Mazer’s house. When you sprinkle liberal amounts of non-dairy creamer above a fire, it combusts like a silo explosion. We took plenty of photos of us making eight foot fireballs. Woo boredom!

The next day was Ian’s welcome home party. He’d been in England/Europe for a year, so it was great to see him and his party was a nice opportunity to see a bunch of other familiar faces from high school. After the party dwindled, we met at a park and played tennis until 10:30 pm. After that, a bunch of us met up at a bar downtown and we just shot the shit for a couple more hours. Max and Bekah, who hadn’t been at the party, showed up and it was good to see them.

The next day Mazer, Bekah, Ian and I drove an hour south to Centerfolds to catch Amateur Night but ended up arriving 20 minutes too late for the main attraction. It probably would have been more fun to go to a topless-only place so we could drink booze, but we still ended up staying there for a good four hours. Ian and I did the whole here’s-a-dollar-to-wrap-your-tits-around-my-face thing, and at one point this one dancer came over and sat at our table for 15 minutes and chatted with us. She claimed to be going to UC Davis (taking classes towards her Real Estate license, wtf), and she apparently commutes to LA every Friday because the clubs/patrons pay better and she makes about $2500 per weekend. Later, when she was on stage, we gave her a couple bucks for being so genial. She was also ridiculously cute. On our way back home, we picked up a bunch of Tsing Tao and a case of Rolling Rock and sat out on Mazer’s deck drinking and talking until the sun came up. That was awesome.

The next day I went to the dentist to get my face raped (ouch ouch ouch) and stopped by Posh Nosh so Bekah could give me free food. While I ate on their oh-so-Nevada-City patio, I listened to her and the other three waitresses talk about creative sex acts, pubic hair, dicks and bad tippers. Yes, this was all in front of the rest of the patrons, and they were loud enough that I’m sure half the diners could hear the conversation as they ate. Delightful. That night we bought 40s of Mickeys, orange juice and more beer, then convened at Mazer’s again for Brass Monkeys and general intoxication. I think our original plan called for the creation of forts and drinking games, but we mostly just watched bad movies from the 80s and got trashed. Sleep came like an avalanche that night.

I headed home in the morning and slept until 5:00 pm. Mike had left Nevada City for Davis that morning so he could put in some time at work, but we met up in Roseville (45 minutes south, equidistant from NC and Davis) for a delicious sushi dinner. Val, Bekah and Bekah’s little sister joined us and we ate like champs. After dinner, I just continued driving south and arrived home at 4:30 am. My sleep schedule was totally fucked up, but at least I was able to collapse in my own bed. I was happy that I’d made the drive in eight hours — three hours less than average.