I've been struck by the approximate bi-annual urge to actually clean my hovel of a bedroom. Times like these make me thankful that I shelled out the $35 at Office Depot for a shredder/wastebasket.

Oh, my family laughed at me, thought me weirder than I already was, but they didn't understand. I justified my purchase – something surprisingly hard for me to do when I'm at Office Depot or Staples, because I get a contact high and a penchant for impulse office supply shopping when I'm there – because I wanted to securely dispose of all the credit card crap I get in the mail.

Little did I realize how utterly cathartic having a shredder could be. I stumbled across a photo of an ex and myself on vacation. It had been collecting dust in a corner for almost 2 years. I deliberated (slightly) and then fed it to my mechanical Audrey II – ambivalent technicolor memories, cut quickly into long vertical ribbons, made the syncopated sound of paper rain as it hit the bottom of the wastebasket.

Nothing feels better than getting rid of stuff that's far outlived its usefulness.

Happy new year. Mwa ha ha.

Just got back from karaoke at my favorite spot, a Brazilian nightclub in Marin called Club Fusetti. Only a few people were in there, so I got to get up and sing around 7 times in 3 hours. Sweet.

So the bartender, who I think also owns the place, passed me something he wrote on a napkin:

Lou

We have two beautiful girls at the bar: Samila and Becky.

Sing one song for them.

So when the call to action was made, the choice was clear: I had to serenade them with the theme song from "The Love Boat."

Awwww yeah, mega-suave-Jack-Jones-singin'-fat-guy in the hoooooouse.

Remember that 2nd truism about karaoke I mentioned earlier – the one about the dearth of groupies? I think it applies only to me. Some dude – short guy, in shape, with a fairly strong voice and a bit of a swagger that some might construe as dickitude – ended up playing tonsil hockey with a lady on the dance floor late in the evening. While I was singing "Kiss," fer chrissakes. He carried quite a 'tude for being the alpha-male in the near-empty karaoke bar. Kinda like being the mightiest beetle on the dung heap.

Do I sound nothing less than completely embittered yet? Thought so. G'night.

So I've spent part of today relaying to friends and family my brush with Survivor glory last night. My whip-smart sister asks me, "So did you dedicate a song to her, like 'Eye of the Tiger'?" (Yes, the theme from Rocky III by... Survivor.)

"Er... no, I didn't think of it, actually," I replied. "Damn, that's a good one," I thought.

"Or how about '867-5309 / Jenny'?" That's the popular '80s song by one-hit wonder band Tommy Tutone. "You could have changed the lyrics to 'Jen-na, I've got your num-ber / I need to make you mi-ine...'"

"Aw man, and they had that song, too," I said. "Double damn", I thought.

"Time to fire up the time machine, Lou," said my brother-in-law.

It's a hilarious thought. If I ever invented a time machine – and that's way down on my to-do list, right after "Get a Ph.D. in physics so I can try to figure out how to invent a time machine" – instead of going back in time to do something noble like avert catastrophes and prevent wars, I'd probably use it solely for the purpose of feeding myself the most perfectly witty comeback – you know, the comeback I thought of 24 hours after I got zinged by someone and really could have used it. Or to give myself some suave lines when I'm flailing to keep my composure around a beautiful woman. Or to mail that bill payment I had missed, or return that overdue video to Blockbuster on time.

See, I wouldn't be a mad scientist/inventor. Just a petty and vain one.

Just got back from the karaoke encounter. Strange bit of fun.

Silver Clouds Bar and Grill is located on Lombard Street in San Francisco, in the trendy Cow Hollow/Marina district. The place was crawling with young yupsters and hotties, all singing in mightily tuneless styles. And then there were a few women in Chinese silk dresses, hawking some new Chinese import brew called Shanghai Beer. I laid down my 2 bucks for a bottle of Shanghai, and suddenly I found myself waxing sentimental for the full-bodied piss-water taste of Tsingtao.

As I walked in the door, I spied someone who looked familiar in the drunken post-frat crowd. I wasn't sure at first, but by the time I left, I was convinced where I knew her from.

It was Jenna Lewis, the spunky single-mother-of-twins / babe-in-a-pink-bikini-who-almost-got-nekkid-for-Playboy / victim-of-the-evil-Tagi-alliance from Survivor. She could tough it out on Pulau Tiga, but when it came to singing "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child, I knew why the tribe had spoken and not busted out into song. She pursued the "strength in numbers" stratagem of getting up as part of a big, tone-deaf group to sing, to no success.

I got to the bar first, and my friends followed soon after, with the Crush finally arriving after engaging in the Survivor Parking Immunity Challenge for a half-hour or so. In the span of about two hours, I sang twice: two of my "showstoppers," Prince's "Kiss" (a la Tom Jones) and Louis Prima's "Just a Gigolo." I wasn't up to top form, but I guess I faked it well enough, as the crowd was receptive and appreciative of the rare person who could halfway carry a tune. The Crush seemed impressed, which made me happy. I couldn't even glance her way when I was singing, for fear of utter embarrassment. I also got mad props from some of the testosterone-laden members of Hootie Nation™ in the bar.

When I got up to sing "Just a Gigolo," a guy yelled out, "Hey, you look like Ron Jeremy!" Sadly, this isn't the first time I've been compared to the pudgy, Semitic, mustachioed porn performer and director. I'll post a photo comparison in the near future. Somehow, I've acquired this rep of being a dead ringer for "The Hedgehog." It's happened too many times now to be called a mere coincidence – people have pulled the Ron Jeremy card on me at open-mic comedy nights, strip clubs, and now at a karaoke bar. This does not help me get laid in the least. Ron Jeremy is someone who gets action because producers pay thousands of dollars to women to fornicate with his hairy old ass on-camera. This does not inspire me. I need to hit the gym and get a penis pump, not necessarily in that order, so that I may aspire to be a "younger, cuter Ron Jeremy." A man can dream, can't he?

Anyway, the Crush says she wants to see me more often than every 8 years, which bodes well for me. "You're a rock star!" she said. Er, okay. But if there are two truisms in karaoke I've discovered, they are:

1) No matter how bad you think you sound, there's always someone up there singing much worse; and

2) No matter how good you are, karaoke will not get you groupies of any kind. Ever. Ever. And if you do obtain groupies, 6:5 odds are that they're mentally imbalanced.

Yesterday was the first time in a long while that I – a 300-plus-pound, 28-year-old hairy beast – ended up blushing, flustered and giggly from a phone conversation. (Well, at least from a non-phone sex encounter.)

I was setting up a get-together with some old high school friends – including a longtime crush of mine. The goofy part of the whole thing is that it's at a karaoke bar in San Francisco. Even goofier – the Crush wanted to see me sing. She kinda catalyzed the whole event.

Back story: I'm a karaoke enthusiast. (Ergo, I'm a sick sick man, but for now that's between me and my shrink.) My friends – at least, the friends I haven't scared off yet – don't share my enthusiasm, so they'll come to a karaoke bar very occasionally but will go nowhere near a mic. Imagine my shit-a-brick-Twinkie surprise when the Crush – through a friend of hers – let it be known that she'd like to see me sing.

So I gave her a call yesterday to confirm the evening. She said, "Yeah, I'm up for it if you are." To which I had to reply, being a karaoke freak, "Well, when would I not be up for it?" And the absurdity of it all swept over me – that I was talking to a beautiful woman that (until recently) I hadn't seen in around 8 years, making plans to meet in a karaoke bar. And I chuckled. Then she chuckled, perhaps because she too realized the absurdity, or perhaps in response to my own stupid laughter. Which, of course, kept me chuckling, momentarily unable to form a coherent sentence, and left me blushing.

Boy howdy, I do believe I was enamored. Am enamored.

Time to brush up on my repertoire of Barry White songs.

OK, another wack-ass dream from last weekend.

I'm a student again at my alma mater, UC Santa Cruz. But now I'm a film actor. I had just appeared in an independent movie, as one of a couple who's held hostage in an apartment by a punk, inexplicably played by aging insult comic Bobby Slayton. I was scheduled to start a David Lynch movie shortly thereafter.

Er, whatever.

I fail to understand the motivation behind spam – "Hey, honey, I've gotta follow this great stock tip I got from someone I've never met!" – but this takes the cake. A good half of the spam I've been receiving lately has originated in Hong Kong. Check out this snappy missive:

Return-Path: xy@xy.com
Received: from 255.255.255.255 (250g2cm162.hkcable.com.hk [203.168.250.162])
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 12:29:03 -0800
From: xxy - xy@xy.com
Message-Id: <419.436873.18619734xy@xy.com>
Subject: ¼v |L ¾÷ ¶R ½æ ºû -* ©±
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-UIDL: dc9ef1fac18fc163f3a99405fd7d92d0


2{|3?j¶q¥·s©Î½·s ?Wªùºû-*
«O¾i|UºØ
¼v|L¾÷ ¶Ç¯u¾÷ ?å»ö¾÷¾1
TEL:81073012
¥´|r¾÷ ¥´ÍüÄÁ

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Hell yeah, sign me up for that! Nothin' I love more than ¥´|r¾÷ ¥´ÍüÄÁ, I'm tellin' ya.

Why can't all spam be in Mandarin?

So I've had a couple of eminently strange dreams in the past couple of weeks. Well, most of my dreams are pretty bizarre anyway, so I guess it's par for the course, but I've never written them down.

The first dream happened about two or three weeks ago, so I've forgotten most of the detail. I do recall, however, a couple of the highlights:

I was working at a very quiet video store in Seattle.

And there was a co-worker – a girl in the low five-feet range with tall, spiked brown hair – whose name was Frantic.

That's all I recall about that one. But the idea of A Girl Named Frantic™ continues to pique my interest. I'm filing that away for the Screenplay I Intend to Write Someday #15.

The second dream occurred last night. I was at University of California - Berkeley. (A recurring pattern in my dreamlife in the past year or so: going back to college. I graduated 6 years ago with a theater degree. I've been working in the increasingly entropic web/e-commerce field for 3 years now.)

Okay, parenthetical preamble over. I walked into a building I thought was a coffee shop. They had a counter featuring baked goods and whatnot. However, it turned out to be a classroom which happened to have a coffee shop counter. So I stumbled into a class, which was attended by some old high school classmates. (My 10-year high school reunion happened two weeks ago. I still have post-traumatic stress because of it.) The teacher – a very personable middle-aged man with a moustache – immediately engaged me in some sort of academic repartée. Unlike most of my dreams, where I'm usually clad only in tighty-whities and am hopelessly flustered and inarticulate, I was able to carry myself with a modicum of aplomb and a full set of clothing. Next thing I know, I was fielding questions from the class, in some sort of lecture/one-man performance. Eventually, I ended up sheepishly confessing, "Hey, I just came in here looking for a danish," to much laughter – sympathetic laughter, not derisive (a welcome change).

Analysis welcomed.