doug nelson: DISENGAGE!

1) Walking down the aisle in Home Depot, 300 dollars worth of painting supplies in one big orange cart, rocking out to the Daft-Punk-flattening “Tito’s Way,” by the Juan Maclean.

2) My car’s trunk. Contents?

• 8 cans of paint
• 2 cans of primer
• 2 breath masks, black warning signs stamped over the mouth
• 2 paint rollers
• 6 paint trays
• 1 roller extender, for ceiling work
• 1 drop cloth
• 1 audio cable, copper
• 1 extension cord, 25′
• 14 CDs of varying degree of obscurity
• 12 board games
• 48 AA batteries
• 2 pairs of headphones, vintage
• 1 pair of shoes, black
• 1 space blanket that folds into a pillow
• 1 11″x17″ portfolio case, filled with work
• 1 car stereo, used
• 5 mechanical pencils, blue
• 1 pen, blue
• 8 sketchpads, blank

Now, I’ve been unclear on the rules as of late, but from what I remember: The current contents of my trunk squarely put me into the top 15 Most Awesome People On Earth.

3) Dick Valentine singing the Magnetic Fields’ ‘Underwear,’ courtesy of Timoni (but her video footage is like 100x better).

5) Neat new friends I need to figure out/meet.

4) Neat old friend that I’m hitting the Caps game with and who I totally just made the best mix CD for.

6) Amazing Unifyin’ Theory revelations that you have in Home Depot that make the world a bearable and controllable place. We just totally wiped out the old theory and posited a new one. I’m writing a paper. It’s gonna rock.

7) Next weekend: Taking Friday off and spending three days painting, drinking, dancing around like an idiot in a totally empty apartment. Stop by, I’ll bring folding chairs and a card table, we’ll totally place some Settlers.

The Wallace and Gromit movie. Consistently laugh-out-loud funny, sharper and more subtle than the animation in Corpse Bride, cute as anything, and once again flawlessly held up by the beautiful things that are Gromit’s perfect little eyebrows.

9) Finding SJ’s camera under my car seat after a year of its absence. Hooray for the lost bein’ found!

THINGS THAT DON’T EFFING RULE:
The end of Dearly Devoted Dexter. Sadly, the best surprise is mid-book (hahahahahahahahaha oh man), and the ending is exactly what I expected: A sign that while Darkly Dreaming Dexter was an amazing, singular novel spawned from an author’s One Great Idea, the sequel comes from the concept of “let’s make another one!” No great revelations to be had here, no confrontations that force you into the same mind-numbing insecurity the final chapter of Darkly did (and probably with reason: you can’t hit that hard twice). In fact, with Dexter’s record for mischief, the question asked for the first 50% of the book is “Why am I seeing this, at this point in his life?” Even at the mid-point, nothing actually CHANGES, but oddly enough, major agents of change are introduced.

Now that I think about this, it feels as if all of this was to set up a third book, which will undoubtedly be an entirely new and unique (and probably almost insufferably dark) affair. I’m already feeling the crawlies about the new relationships forming, and what the hell they’re going to turn into. We shall see.

/nerd.