So most of the day - read: all of it - was spent in preparation of this, my trip to Nashville. Music City, U.S.A. Home of the world’s only full-size replica of the Parthenon. Home of the honky tonk. Home of … some other stuff, probably.

Seriously: What the hell am I doing, with this going to Nahsville? It’s hot there. Moreso even than Chicago.

But on the upside, I do get to take photos under the pretense of ‘work,’ and have been instructed to ‘make them as artistic, as well-composed, as possible.’ So I have that going for me.

Quote of the day: ‘We in the country now, honey.’ That’s just the catchphrase for this Southern excursion. May god have mercy on my Yankee soul.

The ups and downs of the weekend left me grasping at straws, much like Warren G’s unfortunate female friend at the beginning of Dr. Dre’s classic ‘Deez Nuts’:

Warren G: Hey did what’s-his-name done get at you yesterday?

Warren G’s lady: Who that baby?

Warren G: (singing) Deez nuts!

It’s the old misdirection gambit, during which things appear to be going in one direction, but are actually going somewhere completely different. Uneasy feelings that something went completely awry during my party Friday night - think Sublime’s ‘What Happened?’ - strange encounters with people who say ‘I’ve known who you are for years, but you don’t know me,’ dancing with my former bosses (two of them simultaneously), breaking into the apartment of a Northwestern student (in all fairness, he did give us the keys), getting more birthday-wishing phone calls on the 24th rather than on my real birthday, et cetera: Wow. No wonder I’m still getting a handle on events. I leave you with the above: Bar gift certificates and a woman’s shirt. I think the symbolism is evident, showing that despite the guillotine of existential dread hanging over our mortal heads, we find time to express ourselves in frivolous and fleeting orgiastic spurts of desperate grabbing for the threads of meaningful interaction.

In short, despite the nuttiness, the weekend was a good party.

Board game of the month: Trivial Pursuit. So the power went out yesterday afternoon. What the hell was I supposed to do with myself? It was a little hot to head down to the Taste of Chicago, so we broke out the Trivial Pursuit. Did you know, for example, that Myles Standish was the only professional soldier aboard the Mayflower? There’s your next cocktail party tidbit.

Look at a birthday celebration like a Cadbury Creme Egg, the kind you get during an Easter egg hunt: You unwrap the foil with some nervousness, which is part A, the beginning, before enjoying the first bite of chocolate and sugary goo, which is part B. The next few bites are pure enjoyment of candy goodness, all considered parts C, before then you find yourself getting sick of this too-rich treat: part D. The metaphor:

Part A: ‘Oh, shit, it’s my birthday. Maybe I’ll actually have fun this year.’
Part B: ‘Thanks for wishing me well, everyone. This is a pretty good day.’
Part C: ‘It’s great to see everyone at my party. I hope you’re all having a good time celebrating,’
Part D: (disintegration into drunken stupidity)

Thanks all for coming out.

Thanks to the efforts of certain friends last night, getting up for work this morning was quite the chore. But while going through my project list for the day, I was treated to the dulcet sounds of a fire alarm. For 15 minutes. And there was no fire. At least the fire department showed up to make sure we weren’t burning - see above.

I think it’s going to be a long, good weekend, however. If you’re free tonight, swing by the party. The skinny: Durkin’s. 810 W. Diversey. $17 at the door. Open bar. 7 - 11 p.m.

Question of the day: When is legitimate to claim a piece of art? I’m working on updating the portraits of former bigwigs that hang in various locations around my office. Many of the originals date from the building’s construction, circa 1930, and are done in a variety of portraiture styles, from straight-ahead oil paintings to near-Impressionism to even pseudo-Surrealism. But I’m taking high-res digital headshots and running them through a Photoshop filter, then having them photo-imprinted onto sheets of canvas. However, I was instructed to put my signature on the bottom of each image I processed, and I’m not sure I should be doing that. Yes, I did some work on these images to prep them, and there is a need to be consistent with the existing portraits, as they’re all signed by the various artists, but doesn’t claiming something as my own ‘painting’ when all I did was click the mouse a few times, well, cheap? Either way, my signature’s already on there, so I suppose it doesn’t matter - I’m now a part of artistic history.

Birthdays are perhaps entry number five on the list of all-time letdowns, just ahead of

10. Crystal Pepsi
9. the state of Michigan
8. the end of O.J.’s Bronco chase
7. Olean in WOW! Pringles
6. Pete Rose’s ‘confession’ to get reinstated into Major League Baseball

but just behind

4. Star Wars episode I
3. the 2003 Cubs season
2. The Roots at the House of Blues in fall 2004
1. Geraldo’s opening of Al Capone’s vault

They’re never horrible. Instead, they just remain decidedly anticlimactic. Maybe it’s the build-up, maybe it’s the anticipation, but things don’t always work the way you originally intended on your birthday.

Most interesting championship game of the evening: Spurs over Pistons, NBA Finals. The game was actually pretty lousy. Anticlimactic end to an anticlimactic series on a generally anticlimactic day.

When I pull mailing lists for my magazine, I’m always reminded of a riddle I heard as a kid.

Throughout the day today, I held in my hand more than $300,000. Now I have nothing, and must borrow $10 from you for a cab ride home.

What does this man do for a living?

I remember when I first read this: I coudln’t for the life of me come up with the answer. Now, being the jaded cynic I am, I suppose he could be a wholesale crack dealer or perhaps a black-market weapons trafficker, but the riddle book told me that the man is a banker, transacting large sums of cash. What I couldn’t figure out - and please reference the title here, so remember that I’m a (mostly) honest person - was why the sumbitch didn’t take off to Mexico with his 300 large, living knee-deep in hookers, blow and tequila until Armageddon. Or, more likely for my age, why he didn’t buy a really fast car and outrun the police before escaping to his mountain fortress.

Which brings me to my current conundrum: By pulling this mailing list, I hold some extremely personal information that belongs to some extremely rich men.

That’s all. Ain’t gonna do nothin. Just an observation, just like the above picture of geometric tiles.

Summer treat of the day: A Blizzard from DQ. With Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. It’s the second day of summer - not too hot, yet - and sometimes the best refreshment comes from the unexpected, like when your boss says, ‘hey, let’s go to Dairy Queen.’ Rock.

Suddenly I understand the necessity of keeping your body in tip-top shape, as every muscle in my back seized into a lump the size of a golf ball during lunch today. Stretching didn’t help. A quick massage didn’t help. Drugs did: lesson learned.

Then I come back to hours of work - in the interest of disclosure here, I’ll say that I did spend some time this morning loafing and browsing rather than working, but hey - and I can’t tell you how infuriating it is for someone to snap her fingers at you, her face inches from yours, while saying ‘where are they? Let’s go, I have to get these done …’ and I spend the waning hours of daylight on this, the first day of summer, doing inane graphics such as what appears below when I began these projects just yesterday. I can’t tell you how many times I typed the phrase ‘honky tonk’ today, and a little piece of my soul died with each instance.

But things overall stayed buoyant. Must be the anticipation of next week’s honky tonk visits.

Journalistic quandry of the day: Saddam Hussein needs a babysitter. Or a jailer - it depends. So the front cover of the RedEye we see that Saddam needs a babysitter. And likes Doritos. But not President Bush. In other news, water is wet and journalism is stupid. I’m sayin’ bro!

Shout #2: Site of the day: thewaylitd. My boy Dave got his bad self a blog so he can wax poetic about this and that and Jesus. It’s his jollies, so props.

Honky tonks. Fuck.

Once you get to the phase of your life during which things become, well, repetitive, you tend to fall into a set routine. Part of my typical work commute involves reading the front section of the Chicago Tribune, then moving on to skim the sports pages’ baseball scores before opening the Tempo section and immediately folding the penultimate page in half with one forceful, yet gentle, motion and, without even glancing at the comics - OK, fine, sometimes I read ‘Get Fuzzy’ - beginning to solve the day’s crossword in my head. Without writing anything down. The aura of flat-out freaking brilliance surrounds me every morning as I step off the train, mitigated only by the fact that no one is paying attention.

The point here is that yes, I have my brain-teaser puzzle pastime. So when this freaking sudoku (or is it Sudoku? Dammit, I don’t even know if it’s capitalized) thing came along, threatening to usurp my beloved word game, I looked at it like I’ve looked at many other brash pop-trends-come-lately - liking Maroon 5, watching ‘Desperate Housewives,’ reading Harry Potter - namely, with complete disdain.

The only problem is that I ended up loving all of the above items. I will not do this with sudoku, which this morning I noticed was placed above the crossword in the RedEye. Above the crossword? Not on my train. Look at it! Witness its smarmy integers! A 16th-century Spanish cardinal of the Inquisition would have a field day enumerating the ways the devil is manifest in those ordered squares of numbers. I already have plenty of addictions, and I don’t need a number game clogging the brain pathways responsible for remembering a four-letter city in Oklahoma.*

Programming environments of the day: JavaScript and Flash. Check out the beatnik industries image gallery beta test and witness the power that is a camera phone, Photoshop and a Flash-based photo show.

*Enid.

There was a theme running through the fabric of yesterday’s karmic space-time continuum (how’s that for mixing religious and scientific metaphors?) that, for some reason, put the idea of sixosix magazine back in my head.

Exhibit A. Verbatim quote in an e-mail, Friday afternoon: ‘i’m slightly disappointed 606mag is no longer in the works.’

Exhibit B. Verbatim quote from me, Friday evening: ‘You know, I … well, I just miss doing sixosix.’

Exhibit C. Random encounter, 20 minutes after Exhibit B’s occurrence: Guy I’ve been looking at all night, trying to remember how I know him, comes up to me and actually lived upstairs from the sixosix office. Proceeds to tell me how great the magazine was and how we need to get it back up and running, et cetera.

Sometimes you have more power and influence than you realize. The only thing keeping you from realizing this potential is your own fear. For clarificaion, substitute ‘I’ or ‘me’ for ‘you’ in the last two sentences as needed - there ya go. Now we’re on the same page.

Song of the day: ‘Just One More,’ Dressy Bessy. I broke down and bought Dressy Bessy’s self-titled 2003 release. The same one with ‘The Things That You Say That You Do’ on it (reference how I fell to my knees in worship of this song in the post from two days ago). And this first track, ‘Just One More,’ is the same way, full of infectious three-chord power pop. The chorus of this song is like aural freebasing, complete with semi-rhyming, nonsensical lyrics of ‘It’s too much / but oh well / if these walls, they could tell / they’d say what’s the fuss / well you worry too much / well you worry too much / from what I, what I can tell / there’s enough space up there / though in time it’ll disappear / I enjoy being here.’ The drum break from Phil Collins’ ‘Sussudio’ excluded, I don’t normally dance like this to jangly bands.

Marx was wrong: Tongue-in-cheek power pop is the opiate of the masses.

This is going to be the first post that could get me dooced but, in my defense, I could have said some worse things in the past.

If you’ll be kind enough to reference the post directly previous to this, you’ll notice that I planned to ‘drink the night away.’ I succeeded. So naturally getting up this morning for work was something of a stretch. Let’s say there’s a time I’m supposed to be at the office and, for the sake of this discussion, let’s call that time ‘eight-thirty.’ Given that it takes approximately 45 minutes from apartment door to cubicle, and another 20 or so to shower and get dressed, what time should I get up?

This morning, the time of my awakening was nine a.m. But neither of my bosses, nor the executive director, nor the HR director, were working today, so it didn’t matter. I think I left the office at, umm, 11:40 - after arriving at 9:50 - so I would have time to see Batman Begins. Take that, productivity.

And, much like the title explains, the new Batman rocked. I’ve been a fan of Christian Bale since American Psycho, a movie that still pops into my head at the most inopportune times, such as when, umm, well, I’ll actually decline to say in the interest of keeping my facade as ’sane’ and ‘non-homicidal,’ this fifth movie was finally back to the splendor of the original ’60s show with Adam West - see above - who is still showcasing his brilliance as the mayor of Quahog in ‘The Family Guy.’

Movie of the day: Batman Begins. What else did you think I was going with? Gary Oldman, one of the greatest and most underappreciated actors of our time, makes an appearance. And Qui-Gon Jinn is a bad guy.

What’s strange about days like today? You’ve had those days when you think ‘my god. What did I do? Today was completely worthless,’ but you actually accomplished more than you do on most days. I somehow proofed and approved two major projects, played four-square at lunch, prepared for the next week’s worth of work while my supervisor is out of the office and contacted, well, at least six people I’d been meaning to write for a while, as well as a few others. Phew.

So on the flipside, are days when I do next to nothing seemingly productive? I think I’ll go drink the night away. That way, I’ll trick myself into thinking things were accomplished.

Song of the day last two months: ‘The Things You Say That You Do,’ Dressy Bessy. I have not been this obsessed with a song since Us3’s ‘Cantaloop,’ and I was 14 then. And that song launched me into new musical heights by introducing a) the sample, b) live jazz improv trumpet and c) Thelonous Monk.

This song is a piece of candy - let’s say Bit-O-Honey, because that sticks in your teeth like this song does in your brain - wrapped in some light distortion. According to my iTunes playlist, I have listened to this song 54 times, not including the hours I’ve spent at work with Tammy Ealom singing to me the inscrutable lyrics ‘You were right / they’re all wrong / like the things that you say that you do.’ Is it about a breakup? Does she want to elope? Dunno. But it’s under my skin, so much that I find myself humming the same three chords over and over until I realize I can’t live without hearing more of this band. It’s smarmy pop, but with enough distort and indie know-how to keep it interesting.

And the fact that Tammy Ealom sings like a ’60s go-go girl - dresses like one, too - is freaking hot. Probably goes hand-in-hand with my current April March obsession.

I asked a friend to come up with something intriguing, something off-the-wall, something provocative for writing fodder, as the previous week has been somewhat of a blur. The high points of this week follow, with very little commentary.

- I killed an entire bottle of Jack on Wednesday night. See picture to the right. Done and done.

- I went horseback riding on Thursday morning. Those of you for whom this is significant should be taken aback, because when I’m around animals of any type - dogs, lizards, yes, horses too - I feel like Rob Thomas in a biker bar, just a hair more than slightly out of place. But the entire time I was sitting horseback, I was strangely tranquil, content to say such nuggets of wisdom like ‘hey, look! I’m on a horse!’

- I saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith on Friday night, which I thoroughly enjoyed, thank you very much, while sitting next to a beautiful German woman. It’s slightly surreal to hear the execution of a mob boss described as ‘gute schisse.’

- I saw a picture of my younger brother’s removed section of intestine, which had his appendix still attached to it. He still hasn’t seen this picture.

- I had a conversation with this brother - who was on a self-administered morphine drip every seven (7!) minutes - that consisted entirely of exchanges such as ‘wasn’t the trailer for Ghostbusters 2 freaking cool?’ or ‘remember the theme song from “Thundercats”?’

- I was about to ask a friend ‘hey, you want to get some coffee?’ but was pre-empted by the response ‘no, I will not marry you,’ before she heard the end of my query. I don’t know if I have anything else to say about that.

My life has become markedly less interesting since the work week began, so I leave you with the tidbit I pimped for this posting. To be pondered:

Why is it that the world’s bible distributors feel compelled to put the word ‘holy’ before the word ‘bible’ on the cover of each book (making the title “Holy Bible” as opposed to just “Bible”)? Are there other bibles out there that I’m not aware of (”The Unholy Bible,” “The Bible That’s Not Quite as Holy as the ‘Holy Bible,’” “Satan’s Bible: No, It’s Not Holy”)?

I mean really.

Seriously.

Pilfered literary quote of the day: From Justin Tussing’s short story ‘The Laser Age’: ‘But they were the wrong girls. We honed our peripheral vision out of necessity. We existed in a state of hyperawareness and we had dull, thoughtless faces.’ It’s still humbling and, frankly, well, strangely mystic how just a few well-written sentences transcends their placement in a story to become universal. Dull, thoughtless faces.

[Editor’s note: This is the first in the continuing beatnik industries series of guest commentaries. Today, Pacey from TV’s Dawson’s Creek tells us about that one time he and Nick went to a club.]

I fuckin remember this one time me and Nick were out at this club and this girl comes up to him and says hey you’re cute whats your name. but i was like whats up with that don’t talk to nick, cause i was pacey on dawsons creek on the wb. so i tell her that and she was all like what, i thought you were from that show the o.c. but thats ok cause she was like 14 or something so she wouldn’t remember the show and my parole officer said i couldnt’ talk to underage girls anymore.

so i was makin fun of nick, being all like dude your talking to this high school girl and she only likes you cause you look like dawson. he flicks me off so i was like eff this i’m out. i go up to the bar and get my drink. a diet and bacardi. you know gotta watch the carbs. and the bartender was like that’s 12 bucks so i said cool man put it on my tab but then he was like your tab got closed. so i was like do you know i was in mighty ducks 1 2 and 3 and the skulls AND fuckin dawsons creek man do you know who i am. but the bouncer put me in a choke hold but i do yoga now gotta keep loose you know so i got out of that and got ready to beat some ass but first i had to get my black leather jacket off don’t want that torn.

thats when nick came back and paid for my drink and everybody chilled out. hes a nice guy that nick but i still hate that douche.

pacey OUT.

By any reasonable measure of productivity, Monday was supposed to be an extremely busy day. Given that I’ll be in the office only Monday and Tuesday, any work that would have been accomplished during final 3/5 of the week needs to be completed by Tuesday close of business (or a reasonable facsimile thereof, i.e., by midnight). However, news of Apple’s announcement that it was moving from PowerPC chips to Intel’s x86 chip architecture blew my mind – without getting too technical, apparently OS X has been living a secret, Deep Throat-esque double life for the last five years: it was built from the ground up to be compatible with both the PowerPC and x86 chipsets. In a nutshell, wow.

Which leads me to one of the nicest complements I’ve received in quite a while. I was bouncing around the office, explaining the need recompile binaries for the pending transition and wondering if this transition would prove deadly for the Mac or was in fact one of the shrewdest business moves ever, when my friend Dave stopped me.

‘You’re a geek,’ he said. ‘I mean, you have great* fashion sense and you have friends, and you don’t look like one, but you’re a freaking geek.’

That’s what I’m talking about. So I bore the complement nicely, and proceeded to have dinner with my best friend and his new wife. At some point during the second pitcher, he and I went on a tirade about Apple’s market share and whether or not it could capture Windows users in the long term. She, an avid PowerBook user, stopped listening to us.

Instead of going to bed after coming home, though, I spent an extra hour watching Steve Jobs’ keynote address during which he made this momentous announcement and I swear it gave me the shivers. Yes, I had been drinking, but don’t let that fool you. It was intense.

Yep, I’m a geek. Rock.

Album of the day: ’Giant Steps,’ John Coltrane. So I woke up this morning and decided to start the day with some classic jazz. This was a Good Idea, because as I was leaving for the office, ‘Mr. P.C’ was playing, which, as opposed to some of Coltrane’s more experimental playing, hit exactly the correct accessible groove that started the day on the right foot.

*[correction, 10:53 p.m., June 12, 2005: I’ve been corrected by the compliment’s originator. Apparently I have ‘fashion sense,’ not ‘great fashion sense.’ See comments.]