It's a beautiful day here in Memphis. Cludless sky, warm, no humidity...the very epitome of what spring in the south should be. And what am I doing? Dicking around with this computer.

Friday afternoon I was spending some time in the darkroom at work. I'd tested out some black and white film in an old camera and I was going to see if our developing equipment was worth a damn.

But you know, I always had a hard time with those stainless steel developing reels. The plastic ones were no problem, but the steel ones gave me no end of grief in college.

So I'm setting in the dark, trying to force this film onto the steel reel. It was old film, tightly coiled, and I was unfamiliar with the darkroom in question.

Of course I dropped the film.

After several minutes of feeling around foolishly in the pitch-dark I gave up and turned the light on. The roll of film had retreated, cockroach-like, into the darkest and most remote corner. Better luck next time, I guess.

Friday night found me, Jen, James and Sonya lounging around the living room, listening to Cleopatra Records' Goth Box (very scary stuff). James asked me about me injured ankle.

"It's still a little sore, but much better than it was last weekend," I told him.

"They should have given you a wooden shoe to wear," James opined.

"I am not a little Dutch boy," I responded.

We were all silent for a moment.

"You know," I observed, "it must be great to live in Amsterdam. Then you can go in a bar and order a beer, some pot, a whore and some wooden shoes."

"And tulips," Sonya added.

"And a windmill," Jen piped up.

"And a dyke to stick your finger in," James concluded.

No, we would never stereotype Europeans. Except for the French. They really do stink.

There's a new Mystery Science Theater 3000 tonight. Starring Joel and TV's Frank, no less. I'm very excited. This, supposedly, is their last season. I hope not, but they've had a damned good run if it is. How many other shows on TV right now have had a ten-year run? It's a rare thing.

And I have to do taxes tonight. Or re-do taxes, actually. I did the handy dandy phone thing a few months ago, and then promptly received one more form I'd needed and forgotten about. Working on federal government forms. Is there any other way to spend a Saturday night?

Yesterday was fun. James and I went to a shooting range to do some plinking with his pistol.

I'm neutral on guns, personally. The amount of handgun deaths in the country is appalling, to be sure, but I'd bet you a lot of those deaths are connected with criminals anyway, and I doubt they care about the law.

Plus, I grew up in Arkansas in a primarily gun-positive environment. My grandfather, father (in his rare appearances), brother and assorted brothers-in-law have always kept and used guns, primarily for hunting. My grandfather was an armed security guard, too, and his Smith and Wesson .38 revolver is something of a family heirloom. I'm comfortable with guns and I know how to shoot quite well.

[For the record, Sonya wants me to state that she hates guns and won't allow one in the house. Which I'm also cool with.

"I have a frying pan for defense," she says.]

But it had been years since I'd been shooting. And I'd never been to anything as high-tech as a shooting range. My shooting had always been in fields, backroads and bayous. Shooting inside appeared as quite a novelty to me. Plus, I'd never shot James' monster Ruger before, so that was an incentive to me.

So we go to this place behind a car lot and check in with the guy who runs the place. He's was wearing a pistol on his hips and extra ammo on the other side. James later explained to me that he has a concealed weapon permit and he can wander all around Tennessee wearing his gun. Amazing. Dude also tried to talk us into getting our permits. We expressed polite interest and declined.

We did pretty well, target-wise, though James did time in the army so he's a professional and he was more on-target than me. I didn't do bad, though. Either one of us would have killed the motherfucker if the motherfucker in question had been real and not made out of paper. Just look at the guy, for god's sake (pictured, above left). You'd shoot him too, right?

Later, we went shopping at CompUSA and Home Depot. I fondled the Macs, as usual, and even took a shot at Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation. That's a fun game, y'all. No wonder the kids like it so much. At Home Depot we were hunting for a bedside table for James, but we also took the time to shop some power tools (very gratifying). We drove through Popeye's on the way home and got dinner for the family.

At one point during our travels Shania Twain came on the radio while we were looking for a parking space. I changed the station and launched into a rant.

"Fuckin' Shania Twain," I frothed, "she's taken the banality of country music and combined it with lowest common denominator pop, knowing the public would lap it up like so much tit milk!"

James watched a man standing nearby scurry into his car and drive away. "I think you just scared that guy off," he told me.

At the house we were joined by Jen's friend Christy for an orgy of Popeye's eating, drinking and Star Wars trivia. Christy (who would later say "my friends are very political; they don't get silly that often") seemed quite tickled by our cosmopolitan badinage.

When James and I got home last night the girls were watching the Duran Duran special from VH1 that Sonya taped last weekend.

"Andy's had too many snacky cakes," Sonya observed as the chubby guitarist was interviewed.

"It looks like Andy ate Roger," I had to say. This went over very big with the Duran fans in the room.

I'm sad to say that it looks like Siobhan has called it quits. That's too bad 'cause Siobhan wrote one of the few journals (other than my own) that's really consistently a good read. She's also a heck of a nice girl, too, so I'm sure she has her reasons. Still, her regular missives from the really big city will be sorely missed.

Don't be a stranger, S.

Okay, y'all, I had a really weird cluster of dreams this morning right before I woke up. So weird that I got out of bed shaking my head at their clarity, strangeness and detail.

In the first I dreamed Sonya and I had gone back to Conway for a graduation. Conway, Arkansas is where we went to college - a sleepy, near-country college town in a dry county. Nothing like what I dreamed would ever happen there.

In the dream, Conway had become a thriving Metropolis, with skyscrapers, bars and an active populace. They were having a Mardi Gras-like celebration, complete with balconies full of people throwing beads, funny feathered masks and all night parties. This would never, ever happen in Conway. It was wild. Sonya and I stayed out all night in this dream, drinking and catching beads. It was fun, but totally wrong when I woke up.

In the second dream Sonya and I had gone back to Chicago - on business this time, though. However, we also had my niece and nephew with us. This wouldn't be a big deal, except in the dream my niece and nephew were babies. They're actually 14 and 17, in real life. Again, very strange.

So we were making our way through Chicago trying to get to a train that would take us back to our hotel. Sonya got in the wrong line, though, and we ended up in this huge, covered stadium, where Beck and Fatboy Slim were DJing a gigantic roller-disco event. Sonya put down the baby she was carrying and put on some skates.

"But Sonya," I whined, "I need to get the babies back to the hotel."

"Well, go on," she said, skating off, "I put the babies over there." She pointed up a ladder and through a doorway. I went where she had pointed and the babies were gone. I enlisted the help of the stadium security, after convincing them that I was not some sort of protester. They were worried about that for some reason.

I prefer not to consider the subconscious meaning of that dream. They worry Sonya as well.

The last dream was the most sinister. It was back in the Conway-The-Big-City of the first dream. This time, though, we were on a pier looking across a cypress-clogged lake towards the city. Behind us was a castle in the middle of the lake.

Things were strange immediately. There were several vast, sucking whirlpools on the surface of the lake, and the ground and islands around the pier were littered with the bodies of thousands of dead birds, all white, all of a water-living variety (pelicans, egrets, seagulls and the like).

The owner of the castle looked a bit like Gheorge Muresan, the gigantic NBA player. He always wore black, though, and wraparound sunglasses. It turned out he was a vampire who had killed his wife and child. Somehow Sonya and I and a few other people found out about this and went to retrieve the heads of the these two from the swamp where they had been hidden.

After we found the heads, we had to swim back to the castle (the castle, of course, being accessible only by water). After we entered the castle the vampire met us, found the heads and then proceeded to tear my little group to bits - but not before stabbing me through the throat with a long, nasty-looking sword.

I suppose I shouldn't eat red beans and rice so soon before bed, huh?

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