this freaking drink...

Most water enhancers contain a certain amount of acid, aiding in the dissolving of the powder while providing a tartness of flavor. The A&W Root Beer water enhancer is not one of those. In fact, it's pretty weird. Non-carbonated root beer is fine when it's some old fashioned, down to earth thang. That's not what this is. The A&W Root Beer water enhancer doesn't even have the bite of a regular root beer. It's just sweet and weird.

A Salty Piece of Land by Jimmy Buffett

I see Jimmy Buffett like a tropical Mark Twain who also writes great songs. He knows a lot about a lot of things, like: boats, americana, pirates, business, music business, fishing, geography, and horses. A Salty Piece of Land tells a score of interesting stories surrounding the tropical adventures of a fugitive cowboy named Tully Mars.

Twenty pages in I decided it was time to learn fly fishing, immediately. As of writing this, I haven’t yet taken up any kind of fishing. Instead I kept reading as Tully had some of the best times you can imagine, as well as some pretty bad times. Either way it made me want to see more of the world and plan some adventures of my own.

Vampire's Kiss (feat. Nicolas Cage)

Do you love the 80s and comedy horror films? If the answer's yes, then you will love this film. Awesome in some ways and pretty bad in others, I enjoyed it. Nick Cage was was great. In Vampire's Kiss, he plays an office ass hole with a boujie accent, named Peter; the type of guy who deserves to be a vampire. As legend has it, turning into a vampire can be pretty rough. In this instance, it's okay, because we don't like Peter and we don't mind seeing him suffer. And, of course, what happens to him is scary. It's a fun watch but altogether pretty meh.

1. Raising Arizona
2. Leaving Las Vegas
3. Adaptation
4. City of Angels
5. Gone in 60 Seconds
6. Matchstick Men
7. Vampire's Kiss
8. Honeymoon in Vegas
9. The Family Man
10. The Weather Man
11. The Croods

Zone Under Construction

It will probably be a few days before I work out the new format, and even longer before I get all of my old posts in line with the new style. This is the aesthetic I originally intended for The PJ Zone. Blogger's ugly built-in format was just a place holder. In a few months I'm going to have a page, connected to my blog, where I will sell and promote my music.

If you don't know, I've released a lot of tapes and I've been in a lot of bands who all have music to be heard. And I'd like to make a page for people to go and access all of that work, instead of scouting out different, disconnected bandcamp pages.

The Daughter of Hassan by Penny Jordan

I’d never read a ‘sheikh romance’ before but I knew it needed to happen. This one wasn’t recommended or anything. In fact, I just picked it up at a thrift store. By its worn spine, I could tell it had been read a couple times and must be good. The Daughter of Hassan is the love story of little English Danielle and half-middle eastern, half-French Jourdan. He says French things and Penny Jordan often refers to his chest hair as ‘crisp’.

Jourdan's not really a good dude at all, despite his inherent sexiness, among other romantic qualities. Danielle might enjoy abandoning everything in her life to live as the wife of a sheikh with unlimited wealth. Why not? Love is powerful. 

Adaptation (feat. Nicolas Cage)

Adaptation is a good film, I think. Cage plays Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter famous for writing mind bending films like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There are a few things to be said about writers who put themselves in their fictional stories. Kaufman's crippling self-doubt succeeds in transmitting a special, resonating frequency connecting writer, character, and viewer. Making himself a character, I think was also meant to comment on the Writer's inevitable agenda. Every story is inevitably told in a way that flatters its teller and Kaufman reminds us not to fully trust our narrator.

In such ways, Adaptation is kind of deep. It's meta and dishes a little disrespect to its viewers, all in good fun. The premise: Kaufman is writing a film adaptation for a book called The Orchid Thief. It's a serious challenge, so instead Adaptation is about the writing of the adaptation of The Orchid Thief. Clever.

Cage is incredible in this film. Meryl Streep is a pleasure as always. Chris Cooper makes a great Florida Man, feral but irresistible. Adaptation breaks the rules of contemporary Hollywood. It experiments with narrative styles and nested stories. It's clever, but not remarkably so. Adaptation is adequately ambitious and executed to satisfaction.

1. Raising Arizona
2. Leaving Las Vegas
3. Adaptation
4. City of Angels
5. Gone in 60 Seconds
6. Matchstick Men
7. Honeymoon in Vegas
8. The Family Man
9. The Weather Man
10. The Croods

The Last Days of Socrates by Plato

Sometimes in life I have a hard time solving for Y.* You too? Suppose there is a certain wisdom to admitting you don’t know the answers. Suppose there is evidence of the afterlife in our inherent human forms? The Last Days of Socrates is a collection of Socrates’s most notable and important dialogues. As you might expect, he was a next-level thinker. Thinking was what he was passionate about and why not? If you are really good at thinking, then you can likely rationalize your way out of all suffering.

I probably could have read more about this book before diving in, but philosophy seems like a tough thing to summarize. In his Phaedo argument, Socrates tries to prove reincarnation with the same logic of why two can never be three at the same time. Aside from this last (near death) dialogue, I think the rest of his arguments are quite nice.

Of course I would like to learn some more modern philosophies but it seemed logos to start at the beginning if I am going to co-opt any preexisting worldviews. Should you read The Last Days of Socrates? Sure. Especially if you are pretending to know about philosophy.

*Solving for Y is a reference to an episode Pete and Pete in which Ellen boycotts math because she can’t use algebra to solve for Why.

Welcome to Adulthood, Captain! by Rob Spence

Welcome to Adulthood, Captain!, more of a zine than a book, is collection of poetry by my friend Rob Spence, mostly written when he was a kid. If you don’t know Spence, he’s kind of a sweetheart, moreso than most people. So you might imagine as a kid, he was especially sweet. That’s the kind of poetry you’ll get here, a sort of return to innocence.

If you’re feeling especially jaded about adulthood, or you’re a friend of Spence who doesn’t want to read the free ebook version, I invite you to borrow my copy. It will take you an hour to read it. We can even arrange a pick up and drop off with my porch (not your porch).