No tubs were soiled during the making of this film.

Last night, Ron and I went to see the new David Gordon Green film, UNDERTOW, which Roger Ebert gave four stars.

I thought it was pretty good, though it didn't really have a third act to its story. It just had its characters run and run and run, not really giving them anywhere to go.

Ron, though, hated it. Hated it. Hated hated hated it.

"I thought Dermot Mulroney was OK in it," he said. "But everybody else was just boring. And I kept getting tired of seeing dirty people in dirty places everywhere. I mean, did they not know anyone CLEAN?"

"That's a David Gordon Green film for you," I said. "Everyone's usually poor, kinda dirty, and there's always a broken-down car in someone's yard."

The film also has a 10-year-old actor, who looks like Milla Jovovich in the face. His constant need for a haircut becomes distracting.

After watching UNDERTOW, I felt like seeing something predictable, Hollywood, feel-good and pretty. Since SHAUN OF THE DEAD doesn't fit that bill and ALFIE didn't come out until today, I opted to watch SHALL WE DANCE, which Marley had said was OK.

And it was just OK. It was exactly what I expected it to be.

I'm one of the few people in the world who still likes Jennifer Lopez, I think, although I miss when she used to do movies that actually required deep acting. If you want to see a good J. Lo movie, your best option is still the completely awesome OUT OF SIGHT.

I love my children equally.

Yesterday at lunch with my dad, I told him that all the people at my bookstore that I initially had a problem with now get along well enough with me. I reiterated to him that I take some getting used to - but that eventually I'm found valuable.

He said the weirdest thing back to me.

"Yeah, I've always told you that," he said. "You used to come to me and say that I loved [your brother] Dan more than you, and I used to tell you that I loved you both equally. Dan was just easier to love."

"Huh?" I asked him.

"Well, you know, Dan's cool ... like my brother Dwaine was," my dad said. "He's just always so cool about everything, nothing phases him ... If he knows stress, he doesn't show it. You're more like me."

"Oh?" I asked.

"I always said Dan was born 40," my dad said. "You and I tend to maintain the same mental age of about 13."

I let him continue, and my dad said that he has only recently processed things in his head the way a regular adult would.

"You know, until I hit about 40, I didn't know how to deal with people," he said. "And people always find me difficult to deal with - and kinda an ass - in the beginning, but they like me and understand me once they get to know me."

That brought us back to the sentence that started the conversation, and we continued from there.

In front of the Costco cashier, I told Dad he always forgets my birthday.

"I do not," he said, incredulously. "It's June 20!"

"21st," I corrected him.

The cashier started to laugh.

Menswear.

There was a meeting with the president of our division and the head of our region this morning, and my boss wrote the region that cleanliness and punctuality would be highly appreciated.

So I cleaned my desk as best I could, and I got ready for work an hour before I usually do, showing up on time for the meeting and wearing a more professional outfit than I usually do.

Usually, I look like I just rolled out of bed.

Today I'm wearing the glasses, a tweed sport coat, a navy-blue buttoned-down shirt, a black leather belt, black leather shoes and khaki pants.

I was gonna wear a tie, but apparently my neck has swollen since I last wore this shirt.

So my boss, upon seeing me this morning, said, "Good morning. Wow, you're ... um ... FIXED."

I felt like asking him if I'm usually broken, but I didn't.

This outfit's getting me a lot of compliments. Some people from the other divisions, who only ever see me at these meetings, came up after the meeting to tell me that they didn't recognize me.

Seeing me in my attire, a co-worker stopped, stared at me for a moment and said, "What's going on? You look like Clark Kent."

True presidents, false presidents.

Today for lunch, my dad and I went someplace other than our regular restaurant. He took me for hot dogs at Costco in Dunwoody, and we went browsing.

While we were eating the hot dogs - and I'd loaded mine up with relish and onions -and sitting on the crowded benches, I asked Dad if he had heard anything about the new Philip Roth book. I figured, even if he didn't seem the type to read Philip Roth, he'd enjoy the revisionist history aspect of the new book. My dad, in college, was a history major and taught high school history at one point.



"You know Philip Roth, right?" I asked.

"No, what'd he write?" my dad asked.

"Umm, PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT and GOODBYE COLUMBUS, back in the '70s," I said. "He won the Pulitzer Prize for AMERICAN PASTORAL or THE HUMAN STAIN just recently. I forget which."

"PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT sounds familiar," my dad said.

I didn't tell him that PORTNOY's the only Roth I've even attempted to read. But I couldn't do that one. Too much awkwardness, psychoses and obsessive masturbation. It reminded me of real life. I didn't talk to my dad about PORTNOY.

"Anyway, this new book is weird," I said. "It takes place in the 1940s, but, in it, Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR for the presidency. It goes on from there to explain how life would've been different."

"Did Lindbergh ever run for the presidency?" my dad asked me.

"I don't think so," I said. "The book just suggests he was popular enough to have won it."

"No, I think he sought a nomination at one point," my dad said. "And I think he actually, um, was pro-Nazi in some of his speeches."

"Yeah, that's why the book has a swastika on it," I said. "It's about a Jewish family trying to live during the Lindbergh presidency."

"Well, that definitely would've changed history," my dad said.

"Oh, and apparently it's got a big, twist, shocker ending," I said about the book. "It's gotten really good reviews."

At this point, a woman sitting down the long table from us looked over at me and interrupted us.

"I'm sorry, but that book that you're talking about sounds really good," she said. "You know a lot about it."

"Oh, well, um ...," I said. "I work at a bookstore. I'm good at talking about books."

"Actually, you have me interested," she said. "I'm going to go check and see if they have it in the book section right now."

"It's called THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA," I told her. "We keep selling out of it at my store."

She thanked me, which made my dad grin at me. Either out of pride or amusement.

Then, before leaving to look for it, she stopped and asked, "Didn't Philip Roth write the RABBIT books?"

"No, that was John Updike," I told her. "He has a new book, too, and they just put his collection of short stories out in paperback."

"Oh yeah," she said to me.

Then she winked and said, "Wow, you're good."

I felt like I was in an ad. As she walked away, my dad looked at me like I was nuts.

To be honest, I had an Updike discussion with someone a couple days ago who was downright appalled that I'd never read any of his Rabbit Angstrom books. So I'd gotten an Updike refresher.

Anyway, when that lady left, I talked to my dad about the election. And he told me that Bush (whom my dad supported) shouldn't bother me so much.

My dad said our everyday life, thus far, has been affected very little by whomever happens to be in the White House. Maybe some policy changes. A tax cut or a tax break. But nothing really major.

I think he's right, in general, and I know that the institution of the presidency and the nation on the whole can survive a bad president. But I fear that someday someone will prove that not to be the case, affecting a profound change.

Like in that Philip Roth book.

Think Becky Thatcher in Manolo Blahniks.

Reading some blog essays, my friend Brad just paid me the funniest compliment.



"You're like this weird concoction of Mark Twain and Carrie Bradshaw."



I'm trying to figure out exactly what kind of book a Twain-Bradshaw hybrid would write. A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN MANHATTAN? TOM SAWYER AND HUCKLEBERRY FINN: THE EROTIC ADVENTURES? SEX AND THE 'SSIPPI?

Sounds fun.

Some points.

Slept very well. Feeling better.

* A friend who hadn't read my London blog entries just e-mailed me and complimented me on them, telling me to make them into a book.

* Hey, this is a fun website. Any company want to sponsor me?

* My mom said she'd try to help me clean my apartment this weekend (for I'm really going to need some assistance because apathy and exhaustion keep me from doing it myself). And it gives me some time alone with her, so that's cool. I can talk to her about her new job.

* Last night's episode of LOST was good.



* I'm supposed to attend a screening of UNDERTOW tonight with Ron, and it's gotten really good reviews. I'm choosing to see it above BEING JULIA and ALFIE. (Yeah, I'm choosing to see a David Gordon Green film above a movie where Jude Law probably takes his shirt off about a million times. Thus, I'm more "film geek" than "gay man.") If you guys don't know David Gordon Green's stark, Southern movies, you really ought to go to a highbrow video store and rent some stuff.



* I sold some DVDs, which should alleviate some financial woes until I get paid again ... and should help me fund my prescription refill.

* Vic's reading some new books I had sent to her, so that's cool. But I can write a more complete post on those later, for those of you who like me when I'm a critic and salesman here.

Upset beyond reason.

My mood, because of the election, my finances and my lack of both sleep and anti-depressant medication, is lousy today. I went to the bank on my lunch break, and Kevin-the-Happy-Guy-Who-Wants-Me-to-Set-Up-a-Home-Loan asked me how I was doing.

I glared at him. If I could've beamed deadly lasers from my eyes, grinning Kevin would've been split in half.

I'm not moping. I'm not sulking. But I'm frustrated with myself and complaining a whole hell of a lot. To a melodramatic degree.

The election has upset me far more than is reasonable. And I've been alienating friends all day, so I think this funk might be medication-related.

Jenipher, discussing the possibility of someone's sham marriage with me, mentioned that marriage was sacred and meaningful. And she incurred my election-anger wrath for that, then called me the most cynical person she knows.

I wrote her about struggle and darkness being at the center of adult life. She told me to read Thomas Hobbes.

Lupo heard about some of my latest shenanigans and suggested that we talk about it over the weekend, but I told him that I didn't want to frustrate him with an analysis of my behavior and lack of general motivation. I told him instead that he should work on his dissertation, which sounds like it's going to be really good.

Another friend, incidentally, tried to cheer me up about the election, as if me being cheerful were somehow going to happen today. I told her I wanted to leave this poor excuse for a country, which upset her. She voted for Bush.

My mom told me that she was sorry she missed me at her house yesterday. I went there for five minutes after I voted to check my cell phone's messages. My stepfather, in that time, got her on the phone and told her that I was there. So she headed to the house with my brother's fiancee Samantha in the hope that we could all get something to eat.

But they missed me. After checking my messages, I hit the door and didn't even say goodbye to my stepdad - which shouldn't surprise anyone.

My time watching the election results was actually fun. I went to my friend Wes's house in Buford (since that's where I'm registered to vote), spent time with him, picked up food and watched things unfold until 11 p.m.

Then I drove back home and realized I'd not taped "Gilmore Girls." (I'm not having good VCR luck this week.)

My stomach is feeling a little woozy right now, maybe because my meal with Wes consisted of Chick-Fil-A sandwiches, something from Cinnabon and two bottles of fat-free NesQuik. So I called in sick to the store.

(I'd like to be able to rest, but I'll probably head to the used DVD store to sell some stuff so that my rent check won't overdraw me.)

I'm NOT AT ALL fit to deal with the public. So I called in sick to the bookstore.

I've been saying for two weeks now that everything in my life feels compromised and that I'm not focusing on my own happiness as a goal.

I keep saying that. And saying that. And saying that.

I really fucking hate myself right now. I probably should take a nap.

When is my own fucking happiness going to matter to me?

The big cheese.

Larry just wrote me in reply to the blog essay, "The Velveeta Incident," which I called and told him to read.

I should not have sounded non-commital about the blog essay -- I really enjoyed it. You did do what you often accuse me of doing -- exaggeration -- it was not mostly goat cheese -- if you had read the menu you would have found 1 goat cheese, 3 cow cheeses and 1 sheep cheese :)

Here's to Velveeta!

The menu - for the record - had a history of all the cheeses featured in the seven-course meal, and it was printed on this designer, imprinted paper. It was very nice. I meant to save one and bring it home.

Poli Sci Guy asked me about the wine-and-cheese dinner last night at the store. I told him that he'd probably have thought that the most pretentious moments came when Larry performed one of his original music compositions after Duncan and one of the Davids read aloud sonnets from a book of gay love poems.

(OK, writing that down just now, it sounds way more hoity-toity than it actually seemed while it was happening.)

Accustomed to your face.

The first thing I said to Juan Pablo at Larry and David's wine-and-cheese party Sunday was that he looked familiar. I'm fairly sure it sounded like a line.

"Have I met you before?" I asked him. "You look really familiar."

Juan Pablo moved to Atlanta from South America about seven years ago to go to Georgia Tech, so I knew I likely hadn't met him at school.

(I recall the night I kissed the beautiful Latin man wearing a dress at the Boybutante Ball when I was 20, but that was not Juan Pablo. That beautiful Latin man in a dress was the same one I walked up to in a cafe weeks later and asked, "Hey, didn't I kiss you?" And he blushed, then turned back to his book. I'm never smart in those situations.)

So I thought maybe Juan Pablo was that guy or the guy from the sweaty T-shirt photo that I downloaded over and over and over years ago from Planet Out. But he wasn't that guy, either.

Anyway, last night I was working at the cash registers of my bookstore when Juan Pablo walked up to the counter with a copy of Dan Brown's ANGELES Y DEMONIOS.

"Juan Pablo!" I said a bit loud, and he looked at me and smiled. "So THAT'S why you looked familiar!!"

Juan Pablo is the guy who sits quietly at a table in the Linguas en Espanol corner of my bookstore two or three nights a week, the one whom I walk up to on occasion and ask if he wants me to shelve any of his books for him.

It's amazing how different a regular or semi-regular bookstore customer can look in a different setting - particularly when the customer is seen by candlelight, wearing a good smile, tighter pants and a more open shirt while speaking frequently and eloquently and holding a glass of white wine.

Juan Pablo apparently hangs out in my store after his regular trips to the gym.

He was surprised to see me. We spoke for a few minutes. I rang up his book, shook his hand twice and wondered to myself why I hadn't put mousse in my hair yesterday morning.

When he left, I'd forgotten to deactivate the security tag in his book. So it beeped when he went out. (I hope he doesn't hate me from now on. I was just so distracted that he was there.)

I knew he looked familiar.

A reminder.

Vote tomorrow. I don't care who you vote for, though I know who I'm voting for and have been very vocal about that. (And some of my friends have been WAY MORE VOCAL.)

Just vote.

Bring a book, stand in line and vote. Find a way. Vote.

The Velveeta incident.

Last night, after catching a screening of "Vera Drake," I headed to Larry and David's condo for their fourth annual Halloween Wine and Cheese Celebration. I probably had too much wine and some really, really exotic cheese, most of it goat cheese though I think the capper was an extremely harsh bleu cheese. I also preferred the white wines to the rather tart darker wines of the evening, though I had a bit of a good port while I was there.

Larry and David had set up a banquet table in their living room to allow for 16 people, though only 15 were there. (The opera guy was a no-show.)

At the center of the banquet table was a bouquet intended to mock me. There was a cornucopia of flowers, knick-knacks and, in plain view, a box of Velveeta Shells and Cheese.

Last week, coming there for dinner, I brought two boxes of Velveeta Shells and Cheese that I thought I could make to compliment Larry's attempt at Shepherd's Pie. I mean, I was in the mood for Shells and Cheese, and I didn't think that it was going to be a big deal. I mean, it's Shepherd's Pie, so I thought it would be all right to make side items. (Besides, I was going over there to watch "Desperate Housewives," a show that almost merits Velveeta.) When I came in with the boxes, Larry threw a fit, refused to allow me to make my damn pasta, suggested that I was some philistine and made jokes about it all that evening.

So coming into the wine-and-cheese party, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to know that mocking my Velveeta was going to be a running joke, which it was.

The centerpiece was out of my reach, so I was staring down the "macaroni of my discontent" all night.



My place at the table for the seven-course meal was between Andy, the quiet, pensive, fiercely intelligent performance artist/drummer who's working on his latest album, and Duncan, the fabulous, scene-stealing, all-that actor/performance artist/drag queen pictured above who has a performance at Eyedrum scheduled this week.

I told them I wasn't doing a reading this year, and Andy, who said he enjoyed last year's reading (even the part when I started to lose it and ran from the room), asked me if I was still writing. I told him that I'm generally stuck and feel like I'm making too many compromises in every aspect of my life.

Andy told me to work until I found myself unstuck.

Anyway, on to more interesting things, Duncan and I entered into what became a heated discussion about the new Anita Baker CD.

When I told him that what I'd heard of it was a bit weak, Duncan gasped and went into hysterics. And when I told him that it's generally regarded around my store as a boring piece-of-work and that her voice has gotten weaker with age, Duncan threw himself into some sort of brilliant, hand-waving fit, as though I'd just spoken out against the goddess.

"For your INFORMATION, we saw Miss Baker at Chastain last year," he intoned. "And she sounded just like the CD I have at home. Of course, that wasn't new material, but I think she's still able to hold her own."

From that, I went on to praise the new Queen Latifah CD, and Duncan seemed to react as though I'd redeemed myself somewhat.

He asked me who I liked, so I mentioned Annie Lennox. And that redeemed me in his eyes, too.

Unfortunately, then Duncan and I came to verbal blows over what we thought of Barbra and Diana Ross.

"You pay Mary what she's worth," I said, speaking for Diana. "You do not take two girls who were Supremes AFTER YOU LEFT THE GROUP and claim to be the Supremes."

Duncan said that I was being unfair to Diana, that all assertive black females in the music business end up with the "bitch" label they don't deserve and that her reputation and her rumored backstabbing wasn't her fault so much as Berry Gordy's.

"You take three teenage girls from the ghetto, and I mean the GHET-TO, and you put them in front of an older, powerful man, and you see what happens ...," Duncan said, explaining the downfall of Motown's best girl group. "He was married, and she was a teenage girl. But he was the boss."

As for Barbra, Duncan told me that I wasn't old enough to "get" her. I said that my first impression of Barbra came from "The Main Event," "Yentl" and "Nuts," so I'd caught her in the wrong era.

I also talked to Duncan about what's going on in my life. Duncan, upon hearing that friends had suggested that I drop my jobs and concentrate solely on writing, told me that living like a starving artist was bullshit.

"Honey, there's nothing wrong with being able to pay your bills and have a roof over your head," he said.

Everything Duncan said was punctuated with attitude, and I was lucky to be sitting next to him.

Other people, at other corners of the table, were having their own good conversations.

Occasionally, I would look over at other people to see what was going on.

The single one of the Davids (for there were seven people named David) was having a nice, long chat with the new guy Juan Pablo, who was one of the hottest men I've ever seen in my life. Juan Pablo lives in the complex with Larry and David.

And I'm thinking Larry was being strategic with where he had everyone sit, for the plates were marked. Single David and Juan Pablo looked like they were having fun.

And I know this because I looked at Juan Pablo - and his hair, his eyes, the top two buttons of his shirt undone - over and over throughout the night.

In the middle of my conversation with Duncan (who was with his partner David) and Andy (who was with his partner David), I mentioned to Duncan that I was probably being too superficial when I kept glancing in Juan Pablo's direction.

So Duncan told me it was more than all right.

"Honey, you're a gay man," Duncan said to me, indicating Juan Pablo. "And if you're gay in front of a man who looks like that, you're expected to ... FEEL something."

The night ended with me having a long conversation with Brad, my old friend from college. A long conversation. But it was so late, and I'd had so much wine. So I'm just going to pretend that I don't know what things we discussed on the couch while I had my arm around him.

I came home late to find that I'd not reset the time on my TV, so I ended up with the full episode of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" and only 15 minutes of "Desperate Housewives."

It was a good night, although I think I'm more a Velveeta guy than a goat cheese one.

Strike up the band.

So I was working in the music department of my bookstore last night while the biggest, rowdiest, funniest book signing I've ever, ever seen is going on.

A crowd of about 125 people, most of them women-over-40 in wigs and tiaras, was in my bookstore for a signing of Jill Conner Browne's latest book, a Southern favorite, The Sweet Potato Queens' Field Guide to Men.



According to the Sweet Potato Queens' website, Sweet Potato Queens are self-crowned, red-wigged, big-haired, feather-boa-wearing beauty queens who focus on fun and look like female drag queens.

Those women were having a great time, applauding, laughing out loud, bringing in their own bottles of champagne. And their husbands - some of whom were also in pink-and-black bondagewear costumes - were also enjoying themselves.

To top it all off - and to my shock and the shock of several customers, my managers arranged for a 50-member costumed volunteer band, The Seed and Feed Marching Abominables, to perform a trumpets-and-drums fanfare as they marched down the aisles of the fiction department toward the signing at about 8:30 p.m.

I have never, ever, ever seen anything like that in my entire life. Or, at least, I've never seen it inside.

"Oh my God," I kept saying to one of the managers. "Oh my God, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. There's a freakin' marching band in the store. It's like Mardi Gras."

It was a great party. It lasted for about four hours, with my managers passing around "sweet potato delight" refreshments, and there are still pink feathers and champagne stains in the floor of the carpet.

I've seen other signings, from the successful to the zero-attendance ones. Heck, my first day ever at Barnes & Noble Mall of Georgia, they had a book signing for WWE wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, and that had a massive line. I attended a fairly packed David Sedaris signing one year - where the author got severely pissed at the bookstore staff, and I know my store's hosted signings with an apparently fun Madeleine Albright and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But the Sweet Potato Queens, and their books of humor and recipes, have earned my eternal respect and admiration.

Because there was a damn marching band in my store.

How am I not myself?

I'm working on something that I can't and shouldn't talk about here, something fun, important and personal. If anything comes of it that should be shared, I will let you all know.

I know, I know ... I sound like someone who tells you he has a secret but won't tell you what the secret is.

But I've got to work this through myself first.

I saw I Heart Huckabees, and it made me angry. I couldn't figure out what it was trying to say, I guess. I'm not really sure. The movie left me more confused than anything I've seen this year.

Oddly enough, seeing the movie I didn't like might actually help me deal with some stuff, but I still didn't like the movie.

Anyway, I'm being vague. Or maybe you just wouldn't understand.

I'm reading like a fortune cookie.

Movie recommendation.

RAY comes out this weekend, and I saw it a month ago and reviewed it extensively on Amazon.

If "Georgia On My Mind" ever gave you chills, you should see this movie. It's really good.

Art imitates life.

Oh God, I was wrong. Doug Martin has published a book.

My friend Pam just gave me the heads-up.

It's called Outline of My Lover.



Quite surprisingly, it's about a poetry student who comes to Athens, Ga., and ends up dating a rock superstar who lives there.

Yeah, it's fiction.

Your head is there to move you around.

Chris over at Boys' Briefs wrote today about how he met R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe over the weekend, which led me to write to him about how I apparently stalked Stipe like crazy when I went to college in Athens.

I'm reprinting what I wrote, so everyone can either consider me a psycho or consider me cool for getting Michael Stipe's phone number, sorta, from the man himself.

I met Michael Stipe about four or five times between my ages of 18 and 20 when I was going to UGA, naturally. The first time was the best one, for he was doing a reading of names at the campus display of the AIDS Quilt - which I was covering for The Red & Black.

He was looking at the panels, I was looking at the panels, and we met at an intersection and had a real, good conversation about how overwhelming the whole thing was. He was wearing glasses and has real pretty eyes, and he asked me where I was from. Then, he let me quote him for the article on the display, and it was the first time in 20 or so years that a member of R.E.M. had been interviewed by the paper.

In the process of the whole thing, I forgot to introduce myself, so, looking up from my notepad, I said, "By the way, hi, I'm Benjie."

And he said, "I'm Michael. It's nice to meet you."

And he shook my hand, which is when I proceeded to get a big crush on him that I should not have ever considered. But, umm, I was 18 and in the closet, and everybody told me that he was dating this really bad poet named Doug Martin who didn't comb his hair.

And if you look at the photo essays Stipe's done, you'll see Doug Martin and his bad hair. Luckily, none of the bad poetry was ever published mainstream.

Once I saw Doug Martin do a public reading of an erotic poem about getting his hair washed, and he got so into it he started rubbing himself against the microphone stand.

I swear to God, I thought the staff of Jittery Joe's, the coffee shop, was going to have to mop up afterward.

Other times I met Michael Stipe, I think I bugged him and made an ass out of myself.

I was covering the promotion of Jim McKay's "Girls Town," with Lili Taylor, for the paper, and I saw Stipe out at his vegetarian restaurant Guaranteed. And a friend of mine dared me to ask him out.

So I walked up to Stipe, told him I was working on a story and asked him if he was free for coffee sometime.

He told me that he was really busy and told me that I could get in touch with the director through the R.E.M. Athens office. Then Stipe, who was annoyed I'd interrupted his lunch, wrote his office number down on the tab at the end of his waiter's ticket, ripped it off and handed it to me. (I kept that number for years to impress people. "Hey, Michael Stipe gave me his phone number.")

At the "Girls Town" screening and Q&A, I asked Jim McKay a question, and Stipe, walking with Doug Martin, shouted, "GOOD QUESTION!" at me as he was walking out.

The other times I met him, I just managed to annoy him.

Like when I said hello outside the Paul Westerberg concert.

Or when I walked up to Doug Martin, whom I'd actually talked to a couple times, and said hello to Doug with friends of mine, just because Stipe was standing next to him.

So I said hello to Stipe, then walked my friends away from them.

As I did this, I said, "That's him," to them, trying to be cool.

But Stipe heard me, and he made a face of disapproval at me.

Then my friends, upon finding out who it was, RAN back to Michael Stipe and BEGGED him for an autograph.

Seriously, he was browsing in a store, and she ran up to him and asked him to autograph her hardcover copy of GONE WITH THE WIND.

That whole thing embarrassed me thoroughly, and I thankfully never saw or talked to him again.

British invasion.

Miss Gibson writes today to inform me that she got the Robbie Williams Greatest Hits CD for me this weekend.

I hope she'll be able to make it into the country, though I don't think that should be a problem.

On a possibly unrelated note, "Please, God, get rid of George W. Bush."

The man upstairs.

I met my new neighbor Chad from upstairs, and I'm fairly certain that he is in our 'inverted fraternity' since we met after I heard his very effeminate-sounding male "cousin" call him "Debbie Downer."

He probably thinks I'm a bit odd since I spoke to him for a moment, coming in from my car, and then I asked him where he was headed in from.

I suppose I should've asked him about OUT Magazine, since that seems to be the "Are you gay?" tongue-in-cheek question of the month.

My reporter friend Donnelly, in college, called gay people an 'inverted fraternity' when he would speak to me. I had the biggest crush on him, but everyone told me that he was straight.

Yet no one was surprised when he graduated, dumped his girlfriend and ran off to Mexico with some guy.

Or so the legend goes.

My "Grudge" against the Japanese.

OK, so the entire movie THE GRUDGE is annoyingly repetitive, unnerving and, by the end, actually quite scary.

My friend Ron and I were ready to leave it. I offered to go, but, by then, Ron and I were both kinda into the movie. But we were sitting in the center of the aisle because we didn't plan to be so rattled by it.

I recommend it, even though there were moments when I was shaking my hands at the screen in complete frustration.

Someone asked me what kind of scary it was, and I told them it was "Don't go upstairs. No, girl, don't go upstairs! Don't go up the damn stairs, girl!!!" scary.

Oh, and it kinda made me hate Japanese people and run from anyone Asian in the parking lot of the theater.

Kacoon, whom I called from my car completely freaked out, laughed and told Mike, who's half-Japanese, that "The Grudge" had turned me into a racist.

Domestic and imported.

Last night, I finally carried the "refreshments" left over from the high school reunion from my car to my refrigerator. I didn't know, at the point where I volunteered my car as a carrier, that I would actually end up the possessor of such goods, but I wrote my friend Dena to ask what she wanted me to do with the fortysomething bottles of Budweiser that we had left over.

"What do you want me to do with all this beer?" I asked her.

"Can't you drink it?" she asked me.

So I now have beer in my house. Lots and lots of beer.

I'm tempted to sing a song about all those bottles of beer, but I don't want to hurt the wallpaper in my kitchen.

Guests, if I ever have any, are going to think I'm a Bud man. This is likely a problem, as I usually only drink Bass Ale and Woodpecker Cider.

I tried the Budweiser last night, and, though it wasn't bad, it wasn't really my taste.

I'm thinking that I could use the bottles of beer to lure curious frat boys into my apartment for the next two years, but that seems uncharacteristically predatory of me. Maybe someone has a beer exchange program somewhere, or I could donate it to homeless alcoholics.



Meanwhile, I was browsing Amazon UK today to see the variety of different merchandise that we can't get in this country, and I saw that Britpop idol Robbie Williams, formerly of my ex Welsh Guy's favorite boy band Take That, has a new greatest hits album coming out in Britain. And I want it.

I thought about having it shipped, but it seems silly to pay shipping on something that I should probably be a little bit embarrassed to be buying, maybe.

But I love Robbie Williams, the earlier crossover stuff and the great swing album moreso than his last one.

Lupo once impressed me by telling me that he'd been to a Robbie Williams concert that included a moment when Robbie walked onstage wearing only a towel.

Then an idea hit me.

So I e-mailed Miss Gibson and asked her if she would mind too terribly picking it up for me and bringing it here when she sees me next month.

I figured that she and I should start some kind of low-key smuggling operation for when we make trips across the Atlantic, like when I stocked up on Girl Scout Cookies for her before my flight to see her in April.

Hopefully she won't mind getting me my Robbie fix.