Wherefore art thou, muse?

I remember now: I have this blog thingy where I used to post my internal dialogue for the... well, entertainment might be too charitable a word. Amusement, perhaps.

Around 3:30 this morning, I finally gave in to concerns about lawn care that had been milling around in my head and keeping me awake. I crept out of bed and went to my office to look up some information about thatch control and core aeration, but I ended up playing around on Flickr. It's fortunate that web sites don't literally collect dust, but I could tell that it had been a while since I'd been on that site. As if it weren't bad enough that I haven't really uploaded much of anything since Turtle's and my Caribbean cruise last year, I also had a couple buddy requests (or something like that) in my in box.

I didn't even know I had an in box on Flickr.

Anyway, I discovered a new "blog this" feature that allows you to, with the click of a button, add many of the photos on Flickr as a blog posting. Even more exciting, this actually does work with the new and super handy (here's a tissue, in case any of that sarcasm dripped on your shoes) Blogger Beta. I promptly blogged a couple photos I found particularly interesting so that you could enjoy them too.

That lasted about as long as it took for me to get to work, have a cup of coffee, and pause to wonder about the copyright implications of my actions. Sure enough, "The Jimmer's" photos were marked "All rights reserved", so despite the fact that he (or she) hadn't disabled my ability to use the "blog this" button, I felt my only correct options were to either take down the images from my blog, or go through the whole process of contacting the photographer to ask his permission to display his (or her) work.

Frankly, that's just too much effort to go through just for an image of a dilapidated shack with a TV with the screen shot out in the front yard. Even if my alternate title was going to be "The Presley Homestead".

Meanwhile

I've been trying to take Tink's recent challenge to heart and return to noticing all the strange little things going on in the world around me.

• The beefy, early-middle-aged guy in the booth across from us at Chili's. The tribal armband tattoo was kind of cool. The spider web encircling the point of his elbow wasn't something I would have chosen—but then, part of the reason I don't have one is that I could never think of a design that represented something integral enough to Who I Am that I'd want to wear it for the rest of my life.
  
  Which brings me to the four-inch high "KISS" plastered across his bicep. Now, I can almost understand someone getting a tattoo of the Grateful Dead's iconic skull. For their fans, it's not just a band; it's a way of life. But KISS? Sure, I have a couple of their earlier albums (one within arm's reach), from before they got old and fat and couldn't carry off the whole rock-gods-in-makeup thing any more. But come on. Bands come and go.
  
  I bet the poor guy sees that tattoo in the mirror and wonders what he was thinking. Or worse, maybe he doesn't.
  
  
• Speaking of rocking out, I actually got on my desktop computer at home the other day and rediscovered the pile of MP3s I have on it. It occurred to me that it might be nice to put together some driving music to listen to during my commutes, now that I have a CD player in the car. The result? Commuter Sampler - Vol. 1.
  
  You'd think that I'd use lots of soothing ambient music and drowsy Rachmaninov... stuff. Nope. It's all high octane stuff. Counterintuitively, it helps my mood during my commutes, perhaps because I'm so busy howling along with Queens of the Stone Age's "No One Knows" or Dwight Yoakum's "Fast As You" that I can't be bothered to get pissed off when the dozenth butthead cuts me off without signaling. Or maybe there just aren't that many people willing to cut off the insane guy while he's yelling at his windshield.