July 23

There are spiders in my room. Not often. Every third day a spider will appear on the wall. The first one was smallish, and its smear was rust-colored and chunky. It seemed male, its legs were hairy. The second one was larger, and female-seeming, and right up by the ceiling. She was more difficult to kill, and her smear was long, trailing, and black. Most of her is on the bottom of my shoe.

The problem is, I have to kill spiders. If I see one, and its not, you know, lethally huge, I'll probably end up killing it. Why? Because I associate spiders with spider-bites. Because when I see a spider on the wall, all I can imagine is that spider, if left alone, crawling under my covers at night and worming its way right inside my pee-hole. Or latching on to my taint. Or walking upside-down onto the ceiling and kamikazing into my open mouth. Or laying eggs in my ears. Or taking a tiny shit in my eyes. Or making a cozy warm bed where my balls meet my thighs. It gets warm in there. So how can I leave such a danger alone? How can I let it live, as, say, Robert Thurman might have me do.

Ah, the Buddhist. God is that fellow funny. He talked and talked. He commented on how much better everything would be if the Chinese left Tibet alone. His mainstay sayings were centered around having fun, rock groups, and he often plugged Barack Obama. On Uma: "Uma is very sweet. She doesn't kill four hundred people before breakfast. That's Quentin's idea." On Berlin: "The wall came down, people started having fun, lots of rock groups were able to play."

Actually, it's hard for me to quote him directly. I went and drank seven or eight quick beer before the show. Not right before the show, mind you, and I was mostly sober/hung-over by the time things wrapped up. But it was enough that I mostly drifted through the interview. It's alarming, looking back, how much I missed. There I was, sitting beside Lindsey, laughing. Laughing a lot. Amused by the various ways in which Thurman was outlining his vision, his very optimistic vision, and shutting down his interviewer, who seemed hellbent on joking his way through the proceedings. Like a horse whose taken the bit and is on a tear. And yet Thurman was just as jokey if not more so.

It's nice to get near someone who raised one of the hottest chicks alive. Other than seeing Kelly, that was the main reason I went. To share a room with the dude who would've seen Uma grow up. And been there. And who still likely shares a dinner table with her every once in a while. Turns out he's kind of neat on his own.

After Thurman finished there was an Eco fashion show. Waylin, or somebody, the fellow who did the interview, now had his opportunity to unleash his class-clown humor upon the world. Effectively ruining the little show, but it was funny. The mainstays of the show were old Ts, old sports jerseys (Michael Somebody's), old sheets, and old curtains. The girls looked nice and there was plenty of side-boob to keep me interested. But when Waylin (I'll call him that) came across a fashion-specific word he didn't recognize he'd say, "I don't know what that it is, but it's Eco."

To close: I would give one of my seven perfect lives to spend a year in Europe with Charlize Theron.