Sorry, kids. Better luck next time.

There's a fairly large college campus down the street from my workplace. Thus, you can always tell when classes have started up again because you start seeing newer, younger faces... and the occasional fake ID from some kid who hasn't heard from his buddies that hey, that stores will keep your shit so don't bother. I've confiscated two in the last four days alone, which is pretty unusual considering we can go a couple of months without seeing one. One of them was flawed but very good as far as these things go and would probably pass muster in 98 of 100 tries. The other... well, not so good. One of the shitty cheap-looking "Non-Government ID Card" dealies you can pick up on the streets of NYC for fifty to a hundred bucks. I always feel sorry for kids who carry those around -- it's like they didn't realize they were buying a big sticker for their forehead that reads SUCKER in big red print.

Nostalgia

I purchased Slayer's Reign in Blood on CD the other day. Hadn't heard it since my days as a metal-shirt-wearing pimple-faced teenager, so I was impressed to realize it's even better than I remember it being -- an exemplary example of music as blunt-force trauma. Nice to know the things you liked as a kid don't always end up sucking. (Counterpoint: "Lightning Crashes" is playing on XM radio right now. I used to like this song. What an idiot I was.)

Ups and downs

Replace "car" with "guy" and you'll have what I did over the Labor Day Weekend. Five hours up, four hours down. Pretty good for someone who hadn't hiked anywhere in about ten years.



This is an old picture of my cat Patches. I got home from New Hampshire to find a message on my cell phone from my mother saying that she (the cat, not Mom) had gone into renal failure. She died on Tuesday at the age of 11.