Going to Ikea today to hopefully wrap up any furniture needs that I have. I need a kitchen table, a coffee table, night stands, and a holy shit did you see that Michael Jackson interview? As a person who has his fingers on the pulse of pop culture, I missed the original airing because I had to go drinking that night. A friend taped it and I watched it last night, however. He reminds me of that kid in The Toy (Richard Pryor flick) that just surrounds himself with every whimsical thing he can find. MJ goes to Las Vegas (Why? No one under 21 is allowed in the casinos) and takes up seven hotel suites, surrounding himself with wax statues. MJ has a creepy-as-hell amusement park.

Q: What's the icky thing you'll most likely find in a baby's diaper?

A: Michael Jackson's hand.

Speaking of gay, I'm furniture shopping today. I'm driving up to Ikea with my friend Greg who thinks he's going to be working on his laptop while I drive up there. That bitch is going to be reading my newspaper to me. I need a co-pilot, not a tagalong. As of this moment, he's got 12 minutes to get here.

I woke up this morning at 6am and for some reason was bright eyed, bushy tailed, and I think I even had a "zest for life," as my therapist once put it. I opened up the curtains, looked out upon all of the possibility that a town like Troutdale has to offer... that's right... soak it in...

Damn right it was a good day
--Ice Cube

I'm thinking about writing a porn movie... but not just a sex porn movie. It'd me more like a relationship porn movie... sex wouldn't necessarily be involved. Here's some of the female character's script from my ideal relationship porn movie:

"I rented the Star Wars Trilogy... you know how much I love Star Wars."

"Honey, I won tickets to the gun show next weekend."

"I got a job as a security guard from 11pm to 7am, so after we have sex, I'll go to work and still be home in time to make you breakfast. Besides, I don't know how you're going to support your strip club habit on one income alone."

The Greatest Story Ever Told:

I was at a birthday dinner one evening when the guy sitting next to me started telling a story. I can't completely recapture the moment of my hearing this story, but I'll try. This is how it was told to me:

"So this guy I worked with used to be a minor league baseball player. After the games, the players would go out to a bar, get drunk, then pass out in their hotel rooms. One night, this guy is out at a bar after a game and meets this chick. They start talking and he gets her to go back to his hotel room. They get back there and start making out. Things start rounding third base and the girl stops him and says:

'Can we go straight to anal sex?' [I guess that'd be another line to insert into my relationship porn movie above]

The guy says yeah and soon she's taking it like an altar boy until the ball player goes for a courtesy 'reach-around' and finds what was referred to simply as 'the full hog.'

'Oh my God... you're a guy...' the ball player stammered.

'Yeah, the apparent cross-dresser admitted.'

'So what did you do then,' I asked. He told me that he was about ready to come anyway so he finished off and then asked him to leave."

"He finished off?" I asked between drinks.

"Yep" the story teller said.

I ask you, the reader: Is it gay for a guy to "finish off" in a guy if you know it's a guy? i mean, if you think it's a girl it's not gay. However, once you know you're banging a guy and are able to keep an erection in the process... that seems gay to me. I'm about to darken some trouble spots in my beard and I think that's gay, but it's not necessarily a gay act. I went candle shopping for my house... gay but doesn't make me gay. I mean, when you tally all of the people you've had sex with, would you count the one that ended up actually being a guy? Do you get a half notch for that one, or do you even lose a notch? If there's any moral to the story, it's to do a reacharound WAY earlier in the act.

Dave Barry has a Blog page now? The Easy Mac that I was having for breakfast this morning (two packets - because I'm EXTRA EXTRA HUNGRY, as the cooking instructions suggest) nearly flew out of my mouth when I got this news. Al Gore may have invented the internet (I believe it was a science project he and his Dad built in their garage using only chicken wire, duct tape, and Cisco routers), but I INVENTED THE BLOG! Check this out from the other side of my wayback-in-1999 machine: ORIGINAL GOOCH-1.COM "BLOGS."

I invented the Blog, but I use Blogger.com because of the ability to update from anywhere with a computer. In fact, I once sent an update from my phone:

I passed the microsoft exam!

A statement that holds as much historical significance to me as Al Sharpton's "I Have a Dream" speech, Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" speech, and Miss White Trash 2001's "I love to suck cock" speech.

Dave Barry? Christ. I've read Dave Barry and I'm sure that, if I had some money, I could go to a foreign country and find out that one of their native language's most common terms actually means "ugly americans" and that the portions at the restaurants were so small that I politely asked my waiter to "super size it, please" or whatever schtick he's used for the last 30 years. It's all formula... I read somewhere that Nike sublets small Vietnamese children to Dave Barry to write his stuff these days. Not me... this crap his hand crafted, microbrewed drivel. As sure as I use the ellipses way too much, I can assure you that I'm not exploiting children like Dave Barry does. I can assure you that I've never beaten and robbed a blind woman, like Dave Barry. I've never pulled money out of a church's collection plate...

I dig the ellipses. Dave Barry had a TV show based on him, my NetWits colleague W. Bruce Cameron has a show on ABC based on his book. Where's my show? TV is full of fat guys living with hot looking chicks (Jim Belushi and Courtney Thorne-Smith, Leah Remini and some other fat guy)... that was me for the last couple of years. I'm single now (merely hitting on hot looking chicks these days) and it's a sit-comlicious riot! I used dryer sheets for the first time last night. I actually read the directions (place dryer sheet on top of clothes)! I've used my oven once since I've lived on my own and I burned the living shit out of my finger. The microwave is the womb in which the lives of all my meals are incubated. I love the microwave; I stuck popsicle sticks into the door sensors and used the open-door microwave as my sole source of home heating. I've never been so warm... and tan. I had dinner with my ex-girlfriend last week and she asked me how I liked living on my own. I responded with this "You know how frustrated you get when you're trying to do something on the computer but it doesn't work right for you or you just don't know how to do it... THAT'S MY LIFE right now." I'm really eating Easy Mac for breakfast, I might have a hot dog. I might have a heart attack.

Thanks to MSL for the Dave Barry blog tip.

A friend from way back released a CD in Utah... click HERE to check it out.

There were two things wrong with yesterday's log: The omitted apostrophe from "writers note," and the assumption that my threat to "put a hammer through my server" would be effective to anyone other than the handful of people with other websites on the server.

I accidentally woke up early enough to go to the gym today, so off I go. - G

GOOCH: FLASHBACK!

JUNE 2001 (three months before the 9/11 attacks) from the column "Air Travel Sucks"

Not that you need me to tell you what can go wrong in midair, you’ve got flight attendants telling you as soon as you board the plane of all of the “unlikely” events that can occur during the flight. Example: "In the unlikely event of a water landing, your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device." Unlikely? They never give any instructions in the unlikely event of the plane smashing into the side of an office building at 400 mph.

I was off by 100mph.

writers note: I think that my writing persona contrasts sharply with what I am in real life. I'm not really this bitter in person. I'm just a recently single guy with a part time computer job who lives in a condo in Gresham, Oregon. I'm a nice, sensitive person who has become accustomed to public writing as a way of self expression. I cried when 9/11 happened; I cried when the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded. I once became attached to a stray cat that I befriended, fed back to health, and at one point got itself trapped and had to rescue it. I teared up when that cat eventually disappeared (my girlfriend at the time tried to console me by saying that the cat probably didn't leave me, but probably was run over by a car).

My point is this: I'm a nice, sensitive person and if this fucking website and its contents keep any girl from going out with me I'll put a god damned hammer through my server.

What's Gooch Pulling it to Today?
(expanded cable edition)

SCRAMBLED PORN