VolcanoBakemeat

Thanks to an account fiasco, my premier membership was stripped from me. I lived in the cold streets of the membership, sucking putarra dew sticks out of the trash can, coughing up my own plasmatic receptor acid until I collapsed and was pronounced dead for six whole months. I was known better for being the "exile who returned." What I did in this six-month period will be explained when I get some caffeine into my tarnished system. Now, I'm back in black. Put on some AC/DC, can't you take a hint when you see one?

Hmm... Kanohi Jutlin? *imagines Matoran punk band called the Jutlins*

If you'd read the rules, we'd be eternally grateful.

That's 4 words.

Ah, thanks for letting me know. *hands Nukora poodle*

Happy birthday!!! Hope you have a good one. Sorry... I'd draw you something for your birthday, but my scanner's packed.

"Tree Band... the name invokes memories of concerts in Ta-Metru, listening to the chibirau while riding down the Kini-Wahi path on an Ussal crab, the disturbing performance at the Ko-Koro vs. Le-Koro Koli match way back when, memories from when we first discovered ourselves here." _Mata Nui Messenger, 0 B.T.L., Windfade 25 "Even as I write this review, I can't help but hum the brilliant guitar riffs from 'Love Pulsation,' an incredible song joined by 19 others in this awesome album." _Ta-Metru Tribune, 1 B.T.L., Snowdawn 5 "I am speechless. This is easily the greatest rock album ever made." _Chibirau magazine, Snowfade 0 B.T.L. HISTORY Easily the first of the popular rock bands, the Tree Band was founded in 68,876 B.T.L. by a vocalist named Adron. Adron was a street performer from the nicer part of Le-Metru, playing the xylophone and singing. Many people took note of how brilliant a musician he was. Later on, he proved to be an excellent songwriter, creating a new style of music. Adron commissioned the designing of several instruments from the machinery industry Ussanui. Adron sketched out plans for something called an imitator, which resembled a bassoon, a guitar run by proto-electricity, a stand with many kins of drums, and a voice amplifier. Adron got recognition as a genius after the imitator, drum set and electric guitar hit music stores. Many musicians began experimenting with them, including a hopeful rock star named Sanso. Sanso became a public performer using Adron's drum set invention, setting up base in the same part of Le-Metru that Adron started in. The imitator was revolutionized by two artists, Makani and Mikktam, both Le-Matoran. Mikktam was famous for raging imitator solos, while Makani wrote songs purely for the spooky-sounding instrument. After these instruments began to sell and musicians began to produce, a Grand Rock Festival was organized in the newly established Xian Hall. Adron, Makani, Mikktam and Sanso happened to meet at the Xian Hall before the show, and each rehearsing, the four solo artists decided together. And thus it was formed--Tree Band. With Adron on lead guitar, Makani on imitator, Mikktam on bass guitar and Sanso on drums, the quartet rocked the Matoran World for many, many years. 127 albums were released. (Mikktam left the band and went solo around 56,000 B.T.L., but the band went along fine without him.) When the Tree Band arrived on Mata Nui, they changed their name to Le-Koro Tree Band and toned their music down. Adron was still lead vocalist, but he now played xylophone, as he did in the beginning. Makani took flute and Sanso took to a single drum. Also, a bongo drummer named Kissako, an acousic guitarist named Vira and a duet of flutists took stage behind them. (Tree Band did all the music for the MNOLG1 except for the Gali vs. Tarakava, which was conceived by girl-group Takea, and the Pohatu vs. Nui-Jaga game theme, done by a Po-Matoran disco group called the Beat Cacti.) Their 127th and final album, Sunny Mata Nui, was released after the defeat of the Rahkshi and contained all of their greatest hits, including many from Metru Nui they had reemembered. THE ALBUM Sunny Mata Nui Songs: THE DAY OF THE RAHI (Sanso/Makani) LEAFDAWN GONE WILD (Sanso) A VIRGIN MASK (Sanso/Makani/Adron) LOVE PULSATION (Adron) SIGN MY LEAF (Makani) BLUE MASK EXPULSION (Sanso/Makani/Adron) I FELL OFF A TREE (Adron) FINAL MASK CAST (Sanso) TOHUNGA (Sanso/Makani/Adron) HEARTWARMING CRISIS (Sanso/Makani) JUNGLE HATES ME (Sanso/Makani/Adron) ASH BEARS DON'T CRY (Adron) SOUTHERN COAST TRAVELER (Adron) IN MY ELEMENT (Sanso) THE CITY OF LEGENDS (Makani) GOODBYE, RED STAR (Sanso/Makani/Adron) THE MAHA SONG (Sanso/Makani) STREET PERFORMANCE #1 (Adron) NAMING DAY (Traditional arr. Sanso/Makani/Adron) DOWN AT TORNADO FIELD (Makani) Credit to Vezok's Friend's Friend, a banned buddy of mine, for some song names and inventing Tree Band. LYRICS SIGN MY LEAF (2:32) Hey Koli star, come over here I'm your number one fan I'm training to be just like you And doing the bst I can I've organized a fan club I've got branches all about The fan club wants to see you And when you come they'll shout Won't you sign my leaf I'm gonna hang it on the wall Won't you sign my leaf 'Cause I'm the biggest fan of all I pay a thousand widgets For a front-row stadium seat Down at Tornado Stadium 'Cause I think you're the elite I've searched for you all over I've searched all night and day Won't you come and meet the fan club And when you come they'll say Won't you sign my leaf I'm gonna hang it on the wall Won't you sign my leaf 'Cause I'm the biggest fan of all I FELL OFF A TREE (1:21) Get over here Look at me I think I broke My leg and knee I was playing here Just Kai and me I fell right off The madu tree Get over here Look at me I think I broke My leg and knee Oh, darn, I won't Be very free Because I fell Off a tree DOWN AT TORNADO FIELD (1:00) We can storm Ga-Koro's seas With our Koli energy We'll beat Ta-Koro one-two-three Down at Tornado Field We can parch Po-Koro dry We can make Ko-Koro cry Those Onu guys will rot and die Down at Tornado Field

I still can't decide what to be for Halloween. I think I'll go as a non-stereotypical sorcerer with a black wig, makeup and tattoos... maybe with some jewelry, a wand... You get a lot less creative wih costumes as you get older. I was Tattoo Man for two years in a row, and those peel-on tattoo things only last for so long, and we had those things for 8 years. Yes. I'm very obsessive. I like to trick-or-treat. And after trick-or-treating... I GO CRAZY!!!

A few thousand.

My ***, what a dump that Rawlins was! The hotel food was poor. The main employer was the prison. I was threatened by a muncher in the lobby, who told me that "little boys should stay away from him." I was happy when we left that sleazy little hole. When we left at a mileage of 2,112, I was glad to discover that Rawlins was much more beautiful in the daytime, while still horrific. It was twenty degrees. We all suffered headaches, shortness of breath and dried noses. Bunny didn't meow at all, surprisingly. The rocks were interesting. They were layered, showing evidence of age. My mother said she would never learn how to read them because she would have to "buy books and study." Speaking of rock, there were absolutely no radio stations in Wyoming. We also saw a number of freight trains, most of them half a mile long. This brought back memories of a friend of my mother's in Arizona, who was a train engineer before becoming the owner of a bead company. Not much happened until our arrival in Utah, where we saw ducks bathing in the geothermal springs that were shadowed by the vast, beautiful cliffs. These cliffs made us decide that Utah was the most beautiful state yet, tied with Pennsylvania and its vast rainbow of vegetation. There were loads of sheep in Utah, all of them sheared and freezing. We passed Park City, which was not bothering to shake off the dust of the Olympics. After many more fascinating cliffs, little towns and Mormon temples, we arrived in the famous Salt Lake City. At 3:39, we entered. We could only barely see the lake, which was vivid blue, but the city was impressive, many miles of buildings sprawled out in the shadow of beautiful, snow-capped mountains. We stopped in the great city for Subway, where I had an unusually spicy but delicious 6" roast beef sub with lettuce and tomato. All that time, our dog tried to crawl thought the windshield, whining like mad. We got back on 80 after some frantic searching. We actually got close to the lake, and it was very blue. There were no birds, probably because of the salinity. There were many salt plants, belonging to such companies like Cargyll and Morton. Power plants were abundant as well, probably coal. In the rock-questioning state of Utah, there were a surprising number of good radio stations, but that didn't change the fact that the road going through the Salt Desert was easily the most boring stretch on the planet. Then we crossed the Nevada line. And everything changed. For the worse. The signs went from nonexistent to cigarette outlets, triple-X, casino gambling, lotto... some guy named Kevin Smith won 50 grand. Typical Nevada scenery. By the time we arrived at our Elko hotel, I was a screaming wreck thrashing on the ground, driven to insanity by a limited song supply on my radio and all those other vicious Demons of Ennui. This horrible casino/hotel, decked with ashtrays and dead antelope, is actually the nicest Best Western we've stayed at yet. Luckily, we arrive at our final destination of the City by the Bay by tomorrow. Please. Save me. For the love of Mata Nui, why won't you save me?

DAY 4 Gas price was $2.74. Mileage was 1238. As we left Iowa, we recorded our thoughts on it. We all thought it was a beautiful state. Lots of corn, pretty hills, lots of terracing, very clean, very green. Animal behavior was getting stranger. Our cat, Bunny, was now able to occasionally venture outside her cage. When Bunny went out, she would sunbathe on top of the cage, enjoying a nice snack of tissues a la carte. However, she spent most of her time secure in her kennel's litterbox, where she felt safe. Our dog, Kessie, became very picky about what she drank. She turned down a container of Lake Erie water. Of course, she always needs to be on someone's lap. Absolutely nothing happened until we stopped on the Nebraska border. I looked for the Bionicle Encyclopedia 2 at a B&N, but it was nowhere to be found. I had some mediocre Sbarro pasta. My father got gyros for himself and his wife, sho had a tantrum because she wanted a turkey sandwich. Poor lady. We soon arrived in Nebraska. By 5:00, we had gone through Omaha and Lincoln. Corn, hops and barley grew plentily, rising up like the great botanical beard of the state. The gas stations in Nebraska had impressive candy selections. My mother stocked up on confections like a squirrel preparing to hibernate. After passing many hay farms and ranches, we arrived in our destination of North Platt, a dingy Nebraska town and home of Buffalo Bill. The only suitable hotel was a pit called the Royal Colonial Inn. Colonial, sure, but anything but royal. There was no computer, so I went mad and had nearly amputated my wrist by the end of the day. DAY 5 It rained as we left hideous North Platt. We remembered a disturbing incident that morning where we frantically searched and searched for Bunny, who had climbed into a tiny hole under the mattress and was trapped there. Breakfast in Nebraska: I had a donut. My parents had Sausage McSomething-or-others, each of which had about 2,000 calories each. My mother even ate a whole bag of potato chips as an appetizer. My father was desperate for coffee--a rarity in the Heartland--so he got the brown dishwater from McDonalds that they try to passoff as coffee. He hated it, so he rushed into a Starbucks--the first one we had seen since New England--and ran out with good coffee, which he loved so much, Religious content removed. - Nukora As we drove down the road, we saw our first tumbleweed--the classic cartoon symbol of desolation. The topography had changed, too. The flatlands had been replaced with hills, the corn with cattle and the townships back to towns. Sidney, Nebraska: $2.99 for gas, mileage in the 1700s. We received a very disturbing newsflash--the road was closed from Cheyenne to Laramie due to snow issues. That was an essential link on our route. In the confusion, I ate my father's candy bar and he ate mine. We decided to take it a step at a time and head for Cheyenne. Ultimately, the only thing we did in Cheyenne was eat a typical road lunch of Burger King and soda, as I-80 had re-opened. Cheyenne, while glazed with a layer of snow, was hideous. We moved on to Laramie, which was several googolplex times prettier than Cheyenne and covered in white. We had found lodgings in Laramie, but we wanted to move on to Rawlins, 90-someodd miles away, where there was another excellent hotel. So we did. Big mistake. There was a major traffic jam in a mountain pass. No good radio, hail hitting the car like an avalanche, a huge poultry truck blocking our view, moving along at about five miles per hour. We stayed in this jam for an hour, the only scenery a wind farm that was blowing, barely stopped by the pounding hail. We emerged from the traffic jam after that long period of agony to find ourselved sandwiched in between a beautiful rock-face and an even more beautiful mountain, Elk Mountain, a Medicine Bow Mountain with an elevation of 11,196. We passed a sign that said "CERTIFIED HAY." If anyone can tell me what that means, they will receive $1,000,000 and a poodle of their choice. We, interestingly enough, also noticed many trucks that had jackknifed off the road. Perhaps the traffic jam had been in favor of the three huge vehicles that had gone off the roadside. We expected a miracle hotel--it had a lounge, restaurant and indoor pool. Yes, it had all those things, but it was as ugly and sleazy as the horrible city it was in. Rawlins was sleazy, worn-down and full of low-class, baseball-hatted loiterers. Bad grammar everywhere. Not only is the place a pit, but the people are illiterate. More grammatical errors than a Bionicle meets the Flintstones parody in the old Comedies forum. So I am writing from this computer, which is surprisingly fast. By tomorrow, we will be in Winnemucca.

So far, I have been in California, Oregon, Arizona, Alaska, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and now Iowa. As we left Port Clinton, Ohio, it began to rain. The dog was shivering from the pounding noise. The cat was meowing like all Karzahni broke loose. A nuclear power plant smoked in the distance, white steam mixing with the cirrus carpet that hung many miles above us. Our destination was Des Moines. Our mileage was 740 total. To lighten the mood, I played "Rain" on my MP3 player, but it ironically stopped raining after a minute of the droning Beatles song. We drove into a lovely spot called Oak Harbor, by far the nicest part of Ohio we had been through yet. All the houses were tiny and built in the '60s. The lady observed that the reason was because the world in the Swingin' Sixties was far less materialistic. Perhaps the people preferred to hallucinate their desired possessions. At 11:30, we arrived in the state of Indiana. (What the heck is a hoosier?) At 12:26, we stopped at the McDonalds Travel Plaza, where I had a foot-long and a white-chocolate-covered Rice Krispies treat, in which they used margarine instead of the real thing. My mother wore outrageous clothing --a pink shirt with pajama bottoms. Yes, she was underderssed for the McDonalds Travel Plaza in Indiana. As we left the boring state of Indiana, we noticed advertisements for very high-class things. Discount Cigarette Outlet... Fireworks... HIV testing... Free Pregnancy Tests... Texas Poker and Card Table... Gentleman's Club... Dolls, Open 7 Days a Week... The welcome sign was a toilet bowl saying, "Can't Hold It?" At 2:45, we entered the state of Illinois, the "Land of Lincoln." Our mileage was 992. We got to 1,000 a few minutes later. Right outside of Joliet, which my mother pronounced "Juliet," we encountered a huge moving truck that had gone right off I-80 and had split in half, the packed possessions sprawled out pell-mell all over the roadside. My mother panicked and called an insurance company, who tried to shaft us on it. We decided we weren't going to get insurance because we didn't need it. Illinois was just as ugly as Ohio, although there were many flocks of birds. Huge flocks that clustered together, black clouds that spread over the skies like crebain waiting to report back to their master. These flocks consited of thousands of tiny black birds and could stretch to quarter of a mile in length. 4:25. We spotted a Dairy Queen and a Subway: dinner. Interestingly enough, none of us wanted Dairy Queen badly enough, as we had filled up at Subway. The teenage worker had tried to put cheese on my chicken teriyaki sub, which is like putting a reuben on white bread. This was actually our first Subway dinner. 5:37. We entered Iowa, which was full of hundreds of miles of dried-up corn. There were many shining spotlights of the sun shining through the dense clouds, like the divine spotlights so often seen in cartoons. The sun created an eerie, Dali-esque effect when shining through the varying density of the depressing cloud bank. The bird clouds were stretching to half a mile now and a tenth of a mile in width, easy to mistake for a tornado except black. We couldn't find a Best Western in Iowa that took pets that was in our range, so we booked a Holiday Inn. This was the best decision either of my parents ever made. The Holiday Inn, which was in Iowa City, had a beautiful waterpark, but then again, all waterparks are beautiful. There was a weird contraption that filled with water and cascaded hundreds of gallons of liquid every few minutes, soaking the screaming little kids below. There was also a millrace (a race across mats on chains that shift with the flow of the water, making it very unpredictable.) I only got across the millrace once. A few never made it, no matter how hard they tried, but it was funniest with the slender gymnastics girls who thought they could race across tiptoe in five seconds and fell in, screaming, on the third mat. I had to get on all fours to cross it. But most impressive of all was a great big waterslide, hundreds of feet of tube with rushing water. Actually, there were two: a fast one and a slower one. I had no idea what was coming, so I got cold feet and went back in the pool. Today, I'll try to tackle it. I've got a four-dollar bribe. I am actally writing in the morning at this beautiful hotel. I would like to spend a day here, but I know we can't on some charge or another. My father is impatiently bellowing at me like a bull while reading his motorcycle magazine. So that means bye.

Wilkes-Barre had a creepy feel to it, as if it were a graveyard. Towering buildings, idols of evil secret organizations, loomed above me like concrete mountains. The lemon light above me cast eerie shadows over our faces. As we drove to the Bennigan's where we would have a dinner of delicious ribs, my insides turned to ice. Was there something strange afoot? Some baby being eaten with gravy in one of those dingy, bar-windowed basements? Or maybe a mobster gunning down a squealer, his blood landing on the lamps and causing that red light that hovered about, a gaseous bird of ill-omen? The next morning, I woke up to insurance gripings at 8:00--about quarter of a day earlier than I usually wake up. I took a walk, had a morning computer session and went for a walk. My father was cawing about my public revealing of his fetid halitosis. We walked into the hotel's breakfast buffet and found only three stale items, including biscuits with sausage gravy. Atrocious anywhere outside San Bruno. At last, we left at 9:05. The mileage on the car was a total of 296. The cat was still meowing. The sun beat down on the car like a weird mallet. We drove off, passing the infernal buildings. A quick lunch at Panera--I had soup for breakfast, along with a piece of bread that was like chewing a rug. the soup was decent, although I disliked the choice of noodle. Its texture was far too slimy. We reached Lock Haven near noon--I don't remember the exact time. The hills were beautiful, as flat as pancakes with little crags like a pangolin's skin. The color was outstanding. Like a million manicottis, the trees stretched below us, creating vibrant patterns on the earth. These forests were many miles wide and waved up and down with the earth. We stopped in Clarion, a small town in western Pennsylvania, at around 1:30. The town greatly appealed to me. The residents were far more attractive than any found in Sudbury. While there were many handsome individuals in my hometown, the Clarionites were perfect. Not a single gigantic gut. All smooth and pale. After a quick lunch of dumpling soup (soup again) and a hearty filling of jelly beans, it began to rain. We put plastic sheeting over our luggage (the trunk leaked,) but by the time we did it, it had cleared up again. Pennsylvania was endless. I thought we would never get to the next state, but at 3:36, we arrived at the border. Lo! there was Ohio, the name written in blue script just above Gov. Ted Strickland's name. We all agreed that Ohio was ugly, so I decided to amuse myself by hammering some Trainers down at the old Battle Tower in Pokemon: Diamond. After ages, we stopped at a burger-shaped rest stop containing a Popeye, a TCBY, a Burger King and a few Indians paraphernalia bazaars. I ate about a third of my yogurt, which was so slathered in sprinkles, it looked like some ethereal beehive. That yogurt must have had fifty grams of sugar. So I had my father eat a large amount of it. He devoured it like a dog, leaving only about half a teaspoon of yogurt and no sprinkles at all. We drove a total of 622 miles by the time we got the next gas station. Speaking of cars, there were no foreign cars in The Nikira State at all. A few Toyotas every now and then, but nothing else. Ford, Lexus, GMC... and on and on and on. Just American. By the time we passed Elyria, the blinding sun was keeping us all up--except the dog, who had turned our horseshoe-shaped travel pillow into her personal spit valve and rendered it useless. Ohio was just as endless. Perhaps it was just so boring, it seemed atrociously long. We stayed at a town near Toledo called Port Clinton, right on Lake Erie. I am writing from that squalid saltpeter factory right now, and the people here are so bigoted, they won't let under-16s use the computer without a parent. So my mother is sitting there with no clue what I am writing, distracted by her magazine and cheap lobby reality show. Save me. I'm cold. I'm hungry. And there are wall-eyes after me.

Yeah. Back on the road again. My father was a 45-year-old Jewish lawyer. He was six and a quarter feet tall, but he didn't seem too tall to me. He wore spectacles above his nose, which floated atop a medium-sized, salt-and-pepper beard. He was obsessed with steak and the family dog, Kessie, a Miniature Australian Shepherd. My mother was several years older than my father, a rather stocky woman with hair that was graying at an alarming rate. She loved knitting and had an annoying dislike for AC|DC. I was a thirteen-year-old teenager who enjoyed noise, complaining and Japanese cuisine. We had come out to Massachusetts to deal with my grandparents, a nightmarish couple who needed serious help. My grandmother had a memory problem, and they both needed our company. My education was fulfilled at a highly socialist homeschooling co-op called Voyagers, where I made a few close friends but not the posse I had been desperate for. My father couldn't find a job, and my mother hated the weather. After nine months of agoraphobically locking ourselves out from the humidity, we decided we would be far better off back in San Francisco. We made our good-byes, good-riddances and impressions as we sped off down Route 9. It was the best for all of us. By the time we left our temporary residence in Framingham, the lady was bawling like mad, and it took a brief scratch to cheer her up. At about one, we stopped for gasoline at a station on Route 9. The convenience-store inventory consisted of only three kinds of candy--M&Ms, peanut M&Ms, Milky Ways and Twix. And to think I was in the mood for something with white chocolate! We bid the surly-looking cashier a silent farewell. Air was seventy-five cents. "It's a form of [scandal]," my father said as he grudgingly pumped up the tires. I noticed there were many sushi bars on the side of the route. Wasabi Japanese Restaurant, Samba Steak+Sushi, Yuko Sushi Boat... What else have I missed? Hopkinton, Westborough, Auburn and many other little Massachusetts towns float by like great topographic moths. When are we going to get to Connecticut? I keep on repeating to myself. And finally, Connecticut. I hold my breath as we pass the sign. Welcome to Connecticut, the this-and-that state, Governor Jody Somebody-or-other, bla bla bla. And there's Hartford, challenging the vegetation and vibrant colors with its cold gray pinnacles. As I had been a suburban kid for the past year, I had not seen a city in so long, I thought it was some kind of giant hedgehog, and I half expected it to turn around and shout "Dinsdale!" at me. This changed when we drove into the town itself. There were many tunnels, webbing the city like some stange rabbit warren. The architecture is much smoother and more modern than the ugly, squat brick of Boston. With the myriad black panels reflecting the other mirrored windows adjacent, creating an ethereal canyon, it closer resembled San Francisco's Embarcadero. And more billboards! I saved on Geico... Verizon Wireless... The honking of horns was like music to me. And as suddenly as we entered the web of ramps and roads, we left it. Back on the road again, switching seats every now and then, listening to the cat meow like an Eric Clapton solo. I was next to the cat, and when I stuck my finger through the grates to give her a little pet, she jerked away from me, and my finger ended up somewhere weird, like her ear or her nose instead of her forehead. The trek was long. We were going through some mountains near the Pennsylvania border when my mother complained of a full bladder. We decided to stop at a Dairy Queen at a tiny little town called Fort Jervis, which boasted to be the home of two wrestlers, Ed and Joe Balucch or some other name that sounded like a puma coughing up a hairball. I ate my ice cream for a few minutes before I complained my hands were starting to smell like grease. I thought it was from some litter I had picked up earlier, so I went to the dingy little bathroom to wash my hands. I waited in taht dingy bathroom for my hands to dry under the blow-dryer, a subsitute for the urine-stained paper towels lying in the middle of the filthy floor. When I came back, I realized that was not the litter smell. Oh, it was the ice cream, all right. It tasted awful and smelled like all Karzahni. So I chucked it in the dustbin along with the cup and spoon. Cookies and cream! Ha ha! Don't make me laugh! Processed garbage and cream! After even more tedious time spent on the road, we stopped for the night in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The hotel had high-speed internet and allowed animals, but had no pool. And from there I am writing.

What do I need to do to improve this swamp of a blog?