I don’t know how, but I found myself at a concert on Saturday night. I started out at Poor Richards with a few Long Islands, picked up some onion rings from the cafeteria over at Marywood, and out of nowhere I was grooving along to some tunes at Battle of the Bands. It was the first time I’ve been to a concert since the turn of the century (this one) and it freaked me out.

Don’t get me wrong: I love music. Music is the only thing I can really remember for at least half of my life and I couldn’t live without it. Concerts, on the other hand, are like magnets for big dudes with hard fists. I had to swear them off -- too many jagged bottle cuts will do that to you. Concerts make me feel like a warrior and sometimes that’s not a good thing. Especially in the eyes of the law.

There’s been a lot of bad mojo going on at work lately because of computers. Some kid’s been coming around saying how he wants to replace everyone with robots and calculators and little pieces of fruit. The Bossman listens to him, too, even though the kid’s real scrawny and has a horse face. Don’t get me wrong, I like computers as much as the next Joe, but when they start messing with me, I’m not just going to sit there and take it. I’ve seen the movies. If you want to fight back against a machine, you’ve got to chuck it in acid.

Acid. Oh man. Just writing that word brings back some memories. Not really memories. Flashbacks. Scary ones. I get them all the time. The other day I turned on the TV and everyone on the screen was a caveman. Freaked my bean, man.

I house-sat for a friend last weekend. I guess some people wouldn’t really call it house-sitting – it was more like squat-sitting. My buddy Gerson found this great abandoned house over in Honesdale and he’s been squatting there for the past month. It’s one of the best squat-houses I’ve ever seen -- four bedrooms, working plumbing, only a few raccoons. If you get the electricity turned on, that house becomes a home in an instant and on top of that, you’ve already got pets.

Squatting can go one of two ways: it can be really great or it can be horrible – truly, truly horrible. I’ve been in both situations. Sometime in the late seventies (or was it early eighties?), I found my way into an abandoned factory on the eastern shore of Maryland and thought I was going to have the time of my life. I hadn’t seen a place that cool since the Playboy Club in Chicago and I was going to make it mine. What I didn’t know was that the factory was abandoned because it was slowly sinking into the Chesapeake Bay. I had a kegger one night and a hundred and fifty people dropped right into the water. Nobody got injured, though. At least I don’t think so. As soon as I saw the ground start to give, I got the hell out of there.

When I get hungry – and I mean hungry – there are only five words that can satisfy me: All-You-Can-Eat Buffet. They’re like libraries of food, but instead of late fees, they’ve got soft-serve. I hit up the local buffets at least once a month, sometimes more depending on how business is going. It really breaks up my normal routine of soup, soup, tuna, soup, microwave pasta, tuna-soup casserole.

Most people think you’ve got to eat meat to fill up at buffets. No way, suckers. It’s all about the sauces. Think about it: your body is mostly made up of fluid. Blood, water, guts. It’s all liquid. So does it make sense to shove a whole bunch of solids down your gullet? Think again. You want to stock up on the sauces because they’ll keep you full the longest. Go for a big old glass of Alfredo sauce and you won’t eat for weeks. Chinese buffets are great for this, too. Kung pao might be spicy, but you drink enough of it and you won’t even be able to think about eating.