I was trying to get in touch with my editor at the paper about payment, but it was just after 5pm on a Friday. Not only that, but he was leaving town for a trip. I went downtown to try to go to the office to see if he was still there, but on the way, I passed by a house where a girl was mowing in the front yard. She recognized me, though I didn’t recognize her, and she told me that my editor was working late and that he would call me.

So I proceeded downtown and went to Jimmy John’s to wait it out. While I was there, I was thinking about how I really wanted to get a bike to save on car expenses. Conveniently enough, Jimmy John’s was also selling horses, and I bought one for $12.20.

While I was in there, a group of high schoolers dressed for prom came in to get sandwiches. All of the girls were wearing dresses of the same color of blue, although the dress styles varied. One of them suggested that the Jimmy John’s staff open a restaurant in South Africa.

It was shortly after this that I decided to leave. My mom was waiting on me to call her back about what I learned from my editor - which was nothing - but I had to get somewhere with good cell phone reception to call her. I got on my new horse and started riding toward my apartment. It was icy out, and the horse was slow to adjust to the skidding, so we bumped into a few cars but made it home safely.

My horse and I got to my apartment and I brought it inside. I explained to my roommates that it wasn’t going to live there, but I needed to find a place to keep it. I got distracted with some discussion about fig newtons versus strawberry newtons, and if I was eating my own or one of my roommates’ newtons, when I realized that my horse had gone missing. It had wandered into one of my roommates’ bedrooms and hidden in the closet. I quickly looked around for it, but I realized that my sudden movements were frightening the horse.

At this point I decided I should read the instructional labels that were attached around the horse’s head. One of them made special note that I should not say anything about “A Brave Knight” or it could upset the horse. I took it out on the balcony to get some fresh air and finally placed the call to my mom that I hadn’t gotten the money from the paper, but I did buy a horse.

She freaked out temporarily until I told her the horse was only $12, and that my main concern now was to find a place to keep it. I wanted to ride the horse out to the north part of town and see if the place where my grandpa used to keep his horses was still open.

Then my friend Andrew came out onto the balcony and was telling us that this horse could easily jump down to the ground. He went on to explain that he had been to some rodeo camp where he learned all kind of horse tricks. He got on the horse, leaped from the balcony, and took it out to the corral next door. Suddenly there were two other guys on horses that I didn’t recognize before, and Andrew started roping them and dragging them to the ground.

I then spent the rest of the dream at some large place with numerous customer service counters trying to sort through the yellow pages to find a place to keep my horse. The people working at the counter refused to acknowledge how their yellow pages books completely lacked any organization whatsoever and it was a nightmare trying to find anything.

I was listening to Power 106.9 this morning in my car as they talked about rapper T.I getting busted for an attempted purchase of illegal machine guns over the weekend.

Now North Omaha is currently struggling with a lot of violence, and community leaders are trying to rise up to motivate people to cooperate with police to bring an end to the “no snitching” attitude to help stop the shootings and killings.

So how do these local DJs with the power of the airwaves respond to the T.I. news?

Well, they call the bodyguard that ratted him out a “punk” for cooperating with the FBI, and they criticize T.I. not for attempting to purchase a bunch of illegal machine guns, but for being stupid enough to trust someone that he’d only known for a few months to be his bodyguard.

If Tom Osborne supports Jon Bruning for Senate, is it safe to assume that Mike Johanns is allied with Bill Callahan and Steve Pederson?

EWWWW!!!

Tonight was full of surprises. The first and most significant being that I just had an amazing time at a Mandy Moore concert. As in, it’s probably in my top 5 concert experiences of all time, including Morrissey, Portishead and the Beta Band.

I got tickets because Sara is a huge fan. My main concerns going in were that I feared it would be boring, and I also feared that it would be embarrassing for Mandy Moore, considering that most pop stars play the Qwest Center and here she was playing Sokol Auditorium. When we arrived, I discovered it was Sokol Underground. It seemed like it only had potential to get worse.

We got there a little late, and I immediately had to head to the restroom for a second appointment with my triple Haystack from Dinker’s about an hour earlier. From the restroom, though, I could hear the last two songs of opening act Chris Stills - son of Stephen Stills - and I was very impressed. He could easily be branded a Jeff Buckley impersonator if not for the fact that he had the vocal power to pull it off, creating a confident beauty not often found in opening acts. At least that’s how it sounded from my stall.

Ben Lee’s follow-up was fantastic. He was a shameless crowd-pleaser, but with enough self-deprecation that the charm outweighed the cheese. I had never been much of a Ben Lee fan - the last time I deliberately listened to his music was in the late ’90s - but this set won me over. He definitely plays the irony card in a lot of his songs, but there was an obvious layer of genuine passion beneath it all. He wasn’t afraid to go for laughs, but he closed out his set by declaring “This is the way music should be enjoyed - just a bunch of people having fun in a room together.”

Sokol Underground is little more than a room - a hot, sweaty, low-ceilinged, black-walled room. In other words, probably the last place I would ever expect to see Mandy Moore in concert. From her between-song banter, she kind of made it sound like the Pop Princess wanted to slum it up with a “real” band - going out on the road in a bus, playing clubs. Like it was role-playing or something.

And occasionally, it felt like you could take the kid out of the theater but you couldn’t take the theater out of the kid - there were a few embarrassing bouts of air guitar; each lyric was facially broadcast to the back row, apparently carrying the weight of either a baby being born or a friend dying.

But surely old habits die hard, and when it came to getting the impression that Moore was acting, that’s where it ended. Everything else tonight felt astonishingly pure and sincere. This didn’t seem like a pop star and her backing musicians - this felt like a band that was having the time of their lives.
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