From a Hotel Somewhere in Indiana
This trip is a tease. We don't really have time to stop any place. And I'm driving the damned U-haul truck of possible death and dismemberement. Seriously If having to rely on your mirrors for merging doesn't make you paranoid then being extremely fucking top heavy will.
I miss my corolla. Seriously. I miss my P.O.S. dingy plaid interior 86 corolla.
I also miss my friends. Driving along I-70 could be a very appealing activity given a decent budget, two weeks and a group of people possessing an extremely healthy sense of irony. Don't ask me how Irony would have helped you through the cheese omelet I just ate, it just would.
FYI - American cheese is actually considered a cheese in some places. I always assumed that it was an odd form of margarine.
We just checked out the hotel bar. It was pretty much the same as the cantina in Davis, except you could smoke, the girls weren't as cute, (don't flatter yourself honey) and they played Parliment Funkadelic which I tried to persuade the 'tina djs to play for over a year.
loves to all, I'll be calling when I'm back in cali.
Well Ican't stay long. I'm in Philadelphia and I'm going to start working my way accross to California tomorrow.
It isn't as fun as it sounds. I'm due back in Sac on the Second. Hopefully I'll have wacky adventures. So far I'm just moving lots of boxes for my grandfather.
My step aunt and uncle have weird, cute kids. Their seven yearold has become a vegetarian for moral reasons (the rest of the family is not). They do Yoga.
And people say Californians are weird.
Geek Nesting
You know you are a nerd when you see an aisle in Fry's and (audibly) go "Oh! Wires!"
I've got the laptop set up in the bedroom. It is pretty much a groovier machine than the standing beast. It has a better processor and runs on Windows XP Pro, which is remarkably not crash prone. The Beast is in the living room. It has a crap processor, motherboard and video card but a 80 fucking Gig hard drive. Yes, it is basically a glorified MP3 player. Thank you for asking.
The idea is to wire the audio from The Beast through my stereo speakers for CD and MP3 goodness. And that way I don't have to buy a new stereo, seeing as how the current one does play CDs but adds its own little effects such as looping them over and over and stutter starting them. It's like having your very own (crappy) DJ. Only it probably eats less food and contributes more towards rent than one of those would.
Next, we need some sort of gaming consul. PS2 is what I'm leaning toward as it would be the cheapest and I already own some paddles and a game (long story that, but it won't be the last silly purchase I make on account of a woman). I would also like to endow the beast with non-crap motherboard-processor-video card but 1. It costs money 2. I fear what effect that would have on my relationship with the outside world.
Add a well-stocked liquor cabinet and you have a great place to be a geek, which is what I'm shooting for. Well that and a place one could, theoretically, take girls to. Not that there are a whole bunch of those begging to go home with me but for my pad not being swank enough.
Oh. You weren't in danger of thinking that, eh?
I think I'm at the point in the post breakup psychology where I could profit by some female attention and this is working itself out in an odd little Freudian way, through my nesting activities
Some interesting name calling in the NYT today.
MORE than 60 years ago, the columnist Westbrook Pegler, noting California's penchant for political experimentation and social turmoil, proposed that a guardian should be appointed and the state declared incompetent to manage it's own affairs. Last week, California's recall election drama led the columnist George F. Will to call it "the sick man of the Republic."Personally I like Pegler's quote better.
According to the article California seems so wacky because we are so innovative. We are willing to try new things first, like running absurd deficets and having horrible stock market bubbles and governments that are seriously out of sync with voters.
Allow me to be the first to say "Whoo! Cali!"
The article wobbles a bit as to whether its because California voters are so
fantasy prone or because California politicians are so venal.
And Californians — like the rest of the country, only maybe a little bit more so — want it all, all the time: lower taxes and smaller classrooms; tighter pollution controls and bigger S.U.V.'s; cheap labor and fresh produce but tighter limits on immigration and provision of social services. Under Republican and Democratic governors alike over the past 50 years, they have grown used to getting such bounty, especially during the dot-com boom of the late 1990's. Now, the state budget faces a steadily growing deficit that Republicans accused Mr. Davis of failing to acknowledge as he campaigned. Mr. Davis won re-election by just five percentage points last fall, in an election that drew just over 35 percent of eligible voters — the lowest turnout ever in a California general election.But with its particularly broad powers of referendum, California provides the rest of the country with examples of what can happen when voters get their way, unfiltered by politicians or legislators.
"Voters aren't provided real choices," said Alan Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing magazine. "They are asked, would you like ice cream one year, and then the next year, would you like cake? It doesn't ask of voters to make responsible choices from limited alternatives."
Ice cream? I want ice cream.
This Could Lead To Excellance . . . or Serious Injury
I came home drenched in sweat, not even slightly drunk despite two manhattens, a jack and coke and two beers.
Dancing like a fucking maniac will do that.
I'm not sure where I went last night. I mean I know that I went to Old Ironsides, but I'm not sure what the event was called. Lipstick?
Anyway it is too bad because I had a fantastic time and I want to go back. The music was damn good. I think there were two songs I didn't like the whole night (and one was by The Smiths, normally a perfectly acceptable band). The other was "Cavern" a remix of "White Lines" by Liquid Liquid and, it's a pretty fun song to dance to, you just end up wishing that they had played "White Lines" instead.
Normally I dislike about two thirds of any number of songs that any given DJ plays. But last night I got to hear the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Animals, The Clash, THe Psychedelic Furs and Bjork. A lot of the music was stuff wouldn't have everthought to try and dance to.
And the girls . . . Gorgeous and geeky. Kylee (that's a guy) and I stood outside for quite a while geeking out about video games and cartoons with various girls. A lot of them appreciated my own peculiar dancing style. I have found a hangout.
and another thing
Daniel Davies is one of those very smart people whom I suspect to be wrong about just everything. So when the EU and the US make me agree with him about the WTO and the freaking Cancun round . . . I get very depressed indeed.
I do not think it is quite time to give up on the WTO. It is still a useful tool for bargaining between North and South. Granted all sorts of bugbears have snuck onto WTO agendas that don't really belong there, from labor standards to investment rules. But they sneak in there because in recent history the WTO has actually been rather successful as far as international bargaining bodies go.
But I still regard getting rid of first world ag subsidies as the serious issue for those concerned with the poorest of the poor. It is the simplest thing we can do for those who need it the most.
Everything You Know is Wrong
I once had a philosophy teacher in junior college. He was, the wrongest man I've ever met.
You've met these people before. Frequently they are smart, but something inside them causes them to diverge sharply and turn 180 degrees from everything you believe.
Now personally with me there are a lot of ways to be completely different from me. I have two uncles who disagree with me on every issue and also with each other. I am a contrarian. I think the only thing I'm really good at is disagreeing with people.
This college instructor pretty much thought that history had this little dividing line. On one side was Plato, Socrates, John Locke, The founding Fathers, Some Scientists, Environmentalists and Socialists; on the other side were the sophists, and what they turned into: politicians and PR men, and big nasty plutocrats that employed them. The first group were the jeremiahs who were right all the time but nobody listened to. The second group made lots of money, smoked cigars and foisted their ill-educated offspring onto community college professors.
He was a leftist and he did seem to believe that everything in the world was the fault of America although more specifically it was the fault of the Republican party.
By being completely wrong about everything he had pretty much invited me to spar with him in front of the class by saying many stupid things and forcing me to disagree with him. The teacher, I gathered liked Plato and admired Socrates. So I read I.F. Stone's Trial of Socrates and Karl Popper's The Open Society and It's Enemies. Those books were fantastic because they were written by progressives and criticize Socrates from a progressive perspective. So I happily found all sorts of maddening threads of arguments in Socrates that this poor fellow was not prepared to acknowledge let alone confront. (In junior college, torturing teachers was what torturing customers is to me today).
But there was another person in the class (a hippy) who always agreed with him and forced to be even crankier and break-up the little love fest the always seemed to get going.
So one day as usual the hippy was blathering on about the rapacious nature of capitalism and bringing up something awful that Nestle had done. I think Nestle had advertised in the third world causing people to stop breast feeding. I'm not sure how the line of causation went but I bet it involved billboards featured the Quik Bunny ravenously suckling on a human teat.
anyway, sorry about that. The hippy blather was the cue for teacher man to launch into American Corporations are ruining the world speech. But I stopped him short. I informed him that Nestle was a Swiss corporation.
"Oh. I wonder why I assumed that." was his response.
Something inside me has always been frustrated that I couldn't come up with a poignant response to the man's wide open rhetorical question. I love answering rhetorical questions for people too.
What's the point of my story?
Well Jane Hadden has a lovely opinion piece to go along with it. Reading it is kind of like getting that snappy comeback years later.
In honor of september eleventh I'm going to keep my fucking trap shut about it.
My ex-girlfriend's rat has died. I feel sad about that.
Seems a bit odd, no?
most of us here in our midtwenties don't really know where we are going. We work in retail -- it annoys, god it annoys but it pays the rent. We have complicted schemes that may or may not amount to much.
I say have a drink and enjoy it. Being lost is almost like being free.
ps. just going to art school might be the whole point of going to art school. I say go for it.
Talkin Shit About a Pretty Sunset
Every once in a while you just hit a moment which seems about perfect. Tonight, after sushi, featuring some of the best saba nigiri ever, I went and flied a kite with some friends on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. We watched the sunset in between childish play.
Damn thats good.