what scenery!

personal statement

2010-11-08T23:10:00.000-08:00

here's a sentence i just wrote in my personal statement on a law school application that i am certainly NOT leaving in there:

I became alarmed by the practices of certain industries, which seemed to be guided by iterations of the mantra “exploit, rationalize, repeat.”

my essay so far is mostly about kayaking.

obama

2010-10-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

i just watched obama on the daily show. now i know two days is an eternity in this, the digital age (is that what age this is?), but it got me thinking about the state of affairs in this country and my feelings for president obama, a little less than two years on. anyway, here they are...

i'm a firm believer in incrementalism, and by that measure i think this has been a successful legislative session. you know that say saying don't let perfect be the enemy of the good? well can't we agree that to this point, the obama white house has certainly not been perfect, but it certainly has been generally good.

(now close guantanamo and get us out of afganistan, president o.)

i still trust obama, and it sure is nice having a president who is thoughtful and capable of thinking critically about issues. and who can communicate complex ideas. even when i don't agree with him, i still find myself saying hmm, i see your point. and thank you for taking the time to explain yourself.

anyway, i guess i have come to terms with the fact that president obama isn't the paragon of progressive ideology that many of us hoped he would be. now i am just grateful to have a president in office that I'D like to have a beer with.

(note: i realize that that last sentence should have read: now i am just grateful to have a president in office WITH WHOM i'd like to have a beer, but i just couldn't bring myself to write that.)

can it, ross!

2010-10-18T18:52:00.000-07:00

ross douthat, you imbecile.

when someone who is creating a sample has an obvious bias, as in A FUCKING INTERN FROM THE CATO INSTITUTE, you have to take their findings with a grain of salt. now, you also say that 5% of 250 tea party signs referenced president obama's race or religion. that is 12 1/2 signs. how does 1/2 a sign reference race or religion? you ass. and also, the fact that 5% of the signs referenced obama's race or religion and 1% (oh, 2 1/2 signs?) questioned his birth certificate's validity is all well and good, but you have to take into account the fact that THE PERSON ASSEMBLING THE DATA HAD A CLEAR AGENDA and the fact that NOT EVERYBODY WRITES EVERYTHING THEY BELIEVE ON A SIGN. for example, i don't have a sign suggesting that you are a pasty catholic wingnut, but i believe that you are in fact a pasty catholic wingnut.

now let's take a look at your broader points. I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TRYING TO ARGUE, WHAT IS THIS ARTICLE ABOUT? you go through some of the complaints that people make about tea partiers, that they represent a fringe movement that will be the undoing of the republican party, that they're an "astroturf" movement bankrolled by the creepster koch bros., that they're a rehashing of old ideas, and that they're views contradict themselves. for each of these concerns, you say no, this issue does not define the tea party. they might have some dingbats, but there are some candidates that the tea party supports who are not dingbats. the rich weirdo koch brothers with their empire of low-cost, foreign made goods are not responsible for creating the tea party movement, but they are subsidizing it and stand to reap its benefits. oh and sure a radical conservative breed of thinking takes root whenever a democrat is in office, but there has never before been a mainstream message attached to this radical thinking. (nevermind the fact that the mainstream tea party message is just exactly the mainstream republican message and not a new paradigm of conservative thought). and lastly, you say that it remains to be seen whether tea partiers are hypocrites who support entitlements while preaching smaller government.

i'm not in law school yet ross, so excuse me if i am missing something here BUT YOU BASICALLY ACCEPTED ALL THE PREMISES BUT DENIED THE CONCLUSIONS. where are your alternate conclusions? what the hell are you trying to say? the tea party isn't racist/islamophobic , because only 5% of its signs are racist/islamophobic? they aren't a bunch of loud, confused white guys who have NO UNDERSTANDING OF HOW OUR GOVERNMENT OPERATES? that the fucking nutjob kochs along with their opportunistic deregulation/privatization-craving upper class cronies aren't responsible for the rise of the tea party? THE TEA PARTY AGENDA IS BEING COOKED UP IN THE SEMINAL VESICLES OF FOX NEWS AND EJACULATED OUT INTO THE ETHER 24/7 AND YOU HAVE THE AUDACITY TO CLAIM THAT THE TEA PARTY IS A GRASSROOTS MOVEMENT. you sad, doughy knob. what other grassroots movements take their cues from television executives and barons of industry? what other grassroots movements enjoy free airtime?

ross, own up to it. these pest riddled tea leaves were picked by an exploited child overseas, roasted in the bowels of fox news, packaged in the whitest of white tea bags and sold to us unsuspecting, angry, out-of-work americans at a premium. shit...

parsley

2010-10-18T13:34:00.000-07:00

i always wondered why i like parsley so much.

turns out it is jam packed with ketamine! in fact, 153.8% of parsley is ketamine, which by my calculations means that other things make up -53.8% of it. this is why i like science, 'cause it helps me understand why i like parsley, so if you'll excuse me, i'ma go pick a sprig and nod out in my backyard!

andy sanborn

2010-10-11T17:07:00.000-07:00

i once ran a political campaign for an honest and kind and all-around amazing person named harold janeway. he is really wonderful and the new hampshire state legislature will be losing a class act when senator janeway retires when the new class of senators is sworn in after the 2010 elections.

but that is not who i am here to talk about. i am here to talk about andy sanborn, senator janeway's opponent in 2008 and the republican nominee for nh district 7 again in 2010.

in the interest of full disclosure, i gotta say that andy sanborn did file a police report against me for vandalizing his yard signs. i also gotta say that i never once touched his signs, as certain readers of this blog will attest. i went to the police station and cleared up the matter, filing a counter report with them, end of story. but not really. see, after presumably knowingly filing a false police report, mr. sanborn knowingly filed a press release (rife with grammatical, nevermind factual errors) stating that i was arrested for the aforementioned offense. this was the day before the election, this just reeks of someone who is trying to fabricate a scandal. the news outlets that picked up the press release quickly obliged in removing it when i called offered them the phone number for the hillsborough police department for clarification and pointed out that not only was it false, but it was also a pretty clear cut case of libel. so, even though senator janeway won, i have a bit of a bone to pick with andy sanborn.

there was an article published about mr. sanborn in my hometown newspaper, the concord monitor, entitled "Candidate says he 'took it on the chin' in bankruptcy filing" (june 30, 2008). this article lays out the unsavory details of mr. sanborn's checkered businessman past. you should read it, he comes across an almost comically cliche conniving politician. to honor mr. sanborn's resurgence, i want to present you with a hypothetical here.

say you want to make some money, pretty much everybody does, right? where do you draw the line?

see, the way i figure, a person can start a business selling, oh, i don't know mittens and socks. now when you start a business, it is wise to start it as an LLC, which, as i understand, shields the owner(s) from being personally financially liable for any debts the business incurs, should the business be incapable of paying. and now you can start another business (LLC) that gets mortgages and acquires real estate. say your interest is not in running a business per se, but just having money. if you wanted to, your real estate business(es) could rent space to your mitten and sock business for over the market price of the space. you could operate the mitten and sock business with the loan you were given and your mitten and sock suppliers ship you their goods net 30, meaning that you have 30 days from the receipt of the shipment to pay for the goods. now, your mittens and socks might be flying off the shelves, maybe you've priced them to, but your assets are diminishing 'cause you can't really afford the space you're in. fortunately for you though, your real estate company is doing great! that mortgage is getting paid off super fast, and it is a 15 year mortgage so your interest rates are really low! now say after 14 years or so, your mitten and sock business starts lagging on its payments, in fact you are placing new orders that you need to sell real quick in order to pay off the previous supplier. you just keep paying that rent though! eventually, your supplier might get sick of getting paid late and start asking questions. at that point you assuage them by telling them you are going out of business and the proceeds from the sale will be used to pay them back. but all throughout the sale your mitten and sock business is paying the rent you owe yourself. you keep telling the suppliers you'll have the money after the sale. eventually they might get sick of it and force you into bankruptcy, which will certainly ruin you. but no, when the court comes looking, you have no assets! hooray! your mitten and sock business can pay back literally only 5% of money they owe to creditors! but surely they will seize and sell the property to pay back creditors? they can't, it is a separate and unrelated LLC and it can't be touched! and your mortgage is paid off. you have no personal liability to the creditors, as it was your LLC that incurred the debt... you did it! if you're feeling really frisky, your real estate business can even file a claim for back rent against your mitten and sock business!

i'm not sure how i thought up this idea, but i think it might work! it just depends on where you draw the line? are you ok with personal gain at the cost of others?

funreasonable!

2010-09-27T16:09:00.000-07:00

hi friends,

bet you didn't know i had a blog still! well i do and in the months and months it has been since i posted anything, i have been doing nothing but preparing for this blog post.

it the best when people don't pay attention to the implication of the juxtapositions they create, it is like puns for my eyes! also, there are some images here that just don't seem like good ideas. exhibit a:

josh hamilton (DRINK BOOZE) made a very mature decision to (DRINK BEER) abstain from his baseball team's revelry (GET DRUNK ON RUM) celebrating clinching a playoff (HAVE YOU EVER TRIED A RUM & BEER MIXED DRINK, I THINK THEY CALL IT THE UNIMAGINATIVE SAILOR) spot. hamilton has a checkered past of (LOOK AT THE LONG HAIRED MAN STANDING ON A BARREL OF RUM DOESN'T THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO GET LOADED ON RUM) substance abuse.

exhibit b: this isn't a juxtaposition so much as a REALLY TERRIBLE AD.

but hey, i'm glad we're far enough removed from our proud country's dark past of ACTUALLY TORTURING PEOPLE that we can laugh about it. or at least use it as a means of getting people to a website where we FUCKING SELL BATTERIES.

(yes, i watched sam kinison recently, no he's not funny, but he's SO OUTRAGEOUS AH AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!)

a thought, part two

2010-05-25T13:29:00.000-07:00

today i sauteed some asparagus in bragg's liquid aminos and dr. pepper and my first thought was now this is why i don't smoke weed. i'm already dumb enough. (for the record, however, the asparagus was a success.)

but the thing is that some of the smartest people i know smoke pot and some of the fittest people i know eat like garbage disposals. and i knew an actuary who was an interesting guy. so what i am thinking is that maybe we are less defined by the choices that we make than we'd like to think and maybe that's a good thing.

i am t-pain

2010-05-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

(full disclosure: i am actually t-peña.)

jesus and wade boggs

2010-05-11T13:07:00.000-07:00

i don't mean to offend anyone or anything but i was just sitting around thinking about thinking and how our brains make connections between seemingly unrelated things and specifically i was thinking about wade boggs and jesus.

(now before you get all "they aren't hardly unrelated because all humans' DNA is 99.9% the same and so wade boggs is more closely related to jesus than he is to his 1983 topps rookie card ($17.95, near mint) and blah blah blah..." i wasn't like trying to identify the most dissimilar things i could think of, so back off and stop interrupting me, or i'll never get to my point.)

anyway, i was quick to make the obvious connections between jesus and wade boggs, being that they both are said to have done things that no ordinary human is capable of. (though, to my mind, wade boggs drinking 32 or 36 beers on a cross-country flight and willing himself invisible during a knife fight at a night club are the more believable of the feats ascribed to each figure. after all, the man won 5 batting titles and was notoriously compulsive about his routines, waking up at precisely the same time every day, eating fried chicken before every game and starting his windsprints exactly 7 minutes and 17 seconds before the first pitch. i am willing to give a person like that the benefit of the doubt.)

oh, and also they are both known for their superstitions. jesus believed that there was a god who was all-knowing and also that he was this god's son, and wade boggs believed that his success hitting a ball made of horse skin would continue only if he hit the same number of balls on the ground during practice every day. i guess those two are kindred spirits, no wonder they both popped into my brain.

bitch i'm i.m. pei

2010-04-13T16:25:00.001-07:00

that's all i gotta say.

florida

2010-04-09T19:03:00.000-07:00

i have seen two cars upside-down on the highway in my life and another time i saw a helicopter on the roadway, blades spinning, blocking all the lanes of traffic on I-95. i'm not sure what happened. and when i think about things like car accidents, i think about the events that must have led up to that moment and i think how these minor decisions that we make in our lives can have huge consequences, you know? i mention this because i was down in florida visiting my grandmother who lives there and my parents who don't live there and who also left a day before me, so i had a morning to myself before i was supposed to return the rental car and fly back to portland.

now i hope you'll indulge me for a minute while i veer off-course, but there are some things about florida that you should know. first of all, on the way there you'll be sitting in an exit row with the largest man on the flight. and you, being broad-shouldered yourself, will be unable to sit with your back flat against the seat and so for the duration of the four hour flight from vegas to orlando, you will sit cock-eyed against the wall while the electrician next to you burps up the beer and sausage he had in the airport, and you might find the slowly-evolving scents of his digestion interesting if you hadn't given up meat two years ago. then you will wait for your bag with a woman wearing red knit hand warmers and an ed hardy tank-top in the 82 degree florida evening. then after four hours in the orlando airport (where they mercifully have wireless internet) waiting for your parents to arrive, you'll pile into a rented chevy malibu that costs $148 per day and drive down the coast for an hour and a half to your grandmother's house along a route that used to be lined with fragrant orange trees, but is now a series of strip malls, your favorite of which houses a restaurant called "beef o'brady's". ah, irish cuisine, the pinnacle of culinary achievement! (ah, strip malls, the pinnacle of commercial achievement...!) but hey, it's not all bad, there are still some open spaces left along the drive, though they are principally gated communities abandoned by their developers with solitary gatehouses guarding hundreds of acres of paved cul-de-sacs and crab grass.

(and in defense of florida and to avoid coming across as something of a sourpuss, i did have a nice time. my dad and i caught (and released) a bluefish, a sea trout, a mullet and a bar jack, i got a few laughs out of my grandmother who has all but succumbed to her alzheimer's, i cooked some dinner with my mom and played golf with my aunt and uncle. oh there were manatee and dolphin and an egret i saw eating a rat, there was body-surfing and a rocket launched from cape canaveral that we all watched from the backyard. florida, i don't love you and i am still upset about 2000, though i am pretty sure you voted for gore, but as long as you have people i care about in you, i will put up with you.)

but so, my original point was something about the way things work out and how our insignificant decisions can have profound effects on our lives and the reason i brought that up in the first place was because i was driving from grandma's to the airport back along that gauntlet of floundering commerce and i was driving pretty slow in the fast lane, which i don't usually do unlike the drivers from the states of california and massachussetts, who seem unaware of the fact that the left lane is for passing and not traveling the same speed as the cars next to you. but anyway i was in the left lane, slowly gaining on a truck that was a couple hundred yards in front of me and mc hammer's "you can't touch this" came on the radio and something flew off the truck. i don't know what reason any radio station could possibly have for playing mc hammer in 2010. but what flew off the truck in front of me was a windshield from one of the junked cars it was hauling. the entire windshield, 30 feet in the air. it landed a few feet in front of my car in the right lane and the malibu was pelted by pea-sized bits of shatterproof glass. now what if that windshield had landed on my car? would i have boarded this plane safe and sound, or would i be upside-down in well-rated american car, wheels spinning on the side of highway 520 outside of orlando?

thoughts on the politics of the day

2010-03-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

i was reading about the democratic house leadership's strategy to bring health insurance reform to a vote. i don't think many people understand parliamentary procedure. sometimes i like to read articles about politics on the internet all day and inevitably when i get to the comments, i read things like

"A single member bypassing a vote by calling something 'deemed" passed without a vote is in violation of our Constitution and NOT indicative of a Representative Democracy."

first of all, the house will mold the senate bill to their liking and then a vote will be held on their "fixes", with every house member understanding that their vote on the house revisions is an implicit vote on the senate bill as well. there is a reason this strategy is called "deem and pass" and not just "pelosi sez". voting twice, once on the passage of the senate bill and then on the house's revisions would serve no purpose other than to give opponents of the bill greater opportunity to rant and rave and express the health insurance industry's qualms about reform. and bloviate, my god the bloviation!

second of all, for all the cries of fascist and dictator and traitor, you would think that these people were trying to include zyklon b in school lunches. the libertarians, always entertaining, but never ones to engage in reasonable discussion without introducing hyperbole and creepy threats, are screaming for revolution. offering to introduce house leadership to hell and make speaker pelosi "@#$@ her pants". don't you realize that our democracy works in such a way that if you don't like the policies of the people who have been elected, you have the opportunity to vote them out of office? if they happen to be reelected, that is more or less an indication that your fellow americans disagree with you.

armed revolution? limited government? no health care? from the sound of it, you might enjoy sunny somalia!

but then again, i cannot see the appeal of malls, suburbs, the black eyed peas, ed hardy, SUVs, mcdonalds, i think thomas kinkaide is a miserable artist, i think michael pollan and paul krugman are generally right, growing and raising your own food is a rewarding, healthy, economical and beneficial activity, bicycling is a fun and healthy means of transportation and money is not a measure of success. that said, i believe everyone should have the opportunity to succeed (however they define success) and the government can and should be a catalyst for that success. i guess i'm a fascist too.

little-known health insurance reform facts

2010-02-26T18:08:00.000-08:00

there has been to-do made recently about the democrats efforts to reform the health insurance industry, but many americans do not know how the proposed reforms will affect them. to help clear things up, i have compiled a list of the key elements of "obamacare":

- insurance companies will be required to insure those with the preexisting human condition.

- taxpayer money will be used to subsidize "obamabortions".

- in order to keep costs down, your in-network doctors will all be high-school biology students.

- under the new "compulsory sponsorship of an illegal immigrant" system, each health insurance customer, in addition to their own insurance costs, will pay for "the regular doctor's visits and necessary and elective procedures of an illegal immigrant" and they will also receive a photograph and letter of thanks (in spanish), from their sponsoree.

- all STD tests will be performed on semen/vaginal secretion samples mailed directly to rick santorum

whether or not these reforms will bring about the sweeping change promised by barack hussein obama is unclear.

oh newt

2010-02-11T12:37:00.000-08:00

so i watched newt gingrich on the daily show the other day, right, and it struck me that he will just say things, regardless of whether they're true or not, if they serve to prove a point he is trying to make. to wit (and pointed out on TPMmuckraker and whitehouse.gov), gingrich states (very confidently) that richard reid, the shoe-bomber, was read his miranda rights during the bush administration because he was an american citizen. that is false. it is ok to be wrong sometimes, but it is not ok to be wrong when the validity of the point you are making (the obama administration is radical for reading umar farouk abdulmutallab, the underwer bomber, his miranda rights) is contingent on the false "facts" you are presenting (the bush administration also read the shoe bomber his miranda rights, but only because he was an american citizen).

also brought up by gingrich was the infamous quirin case of 1942, in which 13 nazi saboteurs were given military tribunals and executed by the roosevelt administration. the problem with using that case as a precedent (which the bush administration did when they suspended habeas corpus for detainees), was that at least one of the saboteurs was an american citizen and at least two of them had no plans of attacking the united states and acted to turn themselves in to the FBI. in fact, it is likely that many of the saboteurs were using the clandestine nazi mission to repatriate themselves to the united states. there is a fascinating "this american life" episode about the case and the events leading up to it, found here (one of the most amazing and heart wrenching stories i have ever heard). gingrich uses this as an example of a president (and a liberal at that!), taking swift action to ensure the safety of his country. nevermind the fact that his swift action was morally abominable and that he was on the wrong side of history.

now, and this really pisses me off, the obama administration has changed NONE OF THE FUCKING PROTOCOL FOR HOLDING AND TRYING DETAINEES! so not only is the obama administration shitting the bed in terms of human rights, but gingrich is either ignorant of this important position, or so focused on bringing the obama white house down that he is ignoring the facts.

and lastly (according to his wikipedia entry), gingrich is a former history professor whose area of expertise is modern european history. he also once taught a class entitled "renewing american civilization". i don't know many history professors who can be successful when they are so glaringly wrong (and apparently utterly unconcerned about a factual understanding of their areas of expertise), but maybe that's why he went into politics.

questions for the late pope

2010-02-01T22:08:00.000-08:00

dear pope john paul,

please disregard the fact that you are dead. please also understand that i am writing to you because i am still feeling a little bit uneasy about pope benedict's ties to nazi germany, although everyone makes a point of stressing the fact that he was unenthusiastic about the whole affair. anyway, i am more comfortable talking to you.

well, i got to thinking the other day about the catholic position on birth control and i know you have a very clear, zero-tolerance position on contraception, but so what i was wondering was whether or not it would be alright to poke holes in condoms and then use them? because that would make them totally ineffective and then you aren't engaging in any form of birth control. do you see where i'm going with this?

oh and i was also curious who transsexual people can and can't marry. can they marry either sex? neither? or only other transsexual people?

so i guess you probably won't get back to me for a little while, but i just wanted to thank you in advance for taking the time to answer my questions. or if it is god who is answering through you or whatever, thank him too. he seems like a good guy.

sincerely,

hey

2010-01-21T13:01:00.001-08:00

hey nbc: if i could say that you're replacing the new guard with the old guard, i would, but that wouldn't be true so instead i'll say you're replacing an innovator with a tired purveyor of mindless schlock.

hey massachussets: scott brown is no prize, but martha coakley didn't deserve it. health care reform will pass and you'll have an opportunity to replace brown in a few short years. (2012). and haven't you heard that axiom, that you get the government you deserve?

hey democrats: pass health care reform.

always have been, always not anymore

2010-01-18T21:43:00.000-08:00

just when you think you're an apple fritter man, just when you feel confident in elevating that heavenly mound of dough above all others, you will discover the marion berry fritter. glorious be the tulip bakery!

run on sentence

2009-12-21T00:14:00.000-08:00

...and you know i just spent the last hour looking through your photographs, right, and the thing that i saw that for whatever reason immediately struck me was that we both have photographs of jeff and betsy making out which is creepy, like for some reason watching that couple kiss makes us both want to grab our cameras...

beer tube

2009-12-07T14:38:00.000-08:00

i don't think this is an isolated incident. in central pennsylvania, at a certain bowling alley, which shall not be named (mostly because i do not remember the name and also because dan will tell me in the comments section), they sell beer in a tube. draft beer in a clear plastic tube with a little spigot on the bottom. it makes me so happy to know that there is someone out there who heeded america's call for taller, narrower beer dispensers.

now i'm reading this book called deep economy about how maybe we shouldn't measure the success of our societies by their economic growth, because this focus on growth results in the overproduction of goods that a) use resources that can be better applied and b) don't make our lives any better. bill mckibben is the author and i agree with him in theory, right, but something tells me that he would not support the production of beer tubes and i am not sure i could bear to return to a world where beer in bowling alleys is served only in pitchers.

(but wait, oh, i just had a revelation! isn't a pitcher just stouter kind of tube? and a cup too? oh jason and dave at beertubes.com, what do you take me for?)

the tomatoes are green

2009-12-04T13:43:00.000-08:00

do you know when you have a garden and then all of a sudden it is like winter out and you realize that your tomatoes will never ripen and you get kinda sad about it and wonder whether there is something that you can do with them besides fry them? well, i know about that feeling, so i brainstormed and researched and came up with this recipe that i enjoy:

nate's dan quayle green tomatoe sauce:

5-6 lbs. green tomatoes

1 cup white wine

1/4 cup olive oil

3-4 tbsp. (non-iodized) salt

1 tbsp. cane sugar (to cut the tartness)

5 large cloves garlic

handful fresh oregano and thyme

3-4 tbsp. whole green peppercorns

5 bay leaves

core the tomatoes and slice them into quarters, put them in a large pot with the wine and oil and salt and set to simmer for 30 minutes.

dice the garlic and fresh herbs and add them along with the remaining ingredients to the pot and allow to simmer for 1-2 hours.

after simmering the sauce, i mashed the tomato chunks with a large wire whisk. it was tedious and resulted in a chunkier sauce (which i like anyway), but a food processor would be a better option for a smoother sauce.

serve or freeze! (i plan on serving the sauce on squid ink pasta with romano cheese and garnished abundantly with fresh minced parsley. black and green sounds like an intriguing combination.)

have tres leches - will travel

2009-11-07T01:27:00.000-08:00

despite a crippling inability to absorb other languages, i was fortunately able to piece together that tres leches means three milks. and milks is what i want to talk to you about today.

now i like desserts probably more than you do, and my philosophy with regard to them tends toward moderation on the consumption side and not on the preparation side. (consumption-side dessertonomics?)(and i am sorry to joke about consumption, tuberculosis is no laughing matter. it is a coughing matter.)

anyway, i decided to make tres leches for gallagher's taco party. here are things you might want to take into consideration if you find yourself in a similar situation:

1) if you ever think you'll want to eat tres leches in the future, don't prepare it. don't even look at a recipe. that is too much milks.

2) if you are planning on riding your bicycle to the party, ha. you didn't think that through very well, did you?

3) oh yeah? you have a car? you gonna swallow your environmentalist pride and drive it to the party? cool. now your cake has turned into a milk wave pool.

next time i'm bringing some fucking flan.

for your listening pleasure

2009-11-04T14:14:00.000-08:00

i made this song about working on a tv show.

i can't make music and it is a whole bunch of nonsense. enjoy!

choose my career!

2009-11-02T22:34:00.000-08:00

so look, i'm a 27 year old unmarried white male with a b.a. from an elite liberal arts college that nobody has heard of. i live in portland, oregon. i am interested in processes.

in december i will turn 28 and i think i should have a career. my friends seem to be heading towards careers. like benny will be a professor and arijit will be, um, a professor too. or work in a non-profit. or maybe for a government agency. dan will be the host of a japanese game show. elspeth will be a production designer. i feel like other people are focusing their interests and mine just keep expanding. for instance: yeah, so i want to fix that moped up and oh, i wonder if my landlord will let me have chickens. where can i take a bicycle frame building class?

so i am going to put this to a vote, here are my options as i see them:

1) lawyer (look dad, i put this one first.)

2) artist (look dad, i put this one second.)

3) elected official

4) guy who calls you periodically and asks for work

5) restauranteur (like i know anything about that)

6) ___________

post your compelling arguments in the comments section.

(extra credit: which of those options am i at the moment?)

(double extra credit: if you choose artist, what kind of artist should i be?)

(did you ever read those choose your own adventure books? this is more like a choose that guy's adventure book. that guy being me. the book being a blog. adventure being the most mundane bullshit ever. look, i tried to make this interesting. i do this all for you, all of this! what more do you want from me? oh quit my excruciatingly self-aware sniveling? never!)

i love gravy

2009-11-02T17:21:00.000-08:00

i just invented this vegetarian gravy, or anyway, i made it.

1/2 lb. chantrelle mushrooms

2 tbsp. butter

saute the mushrooms in the butter. dice two of the cooked mushrooms and put them back in the pan with the leftover butter. (set the rest aside. yum, chantrelles).

with the heat on medium, add to the pan:

1 oz. bragg's liquid aminos

7 oz. water

1 tbsp. maple syrup

1 tbsp. cider vinegar

1 bay leaf

sprinkle in slowly (mixing vigorously to avoid clumping):

2 tbsp. flour

season with:

dash oregano

dash thyme

dash rosemary

oh man!

i poured it on garlic mashed potatoes served on steamed brussel sprout greens. garnished with arugula flowers.

running in nyc

2009-10-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

when i run in new york city, i can't run as far as when i run elsewhere and i've come to realize that it maybe has nothing to do with the distance i'm going, right, but more to do with the amount of humanity that i absorb in that distance. once i hit my limit i just have to stop.

scattershot

2009-10-16T10:57:00.001-07:00

sometimes i wonder what the last item i cut or copied was so i press "open-apple v" to find out. lots of times it is just an address or an incomplete thought. tonight it was this image, which i like.

also, you might be interested to know that i write all my blog posts in the body of an email. if i don't finish them i send them to myself. i am not sure why i started doing it that way, but now that you know that, can you tell?

why does the english language have such a specific term for lighting oneself on fire that is not "lighting oneself on fire"?

francis

2009-10-05T22:31:00.001-07:00

(boy, it's been a while, readership, so much has happened since last we met.)

(so i guess i am a little late in writing this and i'm not sure how crisply the details of the following events will be remembered, partly as a result of the nature of the events themselves and partly because there have been too many stimuli in my life recently and my detail-remembering dial is set on "economy". in the case of details which are not crisply remembered, they will be completely fabricated.)

dan poppy got married and so did angie salisbury. on the same day no less! thankfully they spared all of their friends the agony of choosing whose wedding to attend by marrying each other. me and nick and seth were the groomsmen, which is the only word i can think of that has the consonants "msm" in a row. so we arranged the bachelor party.

it was a secret and obviously the first thing to take into consideration when you're arranging a secret bachelor party is to try to make the groom think you are going to make him do something like go to the penn national horse track and al's diamond cabaret in reading, pa. it was not hard to convince dan that we were going to do something super lazy and ironic to honor him. well within the realm of possibility.

the second thing to do is to pick the activities for the weekend. to do this, we had to ask ourselves what does dan love? if you said whiskey, you're right. also long walks on majestic white sand beaches? wild ponies? yep, again. um, 11 dudes in a van with two gallons of chili? well, he likes 6 of the dudes, but he definitely loves both gallons of chili.

number three is invite people that you think the groom would invite. this is hard, because a) you kind of have to hierarchically rank your friend's friends and also it is easy to project your own thoughts about your mutual friends onto that hierarchy. and b) you will forget people and there will be people on the bubble and some people who can't come.

the fourth order of business is to contact the friend's boss and arrange to kidnap them from work. dan's boss is josh and he was an excellent accomplice.

lastly, most of the details should be nebulous until the very last minute, because things are way more interesting when they are frantically thrown together at the last minute. bring a whiffle ball and bat, though.

so we decided on assateague island (off the coast of maryland) as our destination. it is this long amazing barrier island of sand beaches with wild ponies. we were hoping to get 6-8 people, so we invited twelve. eleven accepted. we rented a 12-person van and we bought two gallons of chili from ben's chili bowl for $80. extra for the onions. we got food that would satisfy all of the dietary requirements of the group, because we were a very cosmopolitan lot. 6 liters of whiskey seemed adequate.

there were some near disasters. marson was going to drive back to new york after delivering water and s'mores materials to the camp. apparently our site was full, and the rangers told a mightily disgruntled marson that he couldn't stay with us. now walking along the beach to meet him after playing some whiskey whiffle ball, i had stumbled upon a fairly large and brightly colored toy boat. it was probably 2 feet long. so it was while holding this treasure that i was told that "this was not one of nate's best ideas", before he turned on his heels and trudged off along the beach. we had given marson vague words of encouragement about coming back out to the site. we promised to at least find him a ride back to the parking lot. no one thought we were going to see him later.

so it was with heavy hearts and a toy boat that we were making our way along the beach back to our site, me and dan and jesse. we played rock paper scissors to decide who was going to talk to the first car to come our way. dan lost. we made him do it even though it was his party; fair is fair. so dan convinced this carload of two couples, either drunk with the satisfaction of a relaxing and fruitful day fishing, or more likely keystone light, to pick brian up where he was walking, 300 yards down the beach. he said something like "our friend really needs a ride up to the ranger station, you guys look pretty full, but is there any chance you could pick him up?"

"yeah, we're good people"

"oh thanks, i really appre..."

then the driver's eyes got real wide, like cartoon wide. "TUGGY! HE FOUND TUGGY!" this seemed about right, like it was about time in the bachelor party for the carload of intoxicated marylanders who were about to pick up our sullen friend (so that he could drive four hours home) to grow startlingly excited over a molded plastic tugboat that they had apparently lost and had sailed a few hundred yards down the beach to the point where i had found it washed up next to some horseshoe crabs of almost equal size. one question about the situation and our arrangements comes immediately to mind, and it has to do with age and childrens' toys and mental states and good ideas, but i don't know the answer either, so i won't even ask it. so marson would at least get a ride to the ranger's station.

but he came back. and we had a fire on the beach. and macaroni and cheese (and gluten-free macaroni and cheese) and hot dogs (and not-dogs) and whiskey (and scotch and rye and bourbon).

(so now for the moral right, 'cause you knew i was gonna do it.) as men we aren't all that accustomed to expressing our love for one another. the fact that 11 people each took the time to travel many hours (from dc and new york, pittsburgh and harrisburg, north carolina and oregon) speaks volumes about how much dan's friends care about him. the fact that everything that almost went wrong didn't and that everything that seemed like a good idea was goes to show that some deity up there knows he deserves it. and i for one am starting to think that it is tuggy...

david brooks

2009-09-16T01:57:00.000-07:00

dear david brooks,

your recent article "high-five nation" was just the worst. let me explain why.

you say that "[on v-j day] the allies had...completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. and yet there was no chest-beating." maybe there was no exuberance on v-j day because we exploded and incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians in japan. maybe people recognized the frightening future implications of our use of nuclear weapons. maybe it wasn't because those were more modest times.

you call "individual expressionism" a capitalistic routine. you are wrong. sure, aspects of it are frequently co-opted by corporate interests, but there are vital movements (do-it-yourselfers, backyard farmers, much of the bicycle culture, to name a few that come immediately to mind) whose individually expressive members are driven not by money, but by intellectual curiosity and desire for self-sufficiency and sustainability.

you use michael jordan's basketball hall of fame induction speech as an example of immodesty. can't m.j. allow himself a little self congratulation for the simple reason that he is the greatest basketball player to have ever lived? and because he was being inducted into the basketball hall of fame? there is nothing wrong with him reflecting publicly a little bit on his success in front of people who appreciate his accomplishments. he is frequently quoted as saying that his predecessors made his success possible. is the forced aw-shucksism prevalent among athletes today better than a little honest discussion? do you really think michael jordan is trying to bolster his resume at this stage in the game? shit.

later, you essentially compare the actions of contemporary professional athletes and entertainers, people who are paid to get attention, to those of soldiers and average americans at the end of a brutal two-front war; a war in which we unleashed the most fearsome human-made device ever devised on a civilian population. do you really think that our soldiers today would unabashedly celebrate the use of nuclear weapons on our enemies? do you even think that terrell owens would pretend to pull down his pants and moon afganistan or that dikembe mutombo would wag his finger at iraq if we obliterated their major metropolitan areas?

you might remember babe ruth's called shot in 1932, which is possibly one of the cockiest gestures of all time. not just calling the shot, but the mocking and grandstanding the accompanied his trot around the bases. if there wasn't a precedent for public celebrations of personal accomplishments before, that certainly set it.

an opinion column at the new york times? you can say anything you want to hundreds of thousands of intelligent people. don't fucking call me and my contemporaries immodest and self-indulgent and then back it up with illogical nonsense.

hood to coast

2009-09-07T16:47:00.000-07:00

one time i asked my friend how you stop on a fixed gear bicycle without brakes in an emergency, right, because it seemed like the track skid took a second to initiate and he said "you just do". now that is an imperfect explanation and i ride with brakes because my gear ratio is, as rachel's friend pointed out, pretty stout. but i would like to borrow that explanation if i may to describe a recent experience i had that has nothing to do with bicycles.

so i ran in the hood to coast relay, which is a 197 mile road race on the back roads of oregon; teams have 12 people and each team member is responsible for running 3 legs, one every 8 hours or so. it is an intense experience for a number of reasons, 1) you don't have much of an opportunity to sleep, 2) you can't eat normally, because you're always about to run, and 3) unless you are a distance runner and 15+ miles don't bother you, running 5-7 miles every 8 hours is exhausting.

now i was not out of shape, but it is true that i took a couple of weeks off from running before frantically trying to get some training in during the week leading up to the race. nevertheless, i ran my first leg, 6.4 miles, and felt pretty good. my second leg was 4.9 miles around 5am and i overexerted myself, running faster than i planned to (the result of some poor calculations of my proximity to the checkpoint.)

by the last leg i was spent, my quads and calves were frozen solid and i had slept two hours in the rain and eaten only peanuts and raisins and bananas for the last 18 hours. my teammate flurry had given me some energy cubes, little caffeinated gelatinous bundles of carbohydrates (yeah, that's a natural product), of which i ate five to wash down my five ibuprofen. i was at the handoff point, waiting for my teammate to come in and i was thinking "my god, i don't know how i'm going to do this".

and if this seems too self congratulatory or you think i am about to make myself out to be some sort of hero like robert redford in the natural (triumph in the face of adversity!), well then let me disabuse you of that idea. and if you don't want to read what amounts to a story about an overprivileged white kid going for a 5-mile jog, well then i don't blame you. i bet there is some show on mtv right now that will at least make a similar story entertaining with melodramatic dialogue, a lively soundtrack and fast cuts.

well lindsey ran in to the checkpoint and sort of surprised me, i was so checked out. i went from daydreaming to running. the first few minutes i was so uncoordinated i felt like i had hooves (or maybe high-heels on, or maybe both like if the greek god pan were a cross dresser). whenever i passed anybody or someone passed me i thought "oh man, they feel like i feel; this is hard and they are doing this too." and eventually the physical exertion and discomfort were pressed backward in my mind, like they became more than i could focus on and i was just going.

and so if someone asks me how you run a race like hood to coast, the only answer i would be comfortable giving them is "you just do". (and if you want to extrapolate my sentiment to mean "even when you think you can't, you can", then be my guest, just don't hold me responsible if things don't work out.)

the heat and dreams

2009-08-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

so it turns out that my car doesn't have any air conditioning, but i already knew that. you didn't, because that is not generally a piece of information that present to people unprovoked. anyway, me and kathleen took a road trip of sorts down to san francisco and camped along the way in national park/forest/recreation area campgrounds, which are the best kind of campgrounds and i had this amazing vivid dream in our tent one night and i am going to tell you about it, but after i tell you about the heat.

red bluff, california is the fucking hottest place i have ever been. you see, we were visiting lassen volcano (which erupted may 19th and may 22nd, 1915) and we were at an elevation of over 8000' and it was hot up there (but not because it is a volcano, though that's awfully clever) and if i keep adding parenthetical asides to my sentences, i'll never get through this thought. ahem. as we drove west down toward red bluff (at 348' in elevation) the temperature, which is generally one of many components that make up what we call our experiences, began to rise. at about 97 i started to monitor the situation, because at 97 temperature became the only component of living that i was capable of paying attention to and here's one reason why: it became gradually apparent to me that my eyeballs were baking in their sockets.

now i can tolerate physical discomfort generally well, but heat will be the death of me. so with that in mind, and the fact that there was no air conditioning, so our windows were open, picture this scene: one large bearded man of northern european ancestry and a fair freckled lady of irish descent were barreling down a northern california highway at 75 miles an hour with the windows wide open, unable to talk or listen to music for all the buffeting wind noise pulsing in our heads. the bearded man at the wheel was monitoring the thermometer with a sense of foreboding as it the numbers rose and rose. the only communication in the car was every couple of minutes when the man would yell "99...100...101..." over the constant throbbing of the wind. (oh, i think i should mention that the bearded man was me, because i don't want to talk in the third person anymore.) at 105, i started to notice that i didn't seem to be sweating. then i realized that that wasn't true at all, my backside was drenched and i seemed to be stuck to the leather car seat, but everywhere the hot wind hit me was bone dry. my sweat was evaporating before i could feel it. my eyes dried out if i kept them open for more than a second. at 107 we decided to take a picture of the dashboard, where the temperature readout was. if you're all like "that doesn't sound hot", then try sitting in a sauna for two hours.

whenever one part of my body touched another part, there was an instant wetness. (and to steer this story toward the inappropriate, there are instances where that is desirable, but alas this wasn't one. and for the most part though, this drive wasn't hot and wet, just hot and dry.) when the thermometer topped out at 112, sitting in traffic in red bluff (and know that we were the only car with its windows open), i couldn't even bear the electrical attraction between my subatomic particles. i so desperately wanted a dark matter breeze to blow through my being (haha! what a convenient and ill-defined explanation for the real mass of the universe being so much greater than the observable mass. and also, if there was a dark matter breeze blowing through my body, and there might have been, it sure didn't help.) think of this too, we had been driving in that temperature for long enough that all of our water was 107.

but if you don't feel sympathetic to our plight, well then you're right. there was so much good on the trip, that having to reconstitute our eyeballs was just an unpleasant aside. and anyway, san francisco was in the low-60s when we got there later that night.

now to shift gears completely to a dream i had while camping (and the dream i had last night that reminded me that i had the dream that i had while camping)...

look, i have this friend greg and we all lived on this farm, all of my friends and me. so greg fell for this chicken that lived on the farm, like followed it around all day. he named it grubwalker. and you know how chickens move, sometimes running and flapping and jumping all zig-zaggy, well greg would just shuffle along behind the chicken, to the exclusion of everything else. he wasn't even interested in human contact. he just loved grubwalker, he loved that chicken.

now this was a dream, right, so there was no narrative involved. i was just shown briefly this magical relationship between my friend and a chicken. i was sort of sad that greg didn't want to interact with humans anymore, but i was happy that he had found fulfillment (although it was slightly codependent). now i can see three separate aspects of the dream that relate to my life at the moment, the first is this youtube video i saw about a dog and an elephant who are best friends (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBtFTF2ii7U), the second is the fact that i have been entertaining the idea of raising some chickens in my backyard, and third is that my friends are getting married and i am happy for them, but there is also this realization (or maybe a misconception) that marriage will somehow change the dynamic of my relationship with them.

i have no idea why it was greg who fell for the chicken, that part doesn't make any sense. (i would also say that greg probably eats more chickens than any of my other friends, so that adds another layer of strangeness to this dream. he is at least in the top three...) dreams are so awesome.

and last night i was a speed-skate cross racer, which, as far as i know is a sport that i just made up. it is like motocross or snowboard cross (boardercross, bro!), but on speed skates. bonnie blair eat your heart out (tony blair eat your heart out too). it takes place in an arena on this crazy topographical ice. it is totally nuts. i was decent, but not great. my dream centered on this race where i had my best lifetime finish, so that was encouraging. i think i got second or third, but there were some serious competitors. and anyway, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

(and who needs cohesion? who needs narrative or punctuation? this isn't a novel, this is a blog for crying out loud! you want a story, be my editor. sheesh.)

kfc double down sandwich

2009-08-25T10:17:00.001-07:00

why do you mention this you ask? because the bread is replaced with fried chicken. then what is inside the sandwich you ask? bacon and cheese and special sauce. where can i get one you ask? only in rhode island and nebraska. have we finally figured out how to create food products with no redeeming nutritional value you ask? we figured that out a while ago. then what does this sandwich represent you ask? taken in conjunction with "my humps", the direction our political discourse has headed in this country, and the fascination with the sordid details of michael jackson's life (including the fact that his death was ruled a homicide), this sandwich represents the downfall of human civilization. it was a pretty good run though, wasn't it?

oh mythology

2009-08-13T01:56:00.000-07:00

i don't want to assign any mystical powers to myself, and actually i have none, but there was an instance two weekends ago where i was exposed simultaneously to my past and a (the?) future and i was lucky in that i immediately recognized the difference. and it is a rare occasion to feel so privy, to feel as though you understand the choices you have and to understand why you are making decisions you are making. and if you're yearning for more specifics, well then i can't help you. (but you know it has to do with love, right? only love is capable of seeping into the otherwise neatly compartmentalized aspects of our lives).

and i bring this up only because it is on my mind right now. there is a costume party tomorrow, the theme of which is gods and goddesses, and in determining which deity i wanted to emulate, i realized that i couldn't be anyone but janus (and oh, i just learned about him today!). the god of new beginnings. he has two faces, one looking to the past and one looking toward the future.

and my future is this and not forever, but friday, a goddess will fall asleep with me and kiss me on both faces when i am waking up.

pause, sit with your breath or: from russia with love

2009-08-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

the term "mouth-breather" is in the collective consciousness these days and the first time i ever heard it was in a woody allen stand-up routine, but it wasn't live. it was recorded and i was in a car with amy and jill and we were driving from garmisch-partenkirchen down to cinque terre, which is a fun thing to do if you ever find yourself in europe with amy and jill and a woody allen cd. and i don't think it is fair to call it a coincidence that the first time i have ever felt comfortable applying the label of mouth-breather to a person was when i was riding on a chinatown bus from new york to boston two fridays ago. it is not fair to call that a coincidence because one incident involved listening to woody allen in a car with two girls i like and the other incident involved sitting next to a loud russian on a chinatown bus and they are such unrelated incidents that they cannot be considered a coincidence.

now i'm sure you've ridden a chinatown bus. i like the lucky star, mostly because of the dragon wearing a backpack that adorns the sides. and also i like stopping at arby's where there always seem to be other lucky star busses parked letting people stretch out and get cheap beef sandwiches and use a bathroom that isn't quaking and braking and accelerating and decelerating and heaving you around. and it takes some figuring to determine which lucky star is the one you just got off of and which one would take you back to where you just came from if you got on it by accident.

so i was heading up to boston for mike's wedding and it was friday afternoon and i think everyone in new york was heading up to boston for mike's wedding, because the bus was full and so was the highway. it took six and a half hours. but i was waiting in line to board the bus behind this pretty girl and maybe she had tattoos somewhere, i don't know, but she was pretty. i thought to myself "this bus is going to be full, look at all these people in line" and also "i should sit next to this pretty girl and wouldn't that make the time on the bus go by faster?" so i didn't. i sat two rows behind her on the other side of the bus because maybe i would get both seats to myself if i looked gruff enough to scare people away. but the bus was full, like i knew it was going to be. so the last person on the bus was this behemoth of a russian man with a blackberry and a tight t-shirt and a baseball cap on and where else was he supposed to sit?

so he plunked down beside me, all elbows and hanging over the armrest and he immediately launched into a heated discussion with another russian or maybe someone didn't speak russian, but who he wanted to bellow at regardless. he probably didn't need to use the phone, if the person on the other end was anywhere in connecticut i'm sure they could hear him if the wnd was blowing in the right direction and they tilted their head just so. as abruptly as the conversation started, ten minutes later it ended and by the time his hand, still grasping his phone descended to his lap, he was asleep. and he slept like he talked, bellicosely, but instead of some unseen recipient of his energies, the recipient was sitting exactly in my seat and shared all my fears and aspirations. in case that wasn't clear, the snoring mass of russian was piled onto me. his head was on my shoulder, bicep to my bicep, hand on my thigh.

"now this is interesting," i thought and "i can't believe we're only in cos cob."

we rode like that for a while and at least the air conditioning was on this time. then his phone rang and he launched into such another boisterous conversation that i almost forgot he had been asleep seconds before. ten minutes later, conversation over and i had my snoring russian blanket again. once his phone rang again i took the opportunity to get up and spread myself out under the pretenses of heading to the bathroom. not that i didn't have to pee, because i did, but mostly i wanted air around my body and not flesh. so i made it to the bathroom and shut the door and took some deep breaths (unadvisable) and got ready to start peeing and the driver decided to accelerate and switch lanes and brake, all in a span of three or four seconds. so i wedged myself in the tiny bathroom, elbows on walls, feet on the rim the toilet, anything i could do to keep from getting jostled and sending an errant stream trickling down my shorts and out under the door. but i couldn't bring myself to do it. i felt like some drunk in a cartoon, looking down at the bowl meandering it's way through my field of vision. finally, i looked at myself in the scratched up mirror, looked away, sighed and sat down on the toilet seat. i felt so defeated, sitting there peeing while connecticut heaved past me in fits and starts.

and stepped out of the bathroom, four or five minutes later and made my way down the aisle. when i got to my row, the russian was dead asleep, hanging over the armrest, but i didn't need to wake him up. his phone rang...

me so hornets

2009-07-29T22:15:00.000-07:00

oh, my parents like to keep the bushes in order so they periodically traipse about the yard with a hedge trimmer and some felco shears and that is how come magazines sometimes come take pictures of our yard and also politicians film campaign commercials there. i think it is great until i am supposed to take part in the trimming, then i find it unnecessary.

but so, there are casualties in every war, and this is a war story at the heart of it, you see because mom was out pruning the hedges and these crazy little fuckers decided that the pruning shears were too close to their nest. they are called white faced hornets and they don't buzz around so much as fly directly at the point on your body that is most sensitive and sting it over and over. so mom got stung, she threw down her implements and ran inside for the baking soda.

dad was swift in avenging his wife's attack, like a few hours later when i was trying to read some malcolm gladwell by the pool. he came out of the garage with some raid (which is a patented chemical product that kills stinging insects and makes dogs really curious. seriously.) and, never one to tempt fate, a broomstick. get ready to run, he told me as he steadied the broomstick like some don quixote, but with realer, if less intimidating enemies. right-oh, i responded. and "psssssssssssh..." the raid shot out as dad parried at the nest. and "psshhhhhh..." the raid immediately stopped coming out. dad looked at the can, looked up, threw the can down and started running. i leapt up from my lawn chair, threw malcolm to the grass and dove for the pool, fully clothed. i dove right past dad, as he yelled "owwww...shit!" running full tilt. i hid under the water for a few seconds to make sure the hornets passed me by and took the opportunity to scoop up my sunglasses from the bottom of the pool.

dad was inside with the baking soda. it feels like i got hit with a pan he said, looking at his wounded forearm.

i'm going to really let them have it. i'm going to wait until it is dark and they're all in their nest and i'm going to sneak up and let them have it, dad informed me.

hornets 2 - humans 0.

at dusk, from the kitchen i saw dad in the mudroom putting raincoats on and snowpants on. muck boots. canvas hats. ski gloves. not only was he putting them on, he was trying all the options out to see what materials might be best at thwarting a stinger. finally he approached me like some wacked-out fisherman, covered head-to-toe in the most water-repellent, insulated garb he could muster and asked me to pull his mosquito net over his head. i obliged, making sure the elastic around the neckline had no slack that would allow those crazy insects any point of entry into dad's soft parts. he was ready to fight anything.

remember that dude in jurassic park who was trying to steal the fucking embryos or dna or whatever and he's all driving in the rain storm and his car slides off the road and he's trying to winch it back up and this dinosaur starts hissing at him and spits in his eyes and then they all eat him (his name was dennis nedry)? wouldn't have happened to dad. he was impervious.

in fact, the final battle was tame, dad employed the scorched earth policy. he razed that nest. the little fuckers never stood a chance. serves them right for living in our cuboid bushes.

new clothes, no emperor

2009-07-29T21:24:00.000-07:00

so i will start first things first and then move to third things second before skipping my way gleefully back to the second thing last.

just kidding.

god it was hot back a couple of weeks ago and i decided i needed something to wear to mike's wedding, so i was walking purposefully around downtown with my dad during market days in concord. (market days is when all the stores on main street put all their goods on the sidewalk for three or four days and there are bison burgers and real new hampshire maple syrup and dunking booths.) but there is this place on main street called "britches of concord" and they sell sort of middle-aged northeastern men's clothing, which, incidentally, was pretty much exactly what i was looking for. you see... nevermind. i wanted a white blazer. whatever.

so i was in this store and i was smiling at the owner, ray and asking him how to put on an ascot and if he had any white blazers and i don't think he took me very seriously and i was on the way out the door when i was like "that is a white blazer, right there on that mannequin". do you know why i was like that? because it was true. but it was a full suit. and ray told me that if it was my size he would give me 20% off so i went in the dressing room to try on the pants to see how much they needed to be taken in.

i undid my belt and my pants button and my shorts dropped to the floor, first of all, earlier, my dad and ray had gotten a big chuckle out of my cutoff shorts, but i can't remember why. anyway, my shorts pooled at my ankles and i realized that i was naked as the day i was made. it was hot, you see, so i was underwearless. and about to try on white linen pants. i had to make a snap decision, do i beg off an tell dad and ray i don't have underwear on and that i'll come back, or do i waltz out of the dressing room in a pair of baggy white linen pants barely holding onto my hips and let some poor guy grab at my waistband to figure out the appropriate alterations...?

what do you think.

stones

2009-07-26T23:46:00.000-07:00

i have a few stories to relate in the next couple days and we can smile together when we read them, but i have to write them first and so in lieu of writing them and posting them tonight i offer this...

it is a dangerous game and time consuming game to try and determine your five favorite rolling stones songs. first you have to ask yourself if you should take past returns into consideration. i say no. i say five favorite rolling stones songs at this moment. and is it ok to have multiple songs from the same album? sure, but it might offend your sense of symmetry. as of 2:45 am on monday, july 27th, 2009 my selections are: no expectations, shattered, miss you, country honk and monkey man.

and i am not sure if you can see the inner workings of my being based on those selections, but i don't think so. my inner being is mostly made from marshmallows and sun bears.

reflect

2009-07-06T18:52:00.000-07:00

(and i heard greg telling matt costa about the reflection of the moon in the water and how the wind and ripples made the points of light rotate like a music box ballerina when you squinted your eyes and also how it moved like people through grand central station. and dylan and greg and i were sitting and watching it earlier and we were mesmerized together and we talked about how if we tried to explain it to the other folks at the campfire, it wouldn't make any sense. but my point is that our feelings are like that reflection in that the way our experiences effect us is unique to ourselves and sometimes our feelings intertwine with other people's feelings and we can communicate them with each other and relate, but without those shared experiences, it is impossible to convey our feelings completely. )

there's no i in spder

2009-06-26T15:53:00.000-07:00

usually i can't tell spiders apart, like it is hard to positively identify them as individuals, but one came in my CSA share and i sort of developed a fondness for him because he had only five legs. four on one side and one on the other. so i brought him out to the compost bin because there are all these flies that live in there and spiders like flies as far as i know and i thought maybe i could help him out a little, because he was disadvantaged in the leg department.

but so a couple days later i was in the shower and who should appear on the wall above the tile, but the one spider in the world that i can positively identify. now how or why he made the trek 30 ft. from my compost bin to my bathroom is something that i can't begin to understand, but there he was, in the flesh (wait, do spiders have flesh?). i figured that he must have made that journey for a reason though, so i decided to let him be. but as i was showering he started repelling down a strand of whatever a spider's strand is made of, towards the tub and perilously close to the reflected spray of the shower and the river of water headed for the drain. now i know he didn't want to go down there, because there is no way he knew what terrible fate awaited him in the sewage system so i put my hand in his path and he climbed aboard and i placed him on the windowsill, above the tub. he was a little startled by this turn of events and he just sat there, trying to figure out how his scenery had been so rapidly altered.

anyway, next morning i got in the shower and there he was, mister five-legs, waiting for me above the tiles. i turned on the water and hopped in the tub and we reenacted the same series of events as the day before. next day, same thing. so i was not surprised by my arachnid-accompaniment on the fourth day when i climbed into the shower and i was equally unsurprised when the steam animated him and he started wandering about.

now it is impossible to say what was driving that creature towards the stream of water tumbling down the drain and, if he wanted to be down there so badly, why he didn't just go investigate some time when i was not in the shower. but on the fourth day he either repelled faster or just leapt without bothering to secure his strand, or maybe i just wasn't really paying attention, but i noticed the blank spot on the wall where he had been hanging out and looked down in time to see him circle the drain once before succumbing to the whirlpool of wastewater.

it was sad to see him go, but his persistence paid off in the end and i'm sorry if that makes you sad. i have a hard time allotting too many emotions for creatures as small and transient as spiders, but i felt a tinge of sadness as i watched him disappear.

and r.w. emerson said "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" and i'd add that sometimes we don't really want what we think we do.

(and i'm sorry for assigning a gender to the spider, but it made him a more sympathetic character and i don't really know how to ascertain a spider's gender anyway, so lay off. and it is too late now.)

looks can kill, or whatever

2009-06-25T11:08:00.000-07:00

look, i understand that some people find me physically attractive and most of those people are my mom's friends who, every christmastime, tell me that i'm such a handsome man, and so i grew a beard and it became you're such a handsome man, why cover it up with a beard?

but my objection is this, and it has nothing to do with my difficulty accepting a compliment, or wait, maybe it does have something to do with that, but look, why praise someone for something they have no control over? i would rather be noticed for something i do rather than for the way i look. and if you can find something redeeming about me when i look like a homeless man, then i know i'm doing something right.

and there is a precedent for this attitude: nico? sinead o'connor? (man, remember that sinead o'connor reggae album? haha.) and so i feel uncomfortable when people tell me i'm good-looking and i find it difficult to tell other people they are good-looking (and that has gotten me in trouble with girlfriends in the past, that reluctance). it isn't like i don't notice when people are good-looking, more like i would rather focus on other aspects of their personality that they have more control over.

college

2009-06-25T11:05:00.001-07:00

so when you get to the point in your life when you start to wonder what about you makes you you (and believe me, you will if you haven't already), you'll try to assess what you connect with in other people and why. and if that makes no sense, let me just talk about my five-year college reunion.

charlie stole this bmx bike from somewhere (he is a doctor or nearly a doctor) and i don't place a lot of value in partying hard (see my story about jcb, re: pleasure and happiness), but i had had all this purple malt-energy beverage called four-max and sometimes it is fun to go a little crazy so i was chasing charlie up and down the parking lot in a dead sprint taking photographs as he rode this bike around and i remember thinking "i feel insane" and "this is unsustainable" (which is funny, because the theme of our reunion was sustainability). and if you were there i probably announced to you that i felt insane and there was good reason for that. energy drinks and alcohol are a bad combination for me and luckily the worst that happened last weekend was i fell off a golf cart that i was dancing on into the corner of a brick wall and got a little cut up, but one time four years ago (the last time i mixed energy drinks and alcohol) i had all this red bull and vodka and i was at a party and i realized that i had to get out of there so i excused myself to the bathroom which was on the second floor. once i got upstairs i started to formulate plans for my escape, which was not actually that difficult, because there was this balcony over the backyard and obviously all i had to do was climb down the balcony and hop the fence into the alley and walk home. but that wasn't how it worked out because i stepped over the guardrail and started to walk my way down the pillar that ran from the second story down to the ground and it detached from the balcony, pulled right out, and i am not sure how long i held on, but it wasn't very long and i found myself on the concrete, 15 ft. below where i thought i should be and goddamnit, my elbow hurt, but goddamnit that was funny. until i woke up the next day and wondered how i didn't hit my head and if anyone would have found me if i had. i don't think so.

but we were talking about reunion and it was one of the best times i've had in a long time or maybe ever, because after chasing charlie and after the golf cart and the pants-off dance-off and after meeting all these great people, who i didn't really know at school, two of my best friends and two other newer friends who happened to be pretty girls and i went down to the canon river at like 4 in the morning and went for a swim and the sun was starting to come up and rosali didn't go in the water, because she was afraid of drowning and maybe for good reason. and it was the summer solstice and then we went to perkins for breakfast at 5:30 and this waiter named "J" brought us plates of food that we weren't that hungry for and everything was hilarious. after breakfast we drove out to canon falls where there was a lake and on the way there was this grass landing strip with all these people getting ready to take their small planes out for the day and we did yoga on the dock and some of us napped and some fishermen set off from the boat ramp. and i guess there was no real fitting way to end our time together, because we just sort of drifted away once we were back on campus and how do you say goodbye after something like that? it was just so amazing. and i stayed up the rest of the solstice (more or less) and went to a second breakfast with president oden, but i was even less hungry then than i was the first time and then i bade farewell to everyone i saw and to carleton college and went up to st. paul to watch a baseball game. (and that was fun too, but more in the expected fun kind of way). it was the kind of experience that can happen only once in a great while.

now it's not like i wasn't expecting to have fun, because i was, but i was convinced that i was in touch with the majority of people that i wanted to be in touch with and reunion maybe would be an opportunity for us all to be in the same place together, but probably not anything more (and i'm not saying that's not a lot).

(and a brief aside here, why are there so many double negatives in that last sentence?)

anyway, we had our cliques (or social groups or friends or whatever) in college and i expected the same sort of structure to persist ad infinitum. but the miracle of reunion was that something, maybe distance, separation or real life made us realize that we all actually had a lot more in common with each other than any of us ever suspected, and in realizing this, we were freed of our social constraints. we were suddenly free to engage and connect with people outside our groups of friends. now that doesn't sound miraculous, or even noteworthy necessarily, but what if that lesson could be applied to societies greater than college classes? what if we could suddenly see everything we had in common with everyone; our shared goals, as opposed to our disagreements?

and no one likes to be told how something is, least of all me (and especially not when it is me doing the telling-how-something-is), and so i'm sorry for that, i just think it is so nice to feel optimistic.

rambling about books

2009-06-23T11:08:00.000-07:00

i was going through the list of books i've read on this literary social networking site called goodreads, which is kind of fun and it is kind of fun remembering that you've read some of the books that you've forgotten you've read. and there is a function on the website where you rate the book from 1 to 5 stars and i realized that i almost never rate a book below three stars, which means that i like almost every book i have ever read, at least the ones i remember i have read. but i don't think that is the whole story, see, because i figured out that i wasn't rating the books i started and then put down, and if i like a book, i don't tend to put it down with some exceptions (gravity's rainbow, don quixote, finnegan's wake), so the books i would rate as one or two stars are books that i won't rate because i don't finish them. again though, that is not the whole story, because i don't put too many books down. i guess i like every book i pick up because i think that every book has something to offer if you're willing to pay attention.

story 2

2009-05-29T12:27:00.000-07:00

i feel slightly blessed because i crashed my bike a few days ago, and actually, it was my uncle's bike and i don't feel blessed because i didn't get hurt, although that was fortunate, but i feel blessed because my crash was the result of this series of amazing and improbable events. it was like the least possible outcome was the one that happened and it was awesome in the literal sense of the word awesome.

so anyway, i can ride a bike just fine generally and i would go so far as to call it my primary mode of transportation, at least around portland, but i was up in seattle for a few days with my cousin and we wanted to go for a bike ride, but my uncle had a new u-lock that we mounted to the seat tube of his bike frame before we left and that piece of information might seem trivial, but it is essential to the story and file it away as the first factor that made this crash so improbable. there was a cable lock on the frame, but we took it off and mounted this u-lock.

so we rode around seattle and sat in a park for a little while and then went down to this folklife festival with the standard menagerie of craft tents and food vendors and excuse me if i wax a little cynical, but there is something about a subset of festival-goers, the homeless-by-choice kids my age, that puts me off, like i understand the disgust with modern society and all, but isn't there an inherent selfishness in removing yourself from it? like you're part of this society whether you like it or not and if you think it is sick, how are you not going to try to make it well?

phew. but anyway, so we were riding home, me and caley, and we were on this bike trail that was built on an old railroad and i think it was called the burt gilman, or something, but i was following caley along the trail and he passed this guy towing his child by bike in one of those pods and this is where things start to get improbable. because a little earlier i was thinking "i haven't crashed my bike in a while" and also (and don't take this the wrong way, but) "i kind of like crashing my bike and i kind of like being hurt physically, not the act of getting hurt, but being hurt is like 'wow, my body is working to heal itself and what an amazing thing we are as humans that we can put ourselves back together' and also there is an immediacy to being hurt that forces you to be present in the moment and it isn't like i like the pain, i guess it is more that feeling of being where you are and when you are and what you are, right?"

but the u-lock hopped out of it's mount when i hit this potholed section of asphalt and i was right beside the man with the pod-child and i felt it or heard it or saw it dislodge so i braked super hard and locked my wheels, which is usually fine except the lock tumbled its way under my rear tire, so i was skidding along with my front tire on the ground and rear tire on the lock and it didn't take long for the asphalt to scrape through the plastic of the lock and down to the metal and so this scene was accompanied by this hellish screeching sound of metal scraping across asphalt.

and the only reason i bring up the man with the pod-child is that i think it is a funny image and also because i only rode over the potholes because i had to pass pod-child man (and to his credit, he was very concerned with my well-being when he could have been upset that i had endangered his pod-child.)

now i want to stop and consider, briefly, how unlikely it is that a cartwheeling u-lock, that was at times yards away from me and my bike, could make its way under my rear tire. of all the possible outcomes, how unlikely is the one that happened?

but the front tire was braking just fine still, the only issue was that now the back tire wasn't slowing down, and it wasn't like i had been riding that fast, maybe 15-20 miles per hour, but i barreled along for a good five seconds, enough time to allow everyone in the vicinity to wonder what horrible banshee was approaching and watch as my rear wheel swung to my right and slowly began to overtake my front wheel and i stayed upright until my bike was just about perpendicular to the direction it was traveling, at which point my bicycle, the object in motion, decided that the friction from traveling sideways, the unbalanced force, was acting on it enough to keep it from tending to stay in motion with the same speed and direction. and that is newton's first law.

so anyway i learned a valuable lesson as i skidded along the pavement and not about elementary physics, but now i forget what it is. maybe there are things that happen that we shouldn't try to assign a reason to.

dairy diary

2009-05-29T12:25:00.001-07:00

i have such a hard time visually differentiating between the word dairies and diaries that, looking at them now i am not sure which means what. dairy and diary i can figure out though.

jetway tale 2

2009-05-19T18:39:00.000-07:00

after the funeral (what a great opening!) and on the way home, the stewardesses called all those letters and numbers (i feel like i’m in elementary school when they do, like count off as you board) and in the jetway there were all these birds perched down the length of it on top and their raucous cheeps and caws made me think sometimes we put them in cages, but really we’re the ones in cages, you know? because just look around at the metal walls keeping you in and soon maybe someone will give you peanuts.

jetway tale 1

2009-05-19T18:27:00.000-07:00

so i flew to ohio for a funeral and i thought ohio might be the only state in the union that shared no letters with the word funeral and i spent hours thinking about it one night when i couldn’t sleep, but i told this to my cousin cole and he thought for 20 seconds and said mississippi and he’s right, so that theory was disproved but whatever, right?

but i got in a plane and it was from oregon to illinois and there was a family of three in front of me and the kid was this skater kid, like ten years old and i knew he was a skater because he had his skateboard with him as we waited in the jetway. and i was looking at him and thinking he was pretty cool because he was full on in the skater mold like tight jeans and backwards cap that said “independent” or whatever (i made that up because i don’t know any other skater brands and that image adds an air of validity to this story). and his board was all scuffed up and the wheels were all worn down so he was clearly a little skater, whether or not his backwards cap said independent.

so i’m admiring the little dude and he spins his board around, pivoting it on his toe and the pristine red bumper sticker facing me reads “abortion stops a beating heart”.

and i think that’s not punk! in fact that’s not punk at all!

and the rest of the story only tangentially relates to the first part, but the kid loses control of his board, mid-spin (and by now my admiration for the little fellow is much diminished) and it goes crashing down onto his mom’s toe and she yelps and everybody looks at them and the father of the family is startled by the crash-yelp and he turns to look and in so doing, he knocks over his guitar so now the guitar crashes over onto the rare open patch of ground in the jetway and sends a resonating “bong-ng-ng” through our small steel world and to break the tension mom says “like father like son” and everyone laughs.

and the kid says “he’s not my father.”

something old, nothing new, borrowed or blue

2009-05-15T01:51:00.000-07:00

(this is a story i wrote once that is entirely true, but it is reposted here so if you read it then you don't have to read it again.)

well i think that life is trying to teach me a lesson or that's how it appears, but let me try that again...

i fell through the ceiling, but that makes it sounds like i was traveling upwards, so no i fell through the floor, but the floor was the ceiling. and don't get all like "whoa the floor IS the ceiling, man," because that is not the lesson i think life is trying to teach me. and to step further back into the story, these squirrels live in my eaves and that in and of itself is fitting because i determined a while back that squirrels were my spirit animal and have even been known to have said "i don't think i could live somewhere that squirrels don't," but i didn't mean it literally. but squirrels literally do live where i live and so i wanted to see what kind of a door squirrels use to come into my house and i was wondering if maybe they had a doormat that says "welcome squiends" or something clever like that because those seem to be in fashion and almost always with a goose who is wearing a bonnet and carrying a basket. i don't know why. but i never made it to the squirrel door because i knew what was happening a split second before it did happen and this is not the only known instance of my clairvoyance, sometimes i know what i will say even before i say it, but my right leg burst through years of old wood and plaster and many hues of paint and my left leg hesitated like wile e. coyote in the air for a second before following suit (and pardon me for just realizing that expression has to do with card games!)

if you were in the kitchen, and i wish you were, because i like having company, you would have heard some tentative footsteps followed by nothing, because there is a noiseless vacuum that precedes any calamity. then the levy of ceiling, holding back the mass of me would have burst forth, peppering you with plaster, showering you with splinters, pelting you with years and years of accumulated paint and not unlike the fabled yellowstone eruption that blanketed the modern day bible belt with ash and pumice, there was grit and plaster and dust on every shelf, plate and appliance, and definitely unlike the fabled yellowstone eruption, two hairy and bloodied legs protruded from the smoldering caldera.

i don't know how many of you have tried to extricate yourselves upward from a jagged hole of splinters and rusty nails and fiberglass insulation. and never mind the squirrel audience. i know that i didn't want to drag the rest of me down it, the hole i mean, because the ten feet of air beneath me scared me more than the scrapes, and it wasn't the added pressure from having that added air above me that concerned me because i generally tolerate being in the kitchen very well. in fact it is one of my favorite places to spend my time. and so i decided to go down there the conventional way, since i like being there so much and i didn't have a whole lot better to do at that very moment, but i had to climb out of the hole first. and what is really funny and what you don't usually think about when you're walking around in any upstairs anywhere is i had no idea what i was above, no idea which ceiling exactly i had fallen through, so one of my first thoughts after i had a chance to inspect my handy work was "huh, i thought i was closer to that wall."

now i have fallen more than my fair share and that is why i am supposed to learn a lesson, but i want to take a moment to tally for you the times i have fallen, but good. i fell in a manhole, the cover dropped out from under me. i fell off a chairlift, because the bar went up and i was little and i just got off. i fell off a balcony that i was trying to climb down because the railing came off. now i have fallen through the ceiling, because squirrels. the culprit each time is complacency, they all happened because i took something for granted, that what i was walking on was solid, that the railing wasn't rotten, that when your dad puts the bar up, it is ok to dismount. and, oh, i could extend my realization to so many other literal events in my life, but the real temptation for me is to think that all of my metaphorical falls are a result of my complacency, and at first glance that might seem to be true, but it isn't and it can't be, because there is just no way that every negative event that affects me is my own fault. that is too buddhist.

so the first thing i did when i got into the kitchen was pick up two broken slats and a piece of plaster and a shard of wood and i nailed the wood to the wall in my studio and i nailed the plaster to wall in there too. and the shard of wood. and i painted a skull on the plaster and crossbones on the slats and wrote "fear complacency" on the shard. and that is my lesson, and the word fear might count as hyperbole, but i couldn't fit "beware complacency", though now i see i should have tried. you should always try.

feasts

2009-05-14T02:02:00.000-07:00

today i went for a run in the rain and there was a big raccoon running along the train tracks beside me and i looked at him and he had a cat in his mouth and i thought i really don't have any ingredients to make myself dinner tonight so i went to see a movie. when i got home i made myself polenta with cheese and chard.

i will post a story i wrote about squirrels in the near future so stay tuned and most everyone that could potentially be reading this might have already read the story so i guess i'll add some lies in to it.

(wait, that story isn't about squirrels in the near future, they are in the near past but i will post the story in the near future).

file under: chicken, egg

2009-05-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

i can tell you which came first if we are talking about specific chickens and specific eggs.

jcb

2009-05-11T21:52:00.001-07:00

i wanted to write something about my uncle, because he just passed away yesterday, but everything i started sounded so trite and my feelings for him were so complicated, i just couldn't seem to get anything down.

uncle jon had his problems and before you say don't we all?, i feel like i should clarify that he was an alcoholic and a second- or third-offense-drug-bust felon. there was a criminal threatening charge and more that hasn't and probably won't ever come to light. in recent years he was unnecessarily and almost nonsensically belligerent in social settings.

but before you write him off as a bad guy, know that he was a huge presence in my life. we used to play-wrestle all the time as grownups even. he became the cartoon characters he imitated and he seemed as happy to be imitating them as i was to be watching him. once on a camping trip when i couldn't sleep and he was the only one left out at the fire i threw little pebbles at his shoes and when he caught me i went out to the fire and we just sat there staring into the flames side-by-side in silence. he taught me to golf, but more like he taught me how to enjoy golf. and i don't play anymore, in part because i lost the youthful exuberance that is necessary to draw nourishment from the sport. jon though never lost it, i could still play golf with him long after i turned my back on the game, his enthusiasm was contagious. the man would kill a bottle of vodka or pear brandy or whatever-the-alcohol-du-jour a night, but i never saw him drink a drop on the golf course. i guess it was his escape.

(and the pear brandy one time had a pear in the bottle, like someone put the bottle on the bough of a tree and the pear grew inside of it and that idea just lit jon right up. and there were flashes of light even in the darkness.)

he owned a curious mind and he had the means and arguably the will to indulge himself in any way he desired and that was a dangerous combination. when i was at a loss for describing what he meant to me, a conversation with my cousin lead me to the revelation that jon was in some strange sense a martyr, and not that he wanted to be or maybe not that he knew he would be, but here was a man who tried everything that we think might bring us pleasure and let us watch what happened. he showed us that pleasure and happiness are not the same.

there is a super-hero in "the watchmen" called the comedian, who acts out society's worst impulses at their logical extremes and it isn't because he wants to be doing it, it is his way of giving back to society by shedding light on all the terrible shit that we do on a daily basis and never think twice about, by making us pay attention to what we are doing and how it affects other people.

and jon played a similar role in the lives of my family, he wasn't intentionally hurting others, but his pursuit of pleasure left a tangible emptiness in him and people were hurt incidentally along the way. and who's to say he didn't plan it this way or at least understand the role he was playing? the man did everything we think we might want to do, everything we think might make us feel good and we all benefitted from seeing the results.

he gave us someone onto whom we could project our own problems, he wasn't a scapegoat exactly, but we would point out negative aspects of jon's behavior or lifestyle that the we were noticing in our selves, noticing in each other. it was easier to feel like we could make a change that way, that we had to make a change.

i loved him furiously though he was flawed and unhappy, but he showed just enough love, just enough wit and charm, he was engaged just enough to make everyone feel like he could change. maybe he understood the role he had to play or maybe alcohol just got the best of him, but he didn't change.

and here is what i know to be the truth: i brought a budding rose in from my back yard and put it in a wine bottle full of water right before i heard that uncle jon had died and it hasn't bloomed and i don't think it is going to, but when i round the corner into my dining room with my breakfast, i am still happy to see it.

hyphy

2009-05-11T19:11:00.000-07:00

help i think my neighbors are going dumb.

and when the clubs close at 2:30 on weekend mornings they roll up like some bay-area children of the corn in their candy-paint cadillacs and what is their fascination with those buicks?

the best was when this couple fucked in their le sabre, opened the window and threw some taco bell trash out and drove off.

capricorn

2009-04-22T00:21:00.000-07:00

furthermore, and this has no basis in recent events, when people ask me my birthday and then say "oh, a capricorn", like they suddenly know my inner workings and when i tell them that i think any bearing that my astrological sign might seem to have on my personality is just coincidence, i always hear "you would say that" and i ask why and they say "because you're a capricorn," i just feel so confounded.

and look, i won't say that i'm right, because whatever, but i think coincidences are as interesting as the next person and sometimes it is fun to think that everything i do is following whatever path is laid out for me, but i just don't feel it, like i can accept that it might be true, but it just doesn't resonate.

so i think it is confining to put someone into a category and then define them by it, like oh she's a blond and just leave it at that, like that explains her character. and i am not sure who we're talking about.

a beginning, or: better late than never

2009-04-21T23:54:00.000-07:00

i haven't ever been able to keep a journal consistently and sometimes i try, like when i'm on a trip somewhere, but i don't ever pick them up and read them again. and actually, i do, but they embarrass me sometimes so i don't make it a habit. i think starting a blog might result in a similar scenario and i don't want to doom it to fail from the outset, but humans and probably other living things come to the realization that eventually they will die, so as long as this blog has that sense of perspective everything will turn out fine.

and boy if this isn't the second instance of me being late in picking up a cultural trend, because i flipped the rear wheel on my bicycle around today to ride with a fixed gear, but i have to say (and whether or not it is true i have to say it), i just wanted to see what all the fuss was about. that goes for the blog as well.