This is a repost of an argument I got into on Newsvine. I am reposting it here to prove that I am smarter, and funnier, than the guy I was arguing with. I am the one posting as Zom Zom, and he is the one saying idiotic things. The quote that Judge-Whatever starts with isn't from me, by the way.

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Judge-574295
"It is exactly like what Western civilization went through in our own medieval period: kings, and lords, and Popes and Cardinals, and iliteracy and inequality, which we (mostly) got out of only through the Age of Exploration and the emergence of productive commerce, science, and technology. And yet, there are still American Fundies who advocate returning to the primitive, Old Testament brutality, 'that'sll serve 'em right, and make the dissidents obey!"
Not sure if this works. Getting the last out of the way, are there some American "Fundies" blowing up planes somewhere? Some "fundie" terrorists that have become the focus of military and civilian security agencies in the US?
The rest strikes me as more of that Muslim reformation stuff. I wouldn't be waiting for that. The movements against Popes, which eventually opened the way to challenging the divinity of kings, were started by people who saw a difference between the characters who ran the church, and the writings describing the example of Jesus. The only movements going on that are of great impact are of Muslims who are also inspired by the most important figure in Islam, next to Allah, Muhammed. One could say that the most violent Muslims emulate Muhammed quite well. The viiolent movements are often led by educated Moslems, and funded by educated, wealthy Muslims. So much for that.
That's why there can be no reformation, as there is no Muslim body, or any Muslim, that could renounce Muhammed, or renounce him by renouncing those who emulate Muhammed. Unless, of course, you can hide somewhere. We call them brave, and they are, but their voices are also called blashemous by their own, and other than the occassional kudo in the Western media, ignored. They are an embarrassment to Westerners who like to call themselves brave, and liberal, because a person who survives the truth of Islam calls such Westerners cowards, and foolish, which they are.
There. Tough stuff, but I get kinda sick of every discussion having to include the requisite comments about MOST Muslims being swell folks. They may be, but the problem is the teachings of the religion HAS to result in some violent people. Why that surprises some is amazing, when they wouldn't send their kids to a bloody, cut em up movie, for fear of the negative influence. Amazing that there are not more, but that would be luck, and the continued pressure to make violence a net negative experience for that faction of Islam that promotes violence.
4.3 - Sun Nov 2, 2008 10:30 PM PST


Zom zom
"There. Tough stuff, but I get kinda sick of every discussion having to include the requisite comments about MOST Muslims being swell folks. They may be, but the problem is the teachings of the religion HAS to result in some violent people. Why that surprises some is amazing, when they wouldn't send their kids to a bloody, cut em up movie, for fear of the negative influence. Amazing that there are not more, but that would be luck, and the continued pressure to make violence a net negative experience for that faction of Islam that promotes violence. "
The idea that the Quran, and therefore Islam, naturally produces violence and terrorism isn't entirely without merit. There are, undeniably, violent and hateful passages in it. I believe that the earlier point is that the Western World makes such claims without recognizing that Christianity's and Judaism's holy books include teachings that are not particularly different and that Islam is, after all, a Judeo-Christian Religion which recognizes the Torah and (depending on who you ask), the Gospels (recognizing Yeshua as a prophet, though not as the son of God).
The point is that the passages for which the West wishes to condemn Islam are equally represented in the Bible. To argue that Islam is fundamentally a violent religion is a perfectly reasonable line of thinking. However, it is so only if you are willing to take a look at the Bible and admit that Islam is in no way unique in the small sections of the Quran that preach xenophobia.
There absolutely are the same sort of Fundamentalists in the Western World as there are in the Muslim World. The KKK are a good example of this. They do not blow up planes—that's true. However, there are the same, fundamentalists that do commit military actions. The difference between them and us is that our terrorists wear uniforms and commit military actions. The middle-east fundamentalists commit terrorism because, thankfully, they are not governments (even if some are not-so-covertly funded by governments). Our fundamentalists hold offices. Or they support, full-throatedly, those in office who suggest military action be taken against the Middle East. We had a presidential debate where political forces persuaded our two candidates to promise to invade Pakistan if Pakistan was unwilling to take care of its own fundamentalists. Yes. We have them. They are not terrorists, here. They are voters and they are military commanders, or hold some of the highest offices in our government. They do not need terrorism. They have the support of their constituents. The Muslim terrorists are terrorists because not enough Muslims agree with their actions for them to be undertaken as a military enterprise (or because those governments are at least too afraid, thankfully, to do so).
Before you go wild, I have a few passages for you:
Old Testament
"When the LORD your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgas and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you. And when the LORD your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them. (Deutronomy 7:1-2)"
"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves. (Numbers 31:17-18)"
New Testament
"I tell you that to everyone who has, more shall be given, but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. But these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them in my presence. (Luke 19:26-27)"
"Do not think that I have come to send peace on earth. I did not come to send peace, but a sword. I am sent to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law" (Matthew 10:34-35)
4.7 - Mon Nov 3, 2008 10:59 AM PST

Zom zom
Wait. Addendum. Yes. The quotes that I posted are out of context. I am perfectly aware of that. So are the quotes that you might have read from the Quran that preach violence.
There is always a context.
And that's the only point that I wanted to make.
4.8 - Mon Nov 3, 2008 11:13 AM PST

Judge-574295
Got it, ZZ, but you see there are significant demonstrated alternate voices to those passages in the old Testiment, and whole governments where majorities of Christians have constitutionalized rights that supercede religious writing, and those governments have been operatiing with majority Christians for quite some time.
Thus, those writings are not a significant problem. Even IF the intent of Mathew 24 was to incite violence, which it was not. IF you find FEW Christians willing to explain it, and MANY...even quite a few, acting on that misinterpretation without the condemnation of the majority of Christians, AND those who act on that interpretation violently, then not hunted down and punished, in a Christian country, let me know.
And, "The point is that the passages for which the West wishes to condemn Islam are equally represented in the Bible," it is not that one needs to search and find passages in the Koran to warn us about some potential that otherwise is not available for observation. Those Islamic passages are cited as the justification for ongoing events. Hamas has made such passages part of their Charter. So you can read that to find a few of them.
It is pointless to simply condemn Islam anyway. But one must understand it, at least a little.
4.9 - Mon Nov 3, 2008 12:34 PM PST

Zom zom
My point was against your statement that:
They may be, but the problem is the teachings of the religion HAS to result in some violent people
Perhaps I misunderstood, and you were drawing a difference between the writings and the teachings. My point is that the books themselves do not necessarily preach violence, nor establish a religion that preaches violence, any more than any Judeo-Christain religion. If you were simply arguing that many of the established churches teach violence, I won't dispute that claim.
However, in response to:
and whole governments where majorities of Christians have constitutionalized rights that supercede religious writing, and those governments have been operatiing with majority Christians for quite some time.
I would point out that the largest Muslim nation in the world is Indonesia. Indonesia is our peaceful ally, and is a democracy that has begun to do extremely well, both by its own people and by the world at large.
In regards to:
And, "The point is that the passages for which the West wishes to condemn Islam are equally represented in the Bible," it is not that one needs to search and find passages in the Koran to warn us about some potential that otherwise is not available for observation. Those Islamic passages are cited as the justification for ongoing events. Hamas has made such passages part of their Charter. So you can read that to find a few of them.
I would like to respond with the following, taken from the Charter of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan:
"WE BELIEVE the White, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and kindred people to be God's true, literal Children of Israel. Only this race fulfills every detail of Biblical Prophecy and World History concerning Israel and continues in these latter days to be heirs and possessors of the Covenants, Prophecies, Promises and Blessings YHVH God made to Israel. This chosen seedline making up the "Christian Nations" (Gen. 35:11; Isa. 62:2; Acts 11:26) of the earth stands far superior to all other peoples in their call as God's servant race (Isa. 41:8, 44:21; Luke 1:54). Only these descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel scattered abroad (James 1:1; Deut. 4:27; Jer. 31:10; John 11:52) have carried God's Word, the Bible, throughout the world (Gen. 28:14; Isa. 43:10-12, 59:21), have used His Laws in the establishment of their civil governments and are the "Christians" opposed by the Satanic Anti-Christ forces of this world who do not recognize the true and living God (John 5:23, 8:19, 16:2-3).

WE BELIEVE in an existing being known as the Devil or Satan and called the Serpent (Gen. 3:1;Rev. 12:9), who has a literal "seed" or posterity in the earth (Gen. 3:15) commonly called Jews today (Rev. 2:9; 3:9; Isa. 65:15). These children of Satan (John 8:44-47; Matt. 13:38; John 8:23) through Cain (I John 2:22, 4:3) who have throughout history always been a curse to true Israel, the Children of God, because of a natural enmity between the two races (Gen. 3:15), because they do the works of their father the Devil (John 8:38-44), and because they please not God, and are contrary to all men (I Thes. 2:14-15), though they often pose as ministers of righteousness (II Cor. 11:13-15). The ultimate end of this evil race whose hands bear the blood of our Savior (Matt. 27:25) and all the righteous slain upon the earth (Matt. 23:35), is Divine judgment (Matt. 13:38-42, 15:13; Zech. 14:21)."
4.10 - Mon Nov 3, 2008 1:24 PM PST

Judge-574295
Wearily. The Klan. What, 22 members? I can't remember when they were mentioned in the news last. When they are, it is an old guy on his way to jail, or in the news because it IS news. For the other, any newspaper, any day.
I really don't want to read that gibberish with the Klan finding themselves as the Jesus ideal. Two days of actual teachings about Jesus, and any child recognizes their version as garbage. And it really is gibberish, not even bothering to leave bibical quotes alone, but adding their own words. If it becomes more prominent, look for Christians to lead the way on pointing out that they are full of @!$%. There are actual passages that are worth arguing about, in a real bible, but you miss the point.
YOU could write your idea of god justified violence, but I am not going to go out of my way to read garbage if there is no one ACTING on it. And then, I have the comfort of laws and enforcement that will deal with such people, with absolutely NOTHING in this constitution that will protect them from justice. Brought to you by a majority Christian country. So, when and if you read about the Klan being kannish, it will be because they are being hunted, properly, for what Christians in this country agree is a crime.
I thought I made that point, in the alternative section of my comment, that that bull@!$% is dealt with by laws. And condemned by all but six people. So you are down to the genetic dice here, with someone acting agaisnt the law, and against what is a long established norm of Christianity, and then asking me to see the similarities between the odd rarity of the oddball, and the common demonstration of the actual effect religion justified violence in another. I cannot contort myself that much.
Want to get the point? Remember "piss Christ," the exhibit of the crucifix in urine? Try that with a Koran, in a Muslim country. Or write a book questioning the existance of Muhammed. Just have a few aliases lined up. There you might see how law and religion mix in one country and another, praying that you are arrested before you are killed.
Or just read a newspaper. I think I mentioned that I was sick of the 101 level of the discussion.
4.11 - Mon Nov 3, 2008 6:06 PM PST

Zom zom

"I think I mentioned that I was sick of the 101 level of the discussion."
You're right. Dismissing Islam as terrorist, and justifying Christianity because it doesn't happen in America (which, by the way, is a secular, not Christain, nation), is a much higher level of discussion than using things like quotes and references to argue a point.
My bad. So... what's a good price for my first born daughter? According to Exodus, I can sell her into slavery, so I was wondering if anyone would offer a good price-quote. Also, who should I contact about getting my neighbors stoned to death? I've noticed that they wear poly-cotton blends and, according to Leviticus, it is against god to wear clothing made out of more than one type of fabric.
101 level is "any newspaper" or "but I saw it on TV!" Read a book. Our media doesn't cover our own atrocities as often or with as much intensity because no one wants to read about it. Everyone wants to read about the horrible outsiders. It sells more commercial-time. So, dismissing my point because "any child could read the bible and see that it preaches peace" is first wrong and, second, is a point that could be equally made of the Quran.

What is a hypocondriac? Is it someone with a phobia of doctors? A phobia of disease? A mind destroying obsession with the idea that one is ill and slowly dying of a disease that must certainly have a very long, latin sounding name?

No. A hypocondriac is a person who understands the health care system. You see, when you visit a doctor, what is really happening is that you are asking a doctor for help. To tell you that you are fine, that you are not, that you have a tumor and are about to die, or simply to be told that you are annoying and should stop bothering the doctor so much. Now, what most people never realize is that, when you ask someone for help, they can say "No."

Because this is the worst thing that can possibly happen to you, you should avoid, at all cost, ever asking someone for any help of any kind. Think about which is worse: losing your leg to gangrene because you got a cut you did not get properly treated, or losing a leg to gangrene because, when you sought treatment, the doctor said "You cut yourself falling out of a tree? What are you, twelve? Grow up, jack ass," and developing gangrene anyway.

Now, the second result might not be all that likely, but don’t forget that it is a possibility. And, for this reason, you should never trust doctors. When you need someone’s help, they are well aware of it. Just like you used to burn ants with a magnifying glass when you were a child, so too a doctor (or really any specialized professional of any kind) loves to use his knowledge to make you feel like you wasted your life having studied something other than what he did (although, if you were studying philosophy, it turns out the doctor may be right, but this is not the point I’m trying to make).

This does, I have to admit, result in some unfortunate circumstance. You will not be able to get treatment or medecine your your ailments when you need them, so it is very important that you pay close attention to what happens to other people when they are sick. The next time you exhibit symptoms like someone you knew had, you should then assume that whatever is wrong with you is exactly what was wrong with them, and treat yourself with the same medicines that person was treated with. If your symptoms match those of multiple illnesses known to you through others, assume that you have all of those things, and treat accordingly.

Now, this can pose a problem as, since you are not willing to see a doctor, it is difficult for you to get prescription medicine. Because, while any twenty-six year-old can drive a car, drink a litre of scotch and own enough hand guns to outfit a small army, the amount of damage that an unprescribed bottle of penecilin can do to the general public is tremeandous (the edges of those little, orange bottles are really sharp).

What you should do is, first, make friends with a pharmacist. Or just someone who works at the pharmacy counter of a Rite Aide. And, if you may be thinking "Hey, that’d be great for scoring vicodin and valium," you should grow up. On the other hand, it’s perfect for scoring something much better: antibiotics. Of course, this option might not always be available when you need it. What if your friend is on vacation? What if your friend’s boss is at work and he is being closely watched? What if your friend has been fired for stealing controlled substances and now faces possible jail time and hefty fines? So, like I said, this is not necessarily a reliable source.

A second source is the medicine cabinets of friends and relatives. The next time you are using their restroom and see an expired bottle of penecilin, steal it. Remember to stuff plenty of toilet paper into the orange bottle because, otherwise, the pills inside will rattle around and you will be caught orange-handed.

Use these two sources, and amass a wide variety of anything that someone else has ever needed for something that they had. Remember when stealing to only steal the expired or near expired though, because you don’t want to deprive anyone of medicine they might need. You are simply trying to redistribute aid that is no longer needed. And, if you are not going to trust doctors, there is really no reason to trust expiration dates, either.

Now that you are ready to be a full fledged hypocondriac, take a good look at yourself. If you have a lump in your earlobe, for instance, you can, luckily, rule out ear-lobe cancer. While this might at first seem like an attractive possibility, you have to remember that you don’t know anyone who has ever had, nor has ever told a story about someone who has had, earlobe cancer. While this does not necessarily mean that you don’t have earlobe cancer, it does mean that you don’t know how to treat it, and that if it is earlobe cancer, you are screwed and are going to die, and there is nothing you can do about it.

So go with the other possiblity: a cyst inside your earlobe. This diagnosis is pretty fortunate because, unlike trying to home-treat cancer (which requires large batteries hooked to cell phones held for hours at a time against various body parts as you try to induce home-made chemotherapy), a cyst takes very little preperation to correct.

If this should happen to you, though, here is what you are going to need to deal with it: A lighter, a bottle of after-shave, a steak knife and well-chilled bottle of Pinot Grigio (an un-chilled bottle of Cabernet Savignon will do in a pinch, though).

What you need to do, first, is to drink the wine. Not necessarily all of it but... well... yeah... all of it.

Now that you have been sterilized, you need to sterilize your tools. So, take the steak knife and hold it in the lighter’s flame until the knife starts turning red, then gets all black and charred. Then remember that you need to wash the steak knife when little black flecks on it begin burning, do this, and then light it on fire some more (the washing can actually be performed before the first burning if you are lazy and don’t feel like trying to melt it twice). Then pour after-shave all over the steak knife.

Now, sit down and watch T.V. until you feel good and drunk.

Then, go stand in front of your mirror and repeatedly stab yourself in the head until you are thoroughly satisfied that the cyst, along with approximately one-third of the blood in your body, has been completely removed. Now, pour the after-shave all over any parts of your head that are bleeding. This is to ensure that the area remains sterile, so that you do not get an infection, which could lead to gangrene, which would be bad because having your head amputated is not really an option.

Once you have doused your ear in after-shave, feel free to scream loudly and like a little girl, because it is very painful. You must, unfortunately, repeat this process often, so it is a good idea to have a large supply of wine on hand.

After a few days of bleeding, your ear will be brightly scab-colored, and you will be fully cured.

And I’ll have to go to work.

Dang.

**No, I do not steal your medicines. Lighten up. Not since that bottle with the label torn off turned out to be estrogen. Damn...

This morning, before work, I went to Rite Aide to get a box of nicotene gum before work. I had not yet had a full cup of coffee.

Most mornings, if I don’t make coffee before leaving my house, I buy two cups at the corner store on my way out, drink one on my way to work, and drink the other when I get here. This morning, I had forgotten to bring coffee money, so there was only a hundred dollar bill in my pocket. This was for a large box of nicotene gum. It was not for two, dollar-and-a-half coffees. I doubt the girl at the register would have appreciated making ninety-seven dollars change.

So I bought only one cup of coffee with the change on my seat, which I had not finished by the time I got to Rite Aide.

A large box of nicotene gum, with one hundred and seventy pieces, costs forty five dollars which, if you do the math, is cheaper than as many cigarettes, which makes it a better idea than smoking. Also, I read somewhere that smoking is bad for you. But I read it on wikipedia, and everyone always tells me not to trust wikipedia so much, so I’ll stick with the financial defense of nicotene gum.

Now, you have to understand that I do not carry a wallet. My last wallet fell apart about two years ago and I have never bothered to replace it. Instead, I carry bills and cards, crumpled or snapped, stuffed into my pockets. When I get home from work, I usually just pull everything out of my pockets and dump it on the floor, right next to the door, so that it will be visible enough that I will remember to grab it on my way out the door the next morning.

So it was a small miracle that I had remembered to bring my driver’s liscence. I was fingering it in my pocket as I asked the counter girl at Rite Aide for the box of gum. However, she did not ask for my ID. Instead, she asked, "birth date?"

"Um..." I answered, and stared blankly.

"You don’t know your birthday?"

"Um..." I replied again. I had practiced asking for the nicotene gum. I had not practiced answering questions. You see, I am afraid of people so, if I do not know in advance what I am going to say to them, I usually just mumble, or grab the nearest source of alcohol and drink until I can talk to myself and direct it towards other people, which is almost exactly like having a conversation. Of course, at seven thirty in the morning, drinking heavily did not seem like a particularly good idea.

Eventually, I managed to get out: "I don’t know. Let me check." At which point I looked at my ID, and read my birthday off of it.

"Is that your ID?" She asked, looking skeptical.

"Yeah, it has my picture and everything." I showed it to her.

I am seventeen in the picture, and have hair that went half way down my back.

"That doesn’t look like you."

"No really, it’s me. I promise. I just haven’t had coffee yet."

"Sorry, I can’t sell you this unless you are eighteen."

So I had to go to CVS pharmacy. This time, I had memorized my brithdate and practiced it in advance, as well as the spiel about what I wanted.

The woman there asked for my ID.

I was listening to NPR, and heard the following:

"The number of US lives lost in the war in Iraq is now approaching four thousand, while the loss of Iraqi lives is estimated to be much higher, in the hundreds of thousands. Though the loss on  both sides is tragic, far less attention has been paid to the Iraqi loss of life. Some opponents of the war claim that this may be due to prejudice." These same opponents then went on to release a survey of Americans which reveleaded that, by a vast majority, Americans believe the sky to be blue. One spokesman for the report later commented that "space is pretty big."

I’m just curious what supporters of the war attribute the lack of attention paid to Iraqi lives to.

Four years ago, I was living in San Francisco. One night, I was with Rizwan, Anvi and Bikram at a party at Ahzer's. We had been there ten or fifteen minutes when, suddenly, the police showed up in force and began kicking people out of the apartment.

 

The apartment was on the something-teenth floor of a complex in Park Merced. The complexes tower twenty or thirty stories over the maze of townhouses and San Francisco state that share Park Merced.

 

When the police arrived, the four of us ran out the sliding glass doors onto the balcony, while everyone else took the front passed the police. We took the balcony to a door leading into the hallways, running at full speed, into a back-stairwell, and leapt down a dozen flights of stairs, taking them three or four at a time, making a horrible racket as our feet collided with the metal stairs in a concrete well. The echo must have sounded throughout the entire building, we were pounding down so fast.

 

But it wasn't that we were afraid of being stopped by the police, since we had done very little wrong and certainly nothing worthy of receiving tickets over. Rather it was that, when the police arrived at the door, I yelled: "Rizwan, grab the tequila!" I grabbed two gallon bottles of vodka, Rizwan and the others grabbed anything else they could get their hands on, and we dashed out of the apartment with at least two hundred bucks worth of booze in our hands and sticking out of our jacket pockets. We were not running from the police—we were running from anyone else who had been at the party who and might tell Ahzer we had stolen all of his liquor.

 

We got away, and I spent the next two weeks completely floored, avoiding class because I was usually too hung-over in the mornings to endure a bus ride to the college from the Sunset District, which would take about half an hour.

 

Anyway, a couple weeks ago, I went to have lunch with Rizwan, who is now working in Santa Monica, right off the promenade at a bank. I work a couple miles away, and so was meeting him to eat at PF Chang's.

 

I don't remember what I had for lunch, but I do remember that, when you order a glass of wine or a vodka martini at PF Chang's, it will come out in a glass much larger than you would receive at any bar.

 

Forty five minutes later, I walked Rizwan back to his work. Since I had the rest of the day off, I completed my Christmas shopping and slowly made my way up and down the promenade, buying things and wasting time. When I reached the lot I was parked in, I turned off the sidewalk and began walking up the stairs.

Most stairs are made for people who are five feet, three inches tall. The size and width of the stairs are made to comfortably allow persons of that height to ascend them. Being six-foot-three, stairs are uncomfortably short, forcing me to retard the natural stride of my legs. I often compensate by taking stairs two at a time.

 

My favorite pair of pants has a rip in the seam going up the left leg, so that the material is separated between my ankle and my knee.

 

As I took the last two steps up a flight of stairs, my left foot stepped onto the leg of my pants. I tried to press up and straighten that leg, failed, and fell about ten feet, backwards, down the stairs, onto my ass, splayed out across the sidewalk, right in front of two, pretty girls, and about seven-hundred-thousand cars. The books I had bought flew out of the bag I was carrying, scattering all the way into the gutter. I was laid out like a snow-angel, except without the part where it's nice looking. Instead, I groaned, rolled around rocking my arm, bled a little bit, looked like a complete fucking idiot, left two of the books in the gutter, ran up the stairs as fast as my now-shaking legs would carry, and zoomed the hell home to hide in bed, which is how I spent that weekend.

 

So, in eight days now, I have not had a drink, and I think that my head is about to explode. That, or I might just vomit a little bit. All in all, it's actually kind of nice, except that I don't know what the hell to do with myself when I get home at night.

 

I just paid off my third mortgage in Animal Crossing: Wild World DS, last night. My orange trees are growing nicely. I caught three red snappers, and am about to be awarded Green Thumb as the Flower Festival draws to a close.

 

This school of tiny fish is swimming around the dangling roots of an aquatic plant when, suddenly, it dawns on one small fish that the dangling roots are actually the tentacles of a predator. The fish looks at his companions, and says to himself: "With friends like these, who needs anemones?"

Every morning, I park in the Santa Monica East Business Campus.

I work in the West Campus, across the street. I had been in the East in a different building, and have drifted back and forth, depending on what I was working on.

Parking here is expensive. The parking cards for my department are supposed to be activated only for a small garage that is in the middle of the West Campus that requires a lot of traffic jam and walking to get from to my work. However, through some fluke, my card is active in the entire place, allowing me to park anywhere I want. Since parking next to my department head's car would simply seem rude, I park just across the street, instead.

Walking across that street every morning, I often see a black BMW with a vanity liscence plate that makes me want to snub cigarettes on his windshield. It reads: AUTHR.

Don't get me wrong. If I was an established author, I would go to coctail parties just so that I could hear the sound of my own voice in response to the most banal of all questions; "what do you do for a living?" And, being established, I would not say: "I am a writer." A writer is a twenty-eight year-old college drop-out trying to "make it" in L.A. and still living with his folks. An author is someone who lives off the sale of their writing. I would say "author" every last time.

But I'd spell it right. Schmuck.

Someone I was talking to said something stupid to me the other day. He said "I'm not scared of being dead. I'm scared of dying painfully." Now, I won't hold it against him because we were mostly babbling inanely to pass the time, but let me just say: everyone is scared of being dead. People who aren't are either sociopathic or suicidal. Anyone who thinks they aren't just doesn't know how terrified they're going to be when they aren't in their twenties anymore, or when they get sick, or when they do something stupid because, more than death, everyone is scared of spiders.

I walked into my apartment, laid down on the floor in the middle of the room with my back against a pile of pillows. I flipped on the West Wing, season three, opened a bottle of wine, leaned back and looked up at the ceiling fan.

Five feet above my head, dangling from its web between the two pull-chains that alternate the fan's speed and switch the lights, was a gigantic black widow.

As some of you know, I am a huge fan of spiders. I can't get enough of the little guys.

Psyche.

Everyone is scared of spiders.

I flipped out, screamed, ran into the bathroom and slammed the door closed. After I sat down on the closed toilet, smoked a cigarette, had a few gulps from the wine bottle (because this was no time for a glass) and worked up a little bit of courage, I grabbed the can of Raid out from beneath the bathroom sink that I keep for just this sort of occassion.

I walked halfway back into the bedroom, standing in the doorway about seven feet from the spider and attempted to spray Raid at it. The can was no good. Apparently, it had been sitting too long since the last time that the world of creepy-crawlies had attacked me.

Instead of spraying out in a fine mist, the Raid shot out in a jet. While this was great for adding that extra three feet of distance to my shot from the doorway, it unfortunately just resulted in covering my bed in Raid.

Since continuing from that angle seemed like a particularly bad idea, I edged around the walls until I was on the opposite side of the room, backing up into the kitchen (my place is a one bedroom. The bedroom connects directly to the kitchen and to a little closet/dressing room that leads into the bathroom). From here, the only thing the jet would hit was the television set. TV has a better resiliance to poison that I do (I've seen Fox News before).

In a steady stream, I proceeded to spray Raid on the television, the stereo, the stereo cabinet, my entire DVD collection, the ceiling fan and light bulbs, the pile of pillows on the floor, about ten square feet of carpet and, eventually, I even hit the spider.

This was not, apparently, enough to kill the spider. Instead, it produced a reaction from the spider that was my second worst fear: the spider dropped halway down to the floor on its web, struggling to escape the poison clinging to its body (my worst fear being that the spider mutates from the poison, sprouts wings, flies at my face and chews holes through my eyeballs which, thankfully, didn't happen this time).

Seeing it hang off its web, dangerously close to the ground, panic finally brought me enough courage to convince me to grab two coat hangers, catch its web with it still hanging below, and run it into the bathroom where I would be able to properly stomp it to death.

Bad fucking idea. Don't tell me that you're not afraid of spiders.

After three minutes of trying to get the too-strong web to break from the ceiling so that the spider would be dangling from what I was carrying, the seemingly immobile spider was finally on its way to the bathroom. As soon as I dropped it to the ground, it ran beneath the bathroom cabinet where I could not get enough leverage to drop a book on it and did not want to get close enough to hit it with a hammer. So I did the next best thing. I soaked it in Raid. Then I grabbed a lighter. Then I shot Raid at it and lit the Raid on fire. The spider then exploded into a short-lived comet, the blast knocking it out of beneath the cabinet. I then jumped up and down, and up and down on it. At this point, being reasonable certain it was dead, I scooped it up with a piece of paper, dumped it into the toilet, sprayed some more Raid, flushed the little bastard, then sat down to watch season three of the West Wing.

Thank god that stuff comes in lemon-fresh scent these days. To anyone who tells me that they are not afraid of spiders, I say: not yet.

I woke up at five a.m. after having gone to bed at nine yesterday. I showered and got into my car at half passed. The sky was black, but the streetlights, and the nearby searchlights of the convention center dancing in the air, lit the morning as though it were already dawn.

Since I had three hours to kill before work, I took Pico from downtown to Santa Monica. The streets were empty except for the truckers making the morning dairy rounds, the cops working the last shift of yesterday, the bus drivers carrying migrant workers out to Malibu and Santa Monica street corners, and the homeless trying to find a sturdy awning against the threat of morning rain.

I was listening to the same CD that had been playing when I got home from work last night. The song that starts to play is one of my favorites but, when I hear it in my head, it's sung from the lips of a girl other than the one recorded on the CD, although they had the same haircut when they were each nineteen.

The song goes: "I'm still here because I've got nothing else to do. You're an asshole but I'm getting used to you. I like the fact that you talk incessantly; I got a thing for assholes who tell good stories. I think that drinking is the only thing that you do right, you're going to self-destruct and I think that's what I like. You like me so you try and make me feel like shit. I think it's kinda funny, yeah I kind of enjoy it."

The pot of my coffee maker is sitting smashed in the trunk of my car because, when I moved a few months back, I didn't have room for it anywhere else in the first trip. When I opened the trunk and looked at it, all that I could say was: "Yep." So I use the microwave to heat water a big plastic cup in the mornings (because my stove won't work until I get my gas turned on which, four months after moving in, I haven't done yet), line a mug with a filter, fill it with enough coffee for a cup, and pour the hot water through. Then I steep it like a tea bag, too often leaving the used filter on my computer desk, and walk out the door.

"You said: 'This is my bedroom window.' You said: 'This is my view.' You said: 'Lie down here with me and see the things that I do,' Like you were trying to tell me something about the way you live. Like you would give me something, if you had something to give."

It took me half an hour to get out to Santa Monica on Pico, by which time it looked like some of the Big Blue Buses had beaten me there, because, right on the corner of Colorado and eleventh, you can already see a huddled mass of illegal immigrants. They'll stand on that street corner until noon, begging for work. And I think that this is why I cannot stomach the politicians and cowards who scream "send them home," or "throw them in jail." Because it's six a.m. and there they are, in the rain and freezing cold with nothing but a soup-thermos and soggy, brown paper bags, begging for work that there isn't even enough of for it to matter that no one wants to do it. And I think: I don't want to live in a world where we punish these people for being born in the wrong place or, at least, for being born in the wrong time (since California was Mexico long before it was a United State). I would like to tell the ones doing the screaming to go to hell but, then, I don't really have to—those people are already well on their way to building hell right here.

It's still dark outside and the rain has picked up, but it's still two and a half hours before I need to be at work, so I drive down the cliff-side and onto the Pacific Coast Highway, heading out towards Malibu. Neon bar-signs still lit-up and gas station prices are the only things that I can see through the rain and you might start to think that it is the dead of night instead of an hour before the dawn.

The white reflectors on the road blur and sharpen with the swish of my wipers, and I skid around corners only five miles an hour to fast, on a highway that isn't built for rain in a car that isn't built for corners. Driving up a steep hill, the little white and yellow reflectors look like they lead right off into the sky. Like if I just kept driving…

"And for all your talk you don't say much that's real. I think I know more than you about the way you feel. I understand your anger and your apathy. I think that if I was you, you are just who I'd be."

But once I get up the hill, I'm leaving Malibu behind and there are towering cliffs on my right, the crashing surf on my left, and the oil rigs on the horizon that, in the morning rain, form a Southern California Aurora. The roads are tricky here, turning suddenly, jolting up and down, with truckers driving with their fog-lights and their brights all together, careening around corners that I'm afraid to take above thirty.

Out passed the rock you can see in the last scene of Goonies as a pirate ship sails from behind it, the rain is a solid blanket of black, with the rock a looming silhouette in a deep purple sky. One more bend until I reach the end of this drive.

It reminds me of the time that I tried to explain it to you. It's a day that I haven't stopped thinking about for too many months. I said: "You can have your righteousness, your ultimatum and your vindication and I can have this…" But then another song from the same singer started playing on the stereo that went: "When I look around, I think this is good enough, and I try to laugh at whatever life brings. When I look down, I just miss all the good stuff, and when I look up, I just trip over things."

I continue driving passed the cliffs on either side, until there is a mire every way I look, and I reach the last pullout before Oxnard. I stop and turn around, heading back towards work.

And the sky begins to lighten, and the weather starts to clear.

I have spent the past half of an hour avoiding going to the kitchen to get a drink of water, even though I am extremely thirsty, due to my housemate sitting on the couch in the living room and me feeling like a weird-o if I walk around without a shirt on.

It only just occurred to me that I could actually put a shirt on, and then walk out there.

Rats!

I haven't written a story about an animal in a while. Ok, yes Susie, I know that I haven't written any stories in a while. But let's have one about Buttercup.

First, I'll tell you that I got a new rat yesterday morning. I haven't named her yet. She's so afraid of me that she hides beneath the little hampster house and burrows into the recycled newspaper that makes up her cage bedding. I don't think I'll name her until I get to know her a bit better--it'd be rude to do otherwise.

Anyway, Buttercup wasn't afraid of me. Buttercup adored me. Those of you who don't know this: rats are very smart and, if treated well, will come to love you as well as any cat or dog. They're also a lot smarter than dogs are. Dogs are loud, big, and smell bad. They make me sick like banana-nutella crepes (which only make me sick because the place I buy them makes monstrous ones that I eat all of and then feel gross over. But still--sick).

One night, Erin and I come home. I go to say hello to Buttercup and she's not in her cage. Showing great restraint, I never even blamed Erin verbally. In fact, I pretended to think it was my fault. It wasn't, but I'm not bitter... not that bitter.

Well, I began looking around. First: The kitchen. You remember that song in Charlotte's Web? When the rat is at the carnival, gorging itself? I can't remember the words, just the refrain: "That's when a rat can glut, glut, GLUT!" Yup. That's a rat on a none-too-often-cleaned kitchen floor. So out come all the drawers. Looking under the sink. Is that a rat, or a roach? Ick. It's the later. After a short spraying detor, we have covered the whole kitchen. We even looked under the corners of the linoleum that are all curled up where there's no where near enough room for Buttercup to have been. But it's not time to get frantic just yet.

First, we check the closet. This is where the camping gear goes. Here there are pads and bags and boxes and broken electronic equipment (like the old TV and a VCR that probably hasn't worked since January, nineteen eighty seven). Here, we find one of Buttercup's many stashes. I let her roam the house often, and she would always hide half of any treat I gave her. There's some brocolli, hard as a rock. A couple chips that have gained the consistancy of cardboard and a fine layer of fuzz. A few other unidentifiable, black odds and ends.

But no Buttercup.

The bedroom becomes a flurry of mine and Erin's dirty laundry as it flies into the air, off the carpet where a bewildered rat might be hiding. But she's not here either. Not in this closet. Not in the water heater's closet. Not in the vent-space that goes between the living room and bedroom. Not in the bathroom. Wait--you already checked the kitchen. Not inside the futon matress on the couch (and, come to think of it, it might be a little crazy that you thought to look there, since there were no holes in it). Not in the pockets of any of your leather coats. Not in any pockets or legs or sleeves of any shirts or pants. Not in the pillow cases. You get the point--she's not here.

Where else could she be? Perhaps, behind some wall siding, beneath some floor board, there is a way outside? Perhaps she can't figure out how to get back in? She'll come back if you go call her outside. She always comes back. Remember all those times you took her to the beach? Remember that time you took her to the lake and she disappeared into the reeds and Erin said "How do you know she'll come back?" Remember how you just smiled and said "She'll come back," and then, half an hour later, as you were packing up your picknick to leave, Buttercup came bounding back, hopped into your lap and waited to be taken home after just the first time you called her? Go look outside; she'll come back.

So out I go into the parking lot, carrying around a box of cereal, shaking it, and whisppering Buttercup in between snapping my fingers and making chittering noises at ten o'clock at night during a freezing evening. My neigbhors must have thought I was a transient, looking in the trashcans and beneath the cars, talking quietly to myself and shaking something. You spend an hour doing this, but she never comes.

You search the kitchen, and the bedroom once more. You sit on the couch and feel loss hit you like a rock. You search the bathroom then the living room. You search the kitchen--just in case. You even look inside the fridge. You've spent three hours looking for her. You have to pee.

You flush the toilet and up swims one very frightened rat.

Anyone ever noticed how the tube leaving your toilet swivels up before it heads down and out through the wall? I think of it as the rat-trap. We won't get into why it's actually there. That must have been where Buttercup had been hiding for who knows how many hours. She must have wanted a drink and fallen in. It makes me want scream to think how terrified she must have been, only to get washed up in such a way. It's a terrible thought. More terrible is that I laugh at it.

She didn't even get sick. That was one tough-ass rat.

Walking on the Moon

Ten o'clock. I just woke up. Downstairs; get the mail.

Most nights, it lumbers like a child. A fat, furry baby, crawling aimlessly about. Tonight it walks up the trunk of a tree and I see that it's more graceful than I'd known. It has the face of a fox. Not the foxes I've seen in zoos, but the ones I've seen in the cartoons.

I've never looked very hard at an opossum before. I have now. He stood on the trunk and stared at me and I stared back and I think he could smell my tea. I don't blame him--it's pretty good tea.

It doesn't snear or show it's teeth. It stands on a branch a foot and a half from my nose and I wonder if the opossum is a violent critter. It doesn't look stupid. It looks cute. It looks almost kind in its furry little face. It's massive tail--albight looking like a club--sticks up and gives him perfect balance as he stands still just... there. Watching me watch him.

I reach out. Perhaps my mother was wrong. Perhaps the child warnings were wrong. Perhaps we don't have to be afraid of everything we don't know.

Perhaps opossums hiss. Perhaps they scream. Perhaps they bare their teeth and snear and will take your goddamn face off, given half a chance. Perhaps they're the nasty little sons of bitches in the tree. Perhaps that one will think twice before he attacks someone with hot tea.

Long, barren, dry & gorgeous

Flipping through the linkbar on my father's website I came across an album he had posted of pictures he and I had taken in the desert.

Every desert has a Sand Canyon, a Redrock, an Hill, and wide open drifts of dirt. The Mojave, however, isn't any desert.

Nevermind the heat. Nevermind the dryness. Nevermind that every plant looks like a weed from further than ten feet away except the joshua trees that remind you just how close the desert is to Los Angeles--as if the Mojave was the Valley's retarded cousin. As the Joshua Tree is the twisted, malformed relative of the palm. As the desert is the beach without the ocean. All that glass upon the buildings began as sand. That pipe that drains our lakes takes the water to Los Angeles to quench people we moved into the heat and sun to hide from. Beneath the blinding glare we become invisible. If Los Angeles is the sun, then the Mojave is a flare upon its corona.

How much we have studied the flares! The desert, so vast and empty and uninviting is beautiful when you study it. The brown sand, clear sky, ragged dead green weeds and glaring sun wash the colors and smooth the distance.

But if you look real close, you'll see an iguana scurrying beneath the oldest living plants--King Clone lives two hours from my old home and is estimated to be eleven thousand, seven hundred years old. That cloud of dust that appeared beside your feet was a red racer as he slid away. That rattling may be the empty husk of a dead cactus or the tail of a rattler. The hiss you hear is not from a snake, but a chuckwalla who lets go his girth when he decides you must not be a threat. Kangaroo rats squeak and squeal at twilight as the burrowing owls chase them and the silent jackrabbits across the landscape.

However, Sand Canyon is not home to any wild burros.

At the edge of the Sierra Nevada's eastern foothills--south of Death Valley, before the desert closes to a narrow canyon between the Nevadas and the White Mountains as it stretches its tendrils towards yosemite--the wind is always blowing.

Sand Canyon is carved by a trickle of water. You pass beneath a rampart of the LA aqueduct to reach it. The canyon is broad and shallow; an indentation, not a rift. On the south, rolling hills lead up to Five Fingers--the mountain my father always told us someone very large must have bitten. In the canyon, the air is warm and still and the splash of the water in the creek drifts along a hot spring breeze. Atop those hills, Joshua Trees hide sparse patches of shade from the glaring sun and blasting winds. Twenty feet of walking and the air becomes a torrent.

Yet my mother mentions that those tracks may be from burros. They are noctural. They would be sleeping. Sleeping among the joshua trees. The wind is no matter. I must see the wild ass.

Two hours of wind driven dehydration later and the only ass to be found is moi. Here are the gorgeous pictures: http://www.suorez.com/graysonhike/index.htm#20

Sycophantic Scyphozoa

A friend of mine from San Francisco told me he had heard that the Venice Beach area was in some way comparable to Upper Haight in San Francisco, and, upon moving to L.A., the friend was asking for my confirmation of this. Unfortunately, I had to shatter his dream. Besides the number of homeless people prowling the streets, Venice Beach is inferior on many levels. For one: when I go walk down the streets of Venice Beach, I am, at best, offered pot. At worst, change is bummed off me. Now, while the latter is as much the case in Venice as it is in San Francisco, on Haight street I would also have been offered the oppurtunity to purchase heroin, mushrooms, acid, and other things that I don't really want (but it's nice that they ask, you know? Makes you feel like you're in an early Leonardo Dicaprio movie. Good for tourism).

One of the nicest features about Haight Street are the trendy little shops. While the prices are more or less comparable, the goods being sold aren't anything I'm particularly interested in. In Venice, it's hamburgers, surfing accessories and rollerblades while, on Haight, it's headshops, music and book stores, and second hand vintage clothing or terribly expensive and way too fashionable attire. I don't want anything from either set of stores but, again, I'd take the atmosphere of headshops and record stores over surf shops and hamburger joints.

Yet, the best quality Haight has to offer is its proximity to another attraction: the Golden Gate Park and the Botanical Gardens. This is an L.A. story, so I won't launch into a description of all the things in Golden Gate Park I'm fond of. Let's just say that there are many times many things to see and enjoy in the park.

Venice has its own attraction: the ocean.

I don't particularly like the ocean. It smells bad. The beaches are full of screaming children, drunken young men running around with their shirts off, and gorgeous girls who wouldn't give me the time of day (and aren't wearing watches anyway, or at least, not much more than watches). Not to mention the frisbees and footballs hurtling through the air, coming at your head and--watch out!--flying right past you while you're still wondering if you should be hearing air raid sirens soon.

But I do like to swim. However, here Venice Beach offers another problem: hazardous waste. There are signs posted along the beach that warning prospective swimmers not to enter the waters because swimming in them may very well make you ill. Yet, for some reason, this doesn't ever stop me.

So swimming I went one day. I swam far away from the beach, hoping I would be eaten by a shark and have no longer to dwell in this damn city. I was enjoying the swimming in murky, dark, reeking water as waves tossed me about. It's very relaxing in this melancholic sorta way. But just then, as I was treading water and looking back to the shore, I felt something bump my leg, and I looked down.

There in the water I could make out what must be a sinking beach ball. It's green with purple spots and vaguely basketball sized. I reach into the water and grab hold, noticing that it's rather slimy. It feels like a moss-covered, mostly deflated beach ball that should be half the size of my body. So I pull it idly out of the water, slightly curious what consolation prize I've won (since I still hadn't gotten eaten by anything). It was a dead jellyfish.

Lo! spiders

I'm going to try to post a little anticdote every day. Today, we talk of spiders.

Now, I'm not afraid of bugs. I don't like them. They creep, they crawl, and if they smelled like anything, they'd smell bad. I'm convinced, actually, that spiders smell exactly like Raid. But the association might not connect in reality as well as it does in my memory.

Anyway, I'm not afraid of bugs, except spiders. Now, some of you out there with bugs of your own (hidden like in orifices), might squeel out to me that Spiders are in fact arachnids. This does not prevent them from being bugs--as an aside, I'd like to point out that the word bug is actually a general term, not a scientific one, and so it is not limited to insects, but rather to small, insect-like creatures. For instance, caterpillars are insects, but they are not "bugs," while spiders are arachnids, but are, in fact, bugs.

Back to spiders. Particularly, back to black widows. A couple weeks ago, I had parked my car on the street beneath a tree, with the windows slighty rolled down (refer to my previous post to discover the average distance my windows are open at any given time--on that note, now that I'm thinking about it... I seem to have a lot of problems that revolve around my windows being open, so perhaps I should stop opening them). Well, there I am, sleeping peacefully all day with windows down. I awake at 11pm, and around 11:30 get in my car to go to work. Now, often, I will roll the window all the way down when I drive, mostly due to the smell of stale coffee and various other noxious odors that linger in my car. This night was no different. Having spilled coffee (once again) across the passenger seat that morning as I juggled coffee, parking pass card, cell phone, gear shift, steering wheel and wallet (I had been checking my bank account, hence the cell phone and wallet), my car was once more ripe with the rank of caffeine and vanilla nut (No--my work does not supply vanilla nut Don Francisco's coffee; I bring my own). So, there I go, reaching toward the handle of the window and turning my head toward the open air when hello! says the spider to the Grayson.

And there she is. A shiny, juicy black widow, cradled in her expanse of web that spans the crack of my window and well onto the ceiling of my car. A foot at most from the tip of my nose. Since ever I saw a cockroach in flight, I have been under the unrestrainable impression that bugs have, in general, amazing powers of locomotion to which I will remain unwitting until those same powers are used by the bug in the process of breaking what I had previously considered minimal safe distance in a daring and traumatizing breach of the Grayson vs. Natural World treaty.

Out flew the door, Creep-Crawly Bite-y in tow, with the Grayson not far behind when wham! slams the door and down falls the Grayson in the middle of the street. Off comes the sandle and slam goes the sole, but away the spider does slink. Onto the ceiling as out comes the door and split goes the web as the window unrolls and nuts goes the Grayson as slam goes the sandle and to the seat does the spider spill. So I brush at the spider and curse at the sky and squeak at the sight as it flies toward my arm then falls short of the asphalt and lands on the floorboard and crawls under the bucket seat. Forward the seat, again with the sandle, and onto the road, as it breaks for my tire in a streak. Down comes the shoe in a crushing finale and in victory I scream as I leap in my car and turn on the engine and over, over and over I run the spider with shiny black rubber. And only then do I check to make sure there's nothing left of my enemy. And lo! I behold nothing where once my fallen fow had laid. Not even a trace of goo for the world to remember the wicked witch of the window (Another aside: "lo" is one of the few words in english that serves no purpose except to emphasize a statement. Learn it and love it baby. Most languages have these, but the only english words anyone uses these days are explitives in the middle-class sense. Well, lo is technically an interjective, but it's an explitive too. And, technically, it's middle English, not English. Anyhow, the next time you think of saying "I hate this fucking thing," say instead "Lo! My hate for [the thing] goes unrivaled." The girls will dig that shit).

The point is, I completely flipped out.

At risk of turning this anticdote into a full blown story, let me point out that the only available parking on my street is most often a small space behind the handicap zone (for one of my neighbors) and the back end of a white camero perpetually hanging from the one car drive of another neighbor's home (that generally gives berth to three cars at a time, hence the hanging into the street). I'm pointing this out to illustrate that the neighbors that I'm parked in front of are a bunch of crackheads who are up at all hours. And this I'm pointing out so that you'll imagine my embaressment when I finally notice the woman standing on the porch, watching me spaz out about something she can't possibly see in the darkled hours (I'm in word whore mode).

Anyway, I'm telling you people (or no one in particular since this has gotten too long to maintain its worth-my-time factor) this story because it happened again tonight. I didn't freak out as bad. It was at work and it was not a black widow. But the memory of this other story when I saw that little yellow spider (a spider that probably couldn't even catch, let alone hurt a fly) at four a.m. when I went out for lunch sent a shiver down my spine and a flush to my face. I've been thinking about it all night.

Ok, done.

Spider Spider Panic

I'll save you my thoughts about the perrvasive creepiness of spiders. I've posted them before. Suffice it to say: Bugs and I do nt get along. Particularly Spiders. Once upon a time, a truce existed between us, but Hollywood has worn away at the soul of it and now, beneath every dark crack, behind every burned out lightbulb, and in the corner of every dark room, I fear to put my hands, trusting not to the menacing dark where might lurk the sparkling fangs of the biting spiders.

The magnolia tree near my balcony is a beautiful and deadly thing. I love to stare at it during my coffee breaks from the world, when I sit on my balcony, drink a cup and watch the leaves rustle. But now I have found its thorns. They come in pairs and bare poison. They come attached to bodies that span the breach betweeen the nearest branch and the rail about my balcony. They form webs revealed by the dew that glint in the morning and evening sun and, on the underside of leaves, live giant yellow spiders.

These spiders are anomallies. Something between the size of tarantulas and black widows, surely less deadly and greatly more frightening, their jagged, juicy bodies glimmer in the night as they slide on strands of silk down from their perches among the foliage. Beware: Here be spiders.

But I didn't know that.

I had seen the spiders before. I had seen one lurking on the nearest branch many nights, but it was safely locked across a void of space no more than two feet long that, while no great obstacle to me, was the grand canyon for a spider that couldn't fly. And I was not afraid of it. Last night, even, I was interested.

I tried to take a few nice pictures, but I can't figure out how to function the macro on my new camera (what happened to the flower icon? Wasn't that simple enough to understand? This button here with the flower: press it if you seek to take a picture of a flower. Newfangled technology... I'm becoming a ludite). There I am, snapping away at the spider as she (all spiders of any imminent threat are female in mine eyes) snaps back into the cranny of a fuzzy magnolia leaf. But wait! I see now that her web is a foot above her perch. Strange that she would be beneath this leaf if her beautiful web were a foot away, unless...

Unless that's her sister's web. Unless that's her sister, a foot above my hand, inching downward upon a strand. I retract my hand with the quickness and thank whatever animal fear of inspiration had me wrap the camera strap around my wrist. I stumble back across that two feet of fathomless depth and am safe. And now I look at my magnolia.

I had come home for lunch at 4am. Aparently, the giant yellow spiders are nocturnal. There is not one spider. There are not two. There are two and two and many, many, many more. Their webs clothe the magnolia. Their legs embrace her leaves. And they are out in force. There are dozens in my view, sliding along their silk, stripping the caracasses of gnats and moths from webbing and spinning a new tale to ensorcel an unsuspecting insect. Even I, hater of the insidious, have some sympathy for the pathetic flittering creatures who meet their fate at the fangs of a monster like these. And now I see what I have never understood before: The gap is their great challenge.

Surely, they must seek to span it! All that open space to web across if one could swing in the wind over to my balcony and attach a founding thread. All those webs. All those spiders! My poor balcony! They are coming for me, I am certain of that now. They know me by reputation or smell. They can see the fear in my eyes reflected sixteen times againt their own. That fear is so magnified in their perplexing view that it surely consumes their every thoughts. These spiders and I begin a war. Soon comes armagedon.

If you hear I have gone missing, to jail for arson against a tree--let it not surprise you. Oh! Let is not surprise you.

Missfire

The most random thing just happened to me. I was driving down the street with the window cracked open. Cracked I say--four inches like. So there I am, driving along, listening to some nice, quiet, thank-god-I-get-to-sleep-soon music, when wham! Bird dookie hits the windshield and I think: dang. A block later and bird dookie flies through the crack in my window and lands square on my pant leg. It even splashed a little white goo onto the fringe of my shirt. Of all the dumb luck. That bird made a damn trick shot! I think it was seriously gunning for me, and wasn't satisfied with the windshield, so it must have caught me at a stoplight. I blame L.A. traffic. What a bunch of crap.

Back chatter

I've got this whole animal thing going on in these, so lemme tell you about some squirrels.

At my Grandparents' home in Sunnyvale, there is a window that looks out onto the backyard. Above the fence there is a wire (power, phones... something like that). Along this wire, often as not, there are squirrels with mouthfuls of nuts, handfuls of fruit, or heartfulls of nervous, chittering energy.

Apparently, there is a peanut uh... plant (tree? bush? whatever) in a neighbor's yard. The squirrels will grab a peanut from this yard, then take the wire suspended above the back fence of my Grandparent's yard and trek back to another yard where, for some reason, it is more desirable to hide these peanuts. I suppose that, if the squirrels were in the yard with the peanuts, then they wouldn't need to hide them at all, and since that would be against their squirrely nature, living near the plant is less satisfying than the trek with peanuts across the wire to another yard where the peanuts may be hid.

Well, these squirrels, on their highwire act returning from the yard, often encounter other squirrels on their way toward the peanut horde to increase their own peanut stashes.

Now, it would appear that those squirrels coming see those squirrels going and decide that, however satisfying it is to remove the peanuts, it is the rehiding of them, and not the removcal, that is most desirable and so the squirrels heading toward the peanuts, when they encounter another squirrel on a return trip, will often decide that it is a more worthwhile use of their energy to take the peanut from a more endeavoring squirrel than to get a peanut of their own. This results in a battle between squirrels walking a tightrope some fifteen feet off the ground.

I've never seen one fall further than the fence and, as with the leaps often performed by small aborreal mammals, it's difficult to tell whether such motions were intentional or simply good catches. The point is--these squirrels have serious problems prioritizing.

But those squirrels are nothing compared to the squirrel outside my balcony.

A whtie and grey cat prowls the patios of my apartment complex, chasing squirrels, getting into late night screaming and clawing fuzz fights with other cats, and occassionally provoking the possom that lives in the magnolia tree (I know, aliteration is obnoxious, I'll stop).

Anyway, if I weren't saying it, it would go without saying that the cat is not particularly loved by the local squirrel community, who would rather battle one another and the possom than the cat. Most of the squirrels simply scatter when the tomcat arrives--yet one noble, bushy-tailed crier is constantly prepared to defend his perch among the magnolia flowers and gnarls.

Had I ever bothered, I would have named him David. As in the one who beat the big guy up with a little rock. Anyway, we'll go with David.

David works himself into a furor when Goliath approaches. Twigs rain like hellfire and brimstone, shrieks part the air as fiercly as Moses did the sea.

I hear this more often than I witness it. Yet once I was on my balcony drinking a morning cup of coffee when along comes the kitten and I *tut tut* at it to attract its attention--having a fearsome fondness for felines (ok... I'll stop soon though). As Goliath looks up and judges my intention, along comes David with twig in hand. Goliath becomes distracted from his steely eyed evaluation of me, snapping his head around in annoyance as something strikes his fur, then: here comes the screaming and my quiet morning is over. David doesn't chatter. He doesn't chitter or shriek or cry. David screams.

Like a child wailing over a stuffed rabbit whose fluff lies about the garage floor after an episode of raining snow upon himself and his older brother (different story), David screams until the cat, in flippant anoyance, casually strides away. It's a patronizing gesture perfected by the puss. No look for David. No show of anger or resentment. No hunger or desire in the frigid glance. Just a cold shoulder and a resolute stalk back through the bars that block in my complex.

But David, as I said, is in a furor. He can't stop screaming. He keeps it up though goliath is out of sight. He sits on his tree, looking here and there, as if going back to the business of amassing his horde for the coming cold of California winter in Los Angeles. He hops about, squirrely and friendly once more, but now he's shaking and hissing. Ten seconds go by and *hiss*. Half a minute and *scream*. He looks to have hiccups as he howls out a *cry* and shivers with a *shriek*. Twitching, heart racing, trying to concentrate, trying to decide what to do, eventually he sits still and I watch and for ten minutes (I assume it's ten. That's half of how long I generally take to finish a cup of coffee and I figure I had watched for ten minutes by then already), David is a quivering ball of furious fur who can't stop freaking out about a cat that walk within fifteen feet of him once. This squirrel was mad, and crazy, and I wonder how many times my mother warned me that squirrels carry rabies, and if this time, she would have been right.

Butter Bounce

I once had a pet rat named Buttercup.

There is a girl named Sarah who is one of the brightest and shyest people I've ever met. She's a wonderful artist and has her family's gift for brilliance. However, it appears that Sarah was doodling her way through biology. One day, the leson was made up to her. It turns out that if you take one male rat and place him in a cage with one female rat you will soon have far more than the two rats you began with. At this point, you'll learn why "rats" is slang for "ah crap," which is slang for "something unexpected and not very good just happened."

This is when you fling rats at your friends as if they were party favors.

So I ended up taking the BART (bay area rapid transit--this is a story from San Francisco) out to the east bay to Khrista's to pick up my new rat.

Upon first nip (that might have been something more like a "you're either food or coming to get me" pre-emptive strike), I named her Killer. After being at Khrista's for a few hours (which generally turned into a drinking match), Killer became Psycho Killer. Which, naturally, became Psycho Killer Bunny. Which, upon my mothers disapprovale, became Buttercup (Khrista does the horse riding thing, and Buttercup is the equestrian's version of Fido or Rex).

Well, Buttercup was locked at Khrista's for a week or two with Khrista's bird and two cats. PKB became rather friendly with the fat cat, and feared the skinny cat nearly as much as she feared myself.

The only one PKB trusted at this moment was Todd, Khrista's live-in boyfriend. Well, there I am, scoping out my new pet, sitting on the couch as PKB (since this was still her name at the time) runs frantically from side to side, trying to discover a way down (her immature rat trail-blazing skills were still afraid of vertical walls).

Todd walks by. Not particularly nearby. Buttercup is on the arm of the couch. She leaps for his leg and the safety of black jeans. The couch's arm is perhaps three feet off the ground which, coincidentally, is about the distance Todd is away from it.

It was a still motion moment. PKB coils and springs toward Todd, flying into the air as if she had wings and the gap closes, she nears and squirms in last-ditch anticipation of the denim security net.

She doesn't make it. Halfway to Todd's leg, PKB begins her rather rapid decline, thumping to the floor--thwack.

It was not her most graceful moment, but the one that, in my mind, defines her best.

I used to take Buttercup to the beach in San Francisco. She would bury herself in sand, burst out, scamper a bit until I gave her a treat, then, whiskers whipping dust, scurry back into a hill she'd erected.

Sleeping pills and coffee

The title of this post was inspired by my diet. I have discovered that it might be the cause of might slight slenderness. This is pointed out to me too often. However, I wear sandals or boots, and have rarely had otherwise than either very long hair or a shaven head (except during the transition from the latter to the former that hasn't occured in a few years). I will be as thin as I can until I become obese. This inbetween nonsense is terribly pedestrian--just like your sneakers.

But this has nothing to do with tonight's story. Tonight's story is, once again, about an animal. My stories about the fauna of Los Angeles' concrete landscape have been limited to rodents and bugs--until now. Tonight, we're going to move on, to an entirely different animal kingdom over the course of these next two posts. Actually, I suppose two seperate animal kingdoms. In fact, I don't know the animal kingdom either belongs to, but I'm going to go with the class that dictionary.com gives me for these critters. Let's begin with echinoids.

If you're not aware of their technical name, then you'll at least be aware of their metaphorical cousins who, in Los Angeles, are far more prevelant--the street urchin. Well, now that I've arranged a sentence indicating I'm going to talk about fifteen year olds on skateboards and homeless people, let's get back to the topic of sea urchins.

But first, let's have another informative aside: Hedgehogs are also known as urchins, which makes the term very confusing. In fact, the term originally applied to hedgehogs, which is why sea urchins receive the qualifier of "sea," even though few people are aware of the term's original use. Most of us have probably wondered at one time or another why sea urchins are called sea urchins rather than just being called "urchins," since, until we read my informative post, many of us were unaware that, without employing sea as an adjective, we would have been referring (literally at least, even if our statements would have likely been clear had we not designated them as "sea" urchins) to hedgehogs. Sonic the Urchin. Well.. maybe no one but myself has wondered about that very often. So let's get on with the story, hmm (and two cheers for dictionary.com)?

In Malibu there is a gorgeous park right along the sewage run-off. For those of you who don't know the area, you might have become confused by popular television shows into holding the opinion that Malibu is a large city. Actually, it's a rather small town. The way that its size is regulated is by refusing to implement a sewage system. So, all the wonderful mansions in the area require cesspools which increases the already inflated expense of living along PCH, and prevents us meager working folk from living there. The point is: there's a river of runoff sewage and refuse that spills into the ocean right next to a beautiful park. The park is surrounded by a wall of reeds, with a small trail leading past the bog.

Now, you might have gotten the impression from my discussion of Malibu's waterworks that the bog next to this park would be hideous and would smell horrid; you'd be wrong. The bog is the beautiful part. It's full of ducks, minnows, frogs and cranes (or herons or storks or something--I don't know the difference. Tall legs/long necks). It's surrounded by rushes, reeds, grass and--in the spring--wildflowers. It doesn't smell any worse than I generally think the ocean does. There is a rickety bridge over where the water spills into the sea.

What do these animals in the bog have to do with sea urchins, you ask? Nothing at all. I'm trying to draw you a picture of the place, so shut up and read.

Beyond the bog is the beach, and beyond that lies (as you might have guessed) the ocean. This is the part that smells bad. Millions of creatures living in their own filth and dying until they become a roiling stew. I can't stand the ocean; the sea is vast and stagnant, just like this city.

However, along the rim of the water there are numerous boulders and, on the undersides of these there live hundreds of tiny purple and green sea urchins.

This story I'm telling (-ish) is a relation of my first Animal Planet type encounter with the funny little critters. I may have seen them in aquariums before, but they must have been more or less unremarkable. Here, however, along the beach in Malibu, they were magnificent.

Time for another aside: I have a page or two of this story written so far, and all I have said is that it's going to be about sea urchins. Talk about apologies (that's a pun. Go figure it out). My story has become trivial next to the post I'm telling it in, so let's cut it brief.

If you take a sea urchin in hand, you will see something that looks much like the critter carcass you purchase in a shell store. However, if you drop same critter into more or less clear water, you will wtiness an amaszing sight. Sea urchins don't have just one or two tentacles. These things belong in hentai.

When you drop a sea urchin into the ocean, it explodes into tentacles the way a magnolia flower blooms from a woody bud (except a lot faster than that). It's amazing. I must have dropped a hundred in. I sprang and bounded between boulders, prying sea urchins from their perches and tossing them into the shallow pools to watch as they bloomed. It was very cool.

That last two paragraphs were the story. Pretty good, huh?

Trespasses...es.

Last summer or so, I went to my Great Grandmother's funeral with my father. I'll spare you the gruesome details of an open casket funeral. I'm not a fan. Stick me in a stove and smoke me.

Anyway, there was a service, then onto the graveyard for the lowering of the casket. But first, let's all have another service. So the preacher does a little speech, the dutiful families do a little bemoaning dance, everyone weeps the respectful tear and has the gravity of life/death on their minds for ten minutes before we leave to go watch t.v.

There's my father, standing beside his two brothers and cousin who are the pall bearers. The rest of us greivers are on the other side of the coffin in a huddle. Facing us are the three with my father and the black preacher who isn't exactly the preaching in latin type. I doubt he'd have been able to spell ecclesiastic, let alone use it in a two clause sentence. Anyway, it's a funeral, so shut the hell up and listen to something from the bible.

There's my father standing next to my uncle Steve, both looking bravely solemn. I catch the few lines I know (most of my funeral experience coming from movies). They're in a thick, Bakersfield, poor and black accent: "Forgi' us ow' trespasses a' we forgi' dose hoo trespasseses again' us."

Not a typo. Trespasseses. Not so solemn. Oh god. Uncle Steve is facing fifty greiving relatives, but he can't resist. He nudges my father with his elbow. They start giggling. Two fifty something year-old men who are paul bearers at their grandmother's funeral asembled before a large crowd of people who are looking to them to be the iconic symbols of dutiful son-ery. They're giggling like schoolgirls.

But that's just the beggining. They stifle the sniggering and the body gets lowered. And then the preacher's little helper brings out a crate of doves to release in Great Grandmother's honor, or memory, or... something. Maybe it's some pagan ritual to help give wings to her soul to go somewhere better than this world, like Hawaii. Anyway, my grandmother, best loved of the great-grand's children or oldest (I never learned), takes one of the doves in hand, and she and her three sisters are cooing over it, stroking its neck.

But the dove is cooing, too. It's a very large dove... oh crap. That's not a dove. That's a white pigeon. That's a crate of white pigeons. Who the hell tries to pass pigeons off as doves at a funeral? I might not have much respect, but I wasn't trying to pull any gags, either.

Then my father or my uncle make a joke. Grand-grandma would have appreciated the gesture. She wouldn't have called them doves or pigeons, even if she had known the difference. She would have called them squaw. And she would have eaten them. And my father is making jokes about it at her funeral, laughing as his mother spends her greif on a pigeon she thinks is a dove.

I haven't been to many funerals, but I think I'll start going. There are just so many chances for something to go wrong so wonderfully. It's one of the few moments that you can really feel like you too are in a bad sitcom in a rerun, because everything looks just the way it would have in the eightees (funerals probably looked much the same before that, but I was born in '81, so that's what I think of).

Anyway, it was a nice service.

 

Nope, this isn't a new post. Just collecting some of the old posts and compressing them into one.

Business as usual. ..:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

This world fucking hates me. Let me tell you how I know...

It all started twenty five years and a couple months ago when, as my mother loves to tell me, I swam outa' her just like a little fish.

Big mistake.

Then a whole lotta' time went by when, one sunny October in the only city in California that might be as bad as Fresno, I was at a goth/hip-hop club.

That sounds weird, but not world shatteringly bad, right?

Sure, it was the night before halloween and so only twelve patrons showed up to the huge club throwing its halloween bash. Sure they closed the club down at twelve because of how few people were there. But I got in a couple games of pool and had a couple drinks on a cover fee of only five bucks, so what do I really care?

I don't.

Getting home I discover that my check card is gone. In itself, not that big a problem. I call the bank at one a.m. and cancel the card. Problem solved--no big deal.

I use a bank through my work, so there are no branches I can go into. I don't have any checks or anything (hell, I don't even know how to write a check. And no, I don't think tape cassettes are coming back either, you god damned luddites. Don't be so arcane).

All I had was the check card and my account information. And that was all I ever needed.

I go and talk to the woman at my work who handles these accounts. Nice lady. If I had gone in to see her to cancel the account, rather than doing it over the phone, she could have given me a new card right there.

But I didn't, so they shut down the account and will mail me a check with its balance in forty-five days, I'll have to wait two weeks for the new account to become active, until which time my paychecks are being deposited in it anyway, and god only knows what happened to that paycheck that should have been deposited into an account that was already closed before I got a new one.

So I borrow money from my parents and manage to pay rent only a little late.

Well, that's all rather frustrating, but worked out alright in the end.

Later that week Autumn and I are having a pleasant drive up PCH when the overheating light in my car comes on. This is no big deal because it happened pretty regularly ever since I ran the engine over a foot and a half of curb six months ago. I flip on the heater, put it in a higher gear, and wait for it to cool down.

But the heater is blowing cold air.

The engine isn't cooling down.

Now I'm on the side of the road and watching galons of radiator fluid drain out onto the highway.

A tense drive later and I've left the car at a shop and paid the fifty dollar taxi fee to get us back to Santa Monica. The next day Autumn and I take her car back to the shop where they tell me that I've busted the radiator so badly that the whole thing has to be pulled out of the engine before the tiny little hose that popped can be replaced.

A fifty dollar tow later and the car is at a body shop in Santa Monica, where it's going to cost even more (a lot more) cash to pull the frame back into shape.

Did I mention that I wouldn't be able to get the money from my bank account for forty-five days?

Whatever--I need a damn car so let's get the thing fixed, shall we?

This leaves me walking to work. This is fine because working at a video game company has put too many extra pounds onto me and I'm sorta pissed about it.

So I put on my new sandals that I'd gotten the day my car broke down (having left the old sandals in the car's trunk at the body shop) and step out the door when I remember that new leather sandals need breaking in, or they'll give you horrid blisters (especially if they were only ten dollars). Ok, fine, I'll wear my Docs. Of course, those need breaking in, too. Ok, fine, I'll wear my goddamned dress shoes--I need to get to work.

That stuff I'm telling you just in case you see my feet and start to wonder if I might have leporasy. There are blisters attached to my ankles with feet floating somewhere amid the interstitial fluid.

Hey, have I mentioned that my phone doesn't work? See, I broke the screen and have been meaning to get it fixed but haven't done so.

Autumn, fed up with my not answering my phone due to my not being able to see who is calling, gave me her old phone to try my sim card in when we were at her place. Unfortunately, hers was AT&T, mine was cingular, so it didn't work.

Today, frustrated and fed up with it, I finally walked the two miles to the store to get a new one. This was cutting it close because I am supposed to meet someone at 1pm (it's 1:15pm now) to go get lunch and, if I wasn't back, it's not like they were going to be able to call me.

So I try to buy the cheapest phone they have. Which they're sold out of. So I buy the next cheapest one, which is two hundred dollars. They take my old chip out of my phone with a smashed screen and say "Hey, will an AT&T chip work in this?"

Because, see, I'd left my chip in Autumn's old phone. In Long Beach.

So, I've been having a slow week. How's everyone else?

 

Blacklisted: Blacklist

"Otis?" I hear from a loud, stocky metal head as Autumn and I are sitting in a swiveling chair, rocking back and forth and sipping our scotches while we stare at the stage.

"What?" I hear from a voice I can't connect to someone sitting a bit behind me and to the right.

"Are you Otis?" The voice of the stocky little guy raises in pitch and speed, sounding a bit drunk.

"Yeah, who are you?" Otis, quickly getting defensive, responds.

"You fucked my girlfriend!" After this, a plethora of onomopoeia sounds ensue. These are the sort of words you see sprayed across the screen in the old Batman TV show. Kerplunk, splat, thwack... all that good stuff.

However, it's not just sounds for very long. Stumbling over a table and through a couple patrons, a man I can only assume is Otis drags the much smaller guy who used to have a girlfriend on stage, upsetting the performance going on there.

I suppose that the display wasn't entirely out of place. The performers didn't even seem particularly interested until Otis crashed the little man into the wheel a girl wearing duct tape was strapped to.

Wait, I should explain that.

We were at Blacklist. Blacklist is an S&M club in downtown Hollywood at the Knitting Facotry every sunday night. It has three rooms: the main lounge with a small stage where shows usually are and not much dancing takes place, the side stage with darkwave and what passes for dancing with those guys (which is pretty poor, even by my stomp-your-boots, flail-your-fists standards), and a main stage that has a large dance floor.

The shows at this place are one of two varieties, and always perpetuated by one of three creepy old men. There are the half-naked girl gets strapped down and whipped sort and the three-quarters naked girl gets hung by ropes from the ceiling.

For those of you who aren't used to these clubs and are wondering just what kind'a weird-o this guy you message on myspace is: don't dwell on it. If you aren't familiar with it, just think of S&M as the ultimate form of nerd-sex. And these guys and gals who go do these things in public? Well, go check out the video for "Unicorns L.A." sometime. Pay special attention to the part where they start rolling twenty sided dice across the screen and you might get an idea what kind of people these are.

But back to the story.

This night, the club was simply a flop. Previous times we've gone, all three stages were open and there was plenty of dancing and there were plenty of goths. Tonight it's all male metal heads and meat heads. It was difficult to tell if they were having more funning rubbing their crotches staring at the girls getting whipped or cheering on Otis as he gets pounded into the floorboards.

We had been waiting in our little swivel chair hoping that the other stage would open up and we could go get some dancing in. But the main room hadn't opened by eleven thirty and we'd had about our disgusted fill of fat old men hitting drunk little girls and drunk little men hitting one another.

So we left. Apparently, we didn't get the memo and Blacklist is no longer a goth club. Now, it's some ultra-violent version of the milk-bar in Clockwork Orange, complete with all the meth-headed boys and completely lacking in the women. Granted, I was already there with the prettiest girl who would've shown up anyway, but there's something about a club full of little boys that simply isn't condusive to dancing silly with you girlfriend.

So, we now need a new Sunday club, yet again. One of these days, I'm going to get a job that gives me Friday nights off.

Rambling along

This morning the East Campus Business Park was smothered in a sea of fog at six thirty a.m., when I walked across the street from work to grab a cup of english breakfast at the Coffee Bean just opening.

When I woke up this afternoon at four thirty, I met Autumn downstairs and we left in my messy, dank little car with its front bumper falling off to find a book and some make-up.

It is a custom for us. A common debate and resolution from lack of decision or purpose. It doesn't hit me until we're hungry and too indecisive to pick a restaraunt when Autumn says: "How about one of these? How about that one?" And I look and say to her: "We ate there yesterday and you were magnificently unimpressed by their menu." So we eat at the other which I'm sure we haven't been to for at least three days.

It's the Santa Monica Promenade. A stirp of cobbled street running right near the beachside cliffs, taking up prime space that could otherwise be used for parking and quaint, towering apartment complexes with little balcononies, awkwardly slanting geometries and blue umbrellas sticking out everywhere to make the tennants forget that it's still an apartment complex with offices on the bottom four floors.

Pretending to be a cultural hub instead of a mall, the strip of street prohibited to automobiles is a haven for street performing drunks and talentless hacks pretending to be street performing drunks. On the same block you might be caught up in the dancing of wailing hari-krishnas, catholics trapped beneath white sheets pretending to be corpses and expousing the virtues of a life struggled against the all consuming sin and grreed that never touches their white sheets and blue Gap jeans,or those guys with the little note-cards who come up and ask you "which of these questions interests you the most?" You can listen to a guitar player perform another tired rendition of Starry Night as a fifty year old mexican man sits on the curb behind him, jukebox beside him and razor in hand, trimming his beard to look his best when the guitarist finishes and the mexican can sing a monotone version of achy-breaky heart, complete with the same dance fifth-grade girls did when the song was popular fifteen years ago.

You can do and see all these things, but god help you if you head out this way with a goal in mind. Autumn and I are wonderfully alike in most of our activities, and hopelessly, brutually uniform in others. Neither of us, for instance, are able to pay attention to a god damned thing.

Walking along the promenade, we were looking for make-up for her mother that doesn't find its way to the make-up aisles of Walmart in Ridgecrest. Somehow in Sephora, we become sidetracked and spend fifteen minutes walking back and forth, looking at the same to countertops for purple nail polish requested by my coworker Brian who has dark purple hair until Autumn finally decides that: no, neither aisle has the black we were probably looking for when we started.

From here, we head down along the strip to Barnes and Nobles to get a specific book on the rearing of Autumn's seven year old little brother, walking away with two novels, a book of short stories and a stack of "how to cope with the fact that you don't know what the hell you're doing" books on child-care.

Coming out, we see a stand selling beautiful quartz book ends. And look! They light up. They light up because there are candles in them. In the book ends. Isn't that...

Wow that's a big dog! Let's follow it and the girl walking it along. I wonder what sort of dog that... aren't we hungry?

That's about when we wound up at the restaraunt we never seem to remember having gone to before, once again sitting outside remembering that, in the shadow of the apartment complexes at dusk, we always shiver and chill. So, while we wait for our food to arrive, Autumn runs across the walk and retrieves two black wool sweaters from the shop there that we wear while we eat and, taking them off later at my house, quickly lose among the colection of black strewn across my floor in the form of sheets, blankets, pants, shirts, socks, towels and pillows (all of which are the same, washed-too-many-times black).

At the restaraunt, once our shivering subsides and food arrives, we notice that the guitar playing drunk with the Starry Night songs isn't half bad and Autumn and I both decide we would like one of his CDs (a song from which, called "The Alcoholic Song" I am listening to as I write this and drink heavily to lead myself towards sleep).

This desire requires cash, which requires an ATM. There is an Art One gallery beside the restaraunt with a neon "ATM Inside" sign outside, so we head on in and way to the back where the ATM is hidden in a corner. Both of us, skittish about strolling through this store with the three polite employees to greet us, become consumed with guilt at walking all this way through only not to buy a thing. And so, Autumn sifts through a stack of toe-rings, trying them all on and finally picking the single plainest of them all at ten dollars.

Back outside we walk up in front of the guitarist who points and sings into his song: "That's the best one there for ten bucks."

My point is: If you haven't ever read them, go find yourself some books by Charles De Lint. His prose sound just like a rhymier rendition of Starry Night after you've had the last three scotches you'll be getting until you're next paid, having spent all your money on the promenade when you had only gone to keep your girlfriend company while she picked up a compact and a book.

At home drawing pictures

I told this story to Autumn over AIM. I'm reposting it 'cause I think Rebecca might enjoy it and because I haven't posted in a while. These stories make me feel like I'm stuck in one of the slow chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird (which is more or less all of them). Since it's from an IM log, I get to ask for your forgiveness of the word choices, grammatical and spelling mistakes. Also, I get to actively ask this, so that you won't forget to forgive me for them.

For Rebecca's sake: I'm not sure that this is how the story goes. I mostly remember it happening this way, but it could be three or four stories my memory has mixed all into one.

Alright, well, at the time my circle of friends was basically JD, Brian, Rebecca, Sean (My fat neighbor) and Kelley (brian's sister and Rebecca's close friend). I was twelve. I guess that means Brian was thirteen, JD and Sean--also twelve. Rebecca and Kelly would have been 11. Something like that.

I think it was Sean, JD, Brian and I that day.

See, we bought cigarettes and bongs (they keep them in a case under the counter) from Sunrise Liquor, but the old Arab always said we were too young for liquor.

Which only made us determined to get some.

Sometimes we could steal it from JD's stepdad, but JD lived in the dirt area up by the college, and we didn't want to ride our bikes all the way out there, so we went to the Pepto Bismall (the pink building mall on China Lake blvd.) instead.

We were often over there, because we would play Magic Cards at Diamond Comics (A comic store you may not remember--it closed a long time ago). The owner was a reject and nerd, along with his wife. We would often sit and play magic cards with them for hours.

This day, we went to payless (which I don't think is there anymore, but used to be in the pepto bismall)

We walked around for a long time in the store, trying to work up the nerve to go into the liquor aisle.

Brian was carrying the backpack.

I was stealing coupons out of those little dispensers, and had amassed a stack of a few dozen.

Eventually, we walked by the liquor aisle and saw that it was clear.

So we walked straight to the middle of it and quickly located the highest proof, biggest bottle we could find.

Which was a plastic galon tub of Wild Turkey (80 or 85 proof).

Sean and I stood on either side of Brian while JD grabbed the bottle and put it into Brian's backpack.

What happens just then? Naturally, an employee walks into the aisle.

We don't know what else to do.

So we start to run.

I think it was myself or brian who yelled "You two go that door, we'll go this one!" It must have been me, because the worker decided to follow Sean and I.

Well, JD and Brian ran out the exit, but one of the other workers got in front of us and blocked our door (there were two, at the north and south ends of the west wall)

So, when the we got to the door with someone standing in front of it, I threw all my amassed coupons into the air.

And then we ran out past the worker.

But the other worker was still chasing us, and followed us right out of the store and yelled "Stop or I'll call the police!"

This made us stop. We were very much afraid of the police, who we were sure were some sorta monsters.

So we stopped and the employee came over and yelled at us for a good long while, then made us turn out our pockets and turn up our shirts to make sure we hadn't stolen anything.

Then she (I vaguely remember it was a fat woman) lectured us on the dangers of alcohol and why kids shouldn't be playing in stores, or looking at alcohol.

Then she made us pick up all the coupons and, after a few more half hearted threats, told us not to come back to payless without our parents.

JD and Brian were long gone.

So we got on our Bikes and started heading home. We caught up with JD and Brian (I was always the fastest on my bike, and Sean tried hard to catch up)

Then we went back to "The Ditch"

This is the drainage ditch that runs under Bowman.

Right at Upjohn and Bowman, there is a six or seven foot tall tunnel under the road.

In it, there are short, cramped, three foot tall tunnels that lead north and south up and down upjohn to other drainage sites.

This was our regular hang-out, where we'd spend most days smoking cigarettes and pot, and feeling like utter badasses.

Brian would make out with Rebecca, but the rest of us were still pretty much in a "girls are gross" phase.

Anyway, we figured that we should hide the liquor and, by this point, all of our parents regularly checked our bedrooms.

We all had hiding spots (mine was in a large stuffed animal rabbit that had a hole behind the right ear. It was big enough for cigarettes, lighters, pot and knives, because I could push them down into the rabbit's body, but a bottle that size would have been too bulky).

But none of us had a spot big enoguh, or safe enough, for such a treasure as the galon of wiskey.

So we burried it right outside the tunnel at a recognizable creosote bush.

First, we all took a hearty slug, though.

Then we made plans to spend the weekend in the ditch (we often did the everyone-is-staying-over-at-everyone-else's-house trick)

We would do this now and then if we had a lot of pot. We had never had a whole bottle of liqour before.

The plan was for saturday night.

Unfortunately for us, JD and Brian, the canniving little bastards, took Kelley and Rebecca out there friday night (JD mighta been dating Kelley at this point). The four of them drank the whole damned gallon in one night. So saturday we smoked pot instead.

And there you have it: The story of why I never got good and drunk until I was fifteen.

 

Tiny little dots I've lived here more than a year now. I don't even know his last name.

I get the impression that he's vaguely "asian." Nevermind that this encompasses the better half of everyone on the planet. I can tell Koreans sometimes, because of their big, flat, fish faces. And Indians by their not looking that much like other asians. Beyond that, everyone is either vaguely Chinese or Japanese (Vietnamese probably being, more or less, one of the two). I've heard there are other countries over there somewhere, but I can't remember their names.

Also, I know that he owns more shoes than most women I know and a bag that probably contains a surf or snowboard. He does a lot of paperwork and goes to work during the day.

It's eleven o'clock at night and I just woke up, and would like a cup of coffee, but can't go into the living room because I'm afraid he's out there and don't know what to say. If you haven't guessed, I'm talking about my housemate. I don't even know his last name. I know that he's more or less clean and usually puts the mail on the coffee table. Also, every month, fresh fruit is delivered in a box on the doorstep to him. It comes in these high-durability cardboard boxes lined with grey foam, each piece of fruit being carefully wrapped. I stole a grape from it once. They were very good, neurotically packaged grapes. Giant, fat purple grapes, each in its own little foam cup. There were dozens, rather than hundreds, of them, which isn't what you might have expected from the box size. But these weren't just any grapes. These grapes tasted the way a bottle of grapejuice that costs seven dollars would taste. These, I think, were very special grapes.

I know that he has bottles of absinthe, imported from the czec republic, in his liquor cabinet (Well, 'the' liquor cabinet, I suppose... mine being the cubby next to the computer desk). He has other bottles of good scotch, vodka and tequila. Never quite the ludicrously priced ones, but not the ones you'd find in a college dorm, either. I think he must be somewhere between twenty-one and thirty-five, but I wouldn't put much money on it. Sometimes there's a girl here when I get home in the morning. She's never introduced herself, and I'm not good at talking to people, but I assume this means he has a girlfriend. But, again, she too is asian, so it may be the same girl, or a long string of them that I simply can't tell apart. After all, I wouldn't want to sit staring at her, either creeping her out or having her ask "Why are you staring so hard," to which I'd reply "I'm trying to decide if you're the same one as last time." It doesn't seem like a polite thing to say.

The point of this is that I would really very much like a cup of coffee, so I'm sort of hoping I'll hear his bedroom door soon, implying he's turned in (which he generally does around eleven, right before I wake up most nights). But he hasn't yet--I can hear the television when I turn my Nine Inch Nails down a little. So I'm stuck here, writing you a myspace about why I'm afraid to go into my own kitchen like some neurotic sociopath. I wouldn't normally bother to poin this out, but I finished my book and don't want to start a new one until I get a cup of coffee, so I need to occupy myself until he flees the living room. I suppose I'll go play some online scrabble

Mental Deficience

Hi there, boys and girls! It's time to play my favorite game. This game is called: "Thing that would be easier if you weren't such a fucking retard."

In case you're new to it, here are the rules: First, you take a multi-task operation that includes at least five steps that, were you not such a retard, would have been easier to perform. Then, you list these steps. Beneath each step, you write "If you weren't retarded, this would be easier because:" at which point you provide the reason the step would have been easier were you not retarded, and explain. Let's play a round to show you how it's done, shall we?

Multi-task operation: Changing the brakes on your car.

Step 1: Get the brakes

If you weren't retarded, this would be easier because: When you went to Kragen, you would have told the helpful young man at the counter that you drive a Toyota Echo, instead of a Honda Civic, which you still can't figure out why you said, thereby requiring you to walk out into the parking lot and notice that your car is, in fact, an Echo, at which point you have to walk back into the store, return the pads, and receive the proper (and more expensive) new ones.

Step 2: Take the tires and brake calipers off.

If you weren't retarded, this would be easier because: You would have purchased a socket wrench set the first time you went to Kragen, rather than walking the ten blocks back to get one now (since you can't just put the tire back on and drive because the brakes would have to cool for an hour all over).

Step 3: Insert the break pads and replace the tires.

If you weren't retarded, this would be easier because: You would have noticed that there were two sets of pads: outside and inside. You might also have noticed that, while the outside pads can fit on either the outside or the inside, the inside pads only fit inside. This would have saved you the trouble of noticing after you've already replaced the first first set of pads, thereby requiring you to put the second tire back on, take the first tire back off, put the proper set of pads on, replace the first tire, re-remove the second tire, and only then apply the second set of pads.

Step 4: Take the brake calipers off.

If you weren't retarded, this would be easier because: You would have noticed that this was part of step 2. Also, you would have purchased the wrench that, out of four bolts, only this last one that you now need to detach on the second tire when the first set of pads is already on (because the nut was spinning with the bolt, so you needed a non-socket wrench to hold it in place). This would have saved you the third trip to Kragen.

Step 5: Put the last tire back on.

If you weren't retarded, this would be easier because: You wouldn't have spent twenty minutes trying to force the last tire in place before finally realizing, amidst a fit of frustration, that you were trying to put it on backwards.

And there you have it: That's how to play a round of "Things that would be easier if you weren't such a fucking retard." Although this game can be fun, I have to warn you before you try it at home that you will--invariable--lose.

Captain jack

Although under normal circumstances, you might notice as often as I do that Los Angeles is a largely repulsive city, swarming with beligerance, arrogance, concrete and crumpled wrappers, I find that at certain times of day and when in a certain mood, Los Angeles becomes an entirely pleasant place to live. Nevermind that three days of illness due to drinking half a liter of scotch in a night are required to induce such a mood, or that the slightest interferance by other humans would be enough to spoil it--still, it makes dwelling in this city almost pleasant.

The sort of mood and following night I am refering to are the sort where you wake up around eleven thirty at night and, after a cup or two of coffee, you are able to shower and dress warmly before grabbing a book and leaving at just the time of night the bars are beginning to close. The first thing you might find yourself doing, quite naturally, would be heading to a favorite little bar where you may smoke inside and old men tell you stories about their riding their motorbikes across the desert near the city you come from. Old men with white wiskers, red white and blue shirts and guts that hang as low as their heads as they droop into sleep across the bar then, suddenly, snap awake and relate a story about a daughter who is ever-so wonderful (if only she'd still talk to him).

This sort of little bar isn't the place you'd brought the book for. This place is for a cold glass of scotch and a couple of cigarettes, and to wake up to the idea of having people around you (since, aftert all, talking to the patrons at a bar like this is only almost like talking to humans). Well, it is a cozey and relaxing, nicotene stained little dive to spend a half hour in, but once it closes, you'll have to find yourself somewhere else to go. The thing to do, then, is to drive down Wilshire or Santa Monica, eventually to hop over to Hollywood Boulevard and head to downtown Hollywood. Here, you'll find plenty of places still open, and you can spend an entire evening driving between stoplights, looking at the smeared lipstick faces and big black boots. Something about these people that are so ugly during the day becomes much more agreeable at night. Instead of being tolerably ignorable, you now want to drive in second gear and watch them as they stumble across the crosswalks (and you can feel no small deal of moral superiority for being willing to wait at each and every crosswalk for these ambling assholes).

The nice thing about the livelihood of Hollywood at three a.m. are the post drunk businesses that remain open. Although you might find a closing club to spend the last hour in (since some are open until three), and you might even manage to get a dance or two in along with an overpriced beer, you can find other open places to spend your time even once the very last of these places has closed its doors. Countless diners and coffee shops remain open nearly all night, and you're perfectly welcome to spend an hour in one reading your book and drinking a few cups of coffee that, by this time, do well to clear your head after the scotch and beer. Certainly, there are a few pretty girls you'd wish would notice you a little more, but they're likely just wishing you'd do the same and, since you're certainly not going to go around expressing interest in humans, you might as well forget them and go back to your book. Of course, this sort of active forswarence might require you to read a few pages over again after noticing that you've been watching the corners of your vision more than the pages in its center and have gone through a chapter with a better understanding of what's written on the tag of some pretty black hair girl's jeans than you have what was written in the book. But that's no big deal--you probably like reading as much as I do.

However, even though you've got a scarf wrapped around your neck, leather jackets with the lining torn out aren't much for warmth and, whether you enjoy smoking (more precisely, snuffing cigarettes out), you might draw the girls' attention for the wrong reasons if you sit there shivering too much longer. After all, a scarf wrapped young man huddled around a book and shaking quietly, sometimes talking to himself as he notices and expounds on little witticisms with the wording that he's reading might strike those girls as just another vagarant. Not wanting your image to be thus tarnished in the minds of persons you never have, nor ever will, meet (and, in truth, won't give a second thought to once they're out of sight), it might be time to find an establishment indoors.

Now, at half past four in the morning, you're driving around with the late-night drunks perusing your choices of late night diners that go something like this: Denny's, Norm's, Denny's, Denny's, Denny's. Eventually settling on Denny's around five in the morning, you're probably getting hungry. So, now that you can enjoy the warmth and black tea of such a fine dining establishment, it's high time to order a cleverly-named sandwhich that, after all, differs from the other sandwiches more in its name than its contents. By whatever malignent inspiration, however, the little chinese waitress of fifty five, clearly seeing you wish to sit quietly and read to yourself, might just decide to sit you between two loudly drunken crowds of at least six persons, at a booth table large enough at least for four. However, even as you're disappointed to learn that "hot tea" means Lipton's, you find that may discover that the situation is not entirely disagreeable, since four of the persons sitting at the quieter of the two loud tables (the one you would naturally choose to face) are young women, two of which are pleasant to glance at when you think their eyes are occupied somewhere else. It might be especially agreeable to you to notice three of these girls are weaing short shirts and that even the third who is not among those pleasant to look at the face of has particularly nice, long legs. Just as you're more likely to judge a book by the weight of its pages, you're as often likely to judge a woman by her weight (even if the governing rule is inverted in this application), and the ugly face, like the bad painting on a novels cover, might not count for much when compared against the rest of the product.

Then comes the discomforting part, when the drunks notice you and speak in a loudly hushed way peculiar to drunks when convincing themselves they cannot be heard by those they speak of and paradoxically intending to be heard distinctly by the object of their conversations. And you will hear them. You might even take some small pride when the one with the ugly face and ever-so pretty legs admires the length and size of the book you're reading. This naturally leads you to reflect and affirm your axiom that dust covers must be removed, leaving only a bound and unidentifiable book beneath. This, naturally, is so that the girl with legs won't be able to tell that what you're reading is only eight hundred pages of a childrens novel printed on thick paper in large type (including faux-wood-cut pictures). You would wonder then, knowing as you do that the book you're reading happens to be a silly and fanciful story about wizards in England, why your pride feels so slighted when the brazen, acne ridden, beefy bastard beside Legs makes up a slight about length and worth not being equal. Sullenly, and reflecting that the young man's appraisal is obviously out of ignorance (as a simple glance down and to the left at those legs could certainly teach him), you can harumf and return to your reading until five when your food arrives and your tea is replaced with coffee.

The tricky part about eating a sandwich and reading is keeping the pages from flipping closed as your hands occupy themselves with feeding you. Fortunately, diners like this aren't known for their decor, and the overly-large tin spoon provided in your rolled up paper napkin is just the thing to lay across the open pages (and, next time you find yourself in this hypothetical situation, I advise you remember it, because the spilling of sauces onto fingers and pages otherwise becomes bothersome). By the time you've juggled your way through another chapter and the larger part of your sandwhich, the satisfaction of the scotch from earlier in the evening is long gone, so you might seek out the desert menu in hopes of finding some kind of equal (if wholly different) respite from your own moods. Moments such as this lead quite naturally to a large slice of coconut cream pie. However, what you have to remember (and never do, only to be dismayed by when you see it) is that a slice of coconut cream pie is at least as much whipped cream as it is pie. Scraping this onto the remains of your sandwhich (and hoping someone will happen along to take the resultingly offensive sight from your table), and having at the coconut cream while interspersing the bitterness of coffee to cover the syrupy sweetness, you might spend at least another good forty five minutes. Between that and the time you receive your check, reapply your jacket and scarf, pay your bill (always at the register, even though they've brought it to your table), and depart, it's at least six a.m. and getting light in the sky.

You'll have to drive back towards Santa Monica from downtown Hollywood. This drive, which seemed fantastical and dreamy in a way that was mindless of the stop lights at night, seems tiresome during the morning with its crumpled paper, cracked concrete, opening stores and mexicans in churchwear. Now, in the morning, it seems once again quite ugly.

Fortunately, the pacific coast highway is gorgeous. So, instead of heading back to your apartment as you might have intended, you can hop onto the freeway and head out along the coast. Through the harmony of ficticious coincidence, you might happen to have a KMFDM album purchased the day before that you can now listen to blaring loud as you scream your way north along the PCH, listening to Lucia scream: "I'm better off alone--keep to myself so nobody knows misery follows me wherever I go."

If you head far enough up the Pacific Coast, you'll reach a point between Oxnard and Malibu where the highway is cut into cliffsides, with a short drop to the ocean out your driver's side window. Soon, however, you pass the swampy coastal region and are led into the farmland outside Oxnard. At this point, you'll probably be inclined to turn back towards Los Angeles. After all, with the choice of an human infested metropolis like Los Angeles and filthy, swarming city like Oxnard, you might as well travel to the one you live in.

So you head back down the PCH, watching cigarette smoke and the last ounces of your dreamy pre-dawn serenity broken by the encroaching city-scape. Luckily, there's a beautiful little lagoon (where you've previously played with sea-urchins and have written enough about that you won't repeat it here) you could spend a casual hour in after driving through a fast food place for a large, styrofoam cup of not-that-bad coffee. On the beach, you can sit and shiver in the cold morning wind off the ocean. Since the beach is empty at this time of morning, there aren't even any pretty girls to watch, so you don't have to mind the shivering so much. However, the cold becomes too much, or the sun does at some point, so you complete your return to Los Angeles, and head back to your apartment in Santa Monica.

On the way home, noticing that you're now out of cigarettes, you might stop by a seven eleven only to discover that it's now nine a.m. Realizing that the sandwhich you picked at wasn't terribly satisfying, it might occur to you that the crepes store on the promenade is now open. Also, it might occur to you that the crepes store sells your favorite scotch. The culminating effects of these realizations would likely lead you to the crepes store (whose name it's never ever occured to your to wonder about until you sit in front of your monitor trying to think of better monikers for it than "crepes store"). Here, you can admire that gorgeous Romanian waitress who talks to you sometimes when you come from work at nine a.m. twice a week, sit down with a book and drink two scotches in between bites of a ham, emenethal cheese, mushroom, egg and mayonaise crepe.

Having your lightheadedness sufficiently restored by infusions of caffeine, scotch and nicotene, you can now drive home in a sated and blissfull state at least equal to the first moments when you woke up and decided on a course to spend your night. Then, a little after eleven a.m. now (since you could help but wait until Borders was opened and then stop by for the novel you'll be reading by next weekend), you might return home, write a blog (whose title you'll take from a Billy Joel song that pops into your head out of no where and goes "Saturday night and you're still hanging around. Tired of life in your one horse town. You'd like to find a little hole in the ground for a while. So you go to the village in your tie-dye jeans and stare at the junkies and the closet queens. It's like some pornographic magazine. And you smile), and go to sleep.

Dead enough for life

I enjoy goth clubs, for those of you who don't know this.

Most days, I wear slacks, a black shirt, scarf and leather jacket with my doc martins or leather sandals. I think I cut a pretty radical image of too-fucking-cool, wannabe intellectual, skinny-ass sissy. However, on the weekends, I like to go out to the goth clubs. There, I wear my tight black pants (because the man-skirt I got on ebay hasn't arived yet), four or six inch platform boots, and a fish-net shirt along with various bracelets and armor-rings (those rings that are metal covering your fingers and have joints). Sometimes with the nail-polish and makeup, but not all that often. The point of this little relation is that it might seem like a bit of contrast to the clean-cut bullshit I otherwise try to pull off.

But I'm just telling you that part for fun. Last night, Autumn, Jarl and I decided to go out to the goth club (and Jarl is oh-so lame in his not-so-attempted gothiness, I must say). This must be the gothiest club I've ever been to. First, just the name of the event strikes you as uber-angsty: Dark Elysium. It sounds like too much dungeons and dragons with vodka. Next, the club it's at is the Helios (irony... go figure it out). Also, its dress code on the website reads "Darkwave and Vampire." There's a VIP room with a professional, full fetish dungeon. Their music is strictly darkwave (with such classics as "Knock three times on my coffin if you want my love"). The point is, it's the most hardcore goth you're gonna get.

That club was so gothy, even, that the owners were too depressed or dead to open. I got all dressed up, and drove out to Canoga Park, for nothing.

Cutting Off

Yeah, I don't post often anymore. I think every one of the last few posts has opened with: "I don't post much anymore." So this'll be the last time I say it.

Something humurous finally happened to me today. It has been a droll week, so far (there were some high-points of Thanksgiving, but my parents read these).

There I am driving south on Pico street towards my house in my crappy, but compact, Echo. I'm driving about five miles an hour below the speed limit because traffic is generally pretty packed on Pico.

To give you a feel for the traffic, lemme tell you the route I take around nine a.m. every morning when I get off work. First, though, understand that I'm getting off work and tired, and seeing the sunny sky, bright and happy, professionally dressed shit-heads walking around the complex of office buildings as I'm exiting stage left from Activision's basement at too damn early in the morning for me to be awake, makes me want to punch something. Was that a run-on sentence? Yup.

Well, I get into the parking lot after leaving the basement of the activision building and the first thing that greets me is the scorn of the production business types. These are the people who do all the marketing and who don't care if the games are shit, as long as Lawrence Fishbourne and Christopher Walken are doing the voice overs. Fair enough. These people hate the entire QA department, however, and make sure to show it in their superior stares. This is where the wanting to make with the punching comes in. However, about that same time is when the wanting to keep my job kicks in, so I refrain from the urge to slosh my coffee onto "Oh, I'm so sorry'"'s squinty, bunched up little face.

So I get into the parking lot, drive through the press of cars waiting to steal my graveyard shift parking, and head out the gate to the parking lot after swiping my parking card four or five times (since the first swipe rarely gets me anything more than an angry *beep*). From here, we sit at a stoplight for five or ten minutes, waiting for jackasses to get through the unprotected left turn. If you people don't know how to make an unprotected left turn, let's have a little lesson: You pull out into the intersection when the light is green. You pull out as far as you can. You do this so that another car behind you can also pull into the intersection so that, when the light turns amber (not yellow. Go check your driving manuals--it's called amber), two or maybe even three cars will get to turn left, rather than just yours. What you do not do is sit behind the crosswalk, waiting for their to be no oncoming traffic, and then, if the light turns amber, wait until it turns green again and try your luck the next time through. If you do this, you will deserve to be rear ended, and called all sorts of profane names. And it will happen--even if you can't hear it. See that red faced man screaming into his windshield and flailing his arms about wildly? That's me, and I'm swearing at you, calling you "buddy."

Well, once we make the left, we're on Ocean Park, and we've just left the corner of 28th street. We go five blocks towards the ocean and are now at the intersection of Ocean Park and 23rd. Ocean Park is a four lane avenue with a speed limit of forty miles an hour and is, excusing that one busy left turn, generally pretty free of traffic. This is where we calm down and take a few sips of coffee while we wait for the light to change (since you can't make a right on a red light onto 23rd street).

Then we drive down 23rd street, which is a residential street. Every morning, you see the same girl jogging, walking two big dogs, and talking on her cell phone. There's generally an old man smoking a cigarette and reading his newpapers, and sprinklers are wetting a few of the lawns. A utility truck might be pruning one of the trees that have purple flowers in the spring, but other than that, twenty third street is usually pretty empty. This is when "Microsized" kicks in, which is the third song I listen to on the album I listen to every morning. It's a funny little song sung in a robot voice about a woman who makes this whiny little man feel... well, little.

23rd street is littered with speed bumps. There doesn't seem to be any regularity to them. Every ten to fifty feet, though, you hit another one. This is the point in my morning where I calm down, since I'm forced to drive about five miles an hour. I get less tense after a night of having to have delt with humans. It's very relaxing to watch some girl walking a dog, an old man push a lawnmower, or a small boy tossing a ball. It brings back the mood that I can live with.

Well, the first intersection you come upon on 23rd from Ocean Park after a drive down this quiet street no faster than the jogger jogs, listening to a song that makes you feel like you're a robot, is Pearl Street. Pearl is a crappy little street that runs between Pico and Ocean Park until it gets squeezed out around the 10 Freeway, where Ocean Park turns into Gateway and then merges into Pico. Well, you pass the Pearl, and then Proceed to the corner near Pico.

There are two reasons for this route. First, you have to understand that I live about twelve blocks from my work, so it's a very short drive (hence my intimate knowledge of every last portion of it). Before the reasons will make sense, let me reiterate that Pico is a street packed full of cars. Nine a.m. sees this street heavy with traffic (heavy like your mom would be in one of my bad jokes). So, what you want to do in this sort of situation is avoid the street as much as you can. I happen to live on the corner of Michigan (which is the equivalent of Pearl on the other side of Pico, being that it's the crappy little street between Pico and Olympic that gets squished outa existence around the 10 Freeway).

Actually, I live in the Corner of Michigan and 17th Street. So, you might be asking yourself if you did the math, why do I always turn right on 23rd St instead of going six blocks down and turning on Seventeeth St, crossing Pico only at an intersection, and never having to drive on it at all except for that brief forty feet? The answer lies in the reason that Pico is always packed with people: Santa Monica City College. I happen to live a block away from it and, on any given day, the people driving, walking, busing and biking towards it are vast like the fish that would live in the ocean if we hadn't filled it with so much crap that only the red tide of bacteria and dead jellyfish ever wash up on Santa Monica's shores.

Well, Santa Monica City College (for those of you not native to Los angeles) happens to occupy the Southern side of Pico street from about 20th to 16th street. So there are no routes in between. Also, stop lights are only placed along Pico (and its adjoining streets like Olympic and Ocean Park) every three intersection so that, while you can turn right on 26th, 23rd and 20th, you cant' turn at 22nd or 21st. So, the point is that, if you're heading west on Ocean Park and wanting to get over to Pico and 17th because you're a disgruntled little boy trying to come home from work, you have to take either 20th, 23rd, Cloverfield (which is a road that breaks the rules and should be 24th) or 26th. However, 20th is always filled with aspiring college graduates and Cloverfield leads to an intersection that leads to an intersection that leads to the 10 Freeway, and is always jammed up with traffic. So you choose twenty third, then take six blocks on Pico towards 17th.

Ok, so, is my route now clear? Or are you completely lost somewhere on the streets of Santa Monica? It doesn't matter. None of this information is particularly relavent to my story.

The part that is relavent is your understanding that, at Nine a.m., there are many buses traveling westewards on Pico. This is important because Pico is a two lane street in any given direction and, since I want to turn right six blocks after I get on it, I often get into the right lane, which is often blocked by a bus stopped at a bus stop. This was the case this morning.

There I am, waiting in a right lane that will be blocked for the next five minutes, when I only need to get two blocks further before I get home. So what do I do? I flip on the blinker, and look into the rear view, to pull into the leftmost lane and pass this blasted bus. But what's this? It's a Civic with a little asian man, who doesn't want me to pull over. So he speeds up to try and cut me off so that I won't slow him down. Of course, I'm faster, so I cut in, he slams his breaks, I pass the bus, and get back into the right lane.

Now the Civic and I are stopped side by side at the stoplight near 17th. The little asian man looks over at me and shakes his head, as thought disparaging some breach of manners I have commited.

I roll down my window. The asian man does the same. He yells "You could have caused an accident, you asshole." I had planned on saying something rude and witty, but the light turned green, and we both had to drive. So, instead, I spat into his window. Fuck that guy.

I just noticed that my "Personal Stories" section has reached its character limit, and each time I put in a new story, part of an old one is getting deleted. So I'm starting a new thread for these.

Punchdrunk Punchline

I am reminded of this story due to the difficulty I am having removing black nail polish from my fingernails. I had it on because I was at the goth club a couple nights ago. I forget that the way one gets it off is by using the remover, so I have spent the past two hours trying to scratch it off (not owning any nail polish remover, even had I remembered that it existed). Anyway, the point is, I feel like a damn fool going into a store wearing black nail polish so, rather than go purchase something that would provide so simple a solution, I have pressed my nails against one anotehr to the point that my fingers have become tender to typing. Oh well. Back to telling a story.

My grandparents on my mother's side are the classiest people I know. They're brilliant, respectable and very old. For being as old as they are (my grandfather is quickly approaching ninety), they're amazingly sound of mind. Besides their tendancy to fall asleep midsentence, they seem as sharp and intelligent as ever. My favorite story my grandfather tells is of his childhood when he and the other neighborhood boys would follow behind the horse drawn ice-cart. This is a cart that would come through town and sell blocks of ice to housewives who would put the ice in the bottom drawer of their cooler-boxes. This is the pre-electricity version of a refigerator. Well, my grandfather and his chums would follow behind the cart and catch shards of ice that had fallen off the back of the cart, then suck on them like candy. What is it about old people that, when they tell a story, you can see every moment of it? I can't wait till I begin to wrinkle.

Anyway, they'e classy people, and very respectable. One night, my parents, brothers, sister-in-law and I were in Sunnyvale at my grandparents'. I'm not sure what the occasion was--perhaps us all happening to be in the area at the same time was the occassion. Regardless, there we are, eating chinese food from the same restaraunt we've ordered it from since as long as I can remember. The beef with snow pees and chinese chicken salad are two all-time favorites around our family.

This must have been before Skylar and Joa's wedding. Skylar was telling us a story about the sorta-bachelor's party his friends had thrown him.

Before I relate Skylar's story, lemme tell you about living arrangements at the time. I was in San Francisco and had either just, or was just about to, finish school at SFSU. Skylar and Joa were living in Berkeley, waiting to get married and go to Japan. My grandparent's have lived in Sunnyvale all my life, which is in San Jose. The point is that Skylar and I were right across the bay from one another. This point is relevant because of the place Skylar's friends took him for his bachelor's party.

Skylar's friends had taken him to a fetish/bondage club. In case you guys aren't familiar with these places, I suggest you get that way--they're pretty funny. Bar Sinister in L.A. isn't a bad place to start (it's not a full out fetish club... those weird me out. It does have a whipping post upstairs, which was great entertainment for my friends on Saturday night... but that's another story).

Well, Skylar's friends had dressed him up, hauled him out, and made him dance his scrawny white ass off. I didn't see it, but he says they had dressed him up in a cave-man diper. I can't remember whether or not he told me that they made him hold a cave-man club, or if that's just part of the image in my head. The picture I have of it is powerful, nevertheless. I can see Skylar on the dance floor beneath two balconies, just outside the smoking room, dancing in his diaper to VNV Nation and some mix of Raspberry Swirl. He would wave his club and hop around half-naked as creepy old men with giant pot bellies in tight vynil catsuits, and tall girls thin as sticks in skirts that almost go down to where their legs begin, weave around him slowly trying to fuck one another without ever touching (at goth-clubs, you dance alone--not with others). I can imagine him thinking its just a funny game in a crowd of people to whom this bizarr and grotesque scene is more-or-less a lifestyle.

And you can imagine the humor around the dinner table as he tells my classy grandparents and respectable family about what he did last wednessday. How my grandfather gives that wonderful laugh that sounds like something the caring old monk in an anime should elt go when the samurai waltz in half dead and wondering if they're going to have to fight anyone else. You can imagine my mother's amusement at hearing how her resered, most respectable of sons spent wednessday night leaping about in a diaper in a club full of lecherous and rather creepy coke-heads. And you can my embarassment when, after Skylar says the club was called the Glass Cat, I say before I can think to stop myself that: "I go there on Mondays."

 

Slithery

I am not a picky man.

Well, not when it comes to monster movies. Let's take the Alien series. Here we have mindless, senseless aliens that don't appear to need air (unless they're blown into space), food (except perhaps in part 3, where there are all these hunting metaphors), and exists in a world where spaceships are counted in only tens of millions of dollars (jeeze, didn't star wars teach us anything about economy? Use credits).

So, when I went to see Anaconda in the theatres, I was more than satisfied. I had my crazy guy, my hot girl, my jungle romp, and my giant monster snake.

Now, many of you are not fans of Anaconda. I can understand this. The failing is, however, your own. You somehow have come to expect something more out of a monster movie than monster that eat things. You think they should have acting and first class special effects. Boo-hoo. Special effects are for techno-weenies. Have some fucking imagination.

Today I purchased Anacondas. I was willing to look over the dialogue that sounded like something out of the Oxford Compendium of Cliches, the acting that reminded me of highschool drama class, the special effects that reminded me of the projects David's done for his little animation classes, and the characters that were little more thatn bodies on film.

However, there was one problem I had with this film that I just can't let go. It's been nagging at me for a good ten minutes now. Snakes--no matter how threatening and biblically demonic--are not explosive. Gasoline lightly splashed onto a snake--also non-explosive. In the pouring rain, falling into a pool of water, there is no reason that even the biggest snake would explode (thereby causing a mudslide that kills a couple dozen more).

I can look past a lot for a good ol' monster flick, but explosive, otherwise normal (albeit large) anacondas with demonic teeth are something I just can't abide. What a let down. Talk about not living up to the high standards set by the original.

 

Power of Plastic

For Christmas, my little brother bought me a gift card to Hollywood Video.

I had gone into the store thinking I'd get myself a new copy of Alien vs Predator. This, because I traded my previous copy into Ameoba Records so that I could buy old Depeche Mode, David Bowie and Duran Duran albums. I do this now and then when I don't feel right about spending money on cds and movies, but don't want to spend the time it takes to download them (and then you never get exactly what you wanted the way you wanted it, blah blah blah. Look, the internet is for sissies, get over it).

Well, guess what greets me right when I walk into Hollywood: AvP. A row of new copies of it for fifteen bucks, sitting right there in front of me. But I don't want to be that guy who spends five fucking seconds in the store, because that cute girl over at the counter is going to wonder "What the hell is wrong with that poor bastard? He rushes in outa the rain, buys the absolute first thing he sees with a gift card, and hauls ass outa her like the place was burning down." Don't ask me how I get into that kinda line of thinking. It happens, and I go with it.

So, we glance at AvP, and go pretend to look at something. What we end up with is ourself staring at the rack of Previously Viewed, and we bought way more than you peope want, rack of videos. There's a speciall deal going on--anything priced at seven ninety nine or less is four for twenty dollars. My gift card being for twenty five dollars, this suddenly seems like a "Dude, are you a tank?" sorta situation that I can't help but exploit. So I look for the cinciest horror flicks on the shelves, and find them in troves. That's the nice thing about the whole Christmas season--Halloween has just passed (as far as the stores are concered), so all you romantic comedy loving motherfuckers out there who only care to see horror two days a year have given up your interest on a whole slew of always over-stocked films.

I pick up three horror films: Anacondas (which is more of a sci-fi action flick, but it has monsters, so it's horror and you can bite me), The Grudge (which scared me greatly--cute asian chicks who want to eat your brains do it both for my libido and my... other thing in brain I don't know a word for... the one that makes you go all "Ahhh!" when a cat pops out of a closet in some B-Horror flick), and Cabin Fever (which I have on pause as I write this). Also, I picked up "The Dreamers," that an old woman I had a brief thing with once told me reminded her of me (let's not get into details on either of those comments until after I watch the film).

So, four flicks in hand, I'm ready to face the counter girl. It turns out she has post-maternity hips, so I can confidently purchase my films anyway. But, thanks to doubt, I got four for the price of one AvP.

Wait. What the fuck? I could have swonr there was a story here somewhere.

 

And her little dog, too

I was watching a file transfer progress on the ellusive episodes of West Wing's Season Six (it'll be done later this week, very good so far). I was curious how long I'd have to wait before episode nine finished, so I began watching the amount of information transfered, and noticed that there were about two seconds before a hundred kilobytes would complete. However, it wasn't exactly two seconds, so I was counting them against my own figuring of how long two seconds was, to try to see if I could get a rough estimate of how much longer the tranfer would take.

Well, once I had that, I started trying to figure my estimate into the total file size, minus what had already been completed. It was like some convuluted 8th grade math word problem that threw in the variable of however long I decided two seconds was. But, as I was counting, I noticed, eventually, that I had stared at the screen for a good minute or five, counting "One, two, one, two," and never really getting an estimate, and was working my little multiplication problem based on the assumption that the trasnfer rate was 50kb a second.

I reached some semi-meditative state of one-two-edness before, after ten minutes of lethargically reliving eigth grade math, I realized that, not only did the screen show me that the transfer was going at 40kb/s, but that there were eight minutes and thirty three seconds remaining.

How did this information ellude me? My brain is melting.

Save me from the basilisk

(I pasted this from microsoft word, which seems to have deleted most of my punctuation. I'll add the dashes back, but I won't bother with the apostrophes)

Alright, the title: its a song by Harry and the Potters that makes me giggle uncontrollably, and has nothing to do with the story I wanted to tell you guys.

Anvi stopped by to get coffee with me on her way back to San Francisco from San Diego, where shed been for her spring break. For whatever reason, rather than telling me to meet her somewhere near a freeway exit on her way, she picked a coffee shop in West Hollywood halfway between Santa Monica and the 101. While, in theory, this makes it halfway between our respective points of departure towards it, since its downtown Hollywood, the traffic makes it further away from either of us than a short freeway trip to one another. But you dont argue with Anvi, or shell get pissed and kick in your windows (ask Avish if you want that story).

Well, the coffee shop she picked was closed. So we drove around for twenty minutes, each in our own car, looking for parking for the nearest Starbucks. By this point, we were out by the Troubadour so, naturally, there wasnt any parking. Eventually, we found a shitty little Mexican Hamburgers place. I say Mexican cause it was run and patroned by Mexicans and no one seemed to speak English too well. But the place had its own parking, so we got our coffee there.

Although there are a lot of funny stories about Anvi, Avish, Nikki and Ben, well get to the majority of them some other time. For now, all you need to know is that these four are two couples. Anvi and Avish are normally very polite, more or less reserved Indians (except when Anvi is breaking on things and Avish is running around screaming drunk). Also, these four all live up in San Francisco. In fact (not that its pertinent), theyre all now living in the same tiny little house (with two dykes besides).

Those of you who are familiar with large cities are probably equally familiar with that peculiar type of fauna lurking in, and putrefying, their streets: the homeless. They sit on the curb or beneath the awnings, holding out Styrofoam cups rattling with pennies and chicken bones as their black fingers dig into a brown bag and come out dripping something that might be edible.

Well, one night down on Haight Street, six or so of us are walking towards or away from a restaraunt that was probably Kan-Zaman (spelled in a manner vaguely resembling that). We were approached by one of the Haights many homeless and bothered for change. Now, while I normally enjoy entering screaming matches with bums, this one seemed a little different: younger, cleaner, still a little human life left in his eyes. When we declined to donate to him, he offered to read us his poems for a dollar. I asked him if he had any love songs. He replied in the affirmative, and I told him Id pay him a dollar to sing to Anvi and Avish.

This was tremendously embarrassing to them. At first, they walked on, ten feet in front of the rest of us, hand in hand and eyes looking anywhere except at the bum behind them. We werent too far behind them yet, and Anvi turned back and told me to make him stop. So we laughed, the bum stopped, and I gave him an extra dollar. Anvi and Avish continued walking.

But I wasnt done yet. I waited until Anvi and Avish were a bit out of ear shot, and offered the transient five dollars to keep singing until we got to wherever we were going. Accepting, he caught up to Anvi and Avish who were, at this point, putting half a block of distance between the bum and themselves. But he was an honest sort, and caught up and began belting out strange love songs I wish I remembered the words to. Something along the lines of Romeo and Juliet--stars, eyes, hearts and vaginas. That kinda thing.

At first they tried to walk faster and outdistance him. But I think the bum was having as much fun as Nikki and I were, at this point, and he kept pace. They stumbled a good five blocks in embarrassed, angry silence, serenaded by a bum, and cheered on by their spiteful and shit-headed friends. The embarrassment was oozing off them in waves. If I hadnt been balling in laughter, even I would have been embarrassed. Haight Street is never truly empty, and its usually filled with an even mix of trendy shit-heads (like us), and worthless drug addicts (like the bum). So there was quite a crowd to witness our little spectacle--to point and stare and laugh at Anvi and Avishs misfortune.

Ive never actually seen Anvi get into one of her throwing and smashing things tantrums, but I think she came pretty close that night. Why havent people learned not to be friends with me yet?

Two for Kill Joy

I had a funny weekend. At one point I listened to seals and a walrus in a life and death struggle, before cats started trying to steal my wine. There were some giant, jingling boots, mormons and aliens all along the way through three days without a real night's sleep (because I didn't take any sleeping pills) and only a single glass of wine the whole time after skipping work for "family reasons" that I think I'll blame on a death that didn't happen of a relative I'll spend an hour or so later on making up.

Ever find those sentences so full of discoherent words strung well together that you can't stop reading, but, after a couple paragraphs, can't remember a single thing of what you've read and have no mental picture, but just a little giggle and a last empty bottle of wine on the desk? Well, it's happening to me right now. I'm not talking about what I've been writing either, but about the aliens and mormons and what, with the giant statues all over town and the wives whose parents can't come to the weddings. I try to read one book and end up spending all day inside my memory instead, reading through things I might have read somewhere once a decade back, or might have simply extrapolated as a reasonable history out of what I happen to know.

The worst part is that I can't tell the difference between the things that I've learned that I'm more or less sure are true and the things that I've made up and think should be. That's not just some angsty comment by someone who's been reading too much sci-fi until the wine makes the words all funny, either. I mean that--I often make up stories in my head to fill in the little gaps in my knowledge, but then later can't remember which ones are the knowledge and which ones are the gaps.

I'm pretty sure it won't matter, one day, but it tends to bother me whenever I get superior with someone and explain to them a detailed history of the zorse (zebra colored horse), only to realize later that what I've related as fact is simply something I've invented as an analogy to the progression of the striped cheetah and that I've told as true a story that is completely manufactured.

It isn't with any subversive intent that I tell the stories as true, even (although the stories I pick are almost always subversive in themselves). It's just that I meant to tell a story about a thing before I realized that what I was saying, although it might be true, was simply a fabrication. That's alright, though, because everyone likes the story where I threw my tea onto a possum.

If I could pass off made up words as easily as facts, nhhrnmm would mean "Delicious. I'm going to sleep." It's easy to pass these things off because others, like myself, don't care if they're lied to. Only if the lies fit. The earth could really be flat--but I'm just as happy with it being round, and don't care much whether gravitons exist or if the moon is just falling in a real big circle. Although I've railed against it, I even like gravity better. Also, it's easier to think of cheese as a food rather than as stale, fermented milk. It wouldn't be as colorful if all the lipsticks at the store had simply been called green seven hundred a forty five plus red twelve and cyan zero. It's better if they're named something logo-istic and catchy--this adds an element of control into something that would otherwise read too damned abritrarily.

I'd kinda like some nachos, now.

Not Impressed

 I take a variety of over the counter, non-addicting, low side effect sleeping pills. Which I ingest on any given day depends, most often, on what 7-11 most recently had in stock nearest eye-level when I drop by in the morning to pick up cigarettes, watery coffee and sometimes a stale bagel. A given box will generally last me ten to twelve days (depending on the brand and their effectiveness on a particular morning), so there is a great variance as to whether Sleepy Time, Unisom or the pink ones happen to be on the hanger (instead of on the shelf below the hanger).

Sleepy Time are little blue pills in a blue, soothing looking box. Two sheets of neatly pressed pills lie inside, with two pills per punch in the paper-coated-foil that backs the pressed plastic. These are the best choice, economically. They contain twenty-five miligrams of diphenydramine hydrocloride, and, since there are two per punch, I assume that the intended dosage is fifty miligrams of this cryptic substance. I haven't go a pink box on hand, so I can't tell you what those contain. Unisom contains twenty-five miligrams of doxylamine succinate (one per punch), which may or may not be a different substance than what's in Sleepy Time. I assume that, when ingredients are in code, it's because the makers either don't have the trademark on, or don't want you to know the frugality of, their ingredients. Some part of my mind knows that the opinion I just stated is utterly bogus, but I go with it based on experience with cereal boxes and juice cartons (that say, in very small print, that the substance contains no more than three percent of whatever the packaging indicates it's made out of--whole wheat cereals being mostly corn and juice being mostly water).

Perhaps it's the succinate--which looks a lot like succinct, which is precisely what I want out of a sleep aid--that makes me prefer the Unisom comes up highest on the shelf (and let's not even launch into why I buy whatever's atop the shelf instead of looking for the product I actually desire more). It might also be that, while Unisom reeks of bold letter words like Regulated and Registered, Sleepy Time sounds more country, and anything pink can't be better than a warm glass of milk. However, what struck me most just ten minutes back when I swallowed one was the taste of Unisom.

Most pills I take these days come in the aerodynamic, seventy-nine cents per packet shape of a classical capsule without the "melts in your intestines, not in your mouth" coating. I secretly hypothesize that the new tylennol (as opposed to the waifer shaped bullys your mother used to mash in with jelly) is actually coated in teflon for a smooth ride down into your gut. Sleepy Time and Pink are shaped just like this. Unisom is completely uncoated. It has that astringent, medicinal taste as it grits down the back of you gullet. I think that something about that taste alone--something which might be too far due to night life in San Francisco to be mentionable--is the single aspect of these pills that, by the time that it takes me to write this post, has already knocked me into a half-concious, addiction free, will awake to a heavy bladder in six hours, and shouldn't opperate heavy machinery (like fax machines) sorta state.

With all that said: good night.

Yay for Yellowstone!

Have you ever been to Yellowstone?

It's a national park set-up somewhere near Wyoming. It's the best in the nation that I've seen, and I've taken my tour of a few of the bigger ones. Yosemite, the one that looks like craters on the moon except black instead of the florescent white you expect the moon to be, Zion Park in Utah, the windswept arches of the one in Arizona I can't remember the name of, the Grand Canyon—all great. But man, not a one compares a wit to Yellowstone.

Out near the lake that I think is Jenny Lake but probably isn't, a herd of ten thousand bison (not buffalo which, by the way, have never lived in North America so far as I can tell) wander lazily across the road, stopping traffic for miles and goring any car whose drive has the audacity to honk at them. Elk laze about in the sun around Mammoth, knowing that, even in winter, the nearby thermal basins will be warm enough to keep them comfortable, so long as no herd-members fall through the thin crust of mineral deposits covering the sulfur-stinking veins of boiling water just beneath the dirt. Grizzlies, wolves and long horned mountain goats patrol the gorges and their walls. Marmots beg for food by your cabin, chasing off the smaller prairie dogs and ground squirrels.

Up near Teddy Roosevelt lodge—the nicest of all the human encampments in the area—black bears wander around between the cabins we rent for a week or two every summer to sleep in. North of the area there's great bird watching and a few, not-too-strenuous trailheads.

One of these leads to a riverbed where I can remember tossing stones with all of my cousins. Will; Matt, Aaron and Aaron, their little brother Danny; Lisa and her brother whose name I can't even remember anymore; Georgina's kids Brice and Riley (Casey probably wasn't even born yet). I remember skipping stones out across the river and always I think of Charlie Brown. I can't remember if it is Charlie Brown who was told it, or if the association simply comes from my Grandmother's love of Snoopy. The axiom that you shouldn't throw the stones because "If everyone did, the ocean would fill up." A very Kantian sentiment, but it's never been true.

"Hang on Snoopy. Snoopy hang on." And if the words are wrong, we simply remember them in some other way.

The oceans are too big, and our population is much too small. What's the pleasure that we get from the skipping stones that makes us feel the guilt that makes us admonish the children that skip them?

There is an old simile of human beings to Earth as a virus to a human being. It is meant to show you that human beings have acted like a plague upon their world. But let us take it further and see something new in it: The virus spreads and devours, but you do not stop being yourself. You are infected, but it is your leg. It is your arm. It is your mind. You are not any less yourself. Though you do not wish to be, you are yourself and the virus together—you are more. The virus is an additional part—not a self-destroying whole. The body remains what it is. Affected but still itself.

It is foolish to believe that we, mankind, can break this world. Like the virus, we can change the host to a point that it will no longer support us. As a human being changes to a dead body. But the body remains. And then it decays and becomes ground. It is still there. It is simply bigger. It is something else.

Like the oceans that we fill with rocks. The waters will spread. New lakes and ice ages will form. Old species will become extinct. New species will appear. Mankind may leave for Mars as a virus to a new host.

But the world will be what it always has been, and we shall not have ruined it. I do not think that there is a force great enough to do this save the big collapse that is the finale of the big bang. Probably not even then, but my mind wasn't built to work beyond the manner in which the rest of the universe does.

We were skipping stones and I remember that Will was the best at it. Will, who has since finished his PhD in Math and I believe is now married, who was the envy of us all. After him Skylar, then Aaron and Matt who are brilliant at anything that they take their hands to.

We skipped stones across the river, and Lisa and her husband, her brother who might be named Jimmy, stood about and pretended to be with the group of adults. They talked and did the things that adults do while children throw their bodies into futile and pointless contests.

This, perhaps, is what I hate of sports and what I love of those that are done alone. It is one thing for a man to decide that he will test his body, his ingenuity and his will against the face of a cliff, the twenty miles of a bicycle course, or the two miles of a run. It is another entirely to test my body against those of other men. It is not them I should seek to test against unless my love of them outweighs my love of myself—and it should not now that I am twenty five. My love should be for myself. My love should be for my world—not yours. For it has taken me all these years of living to build my world and, if it is yours I have still lived in, if it is yours I still desire the approval of, then I have failed to create my own.

I do not mind a thing. I do not mind that I have shamed myself in the eyes of my parents when I was twelve, and that it haunts me daily. I do not mind that I have shamed myself in front of Autumn and Devin and Jessica, and that it haunts me daily. I do not mind that I shamed myself in front of my coworkers on Saint Patrick's day and that it haunts me daily. I do not mind that Skylar shamed me for four years as I went from being my parent's child to being Grayson. I do not mind that I am ashamed, always. For these people are not myself.

I do not mind that this is the life that I am given to live, for there is a herd of bison, wandering across the road near Jenny Lake, ready to gorge the next driver that honks at them. I do not mind, for my world is full of beauty, and I am but one man, and that is the greatest of all gifts that I ever shall receive.

So let me this summer go to Yellowstone, and wait forty-five minutes for Old Faithful to erupt and spew forth a geyser of steaming water built up deep inside the Earth. Let Bush pour money into Iraq, so long as some is left behind to build satellites in what we naively think of as the empty space between worlds. Let my family and friends make me ashamed for what we naively think of as the space between people.

I do not mind, for I am alive and this world of mine shall always make me happy. I do not mind, for I made this world, and I am grateful that I am to live within it.

There are no stories that are made for another. There are only stories that I make for me. And stories that you share with me. There is shame and guilt—enough for a whole world—but it does not phase me any more that it should you. In our worlds we desire a thing that perhaps we are not strong enough to make, as children are not strong enough to throw all the stones that it will take to fill the ocean. For this we feel ashamed—for this is our great guilt.

I do not mind, for I am alive and this world of mine shall always make me happy. For I am alive, and this is the world that I have made. For I am alive, and that is the most, and the least, that I shall ever be.

Sucker

I've noticed that adds have become interactive. Often, on myspace or dictionary.com, I will see something I immediately recognize as a flash video game appear in a side-bar. Part of me knows that these are advertisements. Part of me can't help myself.

The quinessential fat and hiddeous elderly woman struts before a blackboard and I see a straw that moves as my mouse scrolls by. Obviously-alien spaceships fly toward my stationary, blue, "I'm the good-guy" ship, shooting tiny red lasers. A spider scurries past the picture of a boot. I know what is coming. I know that this is an add. Well, I can at least scroll the mouse around. I can at least throw the football at the tree, as long as I don't hit the tire that will pop-up the add. It's ok to shoot most of the enemy ships--I'll just let the mothership kill me. Come on, Grayson! It's not a real spider. It's just there because the CIA is watching, and know you won't be able to resist. Don't be such a sucker.

Just look at that mother ship. I made it all the way there just to let her blow me up. Where's the justice in it? I don't remember what it looked like. Maybe if I just get to it one more time, my hunger to click will be sated. That woman with the orange hair is horrid looking. Can't you imagine just how bad the animation is going to be? Can't you image a much better picture of her hideous face pelted by spit pellets? Do you really need to play their game? And the spider... it's not real. I could go outside and stomp on ten thousand. Let this one go. Don't be a sucker.

But it wasn't satisfying just to make it to the mothership the second time. It wasn't enough just to shoot spid-wads at her. It was horrible to watch the football bounce off the tree and the quarter miss the rotating cup. I can time these things correctly, can't I? Aren't I a king of Starcraft who knows exactly when to rush, when to run, when to hide, when to fight? Don't I know when to flick a quarter? How could I live with this spider running across my screen? Don't I hate spiders? Don't I want them all stepped upon?

That'll teach that damned mothership. That'll teach that orange-haired old bag. That'll teach that stupid fucking spider. Oh yes, I can time that throw and that flick just right. I can beat these games. Whoever made these games was just a sucker. He didn't know who would be challenging them. I have destroyed them all. I can break these games in ten seconds. Pitiful! What a sucker.

Twenty minutes later and my spybot scan informs me it can fix the problem I'm having with that bar that sticks across the top of my buttons. It can fix these pop-ups that won't lay still. It can keep my computer safe as long as I don't make the same mistakes.

What's this? I have a new myspace message? I suppose I should log back in.

Look at that gangster bounding about. What's this? Boxing gloves on the side of the bar? I click them and my punch misses? Yeah right! No way this bastard is getting away from me.

Depressed Mode

Setting aside the hang over that's breaking my skull into pieces and the fact that the only thing I have to eat is a jar of peanut butter and a pile of sashimi that's been in my fridge for two days, I'm having a rather crappy day.

Why, you ask? Because I decided to go see Nine Inch Nails twice. I'm going to go see them again in San Diego. It'll be the last stop on their tour (the previous stop in San Diego had been cancelled, so they rescheduled it for last). This means that it's going to be an absolutely bad ass show. Also, I saw a picture of our seating, which is closer than we were at the Hollywood Bowl by about one and seven-eigths of a mile. So, on the 20th, I'm catching a show that is going to rock my socks, and probably many other articles of clothing.

However, there's a problem. Because, on the 21st, Depeche Mode is in L.A.

I don't go to concerts. I went to Beck with Jeff once a few years ago, and then to KMFDM with Anvi and Dominique. KMFDM was a wonderfully small venue, but there were kids moshing and it was really loud, and the three of us got mad and left. Yet, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails are two of my all time favorites. And when members rock bands that depend on teenage angst for their inspiration start pushing forty or fifty, you'd better take the chance to see them live if you ever hope to do so.

Now I have to go out of town to catch Depech Mode somewhere else. There's my rant for you reading pleasure.

Sixty three dollars and forty two cents

Is what a bottle of Glenlivit came out to. Have you ever wondered what a glass of butter would taste like over ice with a tiny splash of gasoline? It's an amazing thing. Some people will insist that a wiskey glass should be used for scotch, but I have to dissent. I have a ceramic mug that has a shiny enamel finish in which a glass of scotch becomes a mysterious thing. The color of the mug is the antique paper color of the label on the bottle of Glenlivet.

I enjoy the taste of the scotch that hasn't been destroyed by the addition of such pedestrian elements as soda pop or whatever else we young fools generally place inside our drinks to make them more stomachable. However, I do not posses that constitution of the old that allows them to enjoy blue cheese, and am not able to stomach straight scotch, so I have it over rocks. This causes a bit of melting that distills it just enough to prolong the glass, so that I may be satisfied with the one I am having without becoming drunken. However, the water does not distill the flavor--that savory lingering scent of butter on your tongue.

The reason I prefer the mug over a glass is the sound of the ice. In a glass there is a distinct crashing tinkle as the glass and ice meet in a crushing blow. Something about the enamel on the mug must soften this. The tinkle is more muted--somehow softer. It better compliments that aroma you can only smell after you've already swallowed. The sound of the ice is almost as memorable as the flavor: that snap as the liquor hits it fresh from the freezer sending an imperceptible wisp of steam up and reminding you that somewhere in the North Atlantic, icebergs clash across dark waves on a frozen sea clouded in fog. The taste reminds you that somewhere in France or on the television, a household living at a beautiful vinyard in Tuscany are roasting a whole hog to slice up and dine upon with candied yams, jams, cloves of garlic and horseraddish. The color of the very label on the bottle reminds you that somewhere in Kentucky there is an umarked grave where lays a soldier from the anything-but Civil War and that, in some dark cellar inherited by your grandfather's boss, there is a false wall behind which lay unopened casks of scotch that have been aging perfectly since prohibition.

I cannot wait until my face is old and full of wrinkles and I dream at night that I am young again.

I haven't done anything story worthy in a couple days, and don't feel like reminicing, so that's your story about a glass of Glenlivet.

XBox XBox Revolution

We will train you. We will teach you. We will shape you into an efficient warrior, garnering respect and admiration from your peers. We can even help you work past criminal and/or anti-social tendencies through counseling, drug therapy, and neural resocialization.

Welcome to the Korprula Sector. Four years ago Sarah Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, made Char into her home and unified the Zerg beneath a single sentient a mind--a mind that was once human. Three years ago, I began checking the shelves for my shot at revenge.

In the year two thousand three, I purchased an XBox and marked my calendar for November. In July I was anxious. In september: zealous. In october I sighed in resign. In November I smiled knowingly and felt forgiving. By february--despair.

Two year later and I have sold the XBox. I am at E3 under the twinkling majesty of neon lights, goggling at Stubs the Zombie and Land of the Dead, oggling the Booth Babes, snatching up demos and shirts and mousepads, and hoping to meet Sid Meyer or Stan Lee when whack, my breath is gone and I am standing still while she stands alone before me--beatiful, towering above the heads of the crowd.

She stand three feet taller than the rest although shorter than many of us. Her long golden hair flies in supple rays like the sun spreading a fan of fire and life across the popcorn strewn carpet. The crowd stand back from her except for the little children, who run up to touch her leg. And then a hush falls... and a preview begins to play.

A squad of Marines lands on a barren rock world. A quiet figure in the back of the dropship. Pride and bluster as the marines march onto a barren rock landscape. Fear and frenzy, as the zerg close in. A fierce fire fight and many lay dead and mangled within the first minute as the twisted corpses of zerg pile one atop another, crushing the Terran with sheer number. And a single shimmering figure who darts between them. A single figure who moves with the grace and ease of a killer among killers--an alpha shark among a school of tuna. But she looks like an angel, and she is standing on a pedestal a foot in front of me.

Also, she's made out of platic. But it was a cool statue. XBox 360 is going to cost $299 with one controller and no hard drive. The packages are being presold at $1000. Most people will need to spend at least $600 to get one worth playing. Ah Nova! vile temptress. I must have you at any cost. I bought an XBox solely for that game back in '03, and now, coming up on '06, I'm hoping I'll finally get to play it.

Rock it, baby

I was browsing the myspace links when I discovered something absolutely awesome--the myspace store. Clocks, mugs, hats, bags, bears, shirts, boxers, thongs and even a shirt for the dog I don't have (I'm waiting for them to get the dogs up there).

So I've been thinking about it--shirts I mean (although that thong looks kinda cumfy). On a whim I bought a myspace shirt. There had been a time I was obsessed with getting a stileproject shirt but never did. Then it became a porn site and I didn't want to walk around advertising that.

The only shirt with a logo I own is a shirt for Stubs the Zombie, a resident evil parody where you play the rock'n;roll zombie Stubs, launching heart, gas and brain grenades, shoving stumblers into bullet fire as you throw your hand behind the heads of marshals, infect their brain to open the doors and release a horde of flesh eating monsters upon hapless humans. But myspace is cool too. I do have a cardigan with a little aligator...

This isn't a story either, and I've missed a few days of posts. I'll be more interesting later...

For the children

This isn't a story. It's just a notation.

I just finished watching Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. It didn't flinch. Not from Cloud carrying a dozen swords in his inventory, or Materia giving him magic powers, or the turks in all their silliness. It didn't flinch from anything--not even moogles. That was amazing. That was final fantasy. Wow.

 

This is mostly just essay like things that I posted because I didn't want to write anything, but felt like posting, so I drudged up various things I'd written at some point and posted them. None of these are new, they've all been here awhile. Ps: This is mostly a note to myself.

Post-structuralism--fuck you!

I wrote this sorta-essay in about twenty minutes for Nikki, who asked me if I knew anything about post-structuralism. So, it's not so good. Ergo with the fuck you.

The center of post-structuralism is an essay on the center of structure Derrida gave in the sixties. It begins by presenting the problem with what he refers to as "structuralism." That is, a mode of thinking in which concepts are related to one another under certain rules that we'll call structure. Now, the problem with this is that, although you can have all the explanations and rules you want within your structure, you can't talk about the structure itself. To do so, you'd have to analyze the structure of the structure. This obviously leads us into an infinite regress (A because B because A because B because A ad infinitum).

Now, the classical way to get past this had always been: "The structure is God; go fuck yourself."

How do we get past this, you ask? Derrida refers us to Heidegger, Nietzsche and Freud. He turns to Nietzsche for words that don't need to bear truth value to be useful (let's get into what that means some other time), Freud for (basically) the old "your perspective is subjective" trick, and Heidegger for "metaphysics can go to hell." Then he points out why we're totally fucked: our language assumes metaphysics. You can't talk about trees without assuming that there is something the word refers to. You can't even talk about metaphysics without assuming that metaphysics--at least the understanding of it--exists (which is a huge problem when you consider that metaphysics is something that only needs to exist conceptually).

This is where Derrida grabs us and invents what grad-students would later turn into "post-structuralism" as they got drunk at some bar and did a bunch of coke in the bathroom. He talks, now, about getting "outside philosophy." If you want to hook a bunch of naive, pretentious jackasses, make a comment like that; let them think they can reduce two thousand years of work into the problems you can find with the work (you can't, by the way. The work is the greatness--not the results).

He goes on a lot about Levi-Strauss, who I'm less familiar with than even Heidegger, but he just uses the arguments for an example to prove the point, then grabs this one great quote: "One begins to understand that the distinction between state of nature and state of society... while lacking any acceptable historical signification, presents a value which fully justifies its use by modern sociology: its value as a methodological instrument."

This quote sums up everything I hate about terms like "post-structuralism." This isn't post-anything. This is science. This is how hardcore science has always been. Not abstract science, but physical science. Real science. Words are just tools we use to explain things we experience. Even that sentence is just a bunch of tools to get an idea across to you. Even an idea is just a tool that doesn't bear any truth value that you use to relate to the world around you. Even the world around you is just a tool you use to comprehend your own experiences. We can explain any of these things as fully as we want to, until we fall into an infinite regress where our explenations fail. But we don't need to, because they're just tools!

You don't need to know whether or not the back of a hammer is good for popping off beer caps, if all you want to do is put a nail in the wall. And you don't need to know what the nature of cats is, if you just want to know whether or not Fluffy happens to be one. You only need to know what the nature of cats is if you want to know what the nature of cats is.

This isn't post-anything. It's called Pragmatism. It's what I love in Ayn Rand, in John Dewey, and even in Nietzsche. But we can call it post-structuralism, philosophical nihilism, irreverence to the old masters, pragmatism, or what-the-hell-ever we want to. The details change from one philosopher/scientist/psycologist to the next but the basic point is this: stop assuming that you're refering to anything other than concepts that you have at best a vague understanding of when you use words. They're just words. It's not a tree. It is what it is. A tree is what you understand it to be.

That's my ultra-mega-biased view of post-structuralism. The particulars are in the tons and tons of arguments about it, and there is no such thing as a post-structuralist movement except in classrooms. All of the philosophers who are called that scoff at the term, and not one of them agrees on the particulars with any other one because, rather than leaving at what I just did, they all try to logically justify it, which seems rather self-defeating. The fun parts in it are the deconstructions of ideas and their reconstruction. There are tons of places this is done, and I could probably give you a good reading list, but it sounds like you've already picked one up. Anyway, if you haven't yet, go read Derrida's essay at http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/sign-play.html --that's where the movement gets invented.

A Metaphysically reductive account of Knowledge in Pragmatism and Correspondence Theory

This is an essay I wrote during my senior year at SFSU. It's the one I'm most proud of, so I'm posting it here.

In John Deweys The Quest for Certainty, he works to debase those epistemologies that operate under a theory of knowledge Dewey describes as a "spectator" theory. Stephen Toulmin, in the introduction to my edition of Deweys book, explains: "Philosophers in this tradition assumed that the knower is in the position of a spectator, who makes judgments or discovers facts about the world without otherwise acting on it. Correspondingly, they thought of the process of knowing on the model of vision." Under this view, knowledge is an object in itself, independent of either the knower or the method by which that knowledge is attained.

Dewey rejects this theory, claiming: "If we see that knowing is not the act of an outside spectator but of a participator inside the natural and social scene, then the true object of knowledge resides in the consequences of directed action." We can see that this theory is directly opposed to classic Cartesian epistemology. Descartes claim that his cogito is invulnerable to skeptical challenges about the context or scene within which it is discovered is an attempt to surpass individuals and circumstances, arriving at a claim that is true in itself. Dewey, however, believes that such a theory is the result of a flawed metaphysics. "The spectator theory of knowing may-humanly speaking-have been inevitable when thought was viewed as an exercise of a reason independent of the body, which by means of purely logical operating attained truth." By connecting the mind and body, making the mind a product of the body, we can see that thinking is a practiced activity bearing no fundamental difference with any other function of our daily lives (i.e. jogging around the lake). Dewey states: "All matters of practical action involve an element of uncertainty; we can ascend from belief to knowledge only by isolating the latter from practical doing and making." Since even knowing is a practical action, some element of uncertainty remains because of the imperfect manner in which thoughts are produced.

In a classical model, the knowledge of something like the cogito is not a particular knowledge of a particular individual, but rather a universal claim of self that can be attained under any circumstances, by any thinking subject. Laurence BonJour, for instance, claims, "a proposition is true if it corresponds to or agrees with the relevant aspect or part of reality." He attempts to circumvent such qualms as Deweys by making knowledge-rather than an object in itself-an analogy breaching the gap between thinking and states of affairs.

So far, BonJour and Dewey agree about the nature of knowledge as a product of thinking, rather than as an ontologically independent entity. Yet, there is a serious discrepancy between the epistemologies of Dewey and BonJour, and it is my aim to prove that the apparent irreconcilable difference between the two theories is the result of flawed metaphysical assumptions, rather than an actual difference between the epistemological theories and that, once these assumptions are explicated and rectified, the two theories become compatible.

Deweys greatest qualm with the spectator theory should be seen, not as an epistemic one, but as a metaphysical one. Dewey argues against the concept of knowledge as an ontologically independent object, that, once held, will be the same in kind no matter the spatiotemporal circumstances under which it is possessed. Unlike round, or the number two, Dewey presents a sort of knowledge that is a contingently produced entity. Dewey claims: "We should regard practice as the only means by which whatever is judged to be honorable, admirable, and approvable can be kept in concrete experienceable existence." We can assume from this that, under such an epistemology, knowledge has no objective existence in itself, any more than "jogging" is an entity. Knowledge is simply the act of judging a particular piece of information to be "honorable, admirable, and approvable." We should not be confused by words like "honorable and admirable," believing them to lead us into the realm of the moral. It is important to understand that the realm of the moral and the physical are, as far as knowledge is concerned, inseperable. To say that one has knowledge of what is good and what is evil is not inherently different than to say that cats are mammals. It is only the degree to which our knowledge of good and evil, and our knowledge of cats and mammality, are honroable, admirable and approvable.

BonJour claims that knowledge is by nature analogous. Working from this claim alone, I believe one may resolve his correspondence theory with Deweys pragmatic interpretation. The real problem is not in the nature of knowledge itself-though BonJour still clings to a version of justified true belief, while Dewey ascribes to warranted assertability-but the nature of the objects of which we have knowledge. This provides us enlightenment as to the difficulty in resolving the predicament between these two theories, and reveals that the trouble lies not in the epistemology of the theories themselves, but in the metaphysical assumptions underlying them. By illuminating these assumptions and examining them, I seek to reach closure between the two theories by showing that we may eliminate the unnecessary metaphysical assumptions within correspondence theory without damaging the epistemological elements of it, and thereby reconcile it to a pragmatic account of knowledge. Further, while I shall only attempt to show this in the single instance of correspondence theory, I believe that the implications for epistemology span much further in scope, and similar arguments could be made to reconcile other epistemological theories to pragmatic accounts as well. In this metaphysically reductive spirit-reducing our ontology to include only those entities necessary for our epistemologies-we shall come to a conception of correspondence theory that is in accordance with both pragmatism, and a wide variety of far more traditional theories.

Let us first begin by dispelling the discrepancy between the definitions of knowledge, as either justified true belief or warranted assertability. First, for both philosophers, the expression of knowledge is always propositional. In this, at least, they are in agreement; that knowledge, when formulated, always appears as a claim that a is a particular way. The difference between the two definitions, then, is what constitutes a proposition as knowledge rather than simply as a claim. The belief claim in correspondence theory and the assertability claim in pragmatism, both cover the requirement that knowledge be formulated in the manner of a proposition. The justification, or warrantability, requires that we have some sufficient reason for asserting our proposition. In this instance, the difference between the definitions is purely stylistic. The terms are used in a sufficiently synonymous manner that it would be of no significant hindrance were we to say that correspondence theory requires warranted true belief, or that pragmatic theory requires justified assertability. This linguistic trick is employed by Dewey to set his epistemology apart in discussion, so that we can keep our terms straight. However, it seems worthwhile to abolish this two-faced manner of speaking if we are going to reconcile the theories. The remaining problem is the truth requirement. Yet, my position is that this requirement is sufficiently covered under the assertability requirement that the theories are reconcilable if we examine the nature of propositions (to which both theories subscribe) and how truth-value operates within them.

First, let us admit that, under BonJours own theory, while it may be possible that the truth requirement can be satisfied, it is impossible that we can ever know that this has been accomplished under his apparent understanding of what constitutes truth. We must admit, then, that knowledge, as apparently limited by correspondence theory, is only accidental knowledge: We can never be certain of the truth of our propositions, and therefore can only accidentally have knowledge. This is because under correspondence theory, we cannot make any metaphysical suppositions about the nature of our state of affairs externally of our own perceptions of them. BonJour admits as much, claiming, "You cannot just step outside of your own subjective perspective and observe independently that the claim that you believe and for which you perhaps have reason or justification is also true-there is just no way to occupy such a Gods-eye perspective." To show, then, that the truth requirement is satisfied only accidentally in BonJours position, we find he later states "A proposition is true if reality in whatever way or has whatever features a proposition describes it as having." This means that, even if we did have knowledge under the supposed correspondence restraints on a propositions truth value, we would never be aware of knowledge--we can never know that we know, and so we state that such knowledge is only accidental, for it can never be held as a certain conviction, but only a supposed certainty.

BonJour has shown us that, though his truth requirement seems to appeal to an external reality, he has only a loose conception of such an existence. We learn that we do not require a thoroughly defined conception of ontological entities to subscribe to a correspondence theory. He claims that there is a world that can be discussed in a factual manner; however, for his theory itself, it is not important that we have a particular manner of discovering it, only that our discoveries correspond to it. All correspondence theory requires is that our propositions state, "that reality (in the broadest sense of the term) is a certain way or has certain features that the content of the proposition specifies."

What I propose is that for reality "in the broadest sense of the term" to correspond to the specifications of our propositions, reality does not require our propositions to be exact models for external objects. Indeed, I seek to show that they can never accomplish this.

Let us examine the nature of the truth requirement, and understand that truth in the sense it is being appealed to, is of a particular kind. The requirement in correspondence theory is that our beliefs be true That our propositions be factually consistent with the external world. Yet, our propositions are not some hazy version of platonic Forms. They have no arbitrary existence. They are, ultimately, statements made by people about experiences. These statements have no existence outside of those who claim, hold or suppose them, and exist only in the claiming explicitly in the manner of speech or writing, holding implicitly in the manner of philosophic reflection, or supposing implicitly in the manner of unexamined sense assumption (though here, such beliefs are hardly propositional; however, it must be assumed that, if asked, one could quickly formulate a proposition to express them, even if one had never specifically done so, or was not at the time reflecting on a belief in a propositional manner. When I touch a hot pan, I draw back my hand because it hurts and, although I do not form within my mind a proposition that propells my action, if asked why I drew my hand back, the proposition could be produced immediately that "The pan is hot and hurts to touch").

Because BonJour does not make any explicit claims as to the nature of the external world (besides the claim that there is one, in some indefinable sense), when speaking of propositions, we cannot rely on those classical theories which appeal to metaphysical realism. As quoted previously, BonJour stated that his theory does not suppose to have a "Gods-eye" view of the external world, and does not make suppositions about the nature of external objects. So far, we have admitted only two types of entities into our ontology, both of which are accepted within the two epistemologies with which we are concerned. The first is propositions, and the second is the universe besides propositions in the broadest sense. Even knowledge holds no special place in the ontologies of either correspondence or pragmatism, because knowledge is only a particular type of proposition. The nature of propositions themselves, whether they are particular entities or complex entities concocted out of other entities (as a nominalist, for instance, might claim), is not even an issue. We need not say anything about the ontological status of propositions-that they are or are not entities within themselves; only that they exist in some fashion and contain within them the expression of knowledge. To quote Michael Loux, propositions serve three functions necessary to both of our epistemological theories:

The claim is that there is a special category of entities that are, first, the objects of acts of assertion and denial (acts of statement making), second, essentially the bearers of the truth values, and, finally, the referents of that-clauses. In support of the claim that one kind of entity plays all three roles, realists point out that the same that-clauses that serves as the objects of verbs expressing acts of assertion and denial function as the subjects for the predicates true and false.

Under this conception of propositions, we have managed to restrict our ontology solely to the entity that is the bearer of either justified true belief or warranted assertability (And to those entities which are subsets of propositions). In the first case, justification is accomplished through the expression of prior propositions to those we are stating (or the implicit assumptions that could be ventured upon inquiry as propositional statements), truth as a property of our proposition dependent upon the proposition itself for its existence (For, as Loux points out, truth value resides within our propositions. It is not an external feature of propositions), and belief as expressed through propositions. In the second situation, we can state that our beliefs are warranted by prior propositions and assertable by the physical expression and adherence to/of our beliefs. Now we can clearly see exactly where the discrepancy between the two theories figures into the two definitions of knowledge. We can see that, while both theories require propositions, it is a particular aspect of the nature of propositions that are under fire: the manner in which propositions can be "the bearers of truth values."

Let us, then, clarify the nature of truth values, and how they operate within a proposition. To do so, we shall take a look at why Dewey claims that truth comes down to a matter of assertability:

How can man make an anticipatory projection of the outcome of an activity in such a way as to direct the performance of an act which shall secure or avert that outcome? ...A solution was found when symbols came into existence. By means of symbols, whether gestures, words or more elaborate constructions, we act without acting. That is, we perform experiments by means of symbols which have results which are themselves only symbolized, and which do not therefore commit us to actual or existential consequences [Symbols] became abstract when they were freed from connection with any particular existential application and use [This] makes possible a system of conceptions related together as conceptions.

It must be-and I believe this to be acceptable to both correspondence and pragmatic theory-that propositions are constructed from what Dewey is referring to as symbols. Now, we have another ontological entity, but we see at the same time that propositions are comprised of these symbols and that, in admitting propositions, we have already admitted symbols; therefore, we should not see this as detracting from an attempt to provide a metaphysically reductive account of these two epistemological theories. We have still limited our discussion solely to those entities agreed upon by both Dewey and BonJour, and have made no further claims about them than that they somehow must figure into our ontology. Now, however, we have the tools necessary for showing that truth-values need not rely on anything except those entities already accepted by both theories. BonJour himself claims (as we quoted him earlier) that propositions are only analogies to the external world to which his version of knowledge corresponds.

Let us ask what it is, relying only on these entities that are necessary to the theories and nothing further, for a proposition to be true. For, even under correspondence theory, BonJour seems reluctant to admit the need for any further metaphysical analysis to arrive at knowledge. To examine this, lets take a simple proposition, borrowed from Loux:

(1) Socrates is courageous.

This proposition is employing three symbols: Socrates, being, and courageous. What BonJour believes his correspondence theory to claim is that the thing, which Socrates symbolizes, possesses the property symbolized by courage. Yet, we must ask how this is to be accomplished if we are ever to have any certainty that knowledge is actually possessed, rather than only stumbling upon knowledge accidentally. Therefore, we must have a manner both of creating symbols and of determining the extent to which they analogize the external world.

It seems obvious that the manner in which symbols are created, as Dewey understood, is by conceptualizing-or abstracting-components from our experiences of the perceived world. Likewise, then, they are analogous to the extent that, when applied through action to the perceived world, they agree with our prior formulation of them. But what is this to say? It is to that extent which our propositions are analogous to our experiences of the external world that they are true. This is precisely how they are first formed, and then applied: through and to our experiences.

We can see that we are moving rapidly towards a pragmatic understanding of epistemology, and yet we have not at this point diverged from correspondence theory to the extent that we have contradicted any of its tenants. Rather, we have simply examined the tenants of correspondence theory-and its reliance on propositions as being the bearers of knowledge-more closely than BonJour had originally done. When we earlier saw BonJour claim that a proposition is true if it corresponds to reality in whatever way, we see now that such correspondence, because our propositions rely on symbols, can be attained only through our experience of reality in whatever way. That way, specifically, is perceived reality. That is, our symbols are analogous to reality only insofar as they agree with our experiences of it, and are therefore claims about reality in a very particular way: the way in which we experience it. Now, we have seen the manner in which-without assuming the ontological nature of anything further than (a very broad sense of) reality and propositions and their associates (in like manner to both Dewey and BonJour)-we can understand BonJours definition of knowledge, without appealing to those entities that, as BonJour admits, we cannot understand objectively, and still have a truth value that appeals to the external world for its worth.

What this accomplishes for correspondence theory is to show that, while we may maintain a conception of knowledge as justified true belief, we can also recognize that knowledge has been attained (and is no longer accidental) because we now have a manner of determining whether or not our propositions are actually true. Let us proceed to examine the manner in which this is accomplished and attempt an actual proof of knowledge to show that it is in fact now of both a pragmatic and correspondent sort.

Let us return to our claim that "Socrates is courageous." This proposition, as stated earlier, consists of three symbols. The first is Socrates. What is it, then, that Socrates symbolizes? Does it represent an independent external object? Emphatically: no. When I utter the symbol Socrates, I am not relying on any ontological entity external of myself and the symbol I am expressing. What I am relying on is my experience of having read enough Plato, and taken enough philosophy courses, that I believe there was once a man named Socrates. And it need not be so that Socrates ever lived. My experiences can not lie to me. I experience what I believe to be an account of Socrates, and am only symbolizing those experiences in my claim that there was once a Socrates. I am not symbolizing the man who was Socrates--only my experiences. What I believe my symbol to represent is that he was a Greek, a philosopher, a man, a human being, etc. I believe this because I have experienced reliable reports to this effect. Yet, when I state, for instance, that Socrates is a human being, am I not appealing to ontological entities that our reductive metaphysics has not yet recognized (and is trying to avoid)? No, I am once again referring only to symbols. I am referring to the symbol human being, which I have created from my experiences. We can see that determining how any one symbol is derived would lead us along a very long chain of prior symbols. Is this method of developing symbols not then either eventually appealing to external objects or simply regressive infinitely? I conclude that it is not because, at some point, we do not rely on symbols; we rely on pre-philosophical notions. Was I asked to do so these notions could be formed as symbols and propositions but must ultimately be derived from raw sensory experience. Any experience could be elaborated upon to the point of an infinite regress, but my experience do not depend on that elaboration. They depend on the raw datum itself. In addition, to have sensory experience, we need not make any ontological claims about that reality which generates our experience. Indeed, we need not even make any claim about the nature of the experience itself, only to admit that, in some manner, we are experiencing some thing, and this thing can be conceptualized symbolically (Now, some might argue that this ability to conceptualize is a bold claim in itself, but unless they can argue against it without appealing to any concepts, I cannot imagine that I might need to address any such concerns). Symbolism only appears to be regressive because of its versatile nature, and the depth of sensory experience. And so, when I propose that there was once a man named Socrates, I am making a claim about the external world, but one that comes to me only through sensory experience, and does not rely on the nature of external objects for the truth of my experiences of them (In fact, my very claim that there is an external world is simply the result of experience). It requires only that the symbol I form be analogously applicable to the experience it represents. In like manner, we can consider being and courage without committing ourselves to any claims about the nature of properties or the process of possessing them; only that we admit we experience entities that are interpreted symbolically as properties which, in turn, are held by entities we experience as external objects. So, to say that it is true that Socrates is courageous is simply to say that the thing I symbolize as Socrates I also perceive as possessing a certain set of qualities I represent as courage. However, this does not make any claims about those things I am calling qualities, because even if they were wholly different than the manner in which I perceive and symbolize them, so long as my perceptions of them, and appropriated symbols, are consistent with my sensory experiences of them, I can describe them as qualities with the understanding that quality is simply an effective symbol to express certain experiences.

So far, we have seen that we can have a true claim, expressed through a proposition, which does rely on the external world; however, we have discovered that, because the claim relies on symbolism to express its analogy about the external world, the factual value of our claim resides in its correspondence with the real world through our experience of it. Therefore, because our claims are symbols, not of real world objects, but of sensory perception of real world objects, they are spatiotemporally bound. What this means is that when I make a true proposition, it is not appealing to a universal truth. It is appealing to the truth of a state of affairs as it is experienced perceptually. Yet, one might ask, does this not violate the rigorous nature of that sort of truth which BonJour feels his theory appeals? BonJour questions, when speaking of the truth requirement found in such pragmatic theories as Deweys: "Is such a [pragmatic] belief true because it produces success, since producing success is just what truth is (as the pragmatic theory claim)? Or isnt it exactly the other way around: doesnt the belief lead to success because it is true (in the correspondence sense)?" We discover that, once again, BonJours ascription of truth is confused by a failure to examine the manner in which knowledge is expressed (propositionally).

When the pragmatist-such as Dewey-claims that a belief is true because it produces success, the claim is that the symbols have been affirmed to operate admirably in a particular case. What this sort of truth accomplishes is the proof that our symbolic proposition, which was formulated as an analogy to one spatiotemporal experience (or a set of experiences), has been found once again applicable in another spatiotemporally bound experience, and therefore, our proposition (our analogy as to the current state of affairs) was true because it produced success. Why, though, if our proposition had been true in itself, need it be retested in this new situation? Because it was a claim about a certain set of symbols that were created from past experiences. Such claims, though they may be projected analogously to possible future situations, never cover in their actual formulation any future occurrences.

To say that a belief leads to success because it is true-as BonJour claims-is to say that our symbol was admirably applicable in the current situation, such that it was analogous to it. That is, our actions produced success because our beliefs were appropriately analogous to the current situation. Whether or not they would be analogous was predetermined by the scope of our formulated symbols, but it required their application to determine whether or not that scope was broad enough to cover the current state of affairs.

What we see is that, in both instances, the truth of our claim is dependent upon the extent to which our symbols, garnered from past experiences, are analogous to our current situation. To discover that our symbol is not analogous-that the proposition symbolically expressed is not analogous to the currently experienced state of affairs-is exactly what is required for a proposition to prove to be false. So now we see that in both instances, even in BonJours own attempt to refute a pragmatic sense of truth, the value of truth in our proposition remains the same. Because BonJour makes no special claims about the ontological nature of facts-and indeed deems such claims to be impossible to accurately provide-I can find no other manner in which to understand the warranting of a claim to truth. Now, also, the manner in which warranted assertability is a more concise definition of knowledge, even under the correspondence theory, becomes clear. If our propositions are only analogies as to the actual state of the world, then the manner in which they correspond to that reality is true only insofar as they are applicable to that reality. BonJour has stated that his theory, in itself, does not require a specific rule for how propositions correspond to external reality. If we take him at his word, then we can not only make use of, but also require a pragmatic theory to make his epistemology workable in the external world. What Dewey does is provide us with the rule that BonJour did not take into consideration. By connecting these two theories, we have a more complete epistemology: one that takes account of the ability of our knowledge to correspond to the actual world-what it means for a proposition to be true-and one that tells us the manner in which our knowledge may be discovered to be true and applied to the real world.

Now, we have shown how pragmatism and correspondence theories, both of which seek to limit their ontologies only to those entities absolutely necessary to their definition of knowledge, can reconcile their primary discrepancy (the truth requirement) by examining knowledge in the same metaphysically reductive spirit that lead them to these epistemological theories to begin with.

Having concluded that the conceptions of knowledge in both pragmatic and correspondence theories are therefore equivalent with one another, let us return to the debate over terminology, which earlier I attributed to stylistic differences. It would be ideal that, in all epistemologies requiring justified true belief, such reconciliation with warranted assertability could be reached. Unfortunately, such is not the case. This happy reunion is possible only because of our metaphysical reductivism. Under any epistemology in which the truth requirement requires that we propose an ontological character of a specific type to states of affairs (unlike BonJours "broadest sense"), this understanding would be compromised. For, while it is only a stylistic choice on BonJours part to maintain the truth requirement of knowledge, it is his unorthodoxically loose conception of truth that converts it so seamlessly into pragmatism.

Yet, it seems that perhaps the truth requirement, even after all this discussion, is still too loosely covered under pragmatism to be qualifying of the rigorous nature BonJour wishes it to have. It would appear, for instance, that under this theory, different perceivers of reality could have different versions of knowledge (true propositions) of the same state of affairs-that is, so long as we are willing to concede that the state of affairs of the external world is the same regardless of who is perceiving it. Although there is no particular reason this should be assumed to be the case, we can, for the sake of argument, assume that it is simply to rebuff such a rejection of our truth conception as would rely upon it.

Let us take an example where we appear to have knowledge under this conception of the truth requirement, because we seem to have warranted assertability. Over a regular period of time, the moons appearance in the night sky undergoes a variety of changes as it waxes and wanes from one phase to another. Now, if we require only that our propositions be assertably analogous to this event, then could we not claim to have knowledge that, over a period of 28 days (let us assume that this the exact amount of time the moon requires to move from one phase to the next), the moon goddess Shimbaba, pushes the moon through the ether of the heavens and, while pushing it in one direction, the shadow of her gown is cast over it in a progressive manner that, from full moon, begins to conceal our view of it until the new moon phase is reached. Here, she takes one night of rest, and then begins the journey backwards, and her gown flows away from the moon, revealing more and more of it each evening until it reaches its full phase, when she again spends one evening in recuperation. Wouldnt, under the concept of truth required by warranted assertability, this then constitute knowledge? Yes, indeed it would. We would have actual knowledge that Shimbaba exists, that she pushes the moon, and that her gown cause it to experience what we perceive as its phases.

Yet, let us remember that Shimbaba, her gown, the heavens, the ether, and the moon are only symbols. Our claim about these symbols is knowledge because, as BonJour states, it produces success. Yet, as we have already determined, symbols are always defined in one of two manners. Either they are created from the prephilosophical notions of our experiences, or they are comprised of further sets of symbols. Now, while we may have knowledge of how our symbols operate, we do not have knowledge of our symbols themselves because, by appealing to the rather whimsical notions of a goddesss gown and the ether of the heavens, we are relying on our prephilosophical notions of these symbols. Were we to examine them consciously, in a manner that would give us knowledge of them, we would move through a series of symbols that, while still representative of the same knowledge we originally had about how the moon moves through its phases, would become knowledge in themselves. Perhaps we would discover that that the "gown" was actually the shadow of the earth cast against the moon. This does not change the nature of the symbol itself. The symbol represented something casting a shadow over the moon. Simply because that something was not what we had prephilosophicaly supposed it to be does not change the fact that the symbol is still representative of our experience and that it was, in itself, an accurate symbol for what it represented. Once we have revised this notion, and claim that gravity revolves the moon around the earth and that the shadow of the earth against it causes its phases as various degrees of the sunlight are blocked by the earth, we have not significantly changed our symbols that our earlier statement has become false. What we have changed is the knowledge of the symbols themselves, which we never required for our original propositions, since our original symbols needed only be analogous, and not knowledge in themselves.

If this example seems ludicrous to the reader, let us consider how knowledge of the same events can be the same knowledge represented in different languages. How is it that "el nino es gordo" and "the boy is fat" can both be the same knowledge if they are using completely different symbols? This is because it is not the truth of the symbol that determines the truth of our proposition. The truth of our proposition is contained within the extent to which the symbol analogizes the external world. Calling gravity Shambaba is little different, in the end, than the difference between "gordo" and "fat" because the symbol still represents the same aspect of experience. It is a different question as to whether or not that aspect of our experiences of the external world which lead us to create specific symbols are, in themselves, knowledge.

It is precisely in this way that empirical science is performed, and it is in this way that such sciences produce knowledge. This is also why, though we may have knowledge of a particular set of experiences, it is unlikely that we shall ever run out of things to be scientific about. That is, it is unlikely that we shall ever run out of things of which to have knowledge, because the symbols that explain any particular knowledge can always be investigated until they, too, become knowledge, ad infinitum.

I believe I have now examined these epistemological theories to an extent under which they are, at the least, operable. By accepting my view about truth values, we can see that it is justifiable to claim that correspondence theory and pragmatic epistemology are, in their definitions of truth, ultimately the same theory. By applying Ockams Razor to knowledge, and assuming only that which we require and nothing further, we see that these theories are not in conflict with one another in the manner their authors presume. Further, although when discussing symbols and propositions I also postulated that there is an external reality besides these two entities, this assumption could be completely removed from the theory and it would still operate. We could, for instance, take Berkeleys stance that all objects are fundamentally mental, and my conclusion would still operate. Ultimately, all we need is to claim that there is something that our symbols analogize, and that nothing further need be said about that something to have knowledge of it. As radical as this might sound, so long as we accept knowledge to be fundamentally expressed as propositions, it appears to be an accurate claim.

Let us return, now, to a quote from Dewey we employed earlier, that "all matters of practical action involve an element of uncertainty; we can ascend from belief to knowledge only by isolating the latter from practical doing and making." We see now exactly how this is accurate under our current understanding of truth values. What this boils down to is that which I addressed earlier. The element of uncertainty is that, while our propositions may be knowledge with respect to particular practical actions, a fully competent theory-one that accounts for more than a single proposition-must examine not only the particular proposition and its symbols, but the nature of our symbols as well. Only in this manner can we establish such theories as "the theory of gravity" or "the first law of hydrodynamics." And only with such well-rounded theories will we be able to transcend from our knowledge of particular sets of experiences into useful accounts of the perceived world. Likewise, any theory requiring metaphysical realism will never suffice to fully account for our experiences, because our symbols will ultimately appeal to entities of which we have no experience, and hence of which we can have no knowledge.

Returning to the discussion of the regressive nature of the sort of knowledge proposed here, we can close the argument and see the results of what such a theory prescribes for philosophy. It may seem that knowledge is regressive because the warrantability requirement forces us to continually justify our knowledge with prior knowledge, yet this is not so. If all we wish of our knowledge is that it reveal what phase the moon will be in on a particular evening, all we require is a calendar, arithmetic and our knowledge of Shambaba. This is because our Shambaba theory, in itself, is knowledge of that which we wish to know. This is wonderful for the empirical sciences. It means that (as empirical science has always managed to do) such sciences can progress operating from a point at which knowledge of the subject matter is finite. Also, this is stupendous news for the philosopher because, while technology will be able to progress and build upon itself, resting on some ultimate point-whose justification is irrelevant so long as the point itself is knowledge-philosophers, no matter how many theories they propose, and how much knowledge they attain, will never reach an ultimate truth because we can always have a further knowledge of any particular proposition. Now, we have a metaphysically simple theory that is of use to a wide variety of scholars, wherein our only assumption is that knowledge is a concept that can be attained within the human realm, wherever its ultimate existence may lie.

Presenting a Vician Pragmatic Epistemology

This is an essay I wrote once upon a time. The baseness of the writing is exceeded only by the stupendous failure in the philosophy. I rather like it. Here goes:

I. Exposition of Pragmatic StrainsFifty years ago, John Dewey gave a series of lectures to a Japanese audience that would later be collected under the title Reconstruction of Philosophy. In it, Dewey exposes the failures of epistemology to date to cope with the temporal nature of experiences and truth. He attacks his contemporaries espousing analytic theories of knowledge, stating that "reason as a faculty separate from experience, introducing us to a superior region of universal truths begins now to strike us as remote, uninteresting and unimportant. Reason, as a Kantian faculty that introduces generality and regularity into experience, strikes us more and more as superfluous-the unnecessary creation of men addicted to traditional formalism and to elaborate terminology (Dewey, RIP 89)."

Dewey proclaims a new sort of knowledge, one which is centered on human experience and the process by which we systemize and categorize our experiences into theories that can be evaluated as true and false, because particular ideas or expressions in isolation, such as "chair" and "tree" have, in themselves, no truth value. They are not claims, they are concepts: the categorized and enumerated culmination of a collection of experience represented by a single word that analogizes all similar experiences.

This sort of pragmatic epistemology was revolutionary at the turn of the nineteenth century, erupting from thinkers like Dewey, Charles Sanders Pierce, and William James in a torrent of revulsion with the idealistic analytic philosophers who were their peers. Pragmatism has taken the philosophic world by storm, shifted the entire discourse of epistemology, and altered the way we think of science.

These revolutionary thinkers, and others like them, have contributed an invaluable resource to scholars of scholasticism. Dewey asks his readers "Must man transcend experience by some organ of unique character that carries him into the super-empirical? Failing this, must he wander skeptical and disillusioned? Or is human experience itself worth while in its purposes and its methods of guidance? Can it organize itself into stable courses or must it be sustained from without (Dewey, RIP 77)." By exposing the failures of previous philosophers, Dewey, in the Reconstruction, gives us a guide by which we may discover a theory of knowledge that will have value to the human world. We will be able to gain certain knowledge, and to know that we have it, without relying on any super-human reasoning powers that can attain truths outside of the realm of human experience for, even if there were such truths, it seems contradictory to say we could attain them if they lie outside our realm of experience.

Yet as ground breaking a work as the Reconstruction was at its time, as wide as the influence of pragmatism has been in the last century, these philosophers are not so wholly revolutionary as the casual philosophic historian might come to believe. An obscure Italian philosopher named Giambattista Vico was expounding on these ideas two centuries before Deweys book came out. Vicos name is almost as obscure as his writing, and getting at the philosophical implications of his New Science is at least as difficult as trying to abstract a coherent theory from the sum total of Plato. Often colloquial, historical and philological, not to mention translated from the Italian, Vicos New Science can be quite the challenge to those who wish to approach it from a purely philosophic (in the contemporary sense of the term, though perhaps Vico would disagree with such a usage) perspective.

However, if one wades through the cumbersome (and often bewildering) speculations on the history of social institutions and human nature, a clear picture does (painstakingly) emerge of a particularly Vician epistemology, and its resemblance to pragmatism is striking. The above (first) quote from Dewey, in fact, bears a striking resemblance to Vicos own "conceit of scholars" that the New Science is intended to debase. We shall see that Deweys attempt to reconstruct philosophy upon a pragmatic foundation was not nearly as revolutionary as he presented it to be.

II. Vician Epistemology

"Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness of the certain (#138)."

These two ideas, "true" and "certain," are central to any epistemology. Few philosophers would concede that knowledge can be attained unless it is, in some sense, certain and true. Our knowledge must, in some sense, be "true" to those things it references, and, for us to have actual knowledge, it must be a conscious realization, or in other words, it must be "certain."

How, then, might we attain these two in a Vician sense? The easiest to explain is the certain. "Consciousness of the certain" seems, for Vico, to mean that we may rest assured in our belief that a thing "is" as we say it is. What does it mean, then, that the human being must be the "author" of the certain? How, for instance, may I be "certain" that there is a tree outside of my window? Classic philosophy would say (something to the effect that) the "tree" itself is an entity outside of myself, and that my experience allows me to propose that it exists, which my reason then confirms. Yet this is not the sense of "certain" that Vico gives us. In a Vician sense, I am certain there is a tree because "tree" is a thing of my own making. I have, after experiencing many like things which others refer to as "tree" developed my own concept of what constitutes a tree, and have analogously applied this term to the experience I have when glancing out my window. I have not simply applied the term "tree" to a set of experiences, I have created the tree outside my window from my experience. Before the creative process, all I had was the sensation of greenness and brownness with certain modulations of perspective that denote depth, shadow, texture, etc. It is not the actual object outside my window of which I am certain but, rather, it is that set of sensations to which I apply the concept "tree."

Now that I am certain of my tree, how might I go about showing that my claim "there is a tree outside my window" is true? I may do so by using other such concepts (other things of which I am certain) to show that, rationally, if one ascribes to a similar set of tropes as those which I am employing (and we assume others will, since, as we already saw, I took the concept "tree" from those others who shared presumably similar experiences and also employed the term), then it must be true that this thing outside my window is in fact a tree. Humans, therefore, are authors of first the certain, and then the true, by the way in which that which is certain is made so by relation to other things that are certain.

Yet, behind these claims of what is certain and true lies an intricate groundwork of language, logic and symbolism. This is where we turn to the philosophic historian in Vico for illumination. Proposing, "that which is metaphysics insofar as it contemplates things in all the forms of their being, is logic insofar as it considers things in all the forms by which they may be signified (#400)," Vico begins to provide us with the manner in which we will understand how knowledge comes to us pre-philosophically, because, in the Vician history, "truth" is not available to human beings (whom he refers to as gentiles) until a very late stage in our development. This leads us along a very serious examination of language and its creative process, by which we develop those concepts of which we will later claim are true.

Let us pause for a moment here, however, for I have perhaps given the impression that a clear and distinct epistemology is present in The New Science. In the form of an explicit epistemology, however, this is not the case. What are present in Vico are the concepts necessary to the development of an epistemology. Later in this paper, we shall see how these concepts are precisely those employed by pragmatic epistemology and it is in this manner that I claim Vico has a specific epistemological standpoint, since pragmatism seems to be the natural result of the groundwork Vico provides.

Yet, central to discussions of epistemology are "certainty" and "truth", so let us now see the manner in which these arise through Vicos "Poetic Logic."

Vico states that "In such a logic, sprung from such a metaphysics, the first poets had to give names to things from the most particular and the most sensible ideas (#406)." Though seemingly a claim so common sense to be almost superfluous, this is, nonetheless, where our discussion truly begins. The "poets," as Vico terms them, are simply the early men who thought in a manner devoid of the complex rationality that currently plagues man. This first claim is simply that these men, who had no words and only raw experiences, could not create concepts such as "gravity" or "beautiful." For such men, the connections between one tree and another had yet to be established. Therefore, if a word for "tree" were developed, it would be for a particular tree, rather than all trees, and it would be, rather than "the maple with a five pronged leaf that sheds its foliage into the lake in the winter," would be something more like "the green thing over there that tastes bad." Such a concept would be centered around those experiences inextricable from human life, such as hunger. When Vico claims the first word is for the angry lightning god, the term is nothing like our term "storm." This lightning god is the same person each storm. The connection between one storm and the next as separate but similar entities has yet to be identified, and so we have the angry lightning god returning to throw lightning and shout at us again. In addition, the feeling evoked, fear, is inextricable to the name for this malevolent deity, as is the instinct to flee into the cave, where his rain and lightning do not reach. Though the term refers to an entity wholly philosophy dissimilar to what we mean when we call something a "thunder storm," it nevertheless has the same result for directed human action: we do what is necessary to avoid being drenched and struck by lightning. This, we shall see, is what makes such a theory pragmatic because, though we avoid the rain and lightning by simply going inside our homes, while the first men stop copulating under the open and cower in caves until the gods rage is abated, these actions are, in essence, analogous. Both the rational and first man simply do what is necessary to master their environment. Who can blame the first men for thinking that to do so they had to appease a particular god? How were they to know each storm was different, and was the result of thunderheads clashing, rather than some god sickened by their vulgarity punishing them?

Disregarding the scholastic praiseworthiness of such earlier conceptions, let us go on to see how the concept of "the green thing over there that tastes bad" develops into "trees." Vico claims there are four characteristics of language of particular significance to the development of ideas: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. He claims that "the most luminous [of these first tropes] and therefore the most necessary and frequent is metaphor (#404)."

Obviously, to breech the gap between one tree and the next, by creating a concept which applies to both, metaphor is invaluable. Yet, it is, as Vico states, not an analogy between the greenness of one tree to the next, nor the shape of the leaves of one to another, that causes such concepts as "trees" to arise. Rather "by identity not of proportion but (to speak scholastically) of predictability, allegories signify the diverse species or the diverse individuals comprised under these genera (#403)." Here, we see that it is the experience, not the reason, that creates "trees." It is because both leaves make one ill when eaten that the first men come to realize they are the same plant, not because of their leaf shape. This, for a modern man, is an extremely difficult concept to imagine, but if we attempt to place ourselves in the shoes (well bare feet, but were talking metaphors here!) of these first men, we see that likening trees to one another based on the shape of their leaves would be silly. Suddenly, everything with leaves would be a tree, or even anything in that shape. Starfish would become trees. Even animal tracks would become trees if the animal had the right number of toes! But wait, we said shape of the leaf, so how can I claim animal tracks would be considered trees!? Yet you would have forgotten that we are trying to discover how the concept of "leaf" is created in the first place: because of its shape? No, it is only sensible to agree with Vico on this point, for only the most base of human experiences (pain, hunger, longing) would draw correlations between objects.

Rationality, then, can only be developed later. By rationalities very nature, it is organizing the relationship of concepts to one another. As Vico says "the first founders of humanity applied themselves to a sensory topics, by which they brought together those properties or qualities or relations of individuals and species which we, so to speak, concrete, and from these created their poetic genera (#495)." It would only be when enough of these concepts were created that they could be related to one another (as concepts) that reason would begin to emerge, and so, it is perhaps not fantastic at all to say that it would take an entire age of man to bring forth the first philosophical concepts and, with them, the ability to have "truth."

III. The Nature of Poetic Truth

Though Vico claims that it is not until the second age men can attain "truth," it would seem that this not precisely the case. The distinction between the true and the certain within Vico is vague (at least to me), and it seems to often be redundant to express the two as separate qualities. In fact, it is quite clear that they are inseperable for Vico, and so we must admit that, in the first age when men may be certain (for they are able to author ideas poetically), they must as well have some sense of the true. Perhaps this is not the same sense of "truth" Vico ascribes to the philosophers, but there is, nevertheless, a sense in which those poetic certainties are "true." Employing both Dewey and James, let us see now how Vicos concept of prephilosophic notions applies to pragmatic conceptions of truth.

Vico makes much to do of the Greek myths, placing within them the actual, true history of mankind. He claims "that since the first men of the gentile world had the simplicity of children, who are truthful by nature, the first fables could not feign anything false; they must therefore have been, as they have been defined above, true narrations (#408)." Now perhaps this only means that, to those of us who can rationalize, these myths become true, but the potentiality of being true would be there regardless, and so, we can say that, in an abstract sense, such narrations were true all along. Assuming this to be the case, how, then, are we to understand the myths of gods and monsters as true accounts of the prephilosophic world? I have been preaching a correlation to John Dewey, and here we begin to uncover it: "The gods, whatever their origin and original traits, became idealized projections of the selected and matured achievements which the Greeks admired among their mortal selves. The gods were like mortals, but mortals living only the lives which men would wish to live, with power intensified, beauty perfected, and wisdom ripened (Dewey, RIP 95)."

What this claim of Vicos, elaborated on by Dewey, says then is that the myths are true symbolically. They are analogies for the lives of men, not accounts of the deeds of individuals. Vico, of course, also makes this apparent, and we in no way need Dewey to understand it. However, what we will show is rather that we need Vico to understand Dewey.

Continuing with Dewey, we find an example in Reconstruction of Philosophy very much along Vician lines: "Suppose a busy infant puts his finger in the fire; the doing is random, aimless, without intention or reflection. But something happens in consequence. The child undergoes heat, he suffers pain. The doing and undergoing, the reaching and the burn, are connected. One comes to suggest and mean the other. Then there is experience in a vital and significant sense (Dewey, RIP 83)."

This example is exactly the manner in which Vicos poets derive their concepts. Yet, for the poets to create the principles that will become human civilization, and for Deweys "curious infant" to reach a point where it becomes a human intelligence, these feelings must be taken one step further. Yet, it is not the manner in which classic philosophy tells us that this further step must be taken. Classical epistemology would claim that these instances must illuminate in us the eternal truths of the danger of fire or the love and terror of gods. Yet Vico tells us we must, then, create the concept of "burning" which will contain the concept of "avoid me!" and the concept of gods which will explain, to the best of our abilities, the nature of humanity.

In this sense, then, the Greek gods truly exist. It is the conceit of scholars, as Vico calls it, that leads the philosophers to believe the various "Homer"-s are referring to gods they actually believe exist, because their beliefs do not operate the way the philosophers beliefs do. To them, to say that Ares is the god of war is just to say that the human race possess certain characteristics and potentials that, in total, create a particular image. The actions of that image, when made into fables, then, give an accurate account of the accomplishments and failures of these characteristics within the gentile nations. They tell us which sorts of people have gone to war with which other sorts when Ares fights Apollo. They are a fabled version of history because it is the only sort of history these first men could create. Why does Ares appear every time there is a war between two people? Because Ares does not refer to what modern scholars consider separate entities: Ares reappears to once again make war because "Ares" is any people hostile to the tribe telling the story.

These first words, which will result in a pragmatic epistemology, arise "the interaction of organism and environment, resulting in some adaptation which from secures utilization of the latter, is the primary fact, the basic category (Dewey, RIP 83)." In this manner, we see that these concepts are not simply words. They are creations; they are tools. This is perhaps what Vico had in mind when he claimed that "(1) That the first men of the gentile world conceived ideas of things by imaginative characters of animate and mute substances. (2) That they expressed themselves by means of gestures or physical objects which had natural relations with the ideas (3) That they thus expressed themselves by a language with natural significations (#431)."

This manner of employing concepts as tools will eventually, naturally, progress into rationality, when concepts must arise to deal with concepts between one another. When thunder father is so often accompanied by the life giving mother rain, theories will eventually arise to explain the relation between the two, giving us myths of seasons and natural occurrences. When enough of these "myths" have been generated, we must then create even more elaborate myths to explain how these relational myths interact, until we reach a point where abstract thinking arises from purely concrete universals. The conceit of scholars, the failure of idealist philosophy, is the failure to recognize that such concepts underwent a long generative process.

We see then that these concepts such as the primitive "tree" and Jove are actually true insofar as the first men were able to express themselves. This is the poetic truth. Ideas are true because of their utility. Jove is real, but only insofar as it really produces those feelings that cause the first men to enter the cave. But then, those feelings were the entirety of the claim to begin with. There was no concept of what a "god" is if Jove is the first word, no concept of immortality, and no concept of the Ten Commandments. It was just a summation of sensations. It was the birth of science, not a failure of it. The rationalists cannot fault the first men unless they use the concepts of the first men. In such terms, the only argument that could be made when "Pa" was first uttered was "pa."

IV. Filling Holes in Pragmatism with Vician Theory

What reason affords us, as the pragmatists employ it, is the ability to relate our concepts to one another. This is one of the most stunning achievements of mankind, which sets him above the realm of mere animals. Yet, Vico warns us that we must not fall into the conceit of scholars-that we must not become trapped within our own idealism. The corruption of the third age is the result of dogmatic worship of the ideals that are the rational principles that allow us to relate our pre-rational principles to one another. For instance: the danger of following the doctrine of gravity dogmatically, when the theory was proposed only to explain why one poetic object (like "ball") sensitively falls towards another (the "ground"). Here, we must separate the relational theory from the non-rational entities it relates. For, though "ball" can be discussed in rational terms ("is that a ball?" "This ball is red" "A ball is round"), those sensitive qualities to which a thing must ascribe to be considered a "ball" are wholly arbitrary. They are not, in fact, rational at all. They are, as Vico claims, inventive.

Now, by in large, we have here relegated our talk of poetic objects largely to the level of everyday entities, such as trees and balls. Vico, on the other hand, most often speaks of them in relation to institutions and overarching principles of human nature. However, it is not to slight Vicos discovery that we have confined this discussion to those simpler objects-it is simply the case that it is easier to discuss the sensations involved in "tree" than in "the institution of marriage" or "Achilles." We do not here slight Vicos master key. Instead, we make it far more useful and broad in context, in that we may see how it applies even today (and every day) to the human world within which we are inescapably submerged. More specifically, we make it far more useful to pragmatism.

We are now drawing near our conclusion of this discussion, where we will see the ultimate use of Vico to the Pragmatists. Before we do, though, I would like to return the readers attention to the earlier claim that, to argue against the first mans "Jove," "Jove," or at best "Not Jove," would be the only sort of argument the we could make without giving into the conceit of scholars. This is, of course, because that, according to Vico, this was the first concept of the human world. Because it was a pre-rational concept, because it is the first word, we cannot attempt to employ later concepts to argue against it since there would be no concept that did not (in some manner) find

Destroy My right foot is a twelve, while my left is half a size larger. When it gets cold, when I'm near the ocean, or when I reach those other places that make the old say "oi vay," my right foot gently aches and throbs. The reason for this is that, when I was eleven, a fat boy sat on it and smashed every last bone within. Sean was my neighbor growing up (is still at his parents' home besides my parents' home in Ridgecrest). His father was an ex-hippy fireman who liked to collect anything. The man could carve you a statue, build a car from aparantly nothing but rusty metal sheets, or show you any number of wonderous, old, broken and very large things that littered his back yard. One year, he aquired the bottom half of a crane. I'm not sure that's what it actually was, but a stand for something seems like a good bet. A rectangular metal frame with four iron bars that came up from the frame's corners, forming the skeleton of a pyramid. Among the garbage, car husks and woodpiles, there were a number of coils of rope. One of these was about as thick as an eleven year-old's wrist. Against the eastern fence of their spacious backyard was a small, shaded area beneath a fruitless maple. I was big on climbing trees when I was young, which often meant that other children around me were big on it, too. We would spend hours in trees (Let's not even start reminicing about tree houses, but I can tell you that Jane, Amy and Gwen's beat the hell out of the one at the Jensons'). One day, Sean and I got the brilliant idea of making a swing out of the branch in his mother's maple (plants and the compost heap were the only thing that you cold really think of as the Farrel's Mothers', with every other empty foot of space being occupied by the father's various contraptions). So we took the long, wide rope and added one pyramid, which we then hung from said tree. Now, I should point out that this metal frame wasn't the potential stand of some crane you'd use as a toy for children. This was something you'd mount on the back of a large truck if you wanted to haul the trunks of hardwoods into the back of the giant, broken down brown truck that you'd eventually carve life-sized, wild west style Indians out of with a chainsaw. This was, in short, a rather large piece of metal. The rope, for all its width, was old, stiff and frayed. Stale is the word that comes to mind when I think of it, but I'm not sure a rope can rust. If one could, this thing would have been akin to one of those tarnished black kettles you'd expect some cranky old coot with warts all over her nose to pour lizard's eyes, bat wings, snake tongues and cabbage soup into. The point being: the rope was a piece of shit. Now, once this "swing" had been made, we did what you might expect--we swung. Sean and I, on opposite sides of the frame, enjoyed about two minutes of swinging before the whole thing came crashing to the ground. My foot, trapped beneath it, fell six feet beneath the weight of the metal, mysaelf, and a boy who outweighed the frame and I put together. My foot looked fine, at first. I remember looking at it and thinking, somewhere between screaming "shit shit shit shit shit shit shit" at the top of my lungs, that there didn't appear to be anything wrong with my foot except for two tiny cuts across the middle of its arch. Once my parents carried me inside, I even remember Sean's older brother making a joke that perhaps nothing was wrong at all, and I had simply hurt a toe. Dusty, the cat I was wringing the life out of in an attempt by mother to provide me something comforting to hold onto, would, perhaps, have disagreed with Daniel if he had had the breath to meow a rebuttle. However, being strangled at the time (not to mention being a cat), Dusty kept silent on the matter. Once I reached the hospital and had more or less stopped screaming, we were made to wait an amount of time to see a doctor that seemed unfairly long to me. Eventually, the doctor revealed to my father that my foot wasn't just broken--it was well and thoroughly smashed. I think I must have even broken the toes. If you've ever read www.realultimatepower.com's Pump Up section, you might be familiar with a story about a man trapped beneath a building cut down by a ninja whose feet explode from blood pressure. Some of you probably laughed at the idea. I did not. I cringed. Remember those two little cuts I'd mentioned? Those weren't cuts--those were ruptures. Two blood vessels had exploded in my foot, and proceeded to bleed slowly for the next two weeks. I eventually got a lot of sympathy and a cool black and green cast out of the bargain, but I want to give you all the following warning: avoid the overwieght at all costs. All those cruel jokes you made when you were young that they could kill you by squatting upon you were absolutely accurate. Place a foot beneath a fat child and it will explode into shards of bone and flesh that will still make you squirm and writhe in remembered agony, thirteen years later, as you tell this story to yourself because you can't think of anything better to post on your myspace.

That I am used to

I don't mean to sound gay or anything, but I heart Depeche Mode. Aquired last night: Romero's Land of the Dead & the new Depeche Mode. Fuck yeah. Here goes with the babbling. There are a few stories in here, but I think I'll just see what funny tangents I can come up with along the way of telling them. This is just a nice example of how I live every day under the pressure of utter terror from the world around me.

Let me tell you a little something about how addicted I am to my computer. I have a number of forums I patrol as well as shitty html and flash multiplayer games, newsletters, etc, that I subscirbe to. Most importantly, I have my myspace and my email--my preferred method of communication with people who aren't dead authors since, as we all know, telephones are for women and society is for alcoholics (It's true--Shakespeare said it somewhere in Hamlet). All of these things to which I subscribe--or at least many of them--send email notifications to my yahoo account when messages, comments, threads and replies are posted to me. In turn, my yahoo email account sends to my (on as often as my computer) yahoo messanger account a little signal that causes messanger to create an item in my little tool bar by the clock (which I imagine has a name of some sort). Along with the notification-of-email-received icon, the messanger service plays a sound that I have come to think of as a laser cannon shooting, hitting a small army of robotic rabbits that explode and shatter into ecelectrified shards which fly into the face of my speakers and richocette off into my ears.

My computer is (as are many of yours, I imagine), always on except for that brief moment in between shutting down and restarting when the soothing hum and whiz of... whatever the humming, wizzing pieces of metal and plastic in a computer are... stalls for a moment, as if taking a deep breath before Spybot once again fixes whatever browsing blunders I've made within the last six or seven days (I'm not computer savy--I just don't care. It's a nice medium. Get over it). Now, although my computer is always on, this does not mean that I am always present. Often (er... rarely), I will be somewhere else about my apartment like, for instance, on my hopelessly comfortable and loudly lime green, valore coated chair, reading a book (which I moved from the living room into my bedroom where it's now a foot from my computer. Whatever). Well, to account for the possibility that I will, due to my absence from my terminal, become tardy in a response, I turn my speakers up very fucking loud. This way the laser-induced-explosion-of-hundreds-of-robotic-bunnies noise will resound throughout my apartment that is nearly too small to contain it until, with the same precision as the aim on a beam of light, the sound strikes my ear and motivates me to typing.

The point of this unneccessarily long explanation of the sound of my... wait... what was I explaining?

Oh! My little brother sent me a message on myspace and I was reading, but the noise made me aware I'd gotten an email, and the email made me aware I'd gotten a message. That's the short version. So there I am, reading a myspace message from my little brother. Before we continue (or, more properly, begin) the punchline that this story is going to build up to, I'm first going to tell you about how I aquired the book I was reading when my speakers exploded insane loudly in my ears, causing me to fall flat out of the chair I had been perched upon as I leaned back at a precarious angle away from my computer (since, green chair now present or not, I rarely leave my computer chair when I'm home).

I have written a little story about getting confused in a Borders already, and, since it related to the book at (now in) hand, let's counterbalance my corporate patronage by telling you a story about the book hunt at Barnes & Nobles.

There is a novel I have been awaiting the release of for something like three years. It's the newest addition to an overly long and wrought series of fantasy fiction that has no particular worth or merit. And yet, to date, I've read around twelve thousand pages of it (if we count in paper-back pages). Well, I had become vaguely aware that the novel would be released sometime before christmas and, as my previous story about Borders will illuminate, had recently become aware that it was due in October. So, one evening, I went off to Barne's & Nobles to find a novel.

I am not the sort of person who asks for assistance. I don't want to go ask people for things. I don't want them to ask me what I think of the book or if it's good or have I heard of susie-the-fuck-who-cares-shut-up-and-sell-me-something. I hate these critters that linger behind every shelf asking me if I'm "finding everything alright." No! If I was finding everything alright, I wouldn't be standing here. There's your answer--now fuck off. The whole "could you tell me where..." part never seems to escape my lips. I can't talk to strangers--it just doesn't work for me. I get frustrated and panic and can't remember what I'm doing there.

So I go into the three story Barnes & Nobles beginning my quest.

First, we head over to the escalator. This takes us past the security guard who gives us that "don't steal anything" eye. I hate him. It worries me. I am afraid that, when I'm going out the store, the check-out girl will have forgotten to deactivate the anti-theft tag cleverly hidden in the book's spine (which won't drop out until I've spilled a couple cups of coffee on the cover). I think the natural assumption with such a supposing and intimidating forty year-old mexican, who wares his sunglasses at ten o'clock in the evening on a drizzly winter night, is that, upon hearing those alarms go off, he's going to pull out that pistol that I've always been too embarassed to check whether or not is actually a flashlight and blow me the fuck away before I have time to turn around and plead "No! It's just a mistake."

But we make it past the guard on the way in--that's how they trap you: You can't leave without the books or you'll have you're head blown off, and you can't leave with the books unless you give the mean looking blonde girl all your money.

That's a worry for later. First we have to find our novel. So five steps and then we're at the foot of the escalator. Wait! The new releases! Damned fool. If we turn around now, the guard will become warry of us, which will make the blowing-off of the face more likely when the anti-theft tag is accidently left active by the snooty looking blonde girl who is probably going to sneer at us when we turn around at the foot of the escalator like a dumbass and bumb into the person behind us because we didn't know what the hell we were doing. So don't turn around--the moment is past. If the book is in the new releases, then it's lost to us for now. Check upstairs first.

Up we ride. There's an asian boy in front of you, letting the escalator carry him slowly along. If he would walk five simple steps to quicken his pace, you would arrive just ahead of the stroller passing by the escalator's depot. But he won't. And we arrive just in time to squeeze ourself thin so as not to disturb the quiet soccer-mother who thinks some heroin-addicted-imaging young man dressed all in black has no place among decent, respectable soccer mom's browsing the cookbook section (or the Oprah's book club stand beside it--we don't want to watch her long enough to find out).

So squeeze past and then make the long walk by the toys. There are shelves of monopolies and calendars: Star Wars board games and pictures, Sin City calendars, some girls in bathing suits on glossy paper. Wait! We walk down that corridor and it's a dead-end. A young couple with a boy checking out the latest release of something to do with Wookies. They are blocking our path and we don't want to say the "excuse me." What if he's not very nice? He doesn't look very nice. What if he won't move? Better to walk past the history section and around him.

And now, salvation! the second escalator. This leads up to floor three where the fictions live. It's always dark and feels like an attic. Sweet smell of... perfume? Not a pretty girl. Not here, not now. You can't be looking for such a silly novel in front of a pretty young thing who's browsing the literature opposite you! Let's puruse the latest release by Tom Robbins. You like literature and books and words and... stuff, right? Yeah, that's it. She think's you're smart, now. Eventually, she goes away, and then you're free to flee to the fiction (and to use too much aliteration).

There! A stand with the series on it. But they're all paper backs. You rushed over here for nothing. Shit! The old man in the corner saw you rush. He probably thinks you're a psycho. Doesn't Sartre say that makes you a psycho? But I think Hardy would agree that it's not being a psycho that's bad--it's letting other people think you're one. So walk slower. They're just paper backs. This book is going to be in hard cover. So walk to all the forward facing, glossy pictures done by amateur painters and look for your book. Walk slowly. It's only ten feet. Walk... paid too much attention to walking slowly and not enough to walking. Tripped. Fell over. It's not being a fool that matter... Pretend no one noticed.

There! No. That's the right painter who did the cover, but the wrong book. You can tell because the painting looks grainy and cheap, as if it belongs on a full color page of some Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition revised rules book. Right painter--that's a good sign. Now for the book. But it's not there.

Check the shelves. Perhaps there's a copy with the author's other works. Perhaps there's one hidden in the small-space behind all these paper backs where the extra copies are kept. Perhaps there's one that you're simply glancing over. Perhaps there's one... it's not here. Perhaps someone will have picked it up and browsed the books in other places, setting it down on the wrong shelf. Search the whole fantasy section--it's only five shelves.

Alright, well, let's try the comic section. It's fantasy and comics are big these days. It seems a reasonable place to expect someone to discard a copy they didn't want as much as the newest chapter of Berserk. You're not the only one who only has thirty dollars to spend on books. Someone else, much like you, probably found something better and put a copy down in the literature section. Or the poetry section. Or the book club section.

Or it's not here. Or it's sold out. Or the security guard isn't as swift on the draw as you fear him to be, and that stupid asian kid who blocked you into the carriage corner getting off the escalator stole the last copy and ran out of the store with it and now you're just fucked and have to walk home empty handed in the rain. Or you're freaking out over a book in a series you don't particularly care for and that's not how things are supposed to go.

But wait! The new releases! You passed them on the way up. You know the floors. Squint you eyes so the world goes blurry and you don't have to see it. Good. Now, walk the path in your memory, outlined by these handy colors, over to the down escalator. Once more around, and then down again. Open your eyes now, fool boy! Look at the new releases. Can you find it on your way down? It's the only thing you want, here. You've been here more than half an hour. You'd damned well better buy something.

The new releases are on three octagonal stands. You scour them for the better part of twenty minutes. You make a list and check it twice, then you look at every book under every book. It's not here.

But the overstock are on the two foot tall shelves set into the octaganol displays! What if there's a copy lurking there? Fifteen more minutes spent covering just as few feet and you still can't find it. She's not sneering--she's smug. That little bitch. I'd like to hit her in the face with the four books I'm holding while I search for the possibility that my book lies beneath. But there's the guard, staring at you directly--he thinks you're grabbing as many books as you can carry and are about to run. He might blast you out of principle. You'd do the same to him if you thought you could and he doesn't look bright enough to think he can't. Don't throw the books. There you are. Stacked back as neatly as they came--better, even! What thief would do such a pleasant thing? Surely the guard's fears are quelled, even if his resentment now begins to burn.

Dejection. Emotional devestation. An hour wasted in vain pursuit. Border's closes in five minutes, and you won't make it. You won't get the book--if not today, then never. Your hang heads low in resignation and you stumble towards the door.

Something in your memory tugs your eyes towards the right of your plodding boots. That miniature reprodocction of a painting on the "Best of worthless crap" display near the door pulls at your memory. Stand up straight. Face right. Look at the display. It's a massive display. It's got to be ten feet tall and at least five wide. And it's stacked with about a hundred copies of your novel. You were so damn focused on getting to the escalator without bodily harm that you didn't notice that the first thing that greeted you when you walked in wasn't the guards (lack of a) gun at all, but instead was a giant display, so large it blocks half the store's damned doorway, of exactly the book you've spent the past hour now searching for. You fucking asshole.

We pay for the book and leave. We are singing in the rain. We are soaking the dust cover, but those things just make noise when you man-handle the novel anyway, so it's alright. You have your book. The blonde wasn't even at the counter anymore. It was a nice fat girl. She was pleasant, and only smiled. She hardly even spoke. That wasn't so bad, was it? A wonderful end to the evening.

A few days later and you've finally started reading the book you worked so hard to purchase when the exploding-bunnies sound hits your eardrums like a rocket crashing against the Earth's envelope of air. It's a message from Marcus, you're little brother. It reads:

Sup dudette. Going to Knotts this Saturday with a bunch of friends. I'm in stats at the moment. This jerk is talkin' about Star Trek; I pwnd his ass. Try and tell me what Kuplah means in Klingon. Now he thinks he's one up on me cause he "knows" the space-time continium theory. What? I know more Klingon. Any way, I've been reading through your weblogs(Not blogs! Blogs is for sissies and Christians! We are not sissiaes nor are we Christians), they are quite good. You really need to pursue your writing man, you rock at it. It's amazing how I can read thru(Eh? eh? It's a word!) a famed author like Robert Jordan and be able to say, "My bro's better than you... he knows humor... he knows that only nerdy little fucks, who jerk off to the girls getting enslaved in your book, like overwinded crap, and he doesn't want those morons reading his stuff anyway."

The punchline is that the book I had bought and was reading was Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time Part 12.

Creepy crawlies

Rebecca reminded me of a story after the last one I'd posted. We're going to go back underground for this one, then swing back around to the emberassment of junior highschool later on today.

Ridgecrest is a dusty little town in the middle of a valley. It used to be covered with silver mines, I'm told. Some of these still lurk up in the hills, barricaded by barbed and razored wire, boarded over and blocked with concrete. Some collapsed decades ago. Some rare mines still hide beneath the reflection of the heat.

I was not terribly popular in high school. Don't get me wrong--this is a funny story. But I wasn't, so I hung out with the nerdy culture-club, trenchcoat mafia kinda kids (without the grenades. We had always planned on agent orange in the air conditioning). Anyway, somehow or another, we heard stories from the other lurking wannabes that there was a cult of satanists who used the caves for... for something that would probably be pretty cool to stumble in on, I suppose. That's about as far as I've ever thought it through.

So, at fifteen, we took David's old van up into the hills and started prowling. Their are many mines up in those hills. Dark and smelling of rats and stale dirt. They were always colder than the desert, like well air-conditioned rooms.

Some were vertical. These, I would climb a few feet down into while my friends fretted and refused to join me. Sometimes, you could hear a whole court of pigeons cooing deep inside them and--in response to a yell--the flutter of a dozen wings.

Very rarely, you will come across a horizontal mine. And, if you're particularly lucky, it won't be collapsed after ten feet. We spent years and countless weekends exploring these, but never found the Satanic Caves.

So we did what any rational fifteen year old boys who had had our hopes dashed upon the dirt would do: we invented them. There was one cave that had been blocked by iron struts during some long past decade. Now, the struts were bent outwards, like jagged teeth, bordering a gap two feet tall that led into the best mine, which went hundreds of feet into the hillside. The jagged teeth around the opening isn't my own metaphor--I get it from the demonic eyes someone had placed at the perfect position on the rock's outer surface to give the passer-by this impression.

The Satanic Cave was gorgeous. I haven't been up there in a few, but not all that many, years. The first hundred feet or so, light still leaks in. The floor here is littered with head-sized boulders that have dropped over the years from the cave's ceiling. You can see the boring holes where some prospector had once hoped to find the route of a wayward vein. You can see mice and rats scurry past and out of the way of your crashing clomp along the shale floor. But further back, there are no rats, no spiders, no snakes, no scorpions, and there is no light.

Let's get some dimensions before we get any further in. At most places, it's hard to imagine that the mine is more than four feet wide. But it's often six to eight feet tall, depending on the amount of debris piled upon the floor.

The first time it opens up is at a junction of what appears to have been the beginnings of a branching off, once upon a time. A tube goes five feet in another direction, but stops before it's really begun, leaving a circle space with a diameter of about ten feet. One of the walls has a block broken out of it, providing a perfect, bhuddist shrine sized cranny with a flat bottom. This whole section of wall is spray-painted glossy black. This part wasn't our doing in my recollection, but the candles melted all across it are. I'm not sure what the idea with that was. We got more intricate later--this was a first and foolish attempt.

The next feature is a long, narrow stretch where the wall on your left (if you're walking deeper into the mine) is nearly smooth. We'll call this the mural, and get back to it later, because it's at the heart of our story.

Next came the first gallery. I called them this out of a reference to something from Forgotten Realms (Dungeons & Dragons, for you < geeks). There are two of these. The first is about thirty feet tall. It once opened onto an air vent that has long collapsed. We've actually found the other end of it from outside and further up the mountain, but it's shallow and not much to speak of. But the gallery itself is very frightening when you're young and have an overactive imagination. There is a ledge above the main corridor that recesses into the wall about six feet, and rotting support beams that braces the slowly caving sides of the mine's airshaft.

From the lowest of these supports beams, we hung the Guest Book on a piece of twine. It was just a binder with paper. We checked it every weekend and, to our dismay, always found it either tattered, burned or unsigned. Until one night, there was a message. I can't recall it now. But we wrote a few notes to one another, our group and the mysterious others. We kept the guestbooks there for many years, but got few responses other than graffiti and vandalism.

Well, continuing down the cave, past the first gallery that, despite its height, is only fifteen or so feet long. Next comes the second gallery. It's much like the first, but less impressive. After this, you reach the End Room. Here, the cave floor narrows and rises as if leading to a tiny door in some early disney cartoon. At the very end of the corridor, you'll find only two feet of space to squirm through but, once you slither past, the cavern opens into a wide, round room. This is the largest identifiable "room" within the mine. We once tried to play Dungeons and Dragons in it, but it smelled a lot like shit, and was more than a little stuffy.

Now, on our way out of the mine, and after fruitless years of searching for the Satanist Caves, we come again across that smooth ten feet of wall between the first room and the first gallery. This wall eventually became the mural. What we painted here was extremely intricate and more than a little emberassing (I would like to co-incriminate David and Rebecca with myself as long as I'm telling this story, you can find and mock them on my friends panel).

If you were a dork who listened to too much nine inch nails, you've probably read or owned a copy of the Necronomicon. It's got a lot in common with Scientology. In addition to the "Hey, let's start a cult today," attitude, this little black book also contains spells to summon demons (This is why so few of my stories are from my childhood. It was an embarassing time to be me, but it probably makes for funnier stories).

Part of the ritual you have to go through before the spells will work is the summoning of the seven or so dead gods the Necronomicon is supposedly the prophecy of (these are based around the ancient Sumerian pantheon, in case you weren't all that into Nine Inch Nails when you were younger). Well, you have, first, to perform rituals to summon these gods or demons that, if you actually went through with them perfectly, would take a decade or so to complete (for those of you who remember Final Fantasy VII, get in your mind the memory of trying to reproduce the steps the internet gave you on how you could keep Aeris from getting killed at the end of the first disk. You know you tried it...well, it didn't work, and the steps weren't actually possible to complete, but were intricate enough that few people who tried it could think they'd done them correctly. That's the point of the reference).

Anyway, part of these rituals to summon the seven demons/gods included the drawing of seven very bitchin' looking "gates." These, we painted intricately across the mural wall, along with the incantations from the same book that gave us the word Cthulu (which is to say that the words were highly unpronounceable and creepy looking). Nevermind that the Necronomicon doesn't have anything to do with Satanism. The details are for voyers.

Now comes the funny. The people we had been talking to in the guestbook were people we've all known for many years. Friends of ours began to take credit for having drawn the gates on the walls of the mines. My little brother told me how he and his friends had become scared when they stumbled across the Satanic Cave while exploring the desert. We kept our mouths shut, and it makes me laugh now.

So there you have the origins and brief history of Ridgecrest's one authentic (not so much) Satanic Cave.

David and I used to go up once a year and retouch the paintings and re-hang a guestbook, but its been a few years since we did. I suppose you have to run out of teenage angst eventually (And I'll let you know when it happens).

Tunnel trips--ditched

I grew up in a small city in the desert. We always thought of it as a small town, but I've met more people and seen a little more, and realize now that thirty thousand people isn't as small as it can seem.

I can remember when the Wallmart was first put in. If you went into the ditch behind my house with your two nine year old friends, you could see the timbers going up. We walked over there to watch it be built. It seemed like a wildly exciting thing.

At some point, a series of flood ditches were installed along Bowman Road, which is the road that runs straight from the ditch behind my parents' home to Wallmart. The drainage system was probably always there. But it wasn't until these giant gashes in the sand had been dug that we kids noticed it. The ditches are about two miles long, and stop whenever bowman is intersected by another road (which happens only three times across that two miles). One of the intersections, however, doesn't interupt the ditch. This is where Bowman hits Downs. Downs is the western border of the Ridgecrest grid in most minds. Beneath Downs, along Bowman, there is a giant tube that carries the ditches through the dirt.

As kids, we would sneak through the chainlink fence and down into the ditch. It became a sort of clubhouse for us. My few friends and I would go beneath Downs and hang out "at the ditch." I only still know one of those friends (hi Rebecca), but I can remember them all pretty clearly.

Well, anyway, if you went into this tube, there were two other tubes that lead north and south away from the Ditch. As you can imagine it might be in the Mojave Desert, the Ditch was often dry. I think the side tunnels ran up and down the length of Downs, draining off the water that, once every two or three years, would suddenly flood our little city (I can vaguely remember when my father's car had stalled in the middle of the road and he had trudged through two miles of flood to make it home one year).

Well, as kids might, we would explore these ditches. I should point out that this is around the same time that Sega CD came out, and so I always have this strange association between that place and Sega. The first Sega CD game anyone has played was Sewer Shark, in which you watch some videos as you fly some sorta craft through giant sewers shooting at mutant monsters. It was horrid. I don't know why I felt the need to point that out.

Well, my older brother was always sure to make it clear that he was better than me at things (It was a long time ago, I mostly stopped caring, but just reread this if you ever wonder why I didn't leave a note). So there we were--Skylar and Daniel and Brian, some others and I--on our big exploration of the dank recesses of the Ridgecrest irrigation system. We had flashlights, but not enough for everyone. So I, being younger and not so well liked (I wasn't the dashing young lad I am now. I was fatter and looked a lot like an ugly girl. There's a story there about a picture I saw once at David's. It had been from a halloween when I was thirteen or so. I asked "Who's the ugly little girl?" about a year ago when I found the picture in a box beneath David's piles of comic books. My friends all laugh at me, and I eventually figure out who it is), go without a flashlight.

We head off into the ditches and then, hundreds of feet (or hundreds of inches. Dark spaces felt bigger when I was younger) into these grimmy tubes, the lights go out. I had been far ahead. I was terrified. I'm not sure what of. Mutants in the sewers, I suppose. Too much sega and ninja turtles.

I ran. I ran as fast as I could in a tube that wouldn't be large enough for me, now at 6'3", to crawl my way down. These were giant steel (or aluminum, something shiny and metal) pipes beneath hundreds of pounds of rock and dirt. In some places, they were bent inwards. On one of these places, you'll find a significant section of my scalp. You can still see the slice of skin (even on my profile picture) right in the front of my head where I have no hair and little skin.

Skylar became concerned. I think he was mostly worried that he would be blamed for it. We made up a story that we had been hunting lizards, and I fell down a pile of concrete blocks. Somehow, it seemed in my mind that this would worry my mother less when I came home with my face oozing blood. I'm still not sure how well that played.

Details

For some reason I can't seem to pay attention to the little details now and then.

For instance: I went to Borders last night to pick up a movie and check the release date of a couple books. I was picking up Kung-Fu Hustle because I saw the first five minutes of it once upon a time and though "That looks pretty good." So I grabbed the package from the third floor and then I walk down to the second floor.

First, I go check the new release shelves. Then I go over to the customer computer and browse the releases for the two books I'm looking for. They're both sequals in two never ending, dull as hell fantasy series. One has a release date set for August 2005, but it hasn't been published yet. So maybe not so much with the August. The other one was released this month, but is sold out at every Borders within fifty miles. I know this because the computer tells me. I look at seven Borders and not a single damn one is carrying it.

So I go look at the litterature section because I figure, if I can't read something mindlessly entertaining then the next best thing is to read something that might, you know, be any good. So I browse past the shelves, but I'm not really looking at the books. I fdon't know what I'[m looking at. I'm not even looking at the covers that are facing the puruser like myself because someone in this Borders must have set those books up so that customers would see them when they walked by, so I figure those books must be pieces of shit. Somehow I grab Umberto Eco's Foucult's Pendulum from a shelf and figure that, with a name like his, it'll be great (I started reading it, and it is, by the way).

Anyway, so I have my book and I'm now walking back down to the first floor on my way to check out when, holy freakin crap, where's the movie? I had the movie. I went to look at books and had the movie in my jacket pocket (never mind the fact that I'm dumb enough to think no one's going to mind that I put it in my jacket pocket while I look at books). But now I don't have the movie anymore. There was a shelf full of them back on the third floor, but, for whatever reason, I don't go grab another one. No.

I spend the next fifteen minutes walking around the second floor looking for the copy I had specifically placed God knows where before I forgot about it. It was in the new release section. I had put it facing outwards in front of one of those novels that the Border's troglydytes lined up specifically to catch your eye and that I would never buy. But I was so used to not looking at those particular books that, in the fifteen minutes I'd been prowling the second floor looking for my movie, I'd walked past and looked at the new releases what must have been five times before I finally noticed that my movie was sitting right in the first place I had gone to look for books.

Just now, I went to go outside to go get some food because I'm hungry. I felt like I was forgetting something as I walked out the door. That's because I didn't have a shirt on. Now I'm going to go get some food.

Mind Melt

Testament to my absentmindedness (that's a piss poor conjugation) is the fact that I think I've already posted this story on here before, but I can't remember for sure and don't feel like reading my past posts. So I'm posting it again or for the first time (take your pick).

think my brain is going...somewhere else. A few weeks ago, I went to go return some movies to the video store. I get in my car and start driving to Santa Monica. I pass the blockbuster, but remember that isn't the right video store, so I keep driving mindlessly into Santa Monica. Fifteen or twenty minutes of driving later (past the blockbuster ten minutes away), it occurs to me that I have no idea what I am doing. I think about it, and eventually remember I was going to the video store. Then I realize that I have left the videos at home. Then I realize the video store is 3 blocks from my apartment.

Now, I would like to blame this on my severe drug addiction. Unfortunately, I don't have a severe drug addiction. Instead, I'm blaming it on whatever genetics made my mother call me "marcu-skyla-GRAYSON!" when I was young (and last time I talked to her, but that's beside the point). Anyhow, it seemed more bizarre in my head than it does now that I've written it down...so I'm going to go do some dishes.

Tire trouble

One morning I was leaving a city college in my mother's minivan. The college was Cerro Coso in Ridgecrest and, as some of you know, it's atop a large hill, at the end of a long one lane road with a forty five mile an hour speed limit that most people take around sixty.

I was feeling tired, relaxed and peaceful, and driving rather slowly. I got up to 35 and was cruising along, mindless of the impatience of the people behind me and wholly unconcerned when the car directly behind me began honking. Not interested, I ignored it.

But the honking continued.

As my nerves became agitated, so did the other car's driver, apparently at my disinterest in his plight of not reaching the bottom of the hill in what I believed was outrage at my speed. Annoyed, I sped up to forty five.

This didn't satisfy him. He pulled up beside me and the other young man in the passenger's seat and the driver rolled down their windows and began waving their hands and yelling something. I kept my eyes forward and ignored them, eventually throwing a casual finger in their direction before leaning back my chair and slowing to forty as the car moved back behind me. When other drivers rile me, I tend to slow down out of annoyance and petulance.

Well, the other driver appeared unwilling to accept this arrangement and pulled in front of me in a daring pass, just missing oncomming traffic. I figured it was good riddance to my problem. Then he slammed on his brakes, and, as I followed suit, it seemed that this was his rather dangerous and rather nasty revenge.

This was beginning to become a scene where I'm afraid I'm going to get rammed, dragged from my car and beaten. He began trying to pull up beside me (when opposing traffic was clear) and steer me off the road. In a town full of drunken rednecks, this is the sort of encounter one like myself should seek to avoid. So I sped up, and away.

He pursued, but eventual abandoned the chase.

I got home in a huff and went to bed. My mother later called. A student of hers told her that he had seen a van he had thought with hers. The student had been trying to warn her that she had a popped tire, but it turned out to be some psycho who just got mad and flipped the student off when he tried to help. Turns out it hadn't been my relaxed mood as much as the flat tire I didn't notice that had me driving so slowly.

Stinking humans.

Trains

Here's a story I wrote after riding the train a few years ago in San Francisco. I'm not sure that this (or any of these) counts as a story. Eat it, sucka:

A middle aged Chinese woman switches her stare between the small child leaning against her, sucking happily away at a lollipop and the box with the stuffed animal in it that occupies her lap. As she watches her child, her expression struggles to resolve itself between fond fascinations and idle horrors. She plays with a loose flap of cardboard from the box, tearing away small scraps of recycled paper, which disappear, into her coat pocket. The bottom left pocket, with tissue paper, a pen, and other scraps.

Two people are reading books. One, his head shaven to look like Michel Stipe, is a college graduate student, or would like to be. The other is another Chinese lady, this time dressed like a high school student although she’s in her thirties. The yuppies read Contact and The Hours. Probably neither have televisions at home. Or if they do, it’s certainly only for watching DVDs. But at coffee on Monday (which consists mainly of café mochas), when their friends are talking about the movies they saw over the weekend, they will say in an aloof, superior tone: "I don’t watch T.V., so I don’t know much about the movie, but the book was wonderful." And then they’ll ask how the movie went, to see if it compares, and astound their friends with their vast knowledge of the uncertain points and make eloquent elaborations on the characters.

The Chinese reader isn’t married. She went grocery shopping. At least, she meant to go grocery shopping. All she ended up getting were two boxes of Total Brand Cereal.

The mother’s daughter has fallen asleep. The mother’s countenance has softened considerably.

Both readers get off at the University, the mother and her child having eloped into the shopping center three stops before. The woman is heading home, the studious young type into the University, probably towards the library, as the sun has long set and both are weary from the day’s efforts. The efforts of going through the motions of a life they scarcely notice they’re living. It was most apparent on the mother’s face. Her look towards the child had revealed a life lived in wonder of the world, never noticing what was going on around her. She never made any decisions, and wound up with what everyone had always hoped for her; a good job to afford toys for her good children and a good husband who takes good care of her.

A young man’s roommate accompanies him off the bus. They walk to the crosswalk; the roommate with his face turned the other direction to avoid cigarette smoke. The campus looks like an archaic fortress, with five story buildings towering above narrow walkways. Smoking decks provide archer platforms, and occasionally a flaming arrow can be seen launching from one of the havens. A familiar sort of rock and roll drifts from the roommate’s headphones. It is music so complex in its social implications that it can only be understood through the flannel jacket and skateboarding shoes its singers would wear on stage until their premier star got sick of it and blew his face off.

Nylon pylon

Now, I'm not an expert on construction materials. I had always thought of Nylon as something you made crappy rope out of and put in pants coke heads in the seventies wore that you get in thrift stores. You can tell the nylon type by the zippers they have on the pockets. Anyway, if you take a look, and if you have a cheap apartment furnished by a landlord russian scumbag (or a chinese scumbag. Or maybe just an asian scumbag you assume is chinese and turns out to be vietnamese...nevermind), you might find that you have nylon curtains.

These aren't realy "curtains" in the classical sense. They're more like plastic slats strung along a cheap chain cord. It's probably aluminum. Except the slats aren't plastic--they're nylon and, when the wind hits them, they click and clatter against one another.

Such are the "curtains" that clothe my window. My window which, like other windows I consider in my possession (such as those in my car which previous posts will illuminate the relevance of), they are constantly open. Often, the wind hits them at that certain angle so that they click and clack and annoy the crap outa me. But the alternative is a closed window and that alternative hasn't occured to me until recently (unless it's raining).

Why I leave my windows open always probably has something to do with a cat named Nippers and sneaking out of my childhood home to smoke cigarettes in the backyard and stuff them between the fence-boards of my neighbor's yard beneath the rocks surrounding their pond. But, since none of that is relavent to the story I'm coming to getting across, we'll leave it for another time.

The story that I'm trying to tell is about a window with curtains that clack, and the two pillows, three blankets and one husband on my bed. I'm told that those pillows that are made for sitting up in bed with the little protrusions are called husbands. If they're not... well screw you--it's my story.

Anyway, I have three blankets, two pillows and a husband. I sleep with one blanket and one pillow. The other two blankets, the husband, and the extra pillow, are all piled against the window meticulously, to prevent it from clacking when the wind hits it the right way.

Specifically, the large black comforted is constantly being re-stuffed into the crack between the curtain hanger bar (that probably has a name in French) and the wall. I re-stuff it every two or three days, when the thing begins to droop and light leaks through. You see, the comforter keeps the clacking planks of my curtain muted during their clanking by pressing them together. Yet, by itself, pressing the planks together only enhances the click and the clack. What you need to do in this situation is provide a prop to keep the planks, nowpressed together, from shifting against one another. This is where the husband comes in. Since only half of the window is open at a given time, only half of the planks are being ruffled by the wind. Against this, you apply one large black comforter and one husband. This keeps the slight clacking that occurs when the planks joggle one another from being audible, while the husband prevents the severe clipping that produces the loudest sort of clank. Yet, that other half of the window still allows a passage of air, which in turn allows the shifting of the planks, which in turn causes the dreaded clacking. So, here goes the other pillow. However, the problem comes when you combine this method of noise reduction with a young man who is six foot three and who barely fits upon his bed before the aplication of various sound nullifying equippage. This requires the young man to sleep sideways, with his neck at a rather uncomfortable angle against a severe incline of downy pillows. This also forces said young man not to use either pillow or husband as the personal pillow that gets molested during the night as it is shifted across the eyes, ears, and eventually beneath the spiggot of drool. So, for this, such a young man would require a second pillow (third if you're counting the husband). Now, we have an incline too steep between tall young man's head and his torso for his neck to comfortably navigate during rest. This is where the second blanket takes a leading roll: it supplies the gentle incline--if piled in a precise manner--that allows the young man to sleep easily. Now, all we need is a second blanket to warm the young man and voila--a bed we have made.

And such is my bed, three pillows and two blankets with only two essential if not for the presence of an open window and nylon curtains.

Burger bogey

First, I would like everyone to get onto dictionary.com and take note of the fact that "thru" is now a word. If the internet tells me so, I must believe it.

I had been driving thru Burger King when I saw a new item on a flashy posterboard in bright, striking colors with dark orange tones that screamed hunger into my eye sockets, thru my nerves, and into my brain from where it traveled into my intestines that squirmed with mustard-colored relish.

This picture that arroused such a cacophony of intestinal activity was in promotion of the cousin of the french fry: the chicken fry. Now, that's not my tag line for them, mind you--that's the official Patty Pasha's phrase. Cousin of the chip. The batter drench sliver of chicken. The poultry... I'm done.

Anyway, I order these chicken fries and, when I pull up to the window to receive my "wonderful, new and cheap so buy it in a bag," I am asked by burger-boy if I would like any sauce. I say yes, and am asked what sort of sauce I would like best with those. I, in turn, ask what sort of sauces are to be had. The boy: "Barbeque sauce." I said "ok, ranch please." He nods in a zombie-eyed manner, puts something into the bag.

I drive home and it's barbeque sauce. I filed a complaint online.

Jokes & Jerks

Here's a little sample of my pathetic experiment at a domestic life that failed a few months back. It's in psudo-story format, and might not have been the words that were exactly used:

Grayson placed his hand on the counter covered by faux-marble, laminated wallpaper, and smeared soapy suds across the counter-top. His face was a perfect mask of nodding patience. Listening, caring, understanding, awaiting his turn to speak and belittle Erin until she crawled back into her "office."

They had been arguing about dishes. Done by hand, water would often spot the floor as Grayson worked through them. Erin demanded that he drip less. Grayson had claimed-emphatically enough that even he believed it-that his intention was to clean the spilled water after finishing the dishes. He was such a child, and she was, naturally, being a bitch. Twenty minutes of silence later, she offered a compromise: she would allow that not everything be her way all the time, if he worked to keep things cleaner.

"So, the compromise is that you’ll stop nagging if I do what you tell me?"

"No, that’s not what I said."

"But you said that you will allow that not everything always needs to be your way, if I’d try to keep things neater. What we had been arguing about was whether I was washing dishes neatly enough for your high domestic standards." Sarcasm dripped thick and slow, like ketchup, crusty and maroon, languishing from a diner bottle. In perfectly reasonable tones, he continued, "So, aren’t you just saying that the compromise is that if I do what you tell me, we won’t have to argue about it?"

"No!" She rallied, then huffed, then crossed her arms and stomped. "Yes. Fine, that’s exactly what I said. I can’t even remember what we’re arguing about! But, you’re right and I’m guilty, and you’re a jerk."

"Well… you always tell me you wish I’d tell you more of what I think."

"You’re not telling me what you think. You’re telling me what to think." She huffed and stomped off, down the hall, trampling millions of innocent dust motes into the cranny recesses of her wide-heeled shoes the way Godzilla would parade through Okinawa.

Grayson sighed. "Ok," he called after her.

"Ok, what?" came flying back through the walls and across the endless space of the hallway between them.

"Ok, I’ll compromise." Because in the end, he had a way of talking himself into trouble, and he did love her, and he did not want to argue. Moreover, the dishes did smell bad, and the floor was slick with soap. And he was a jerk.

Empty glasses

I just finished a book called An Empty Room. It was pretty good. I'm not in a funny mood tonight. Tonight's story comes out of an email. It's about overthinking things. The book I finished was about a young girl who enters an adulturous relationship and has her heart broken. It was too melodramatic to be sad, too small in scope to be touching, too pathetic to be satirical. But it was well written and I read it in one sitting, so I'm sorta full of that mood at the moment. Here's today's story:

When Erin left me, I didn't know it had been for someone she'd been cheating on me with. Then a couple days after I left our old apartment, I went back to pick up a few things and there were two wine glasses next to the bed.

Now, Erin would often have a wine glass next to my bed on her computer table. However, she would never have had two dishes dirty in one place, when one dirty dish could have done the job. That was how I discovered she had been cheating on me: an extra wine glass.

But I didn't know in the concrete sense until I went to San Francisco. I told Anvi I did know. I told her because I know Erin, and knew Erin would have told Anvi if she had left me for someone else. And Erin had visited Anvi the week before. So, Anvi, believing I already knew, told me Erin had told her. Then I just guessed the name of the most likely candidate, and Anvi confirmed it.

Erin called and I told her I knew. I wasn't sure she'd been cheating on me, rather than waiting that whole extra day until she left me. I didn't ask on the phone, but she denied it, so that was that.

When the big changes come, we expect the sky to crack open "and God himself to reach his whole fucking arm through" but it doesn't happen that way. Erin left and I thought "well, I remember what I remember, I took what I have, and leaving doesn't ruin any of that." The big one, that forced me to move and threw a few other significant changes in--that didn't matter. And then two empty wine glasses on a nightstand broke me to pieces.

Maybe that is a funny story.

A certain slant of light

A Certain Slant of Light is an Emily Dickenson poem I like rather well. Today's story isn't particularly funny, but maybe it is a little bit.

My stomach hurts. It's been hurting for months, little by little. It burns inches at a time. I can feel a band of warm scalding pain spanning six inches of my intestines. I don't ever mind it.

I sometimes enjoy it. It's not a sense of romance. It's just that, sometimes, a little pain in my stomach seems lovely. I tell myself that perhaps its an ulcer. That amuses me, sometimes. The thought that, at twenty four, I've got an ulcer in a life devoid of stress. I know where it comes from. The stress doesn't come from the outside world. It comes from a bedroom that's cold and dark and a corner I sit in by myself in front of my computer writing down whatever comes to my mind after a couple of drinks.

I wake up at eleven at night and go to work at midnight thirty. I always leave early and spend half an hour driving around the empty streets smoking cigarettes and listening to Tweaker. "I guess I'm staying here tonight, so shut the door and shut off the light. I guess I'm staying here tonight. It's been a long time." That's my favorite song.

It's a song about a man who hasn't been loved in a long time. He's alone and someone offers him a warm bed; someone to share it with. Warm food and pleasant talk--nothing special. Nothing extraordinary or miraculous. He has intelligence and gravity, and is probably very handsome and witty, and has a good family and friends who admire or adore him. And yet he's so alone that the thought of this one warm night makes him scream out in joy as the music picks up that one line: "it's been a long time." Then the music comes down and we hear the murmur, because in the morning, the man has to wake up.

Before the chorus comes, there's a woman murmuring. You can't quite hear her. "Those people hanging out..." something else is heard but it's indistinct and it doesn't really matter. He could be out there on the streets in the bars and clubs and alleys, among the gardens and roadway islands with their thorny trees and purple flowers, among the cacophony of murmurs. But this one warm night saves him. And in that rapturous moment when he figures it out--when it dawns on him that he has a place to stay and someone to stay there with--he can no longer keep his voice a quiet murmur and out comes a shrieking song full of life and joy.

Most days, I think he can't bring himself to get out of bed. He wakes up and goes about his work, and talks to people and does what he needs to. Fixing a broken refigerator. Paying an electric bill and putting on a pot of coffee. He takes a drink from the bottle on top of the refigerator--it's vermouth. It doesn't matter. There's something else in the cupboard, but he doesn't care what it tastes like. And all day, no matter where he is, he hasn't even gotten out of bed. He's still there beneath a cold cover slip. He's curled beneath a gray valore blanket that is very soft and doesn't have any pretentions of warming its occupant.

Images play through his head of the time he spent with his family walking in the woods in the North Bay. He was so angry all day. All he could do was complain, even though his brothers and parents had taken him walking through the redwoods. It was such a beautiful day and he just wanted to go home to the small room in his apartment with an intercom that hadn't worked since nineteen seventy two. He just wanted to tell his mother and father he loved them. He wanted to turn off the lights and take a pair of sleeping pills and not have to see the world again until tomorrow. He wanted to tell them how hard he'd been working and how proud they could feel of him. He wanted not to have to face his family because he wouldn't be able to tell them that he thought the redwoods were beautiful and he loved the walk. He just wanted to have a cigarette and be left alone. And he just wanted to say to them that he was alone and couldn't understand who they were or why they were there.

And then one night there was a woman whose voice was barely distinct from the murmur and she offered him a single warm night and it saved his life. It would have.

But I leave for work a half hour early and drive around every night listening to the same song repeat as I chainsmoke a pack of menthols. I'll have to wake up tomorrow night and go to work again. My room is dark from the comforter I hang across the window and it's freezing cold and I sleep beneath a single thin blanket and feel the cold penetrate my skin. And I close my eyes and look at the inside of my skin and see nothing but darkness and the occasional burst of red color. I feel a burning in my stomach, sigh, and go to sleep.

 

Shirts and pixels

I'm in a bit of a weird mood today and I doubt I'll end up posting a story tomorrow, so I figure I should post as many as I can and post-date them while I still have the energy to do it. So, today, you get a story about the color of a shirt I used to own, and about my career at college that I've never particularly cared for. Here goes:

I went to school under the guise of being a student of philosophy, but I'm not. I have never been any good at writing philosophy because of the simple fact that I don't care to have abstract conversations. I have tried and poured my heart into it and written intelligently and weel and been so competely uninspired that it came out as a senior thesis. I write a story about a dead jelleyfish and it seems to me a wonderful work of which I'm infinitely proud. I write a ten page answer to one of the most fundemental of all questions in philosophy and I answer it better than I've ever answered anyone anything and I couldn't care less and don't even remember what the question is.

I love to write. I may or may not be any good at it--I guess that's something that the rest of you have to tell me. I don't really care whether or not you enjoy reading it. I'd like it if yo did the same way that I'd like a nice bowl of ice-cream. But it's the writing of it that I care about, and I just don't care to write about philosophy because it has nothing to do with me.

And I loveme. I can't get enough of him. I'm completely obsessed with his world of minute disasters and epic, tiny, success. Every small struggle won--the simple act of getting a job that I'm good at--seems like the most monumental of accomplishments. It's my only real subject: Grayson.

It's funny that I never think of my name. My name is a bit out of the ordinary, but it's nothing terribly interesting. I'm not particularly fond of it. Whenever I think of my name the color green comes into my mind. I'm not entirely sure why.

When I was twelve years old my mother took me to Mervyns to buy some new shirts. I picked out two. One was green and had images of tigers and tucans and other scenes from a rain forest. The other was stone gray and had some slogan across it. I can remember the images on the green one, but the gray one I can't even begin to imagine what the slogan was. These two shirts are everything I've ever been.

The green one was a "Save the rain forest, eat drink, and be merry." The other shirt was the "Tomorrow we die." I used to call it my tombstone gray shirt. I don't remember if I ever called it this to anyone else, or if this is simply how I thought of it in my head. The green shirt was the one I wanted other people to see me wear. It was one that showed I cared about things outside of myself. It showed that I loved animals and trees and the warm, earthy tone of green.

I would put on the gray shirt and look at myself in the mirror. I didn't wear it as often as I would have liked to. I can't remember the color distinctly, but I remember that the shirt was mottled. It looked like one color from far enough away but then, up close, you could see that it was actually three colors repeated in an indecipherable pattern: gray, black and white. Like the pixels of a television they were nothing but out of place colors that made no sense until you sat four feet away and stared at them and saw that a picture emerged. And that is how I've always wanted to be seen--a picture from a few yards away. Because if you get too close, I'm just a bunch of colors in tiny little boxes that don't make any sense.

 

Bad Driving

During overtime days at my work, the company buy's everyone lunch. Most days, different teams send different people to pick up food and return it to work.

Now, my lunch break is at four a.m. and, as you might imagine, the cuisine is strictly limited during the small hours to late night fast food and diners. Few diners are any better than fast food, and with the added risk of greese globs, fast food is sometimes the safest move to make. I won't get started on Denny's or Norm's (Norm's: a Denny's-esque diner).

However, last night, someone came up with a delicious idea: why not get all seven teams together and send out to the one good restaurant still open: Jerry's Famous Deli. Not the most wonderful food in the world, but certainly more appetizing than diners and fast food. I'm especially fond of their pastries because I'm a sucker for a good eclair and the german chocolate cake is wonderful--if you're willing to scrape through a pound of frosting. Anyway, let's leave my eating habbits for a different post. There's a story here.

Seven teams is near a hundred people--perhaps it's more...I'm not sure. The bill was seven pages long is the point. A point which is of import to the story because, as you can imagine, seven pages of receipt requires more than a single person's efforts to retrieve, load, carry and unload back at work. We won't even mention the effort of paying for it. Well, what's important is that I and two others went to pick up the food because we had cars that might possess the ability to berth it. So Tim, creepy guy (I don't know his name--I've always just called him "Hey you!" or refered to him as "that creepy fat guy." Actually, when I need his attention, I usually just hit him with something like a rubberband) and I leave at two a.m., and begin the hunt for Jerry's Famous Diner.

The directions were the first obstacle. You see, the virtue of cardinal directions are that they are not (or at least less so) relative to one's own location. North is--on the small scale--the same direction regardless of what direction it is you happen to be currently driving. The other method available for directions, then would be the relativistic two-facerd matter of right and left (four if you count straight and back I suppose, but that's not important here). When on a freeway, few exits are not on one's right. So to say that one must exit the freeway to the right might seem like a flippant instruction to some. In Los Angeles on the Ten when downtown, many exits have two seperate ramps: one for heading north on the street you've exited onto, and one for heading south. The exit in question was no different.

I should tell you a little something about the caravan included in this endeavour. There was myself in the middle in my little silver echo. Behind me, creepy guy drove some sort of sedan, with Tim leading in a sports car in front. Creepy guy had directions consisting of a map without instruction while Tim had instructions without a map. I was trying to keep up with Tim--having neither map nor the vaguest hint where at two-twenty in the morning I was heading.

So Tim is off to a running start, careening down the deserted freeway and swinging to the right then swooshing toward the exit, over to the far right lane, and around a circular offramp for a graceful, if centrifical, exit landing on his feet at a steady gait on a southward course. I followed in an ambling third gear, feeling the lightness of my car and the slight lift as the weight shifts to right side of the car and a cup of english teatime, my cell phone, key card, and various books piled in the back go crashing against the passenger side wall and door. Creepy guy *put puts* along, waiting until he's cleared the offramp to enter a sprint that returns him to my rear (creepy guys often observe my rear, I must admit. Women too, mind you, but we're concerned with creepy fat guys at the moment. I was about to make pull out a gag about Tim being at our caravan's head, but I think that would be stretching it).

So, there we three are, following the stars southward as we pass a deserted industrial park and eventually enter the hills until, some ten minutes down the road, Tim shoots over at the last minute without warning and comes to a crashing halt before a stoplight in the left hand turn lane. I follow suit and our last companions creeps up behind me. The light turns and so does TIm--tightly, around in a half circle, then pulling over by the side of the road. We are in the hills and there is nothing anywhere nearby and I can't help but assume it--we're lost.

Tim is out of the car and coming towards me waving a piece of paper. Creepy guy puts on the parking lights and rolls up behind me and I wonder why this is starting to feel like the beginning of a psycho-killer movie.

But no--Tim is convinced that we're going the wrong way and we'll be heading ten minutes back north to where we left the freeway and continuing northward from there. From here things go downhill.

Beverly Drive and Beverly Boulevard, by the way, are different streets that are in nearly the same spot. We began on the 1400 block of Beverly Drive and headed toward the address at 8700 something. Eventually, we discover the mistake, having first headed into the hills and dense residential zones around 3500 North Beverly Drive, then likewise twisted residential streets around 2000 South Beverly Drive. A few roundabouts, traffic circles, U-Turns and missed stop signs later and we're passing Factor's Famous Deli beside a Bank of America on Beverly Drive near San Vicente. In fact, we've passed the place a few times, and I become insistent that--having been given San Vicente and a Bank of America as reference points--the Factor's must be the Famous Deli that we are looking for.

It wasn't.

Now, I had told you that Creepy guy had the map. However, this is something I hadn't been aware of at the time. I had simply been told that Tim and Creepy Guy (who I've decided to redub Mor