They’re on instruments!

Easy flight. It was the captain’s farewell flight after 25 years and his whole family was aboard. The airport fire dept did what is apparently the traditional sendoff; they sprayed the plane with water from both sides before takeoff.

Huge snafu with hotel on arrival, barely rescued by a Sherpa. Really.

Tomorrow I plan to get into trouble.

irony is a dead scene (insert dick or dick joke here)

A good evening gabbling along with nickjb about art and life and music and art again. We had just got through a good discussion of the death of expertise in rock ‘n’ roll and were being very smart about big ideas (this is fun), and also talking about how impossible standup comedy is, because everyone hates actual humor and just likes to be insulted and made nervous. Basically the usual rediscovery that stupidity is a big virtue and one isn’t supposed to GET TOO BIG FOR ONE’S BRITCHES ‘round here.

And as we were walking to our cars, the poster boy for this mentality, Mr. Drunk Bartender with Beer Bottle Design Shirt was walking to his car and yelling back and forth to a friend:

DRUNK_BARTENDER: LATER HOSER!!!
FRIEND: LATER, YOU GOIN’ HOME OR WHAT? YOU LOSER
DRUNK_BARTENDER: FUCK NO! I’M GOIN’ GAMBLIN!
FRIEND: RIGHT ON! YOU COMIN’ WITH US TO THE FINE CITY OF SAN BERNARDINO?
DRUNK_BARTENDER: WHAT? FUCK?

This is the kind of atmosphere that drives anyone with an IQ over about 60 into grumpy elitism purely as a defense mechanism. Stuff a rock ‘n’ roll club or a comedy joint with 100 of these guys and you can see why pop culture is such a nasty business.

Modest proposals

I’ve noticed that it’s possible to get Orange County White Guys to wear or display damn near any logo merchandise done in blackletter type and/or with German military symbols on it. This pisses me off, not just because of the crypto-Nazi flavor of all this stuff, but because it’s been going on for 20 years and it’s really boring. I’ve come up with a couple of designs of my own that I hope to sell to these truck-driving, skating, drinking, ignorant, racist fucks. Ahem. The other day I saw a sullen, ape-like kid wearing a hat that said in some blackletter type SULLEN. And I saw my millionth Independent shirt with the iron cross. And the West Coast choppers with the iron cross. And I thought ARE YOU ALL NEO NAZIS OR JUST NO-NECK MORONS? ANYWAY, here’s my designs:


overheard dialogue: the Days of Vans

Karl*: Yeah, so my big brother had one of those vans, a 1974 Chevy Van with the big block engine, slicks on the back, carpet in the interior, the whole thing.

nickjb: Did he have Humble Pie’s Rockin’ the Fillmore on 8-track? All of those guys did.

*Karl is a fiftysomething divorced aerospace engineer who hangs out at the coffeehouse a lot. He is a nice fella and has entertaining stories at times.