Tag: self-indulgent

The con and fimmtiu’s visit

Comic Con was a blast. There were lots of nerds there, including us. I only bought one thing (a bob the angry flower book). fimmtiu and redmaenad and zebulon_y and I went from one end of the nerdiverse to the other many times and saw uncounted mouth-breathers, inappropriate fedoras, Pink Floyd t-shirts, and people dressed as video game characters.

A street hustler had got hold of a pass and was trying a variation on the Gas Station Pitch: “I gotta buy this collectable ITEM upstairs and I am SEVEN DOLLARS SHORT could you spare me a BUCK or TWO?”

One of the seller booths thought it would be smart to offer recent Star Wars material on bootleg DVD for sale. They were last seen with their stuff all tarped over and guys with bad cop hair talking to them.

I got to meet both of Zeb’s brothers and some friends of theirs, and also the famous Nancy[i] and her fiancĂ©, and Zeb’s friend Leora. All of whom were cool people.

It was great seeing fimmtiu again; it had been five years! I stuffed him with Mexican food at Taco Mesa the night he arrived and then we got to horse around all day at the con. Put him on a plane to Salt Lake (ow!) this morning.

I have a cold; pity me. Fortunately I didn’t descend into strep or flu yesterday, probably because I drank from the firehose all day. I also now have the pager for my job for a week, which means no life. But heck, I had a great day off.

When I’m not so exhausted by tiny, tiny creatures eating my throat I’ll write more about the con and the things it made us think about.

waving from the peanut gallery again

So there’s this woman I met at a party a couple years ago, and have talked to by email maybe three times since. I got a crush on her when we met and we got along okay but it was pretty clear that she wasn’t going to be my pal or anything. But I thought she was so cool! Pretty close to my age, did a lot of interesting things and had an unusual background, smart and fun and full of surprises. The kind of person you just feel good after meeting. And then I forgot about her.

Because of one of the movies I knew she’d helped make came up in the conversation tonight, I e-stalked her tonight to see what she’s about. Shit. No wonder she was out of my league. Not only does she have three real degrees from a good school, but she’s produced about 10 movies and has her own movie company. I guess I should feel privileged that I got to buy Tupperware from her.

Reminds me of the last such person before that, who was a consultant type I met at a job. She had a Harvard Econ degree and had already sold out of one company and bought a house in L.A. and was attractive and fun and nice and wildly successful and whoosh off she goes on the wondertruck!

Hello there, ladies. I am a system administrator who tells funny stories and cooks a good quiche. Have some coffee.

No one could say that she was left up on the shelf

Some of us never get over the childhood desire for the impossible. I remember a book I read as a kid, colorfully illustrated without words, in which some children get magical christmas presents of unknown origin. The presents turn out to be strange jumpsuits with backpacks on them. When they are put on and a button on the chest is pressed, the backpacks sprout wings and the children fly off.

The kids soar over beautiful green farmland and towns, land and visit friends, get ice cream, fly some more, and finally return home happily exhausted. When they wake up the next day, the magic flying suits are gone, and in fact never were; it was all a dream.

This is a terrible cheat. Not only is it a nasty trick to use the “it was all a dream” trick anywhere, but the author of this book didn’t have the balls to let the poor kids have their science fiction flying suits of the future in a work of fiction! I remember being really upset by the end of that little book.

Throughout childhood I had a series of impossible dreams: toys my parents could never buy, mostly. As I got older I wanted various Cool Stuff that was out of my reach: the ultimate bicycle, various electronic items, eventually a computer. I would make elaborate lists of the exact specifications of things I would never have. It’s not that I was a demanding child; quite the opposite! I was almost always too polite to ask for anything, and just hoped that someone would notice my obsession with the current golden dream and present it to me.

But I had a talent for wanting the unreachable. I wasn’t often satisfied; one bicycle and a walkie-talkie set stand out as dreams fulfilled. Rosebud! O my Raleigh 10 speed, and the little walkie talkies with the separate microphone that was so cool.

As the Apostle says, now that I think as a man I put away childish things. My toy planning now is limited to the occasional configuration rampage on an auto maker’s or computer company’s website. I don’t like to play the “if I won the Lottery” game or read books about how to become the CEO of a company. That stuff feels immature, silly.

But if there’s a woman I know who’s unavailable, I’ll fall for her whether she’s attached, uninterested, or just emotionally inaccessible. Reliably and fatally, I’m attracted to whomever won’t reciprocate: ice queens, people who live far away, people in love with someone else, and people who just aren’t interested.

And when I think about solving my problems I need to fix everything, now and forever; I insist on total cures for my ills and freedom from every demon that dogs me. I can hold up some ridiculous image of future perfection and call it a goal, and I’m being serious.

And when I let my mind drift and imagine some kind of happiness like that, I always next imagine betrayal and failure. Clearly I’d be dumped by anyone I wanted, obviously any success at defeating my troubles would blow back in my face sevenfold once I told myself I’d won. I build tragic ends to every daydream.

There’s life lived with nose pressed to the glass. The flying suits never arrive, and if they did it was all a dream. Real life is more like marching than like flying, and that’s never suited me.

Childhood Tales: The Plants I Hated

  1. Algerian Ivy:

    The back of the house and half the front were covered with ivy in about a three foot thickness. It grew at about an inch a day. Dark chambers inside the ivy contained black widow spiders, rats, ants, grass fleas, worms, and probably gigantic poisonous snakes. The ivy secreted ichor that melted paint and stuck to everything. Stuff rolled into the ivy caves and didn’t come back, especially toys. Anything that spent time in the ivy turned into a damp, foul-smelling version of itself. My earliest garden chore was trimming back the ivy and prying the more tenacious bits off the stucco and concrete with a dull table knife. When my father finally decided that the ivy had to go, an army of landscaping guys with power tools, chemicals, and fire spent a week fighting it. To this day the smell of Algerian ivy makes me slightly ill. I noticed last week that our neighbor’s ivy is crawling over our garden shed towards the house. It’s time for chemicals, fire, and power tools.

  2. Bottlebrush:

    At one side of the house, looming over the carport driveway, was a gigantic bottlebrush plant. Beautiful red cone-shaped flowers made of a million little hairs stretched out. And oozed some kind of sticky goo that instantly stained any object. When skating into the carport, if I cut it just a little too close I’d sideswipe a bit of bottlebrush and suddenly be coated with Nature’s Pigmented Airplane Glue. It was my job to cut this thing back, and when I did I always got a nice raised rash on my skin everywhere it touched.

  3. Bird of Paradise:

    At the corner of the house seven or eight of these tropical jungle plants lived. Their “flowers” looked like the Toucan Sam of the vegetable kingdom, or like an early prototype for the banana: long pelican beak-like boats of leaves with colorful petals protruding. They slowly produced a stinking greasy liquid which dripped down the plant. As the goo dripped, the “flower” rotted from the inside. Flies and ants gathered, and a miasma of South Sea decay rose into the air. I was assigned to hack off these diseased protuberances and heave them into the trash, in the process covering myself with insects and plant spooge.

  4. Bougainvillea:

    This is an awfully pretty bush, with shiny spiky leaves. We had several in the back yard and one in front next to the bottlebrush. Bougainvillea has very long, sharp thorns. As the plant grows older, the thorns get longer, and wider, and stronger. Its blooms and leaves obscure the thorns pretty well, so that when you’re in the process of wiping out on a skateboard you can easily forget, in the heat of the moment, which plant you’re about to belly-flop into. It hurts so, so very much to slam into a bougainvillea, or to be heaved into one by another kid. Hey, guess what one of my other tasks was? I learned very early on to borrow Dad’s gloves when I was told to clip this one.

I liked the cherry tomatoes and the basil and mint I grew. I liked the calla lilies and the tangerine trees and the big pine, and the palm that was a bitch to cut back but big and beautiful. And I even liked the cactus, which was spiky and dangerous but honest about it; you couldn’t fault a cactus for stabbing you, it was your own damned fault. But I still hold grudges about those others.

Straight, no cheaters.

I found my six-disc set of Miles Davis and John Coltrane and ripped the first three discs today. I hadn’t been listening to much jazz in the last three months and now I’ve dived back into it. This is exactly the kind of jazz I love.

When I listen to this music it does the same thing as the classical music I grew up with; it completely sucks me in. I don’t want to do anything but listen and follow the melodic line, the rhythm, everything, as closely as possible. I find myself smiling at little musical jokes and getting shivers when something unexpected happens.

Music geeks my age or younger are all about post-rock music. If they’re enthusing about an innovative artist, chances are it’s Four Middle Class Kids Making Somewhat Dissonant Noises to a Pop Beat. There are probably at least two electric guitars involved, and if they don’t exactly make rock and roll music, that’s their background. If they do a cover song, it’s likely to be a post-Beatles pop number.

And then I put on a CD like this and think: The most sophisticated and subtle music America produced is here. It’s from the late fifties and early sixties. And it was made by largely uneducated people from poor families, most of them from a mistreated and disadvantaged ethnic group, working under tremendous commercial pressure. The music these people made still feels new today. And there’s more innovation and exploration in one of these songs than a hundred faux naive indie pop albums can muster.

I still like pop music. I can’t be one of those “Well now that I’ve heard jazz I can’t be bothered with pop music” elitists. But the armies of college kids with guitars and Pavement CDs have some catching up to do.

stomping grounds

The Diedrich coffeehouse with the patio will close down. The building is collapsing. The thing hasn’t made money in forever. It’s big and relaxed and welcoming, and that’s over in this part of the world, killed by high land prices and spreadsheets. There’s a new one a block away that’s small and Starbucksy and all spreadsheet-optimized for profit. Push push push the yuppies through the revolving door. The big wide patio is a relic. I assume that they’ll announce that it’s going to be remodeled, close it, and never reopen it.

This makes me sad, because I’m the kind of person who attaches to places far too strongly. I get terribly emotional about places I’ve been, and not just the pretty ones or the ones where I was happy. I get sort of misty thinking about Kansas City and I only lived there for 9 months on a contract job, fer chrissakes. I imagine myself returning to the site after it’s torn down and morosely standing around looking at the Junta Juice or Yiffy Lube or whatever goes there in a couple years.

Five years ago I knew this guy D., friend of Greg’s. D. was a really nice, smart guy. He was that Alternative Pierced Guy with the weird beard: tall and thin, soft-spoken, deferentially pleasant. He was really into Greg’s band so I saw him a lot, and we’d talk a little about music or art, both of which he knew a lot about. D.’s particular interest was clothing, and he opened a vintage clothing store. He didn’t just have good taste; he was hard-working, understood how to run a store, and totally committed to doing this right. I believe it was in Silverlake; I never went there. He had an eye for that stuff and girls loved his taste, and he was doing well.

Then came the surprise. This scary guy started hanging around the store all the time, and he didn’t fit. He was a hardcore criminal recently released from prison for the latest in a series of violent crimes. He was covered in nonironic tattoos of dire significance and almost always drunk. He’d just show up, 40 in hand, and talk to D. in what was intended as a friendly manner, and scare the shit out of him. The guy was foul-mouthed, racist, misogynist, usually angry, and always in search of money. He scared the girls away. Business went to hell. Any suggestion that he might find somewhere else to hang out enraged him, and threats were made. Even if he left the store itself, he’d always be around within about a block, ready to come back. The last I heard, D. had finally closed the store, almost entirely because of this crappy Cape Fear remake he’d been pushed into.

And why was Mr. Ex Con there at all? Because before D. got that space it had been a crappy liquor store, bars in the cash window and all, where Sideshow Bob here had spent many a happy day in the years before he got that big sentence. When he got out it was time to go back and have him some fun again! There was a new business there, but it was still the same corner. This wasn’t Cape Fear; Poor D. had wandered into the retail version of the hotel in The Shining.

I’ve heard a possibly apocryphal story that in rural Kenya, the trick played on new people in town is to sell them cheap land for their new houses. People are enthused; they get acreage with water access and good soil, and it’s so cheap! A year later they find out they’re on the track of an elephant migration. The elephants come through the same places each year, and they don’t let anything get in their way. There are a lot of them. Things get… …flat.

I wish I was an elephant.

My Hitler

  1. My father once had a dream in which he was staying in a Swiss pension. There was a boarding house group from several countries, and as typical in these places meals were communal, all at one table. Shortly after his arrival he discovered that the elderly German gentleman with the mustache was, in fact, Adolf Hitler. Since dream logic was in effect, the problem was not how to kill Hitler, or call the police or the army, or even berate him for his crimes. The question was: how to address him at dinner?

    He couldn’t just be “Mr. Hitler”; the guy was a former head of state. “Herr FĂĽhrer”, though, would imply approval of the Third Reich and his dictatorship, which can’t be done even at dinner. Finally he figured it out: “Herr Reichskanzler Hitler” [sp?]. Since that was his official elected office, it was the best choice for being introduced or asking the guy to pass the salt.

  2. I once saw a lecture by a psychologist whose field of expertise was the psychology of contagion. This was just a few years into the AIDS epidemic, so it was a topic of current interest. He pointed out that how people think and behave about infection and contagion is related to scientific knowledge, but separate and different. And way stupider. For example, physically handicapped people are treated the way we treat people with an infectious transmittable disease: stay away, don’t touch. The mentally handicapped, too. NIMBY arguments against group homes sometimes boil down to “I’m afraid to have this near me”, as though one could catch mental retardation or multiple sclerosis from the water supply or at the mall.

    The most fascinating part of the lecture was the discussion of the contagion of clothing. People were asked a series of questions about clothing that had been worn by others. No one wanted to wear clothing that an AIDS patient had worn, even if it had been thoroughly cleaned. Many people didn’t want to wear clothing that a handicapped person had worn. And finally, the contagion of evil enters the picture when we’re talking about clothing. If some beloved figure like Mother Theresa has worn a sweater, most people responded they’d love to wear it. However, if Adolf Hitler had worn the sweater, no one wanted to wear it. And if the sweater had been worn by Adolf Hitler and then by the Dalai Lama, they still wouldn’t wear it. Some kinds of contagion can’t be purified.

So anyway that’s how I learned that you can turn into Hitler if you sit on the wrong toilet seat, and that you don’t want to stay in a hotel with the guy.