Aliens Prefer Americano

06JUN2010 – Hot as fuck outside, and I’m not in the mood to sit on my floor, pace my floor, sweep my floor, or get into a mental wrasslin’ match with my inner accountant about my lack of groceries as I wait for the Big Fat Paycheck that isn’t due until the first of next month.

Instead, I told myself that, historically and artistically speaking, it’s all the rage to be poor and hungry in New York.  I think I bought it, so I decided to step out for a stout.  Presently holding court at the Barcade, brushing up on my Galaga patterns, and penning nonsense in my ubiquitous journal, as follows:

What do the following have in common?

- Any liquor store

- An aisle of a bookstore devoted to bibles

- The cereal section of your local grocer

- Gun shops

Give up?  Variations on a theme.  How many different bottles of booze can one person possibly crawl into?  Why are there so many versions of the Bible?  How much Muesli do we really need?  Isn’t one gun enough when you catch your wife making magic monkeys with your best friend?

“Well, people need choices.” No, we fucking don’t.  We don’t need leopard print cell phone cases.  We don’t need peanut butter AND jelly in the same jar, and we sure as fuck have no business sipping anything from a can marked JOOSE.  Call me crazy, but sometimes I think free will is a loaded firearm: something best kept under lock and key, especially when there are children in the house.

P.S. Crocs were conceived as a dare.  Ha, ha!  Fooled you!

Common courtesy is a disease we could all stand to catch.  Don’t get the sniffles, or a weekend bug.  Catch a fucking plague of it.  Lose your leg, if need be.

[HHG SHIPMENT ARRIVED SOMEWHERE DURING THIS TIMEFRAME. CASUALTY: ONE FLOOR LAMP]

08JUN2010 – MEMORY OF EARTH: 8^th Ave subway stop, hot summer night, drunk on tequila and red wine.  Across the platform, a beautiful young black girl with Cappuccino skin plucks wandering melodies from her acoustic guitar, the notes lost among the cocktail din of the other commuters waiting for the Brooklyn-bound L.

09JUN2010 – Tired from walking, stopped into Cho’s for an iced coffee.  It’s just around the corner from my place.  Don’t want to go home, but I’ve been wandering for a few hours now.  No money, no friendly faces.

You: “Oh, but there’s so many free things to do in New Yor–.”

Me: Shut up.  I know.  None of them include eating.

Planet WillBurg is kinda weirding me out, anthropologically speaking.  I’ve been dressing like a power nerd since Christ was a messcook: thick black glasses, courier bag, tattoos, camo shorts.  It’s been my thing for years, and I’m great with it.  Imagine my reaction — nay, my chagrin! — when I roll off the train to find these irony-based motherfuckers dropping out of the trees, and all of them look like me.  There’s probably fifty-million dollars worth of India ink walking down Metropolitan Avenue at any given point in time!  So much for being different. Not sure how I feel about it. Safety in anonymity?

I tried to strike up a conversation with the barista.  It went like this:

[brief introductory chatter here, blah, blah]

Her: “So, what do you do?”

Me: (pausing, not wanting to mention government because it always gets a weird response; not quite ready to say, “I’m a writer” because my book isn’t published yet; not wanting to say something coy and asinine like, “Oh, this and that,” because that’s a fucking retard movie dickhead answer; and definitely not wanting to throw down my entire goat-choking title: crisis communications, risk management and media relations specialist…) “Uh, I’m a photographer…”

Her: (dismissively) “Oh, just like everyone else.  That’ll be three-fifty.”

That’s right.  I look like everyone else, and I’m here to open a gallery, just like everyone else.  My mom’s paying for this coffee.  I’ll be over there taking MySpace photos of myself and trying to look poor.

Guess I should go home.  And do what?  (Image of an action figure in blister packaging, sitting erect on the edge of a perfectly-made bed in an inspection-ready apartment.  Towels folded to crisp precision, fridge gleaming – albeit empty.  Glasses and plates washed, dressed to the edge of the cupboard.  Floor swept, files organized by color, trash empty.  Room suffocatingly silent, except for the air conditioner.  Cursor blinking, awaiting further instruction.)

Part of me is thrilled to the gills at not having a social life.  No distractions.  Nothing to do but learn my job, aspire to greatness and write my ass off.  That part of me knows I can survive for extended periods of time on nothing more than beans, rice, tuna, coffee, Sharpies, music, and social media.  But there’s another part of me that knows that first part is a lying motherfucker.  “Friends are a form of wealth, as is knowledge.  Likewise, health.”  I don’t know who said that, probably me.  Plants need food, sunlight, water.  Human beings need their Maslow’s met.

I have dreams where I can fly, or move objects with my mind.  And in these dreams, I can feel the part of my mind that knows how to do these things.  I understand the weight of the object on some deep level.  I feel it rising up, moving toward me, coming to rest in my hand.  But on awakening, that part of my brain reads as 404 FILE NOT FOUND.  It feels like something in me has died.

I wonder what will become of these journals.  Used as tinder, perhaps?

All my travels and
years set free in the tears of
slowly rising flames.

Maybe they’ll put stretch marks on the bottom of a trash bag.  Guess it doesn’t matter, brevity of life, Pale Blue Dot, blah, blah.

Relax, people.  I’m not looking to conquer anything but myself.

26JUN2010 – I’ve fallen into the Pit of Quiet.  I go for days without saying much.  Don’t feel like speaking.  Took everything I had to dress myself and wander into the sunlight this morning.  New York might be safer, doesn’t make it any friendlier.  Found a series of coaxial adapters approximately three inches long on the sidewalk near my apartment.  Walked along twirling this tiny technological sword of state in my fingers, hefting it, feeling the weight of the thing.  Remain silent, stay hidden, Ghost Dog my way through my environment, wait for the map of familiarity to reveal itself.  Muscle memory takes time to form.  Someday I will think to myself, “Remember when this was all brand new?”

Sometimes a woman is a beautiful painting.  She doesn’t need your consent, she doesn’t want your admiration, she doesn’t care for your conversation, she doesn’t require your loyalty, your chivalry or your complication.  Sometimes she just wants to walk down a sunlit street in a pretty dress, wearing her favorite sunglasses and the sandals that took her forever to find.  Sometimes she just wants to be pretty.  Let her.

I’m still afraid of ending up broken and homeless; filthy and terrified, hungry and wasting, begging for the change you got from your latte and have nothing better to do with, but still won’t give it away.  All my clever will be for naught, my stories will fall upon deaf ears, and that will be that.  We leave this world the same way we came in.

The music is this place is god-awful, unless you’re a raging fan of Christmas 1985 Casio keyboards and tone-deaf, two-chord sorcerers wringing every nuance from a simplified rhyme structure, where every line begins with “I feel”.  Makes me want to punch a goat.

Fascinating to consider that people make a conscious decision to dress as they do.  Observe the wild-haired man passing by the window: “I WILL leave the house today dressed in camouflage trousers, a red tank top, worn leather sandals and a healthy stack of ‘rock guy’ bracelets on each wrist.”  There must be an anthropological study on why people dress as they do.  We’re like pirate radio stations, walking the street, broadcasting our likes and dislikes, wearing our hearts on our record sleeves, staying awake on strong coffee and cigarettes, exhaling into the microphone and wondering if anyone is still  listening.

A song is like a piece of software, or a tool.  Someone has to dream it up, write it, assemble it from the tools they have on hand (and hopefully have a working knowledge of).  Then they send it out into the world.  Their user/audience learns of this product, using his/her own personal network to acquire it, and is forced to make an ethical decision:  “Hey, my favorite (programmer) has a new (meme/abstract analogy/external emotion experience/brain virus) available! I will (or will not) engage in the exchange of valued currency to obtain it.”  For some, these programs are just background clutter, and they interact with the program on a very basic level.

For others, the program becomes something like a theme for their computer; it changes the color of their background, selects a complimentary font, or has some other effect on their overall system.

And for still others, the effect is all-consuming: it becomes a photograph, an envelope, a time capsule, a shorthand statement, a bookmark, a reminder of the state of their perception and senses during a moment in time.  “Yes,” we imagine them saying.  “Song X reminds me of time period Y when I was in a relationships A, B, and C with the following objects, systems, or people: [DESCRIBE FURTHER]”

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y! NIGHT!

TWM

Letter to a friend

(Letter to my good friend @GoFrankGo)

Frankly (Mr. Shankly!),

Sorry I missed your call on Sunday.  It’s been a rough weekend:

Friday night, I ate some takeout Chinese and washed it down with a Red Bull while watching “Venture Bros.”  As one does.  (Fuck, I have GOT to stop eating like I’m 20…) You’re right.  In fact, everyone who has ever recommended “Venture Bros.” to me was right about that show.

That night, I had dreams where I was dying of thirst even though I was drinking as much as physically possible – a sure sign that my body wasn’t happy with the choice I’d made.  (I have those dreams when I eat pepperoni or sausage on pizza, too.  Mmmm, sausage and mushrooms.… )  In these dreams, I’m drinking from the garden hose on full stream, or pounding gallon jugs of ice water straight from the fridge but nothing’s coming out.  Woke up the next morning and I was sore all over, like I was coming down with something.  Showered, went back to bed for a few hours.  Can’t nap too late, though…

Oddly enough, Katie Orlando was in town this weekend with her boyfriend to shoot the Cherry Blossom festival. My plan was to leave a few hours early to say hello (she being only the fourth TLC postboard persona I’d have met!), then head over to Dupont Circle to meet up with Cass (see also: Special Lady) for fancy salads, and then take in a Bach Concert at the Kennedy Center. Eventually: I got up, dragged on clean clothes (NOT feeling like doing any of the above now), packed my faithful bag, and headed for the bus stop.

Fucking tourists. Seems I can never get away from them. They swarmed me in Hilton Head, South Carolina; they clogged the streets of Juneau, Alaska; and now they fuck up my chi each Spring when the blossoms bloom in Disco Charlie.  They clog the Metro, make a mess of the escalators and generally get in the way.  As I get sicker, I grow… angrier.

Short story long, I missed out on seeing Katie but she lives in New York; no worries, we’ll have time to say hello later.  Waited for Cass for almost an hour before she shows up and tells me she was waiting at the other entrance to DuPont Circle – and, her new cellphone’s not working. Google phone can’t get a T-Mobile signal in D.C.?  Who’dve thought it?

We ate our fancy salads and relished every bit — no, wait.  I’m lying.  Because, oh yeah, the salads sucked.  Now, I’m a member of the clean plate club.  All the time.  That’s just how I roll.  And when I tell you my favorite fantasy is taking shelter in an empty hotel in the middle of hurricane season with nothing to do but write (and I’ve got the keys for the bar, the pool, and access to a generous supply of fresh fish, steamed veggies, fresh oranges and brown rice) well, you come to understand what sort of sick, salad-humping son of a bitch I really am.

So when I say I couldn’t finish this salad — well, let’s just not repeat that sentence.

Cass was still hungry (her salad sucked, too! A word to the wise: SweetGreen? SweetFail.  I mean… look at the menu! It’s vegetable PrØn!  How could they fuck it up!?)

…so we ducked into a Subway. She ate half a sub, stashed the rest in my bag. Offered me some, but at this point I couldn’t imagine ever eating again. (I had a feeling of perfect balance, and the following thought occured: “Never eat again!  Why not?  It’s like being a character in a Tom Robbins novel and deciding not to age anymore.”)

On to the Kennedy Center!

Wait!  Go back!  When Special Lady told me we were gonna catch a Bach mass for twenty bucks, I, in my present state of physical delusion, assumed that my attire of camouflage shorts, a clean polo shirt and my beat-to-shit hiking shoes were perfectly AOK for the occasion. What the hell do I know from the Kennedy Center? (What the hell do I know from a mass??) We show up, and of course everyone is wearing suits. Yeah, I looked like a painted turd.  But fuck it, we paid for our tickets so we took our seats.  I slumped down extra low to hide my poor fashion sense from Jesus.

Catholic masses… wait, aren’t those–?  Long as fuck?  Yes.

I experienced a specific mental meme,  a soundbite from a skit starring a Catholic priest who “really thought the world of a GOOD LONG MASS!” (*fist punched into palm for enthusiasm and emphasis*. Might be an old episode of ‘Father Ted’?)  Now, I own recordings by Vivaldi, Wagner, and Mozart, and my first favorite song ever was the Pachebel Canon in D Minor.  So I’m not a culture buffoon.  But this was about the most boring goddamn thing I’d ever seen!  No plot, just grovelling. “Oh, Lord, please forgive us!  We’re not worthy!  Just you!  Only you are worthy!  You’re number one!  We’re number two!  Please let us into your special club!”

Just then, Special Lady (dressed in suitable jeans, top and a shawl — making me look even shittier, thanks) writes on her program and slides it over: WHY ARE THEY SINGING ABOUT CHEESE AND RICE?  I try not to laugh, makes my head hurt, can’t help it.  She’s wearing a mischievous grin, her bright eyes sparkling. I’m feeling like smeared death… sore limbs, and a raging headache, and the chairs are built for tiny beings, not 6′ 4″ motherfuckers like myself.  So we start passing notes back and forth. Hilarity ensues.  We are comedic geniuses the likes of which the world has never seen.

Then she writes: IF THERE’S AN INTERMISSION, LET’S BAIL. I slide her a low-five… aw, yeah. Dig this girl…

We slip out, she finished her sandwich and we discuss an important new opera called “The Cheese and The Rice” on the way to the Metro.  She performs a few scenes for me, in falsetto, at the top of her lungs.  More tourists.  Back to her place, finally.  I’m sore, shivering, and I’ve got a headache strong enough to make a horse squint. I crawl under the covers and I’m out…

Next morning, her godawful rooster alarm wakes me up at zero-dark. She has to go to work, but tells me I can sleep in late, shower, and catch a cab to the Metro.  No worries. I’ll make up the bed.

Conversation courtesy of Jesus of Bastardeth

Back to sleep, in and out of dreams. Head throbbing. (At one point, you texted me. Or maybe it was Jesus trying to sneak in a little self-promotion. You can’t blame the man, everybody has bills to pay.) Back to sleep, more dreams.

Wake up weak with a squinteriffic headache. It’s almost 3 p.m. Shower, dress, and lock up. Check iPhone app for local cab companies while standing in the driveway. Seven numbers appear, three of which are limo service and airport shuttles. Read: expensive. Two numbers don’t even answer. The last picks up: “Yeah? Naw, we don’t pick up there no more. You gotta call someone else.”  He gives me a number, hangs up.  In my feverish, fucked up condition I hope I’ve got it right.  Dialed it.  A Hindu voice answers.  “We don’t pick up there.  You gotta call someone else.”  I dialed the third number.  The sun is beating down, I’m shivering, and my head is SCREAMING.  Cars are whipping past carrying bored expressions and bad sunglasses.  Seems folks’re already sick of sunlight around here.  The last number is a winner.  They’ll be here in ten, and they take plastic.

Get to the Metro station. There’s a guy with a dazed look on his face, standing with his face pressed against the chain link fence, headphones in, his toneless voice rapping along: “Tryin’ ta get her pregnant, tryin’ to get her pregnant…” His eyes are dark and dead.  I’m shredding my taxi receipt into tiny pieces because it has my card number on it, and I throw it into a trashcan that reeks of piss. Everyone looks mean, cheap, like someone pissed in their Cheerios a long time ago and they’ve just kept eating it. I’m still not a fan of the ghetto, I don’t care how much we stand to learn from its residents.

Remember those tourists?  And remember that part about Chinese food and Red Bull being the last thing I’ve eaten all weekend?  I almost lost my temper and starting shouting at some tourists who were wide-eyed as amazed deer that the doors on a Metro car don’t bounce open when they encounter your arm or leg.  “Goodness!”  But I bite my tongue, ever polite.  Off the train now, walking faster and faster, dodging and moving through gaps in the crowd. Muttering, swearing.  Moments from losing it.  Don’t wanna be in a crowd if I do.  Through the Metro, up the escalator (“The RIGHT side is for standing, people!”) and get to the top, spot a cab.  Give the intersection of my neighborly hood, and asked if he took plastic.  He shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know how to work the machine..?”  Try another cab.  He is apparently certified to work the machine.  I pile in.  The cab is clean, and smells of incense. “Nice weather, yes?”  I agree wordlessly, staring out the window, thinking thunderclouds.

I get home, check the mail, unpack, toss my dirty clothes in the laundry basket, gun a handful of ibuprofen and some other stuff Cass had given me before diving under the covers, trying to wish away the intense brain pain.  Sleep, and more weird dreams…

In this one, I wake up in my first-ever bedroom, which was haunted.  I know there are visitors downstairs, and I’m supposed to go see them.  But I have to get dressed.  I can’t turn on any of the light switches (sure sign that I’m dreaming) so I use my cellphone camera for light.  As one does.  I put on a black shirt, black slacks and black dress shoes.  I look like I’m ready for Vegas.  Or a Miami funeral.  I go downstairs and suddenly I’m in a cab.  And we’re driving  - have been driving for quite some time, actually. Eventually, I speak to the driver.  “Say, man. We’ve been at this for awhile, and, like, I don’t remember telling you where I wanted to go..? So how’s about we go a little further for scenery’s sake, and then you drop me off at where ever it was that you picked me up?”

Suddenly, I’m walking under a clear night sky.  The weather is perfect.  The stars are bright and plentiful, like when you’re out at sea, or in a country with minimal light pollution.  I’m aware that I’m walking ahead of a great multitude of people, and they’re waiting for me to do something, but it’s dark and I can’t see them.  The stars are huge and perfect…

Woke up at midnight. Headache and soreness gone. Wrote this letter to pass the time, which may explain the typos.

That’s why I missed your call.

TWM

100413/1502

Been a little while since I typed up a new picture to hang in this room…

I’m planning to move to NYC in June (for work), and simultaneously preparing to hand over said work-related responsibilities to an as-yet absent party. Experiment: spend three years becoming something of a subject matter expert for a tech-heavy government project with which you are only vaguely acquainted, but genuinely interested in. Example: VHF radios, radio tower architecture, satellite and rescue communications, and the Washington, D.C.-based political water-balloon battle that must be fought in order to keep said project in the air. Put *everything* you’ve learned about this complicated subject into a cohesive, concise document. Make sure that anyone and everyone who picks it up can easily understand it. Call it a Passdown Log. Leave it for your relief to find. Hope for the best (but expect ..?). And now, recognizing that while you’re more at home in a quiet stretch of woods, you must be prepared to start your life over from scratch in the busiest media market in the country in less than 60 days, with no friends and no allies. No advanced ground support.

And now, random thoughts in lieu of a proper blog entry:

Hours – everything breaks down to hours. The average life expectancy is approximately 75 years. That breaks down to 657,000 hours. That’s all you get! Call it your currency, and your credit limit. There’s not a bank in the land that will grant you an extension on this loan. The pyramids were built X hours ago. The Battle of Hastings was fought X hours ago. I recall the first time I stayed awake for twenty-four hours. In one giddy act, night time ceased to exist. Time fell into two camps: bright time spent awake, and dark time spent asleep.

For me, the Earth literally changed. I became more *aware* of the Earth and it’s clockwork motions, the pale blue dot *hanging* in the vastness of space, like a nervous child that’s waded into the deeper end and can no longer feel the rough concrete floor of the pool with the tips of his toes, and must struggle to keep his tender chin above water. Mouthfuls of chlorinated water splash in, and must be spat out again.

Time – As in “the measurement of atrophy and activity”. Finished my first novel; presently waiting for the legendary @GoFrankGo to finish the cover. Started my second novel – HEAVY on the time travel and spatial anomalies, lots of laws and physics to consider. Winners write the history books – most of what we know is a lie but there’s nothing we can do about it except *recognize* that certain *truths* might just *be* a lie, but that these lies have very little bearing on our everyday lives, and that’s where we spend our attention and focus. Our time here is short (see above) and campaigning for truth serves no real purpose.

(They’re counting on this.)

Light – Is it just me, or is light f*cking amazing? Turn off all the lights in your home. Make it pitch black. Now, open your refrigerator door just a crack. See how far the light spreads! Marvel at the tiny places where light reaches, emanating from one piece of glowing Tungsten sealed inside a thin glass vacuum. I get very excited about the basics, the stuff we take for granted. Forgive me. (The world’s longest lasting light bulb is the Centennial Light located at 4550 East Avenue, Livermore, California. It’s maintained by the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department, which claims that the bulb is at least 109 years old and has only been turned off a handful of times. The bulb has been noted by “The Guinness Book of World Records”, “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”, and General Electric as being the world’s longest-lasting light bulb.)

Projects – I’m photographing the Kinetic Sculpture Race in Baltimore on the 1st of May. Looking forward to the madness (though perhaps not the obligatory “kooky hat” I’m expected to wear!)

Tourists – Stand on the right, WALK on the left, and DON’T STOP at the bottom of the escalator. You WILL get run over.

Coffee – Recently developed a devotion to Americano coffee. Take three parts of heart-stopping espresso, add one part boiling water. Add a short dose of raw sugar and wait exactly ten minutes before sipping. Perfect.

Books – Presently reading: William Gibson’s “Spook Country”, Gene Roddenberry’s novelization of the first “Star Trek” movie, and a book or two on alternative medicine. My Amazon cart is loaded with used goodies – I’m waiting to shed some older skins before I purchase additional ones.

New York – I’ve been pouring over NYC transit maps and schedules in preparation for my move to Alien Territory. I think the system was initially sketched on a dare, but for whatever reason the designers had to follow through with it. (Google Earth has a lot of useful tools.) At this point I can almost picture myself wandering the streets, my bag over one shoulder, camera at the ready, my brain set on GATHER, my eyes searching for artifacts which fall under the following categories: rather weird, very old…

Listening to: Jello Biafra and the Melvins “Caped Crusader”,

TWM

When Chuck Norris gives you the finger,

… he’s telling you how many seconds you have left to live. #chucknorrisfacts

Tuesday in The Sunlight

If I don’t write it down, I’ll never believe it.

I’m moving to New York City.

TWM

Chocolate, Salmon and Directions

Look ye mighty upon my building codes and despair.

06MAR2010 – We meant to be up much earlier.  Haven’t seen a blue sky in so long, I forgot they were still in production.  The Eternal Shotgun, I am also the holder of Chocolate, Salmon and Directions. Drove north, navigating with my iPhone.  Tromped about in the woods for three quarters of a dollar.  Hard pack snow turns half-thawed hill into amusement park slides.  Old stone church just over the next rise!  Alas, chain link denial.  Rethink required.

Drove an hour West, parked the Mouse and hiked along the railroad tracks, kicking rocks and talking trash.  Engrossed in the moment, nearly ignored the train whistle coming up behind.  Fun science fact: corn syrup is transported via rusted railcars.  I swore to never drink another can of Choke, but probably will.  Poked around old power station; a fortune in dying metal and potential album cover for aspiring rock bands.  Up the hill now, brushing aside the Douglas firs.  Clearing yields two- and three-story structures masked in modern cave murals; proclamations of might, love and genitalia size by kids and kings alike.  Broken glass everywhere.  More buildings beyond.  Administration.  Staff housing.  Chapel.  Workshops.  Pool.

Right now was a long time ago, and tomorrow never comes.

Built in the 20s as an equal-treatment facility for African-Americans with tuberculosis, Henryton was briefly converted to a minimum-security mental hospital before it was boarded shut in the mid-80s.  Easily two days worth of exploring here, but we’re woefully unprepared.  Flashlight failure, relied instead upon my camera to light the voids, taking core samples of the local darkness.  Half wondered if we’d see the blood-shot eyes and grimy face of a cornered squatter captured in the camera’s LCD each time I pressed ‘view’.  Should have packed the Big Gun, brought my point-and-shoot instead.  Better low-light capabilities, colored filters, speed flash.  Still: “The best camera in the world is the one you have with you.”

Vandals tore radiators from the walls, dragged them into the hallways and beat them to death.  Threw sinks through three story windows for good measure.  Kicked out entire sections of some of the upper floors, the ribs of the buildings now visible.  Wet skin and dry wall.  Graffiti: Alice in Wonderland, dancing Lysergic acid diethylamide pills, giant koi, koala bears, sheep.  For the record, pentagrams with horns are WAY evil.  You don’t even know.

Shown here: life

Less than an hour of daylight left, we better vamoose.  Back through the woods, along the tracks.  More trash talking.  Drove to a Cuban restaurant that lied about where it was located.  Me underdressed: camouflaged hiking trousers, muddied Keens, and an old sci-fi t-shirt among the polished loafers and pressed shirt crowd.  Not content with one faux pas, I decide to brush the glass candle to the stone floor.  Terrific noise, heads turn.  I’m mortified.  Reach for the broom, offer to clean up my own mess.  Wait staff urge me to sit down and shut up.  Good food.  I tip big.  We depart.

Drive to home of Special Lady, collect needful things.  Clothes, GPS.  Enroute to Department of Awesome, spy CRT television set left sitting on interstate median.  I wonder what was going through the owners mind: “This busy intersection looks like the perfect spot to abandon a large plastic cube of glass and noxious chemicals.  Since it will take millions of years for it to decompose, I can return often to visit it.”  I should get a job going door to door slapping litterbugs:

Doorbell: (say nothing, present 8 X 10 color glossy of offender shirking their responsibility) SMACK! “WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?”

Welcome back, Spring.  I nearly went mad.

What Happened At The Edge Of The World

See that tiny red speck? That's the welding torch.

My scorn for sleep has finally caught up with me.

I’ve lost track of the hour and I can no longer feel my legs.  I must now rely on a desperate dietary cushion of constant coffee consumption in the face of complete exhaustion.  Total system shutdown is imminent. 

As I type these words, I’m sitting in the deserted ballroom of a four-star hotel at the end of Alaska’s Aleutian Chain.  The room is a confused mess filled with folding tables, magnetic dry-erase boards, slumbering laptops with power cables affixed to the carpet by the shiny scars of duct tape and Post-it notes large enough for a condemned man to Sharpie his final confession upon.  My job and reason for being here: information officer for a massive maritime shipping accident — the grounding of the Selendang Ayu.

Here are the facts compiled from available press releases: “The M/V Selendang Ayu was a Malaysian cargo ship carrying soybeans from Seattle, Washington to China when it ran aground off the western coast of Unalaska Island in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on December 8, 2004, resulting in a large oil spill.

Two HH-60J Jayhawk helicopters from the U.S. Coast Guard were involved in evacuating 18 of the ship’s crewmembers, 9 to the Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley.  During attempts to save the last 8 crewmembers, Coast Guard CGNR 6020, an HH-60J from Air Station Kodiak, was engulfed by a rogue wave that broke over the bow of the ship.  When the engines flamed out from ingesting sea water, the Jayhawk crashed into the sea…”

I would have the opportunity to speak to the members of the downed helicopter, who said the inside of the helicopter was a “pandemonium of rushing water, alarm horns and flashing lights as the Jayhawk rolled over and began to sink.”  The three Coast Guard crewmen, wearing buoyant survival suits, floated to the surface, where the Dolphin picked them up.  Six men from the Selendang Ayu weren’t as lucky.  The seventh was pulled from the churning sea, and he was close to death, suffering from hypothermia and injuries sustained in the crash.  By the time he reached the Dutch Harbor Clinic, his body temperature had fallen to a dangerously low 78°F, but he did survive.

Later that night, the HH-65B returned to rescue the Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer and ship’s master from the Selendang Ayu, which had broken in half during their absence.  The rescue swimmer who remained with the master told me it was “the most intimidating feeling to be standing on the deck of a ship that was tearing apart beneath his feet.”  This aircraft, CGNR 6513’s crew would all be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for their actions.  The Coast Guard searched for the remaining crew until their efforts were suspended on December 10.

The ship had been carrying a significant amount of fuel, so there were fears that the Selendang Ayu could create the worst Alaskan oil spill since the Exxon Valdez.  One tank containing 40,131 gallons of fuel ruptured when the ship broke apart.  It is estimated that 424,000 gallons of heavy bunker C fuel oil and 18,000 gallons of diesel fuel was on board when it grounded.  Ultimately, 350,000 gallons of bunker oil and diesel spilled, which is about 2.9% of the volume of crude oil spilled from the Exxon Valdez.  The crew had transferred the fuel internal tanks when the ship foundered, and heaters were turned off so that the fuel would thicken in the cold waters.  However, environmental officials estimate that up to 1.28 million liters of thick fuel oil (338,000 US gallons) leaked from the freighter…

Flash forward two weeks: I’m staying in a room down the hall.  Government rates apply, and there’s fresh salmon and halibut for dinner with lobster and crab on Tuesday and Thursday nights.  But the mood is not a festive one.  Members of this Joint Information Command work long days, akin to pushing back the tide in lengthy shifts with a corn broom.  I spend much of my time shackled to a folding card table in the corner of the ballroom, herding the local media from event to event and crafting polished press releases.  I’ve had to “vote” two members of the media off the island.  One of them was a Greenpeace activist.  The other, an Anchorage reporter who couldn’t get his facts straight, spent his various interview opportunities looking for “the dirt ” on both the rescue and salvage operations.  

When I’m not giving accredited members of the press the Roman Thumbs Down, I’m sifting through stacks of poorly labeled CDs and thumb drives full of images from the field, harvesting what I deem worthy.  As a rule, the images will require a minimum of cropping and the crafting of a proper cutline in order for the outside world to understand what happened here, and why, and what we plan to do to fix it.

The highlight of my day today, however, was the helicopter ride.  I went up in a little red bird with the CEOs of a local land ownership corporation to view some of the areas effected by the wrecked behemoth.

I strapped myself into the shotgun seat, watching the pilot run through his pre-flight checklist and readying my camera.  Before we took off, the pilot gave us a quick safety brief; what to do in the event of engine failure, bird strike or the impulsive actions of a jealous God.  The cockpit intercom system was accessible via the lip mike mounted to my headset and the rocker-switch under my right boot, which allowed me to listen in on the radio chatter from the control tower.  I was safe as houses, strapped in by a five-point harness and wearing a Mustang survival suit and an inflatable vest.

It’s not integral to this story, but you should know I’m the kind of guy who gets a strange thrill from safety briefs.  On my way to the island, I smiled and winked a dog-eared copy of the pre-flight brief from the manicured hands of the stewardess, a script which encompasses all of Boeing’s 737 class aircraft. Score!

I looked out through the bubble as we lifted off, watching the world fall away between the skinny legs of the landing struts.

White mountains stand guard.
Visibility: six miles,
winds: almost five knots.

As we circled the wreck, the pilot’s voice crackled in my ear.  “My wife described pictures of the wreck as being hauntingly beautiful.’”  I nodded my agreement, keeping in mind that six of the Selendang Ayu’s crew lost their lives during the rescue.  The hard truth of those deaths overshadowed everything we did during that response.  I’d also been present for the town hall meetings and heard firsthand the protests of angry subsistence fishermen who wanted to know “when the blankity-blank Coast Guard was gonna get this mess cleaned up because there was money being lost.” 


I returned my eye to the viewfinder and focused on my intended money shot; framing the twisted wreck in the polished passenger-side landing mirror mounted below and forward of the bubble dome at my feet.  The vibrations of the helicopter made this quite impossible so I rethought my plan, staring out at the wreckage before me.

The sea doesn’t take kindly to stationary objects — enormous sections of the deck plating have been violently ripped away from the hull like the top of a sardine can.  Several of the massive, hundred-pound hatch covers from the bulk cargo holds have since washed ashore on a nearby stretch of beach now covered in spilled soybeans.  In some places, the beans form a quagmire several feet deep.  It’s a surreal sight, to say the least.  Try to picture billions and billions of butterscotch jelly beans covering the shores of a rough and ragged Alaskan beach.  That vision in your head probably won’t come anywhere close.

Last night, I ate my fancy fish dinner with the salvage crew, listening in awe to their wild tales.  They’re an awesome breed; rip-roaring old salts who hail from England, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Singapore.  Want to know the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story?  A fairy tale starts out, “Once upon a time.”  A sea story starts out with, “This is a no-shitter.”  The crew give the impression as being free-wheeling, devil-may-care types who don’t take life too seriously.  They work hard, play hard and live like kings in a land just beyond the borders of conventional life.

According to their accounts, the stench of the soybeans on board is overwhelming.  They’ve begun to decompose in the harsh conditions, creating a gas that pushes upwards on the remaining hatch covers.  Furthermore, the created gas has replaced the oxygen in many spaces, making them unsafe.  They will have to be vented.

The good news is that, because they’re organic, they’re not part of the cleanup process.  In time, they will biodegrade.  There’s no danger of them germinating in this inhospitable environment and causing further problems in the local ecosystem.  According to notes I gathered earlier today from the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife, the weight of the soybeans is crushing the invertebrates caught beneath the mountain of beans.  After fighting their way to the top, small creatures are gobbled up by the mob of hungry seagulls circling the immediate area.  None of the animals are capable of eating the soybeans, since their digestive systems are unable to draw nutrients from the beans.

Back in the helicopter now:  While circling the wreck, we could see the bright red flashes of wielding torches.  The salvage crews were cutting into the deck on the port side as part of the time-consuming process of ‘lightering’.  Openings must be cut through the surface deck plates to access a three-foot void, one which is necessary to keep the surface plates from being exposed to the heat from the coils in the bottom of the fuel tanks which keeps the fuel from freezing.  Then, work begins on the second layer. This process is called ‘hot tapping’, and requires an extremely slow-boring drill to create four holes in a tight square, which further allows the crews to cut an opening large enough for a man to crawl inside.  After the first tank of marine diesel is emptied, the tank has to be cleaned since the void is considered harmful to human life.

There’s a great deal of sludge at the bottom of the tanks, congealed among the heater coils.  The fuel will have to be mixed with sea water to get it to flow.  It’s like forcing high-pressure water into the bottom of a tube of toothpaste to get at those last dollops onto your brush.  It’s messier than shit, but it works.  From there, the fuel is pumped into a waiting 7-foot reinforced steel CONEX cube complete with eyelets, which allow a heavy-lift Chinook helicopter to hoist the cube via sling and transport it to a staging area on the island.  Empty cubes arrive, full cubes leave.  Work is slow on some days, and fast on others.

As we flew over another desolate stretch of shore, crews from the Department of Fish and Wildlife combed the beaches of oil contaminated areas in search of dead birds, dead otters, pieces of birds, etc.  Present body count: 401 birds, 5 otters.  That number will probably continue to grow.

There are other jobs, equally unpleasant.  Fighting local currents and weather conditions, work skiffs are piloted ashore carrying the work crews who’ll spend countless hours shoveling oil-soaked gravel, plant life and sand into heavy-duty garbage bags while dressed head to toe in chemical resistant suits, disposable rubber boots and bright blue gloves.  Filthy, time-consuming and back-breaking work.

We landed on a site the operations cell labeled SKN14 just as the shore crews stopped for a water break.  While they were lounging on the rocky beach enjoying the afternoon sun, I snapped a picture of an strangely alluring older woman.  She had a weathered, craggy face with glittering eyes and a broad smile.  She joked easily with me while reclining on that oil-soaked beach beneath perfect blue skies somewhere at the Edge of the World, dressed in her filthy yellow Devo suit, her hands grimy with oil despite the protective gloves.  She was pleasant company and made me promise to email her a copy of the picture, which I did.

On the way back to Dutch Harbor, the pilot flew slow and low over a stretch of volcanic black sand. We were twenty feet off the ground and moving forward at a crawl, the rotor wash churning up the sand and tide below.  Ten minutes later, we were at the top of Volcano Bay and circling the mouth of the volcano, and I saw the steam billowing out like products from a cloud factory.  There was a band of bright green visible near the mouth, remnants of the sulfur deposits in the snow.  And as with many of the countries I’ve visited, I could see that point along the horizon, the place where the earth begins to curve.  The sky was a deep, soothing blue, and the sun shone down on pristine mountain tops no human foot has ever touched.  There were mile-wide basins carved in the rock, residue from the slow-moving glaciers which carved these mountains back in the Ice Age.  I realized the towering structures we were slow dancing with were merely the worn stumps of far greater monuments to our brevity, standing silent guard in this part of the globe for longer than I could comprehend, and would continue to do so no matter what events shaped the outcome of the rest of the world.

The pilot informed us we’d reached ‘bingo fuel’, the point at which we had to turn back in order to safely reach the base.  Upon our approach, we crawled slowly forward at a graceful five knots, descending slowly from the heavens like a rock god being lowered to the stage on his comeback tour.

Back at the office, I discovered I’d snapped 217 photos.  And like these words, not one of them really captured what I’d seen.

Not so much ‘going to sleep’ as ‘passing out’,

TWM

Welcome back to Wednesday

Welcome back to Wednesday.  It hasn’t changed much since your last visit.

 

The Earth is getting steadily closer to the Sun, but things are pretty much on course for Spring, same as last year.  You might have noticed your fingernails growing faster as of late, and there’ll be fewer emails in your inbox when you get to work, and yes, those *are* the same sad-shaped entities you see riding the PTT and the Metro every weekday.  But all in all, nothing’s changed.  Wednesday has been Wednesday since someone thought to give it a name.

You probably woke up this morning as you often do, by bumping into your own consciousness in a dark room; running into your brain like an old friend at a party and being too drunk to remember you’ve known them for years.  That half-awake state is mighty slippery, and rumored to be the consistency of mercury.

The experience of waking up is like sitting at a desk in the showroom of your personal dream factory as you dutifully review the feed from the previous rest period.  According to these proofs, you were busy designing a weapon of sorts; a chunky, cartoonish pistol that fires lead-colored spheres designed to whip wildly about, gathering speed before colliding with the target, rendering them momentarily stupid.  The effects are momentary, laughable, and totally harmless.

Eventually, curiosity forced you to open your eyes…

VERIFY nothing changed in the night.  Still no super powers, unfortunately.  Check your phone for the time.  Count to thirty, listening to the sounds of your apartment, the sounds of your neighbors showering, making coffee and… hanging pictures, apparently?  You counted backwards from thirty again, then you got up, showered, shaved, brushed your teeth and dressed.  Bag over one shoulder, headphones in, you sat on the couch for a few moments experiencing that same strange flutter in your stomach as you did while attending school as a child.  Then you walked up the block and waited for the Public Troop Transport in the pearly wet X,Y of 0745, in what history would come to know as January 20, 2010.

Pentagram Metro.  Again, that stench of robot sex ozone awaited you in the tunnel.  Crowded together with the huddled masses, you waited your turn to board.  Suddenly, you detect a new smell, chlorine.  Are they hiding a swimming pool along one of these tunnels?  For a moment, you picture it; bright and shimmering like an subterranean mirage, soft gold griffins and immaculate white tiles, clear blue water reflecting the light from a sewer drain somewhere far above.

10 BOARD TRAIN
20 CLEAR PATH FOR OTHERS
30 GRAB SAFETY RAIL
40 RIDE TRAIN
50 WHEN/IF DOORS OPEN?
60 EXIT TRAIN
70 REPEAT TOMORROW

Open the doors, launch the Machines.  “We’re like poorly paid nanites, plunged suddenly into the bloodstream of the city from a mobile hypodermic, programmed to infect, inspect, detect, erect, expect, neglect and reject, etc..” You fall through the converging crowd as is your custom, inwardly pleased at your lifelong ability to pass through a dense throng of commuters without touching a single person.  You bound up the escalator, cross over the tracks and come down the far side before the Old Beast starts up with a hiss and a snort, lumbering slowly back through the tunnel in search of your hidden swimming pool.

Next, you board a shuttle at Elephant Plaza that takes you to your office building.  Use your fancy ID to scan into your glass front office and change into your work clothes; a dark blue uniform complete with boots.

Seven more years of this.  You still haven’t decided if this gig is a Trojan blessing or a soul-sucking curse.  Maybe it’s both.  Every coin has two sides. Balance is part of the game.  It’s unwise to bite the hand that feeds you.  Hey, whatever gets you through the night…

YOU WILL: drink your coffee, eat your breakfast, and shove email around for half an hour before scanning the internet for newsclips related to the Project.  On your first break, you’ll harvest your own interests; Wired, Wikipedia, io9, Popular Science, CNN, and Gizmodo.  Anything for your ‘feed.  There was nothing of interest today.

Enviously, you read the reports of your peers and their brave actions in Haiti.  Some part of you is jealous.  THEY are doing something useful.  THEY are making their lives count for something.  THEY are helping other HU-MANS.

Email is helpful, right?  Taking ‘graphs of awards earned for fiscal responsibility is helpful, right?  Writing speeches can be helpful, right?  Slap-boxing an unwieldy and sluggish database in search of current SAR figures in active Sectors for Congressional reports is helpful, right?

Yeah.  And you’re a motherfucking Chinese jet pilot.

You’ve been thinking more and more about Saturn-9.  You heard it gives you focus, which you sorely lack.  You feel as though you’re just spinning your wheels, waving your arms, taking whacks at saplings, when you’re meant to be chopping down trees.  In short, you feel as though you’re failing on every level.  “Fake it till you make it,” as the saying goes.  But what if you’re really a fake, and you never really make it?

Congratulations!  It’s now noon:fifteen.  Too early for lunch?  Maybe you’ll walk over to the other building and pick up a spare uniform from the dry cleaners, or bum a F@rsi from a fellow encephalographer who works there.  Although, entering that other building means you might come into contact with your peers, people you don’t necessarily enjoy talking to.  So much in common, yet so little to say.

Walking into that office makes your skin crawl.  Typically, wisdom falls from your mouth with all the fast ease of a race horse pissing on a flat rock, but somehow the uniform negates all sense of clever.  WHEN IN BLUE / YOU AREN’T YOU.  No one gets your jokes, no one gives a shit, and no one cares.  To the techs in the lab, you’re just a Big Friendly Giant in Buddy Holly glasses and jailhouse tattoos.  The tattoo jokes make you feel one dimensional; sadly, it appears to be the only gag they know.  There are times when you’d like to ditch your polite veneer and explode in frustration, but you know all too well that a bell once rung cannot be unrung.  End result: slack jaws, slow blinks, hurt feelings, pointless acts. Then where would you be? Consider this the pickles on your shit sandwich. Keep chewing, keep choking it down. Smile, dab mouth with napkin. “Yes, ha. Very funny.”

Mid-afternoon caffeine crash sounds like a gunfight in a symbol factory and you sit waiting for the credits, watching the clock; the grains of another day slipping away, wasted.

What does any of this mean?  Is it a test?  Voices in your head represent the Feeding Hand, you one you must be careful not to bite.  A tut-tut of the finger and a disapproving glare: “Well, you’d better just buckle down and put those thoughts out of your mind, we’re not paying you to think.” They’re not here to help, nor are they here to care.  Give him the speech, show him the manual, read him the paragraph, and let the record show that we did our part.  “Frankly, we expect more from someone at your level!”

 

Am you crazy?  Am you stupid? What the fuck am wrong with you?  Why can’t you just decide to be happy, and then… be happy?  Oh, that’s right.  Because you still think such axioms are a trick, a virus initiated by the rich and powerful to keep the poor and common from storming the True Bastille.  The same goes for  organized religion, professional sports, and decaffeinated coffee.

Secretly, you think you’re poorly suited to be a human being; you see yourself as a half-developed character in someone else’s novel.  Two paragraphs of background history.  Don’t dive too deep, the pool only goes down so far.

//

The windshield wipers on your homeward jaunt look like two underfed pterodactyls trying to tunnel out of a diamond mine.

“The Machine is too big, our mouths too many,” you’ll type, hunched over the tiny keyboard of your phone.  “We’re way out of balance; too many people are screaming for more.  Entitlement is our battle cry.  We take and take, and we don’t particularly care where it comes from or who has to do without, so long as we GET OURS NOW.  Once upon a time, it was a point of civic pride to be a part of a community, to give something back.” You don’t want to become ugly inside, so you compartmentalize every dark instant as a separate occurrence.  If you didn’t, you’d drown.

 

Off the Public Troop Transport, into the local Sandwich Chain.  You’re hungry, thought you might like a change.  The old homeless woman you spoke of earlier is back:

X,Y: coffee house, a roughshod elderly woman rocks to and fro, rubbing her legs and making sounds like VHF radio static. Transmission sent. 5:00 PM Jan 6th

She’s slumped and slumbering across a table, breathing slow and low like a suspension bridge in high wind.  Her tattered shoes are off, exposing her bare feet.  You glimpse her toenails, long and jagged, predatory, as though nature had intended her to spear chickens with her feet for her dinner.  Her skin looks like something that left to dangle in the Potomac River for two or three hundred years.

Ahead of you in line, a husky 8-year-old with a Gluetooth headset and a cookie in his hand stands transfixed, gawking at the woman. It’s hard to believe she was ever a snoring pink bundle in a warm blanket, her future stretching out before her like a highway of pearls.

Maybe she’s happier this way.  Or shit, maybe she’s just heavily medicated.

Once home, you’ll sit in front of your computer downloading BirdB®ain episodes and making clever comments on your ‘feed until you decide you’ve had enough of Wednesday.  You used to devote this time to writing, but you haven’t written anything in awhile.  Can’t really call yourself a writer if you don’t write, can you?  You used to lift in the evenings, go for walks, take pictures.  Nowadays, you devote too much of your time to the ‘Tubes and all the social crap that goes with it.  It’s come to be your prime source of interaction and validation, and that’s not good.

You’re getting older, and friends are getting scarce.  You’ve forgotten how to be a friend.  In fact, you’re turning into a bit of an asshole.  You thrive on movement, adventure and change but anymore you’re like a brain damaged shark; alternately forgetting and remembering how to swim, moving through the water in stops and starts.

Soon you’ll go to bed and close your eyes.  When you wake up, it will be Thursday.

That hasn’t changed much, either.

“Waiting for the beat to kick in, but it never does.”

Dear Frank,

Thank you for your earlier letter, but I’m not Santa Claus. I hope you get the Sharpies and the new software that you asked for, but I wouldn’t hold out for the you-know-what; I sincerely doubt that Santa’s elves have much experience working in latex.

So how are you? I hope things are going well. Just think, we’re a few days away from the dawn of a new decade. A blank page to doodle upon.

 There must be a word for the feeling of frustration that comes with having one’s brain “on” all the time. Nonstop dialog, nonstop chatter — except when one sits down to harvest the expected results. Then, the cookie jar is empty. There’s nothing there. And some doubtful voice in the back of one’s head is saying, “I told you, that was just a dumb little crumby idea, and not really worth putting down on paper. Now go fix me a turkey pot pie.”  Never listen to that voice, Frank. You’re a fucking genius. We’re all just waiting for you to figure this out.

 Everywhere I go in this town I witness tiny jewels of dialog, flashes of moments in time; I present to you the angry staccato pop of high heels marching across a tile floor; an echoing metronome to the self-important song of an older Barbie doll wearing absurd levels of gold and perfume (desperate subluminal message: “I’M STILL PRETTY! I’M ONLY 39! I’M STILL A VIABLE OPTION!”), except barbie says terse, hurried things like, “Well, we need to language that out.” Or, “The figures from last quarter don’t reflect that.” Or, “It’s an opportunity to build synergy with their team,” or my personal fave, “What’s your throughput on this?” This last line must be delivered with the appropriately-shaped head and hand motions.

 Equally baffling is the exchange of emotionless pleasantries among my fellow robots: “Hi, how are you. Fine, thanks. How are you. Fine, thanks.” Sometimes I imagine crowds of office drones marching between meetings in this fashion; lab rats scurrying through the maze of Veal Fattening Pens, muttering and squeaking a slew of official phrases. Just remember Bob Dobalina.

 The city of Disco Charlie is a majestic ego library filled with dust jackets of insecurity, where casual quips are met with an over abundance of false knee-slappery. It’s important to understand that no one will question your “value” to the project if you laugh a lot and pepper your conversation with statements like, “Well, I’m truly blessed.” But you have to pronounce it as “bless-ed.” This makes you sound extra holy. No one DARES to question the project value of anyone with pronounced religious beliefs. Not here. Not in this town. So long as your god is white.

 Some days I feel like a post-modern anthropologist: “Mutual of Omaha’s Office Kingdom.” For some of these wind-ups, the Office is a confidence game, a high-powered extension of Fraternity Row, a further extension of High School which points all the way back to the primordial proving playground. These drones aren’t real. None of this is real. They’ve been encouraged to believe they’re real, they’ve been given authority, and shown how to tie a double-Windsor. “The evidence points to the facts.” They remind me of primitive man, clinging close to his fading fire when the winter sun disappears, puffing up his importance to keep the wolves at bay.

 Furthermore, Disco Charlie etiquette dictates that you speak in acronyms, carry a clipboard and consult your watch often. Also, when you’re going to invade someone’s personal space, possibly interrupt their lunch, and definitely ask them to do something you were tasked with in order to take the credit, DON’T politely rap on the edge of the cubicle and wait to be invited in. Hell, no. That would be too considerate. Instead, say something clever like “knock-knock” as you’re STRIDING IN. First, stand there blinking as if you’re expecting something. Then, proceed to squint at their monitor to see what they’re working on before glancing around at their personal effects, touching, pawing and commenting as your little rat brain doth bade you. No one will question your burgeoning authority if you’re a reedy little mouth-breather who favors pastel-colored sweaters. Once you’ve confirmed the obvious and asked all the stupid question you can think of, make your welcomed exit and bid a much-anticipated adieu in two or three languages. But not the interesting ones. “Aloha, ciao, adios!” (“Wow,” says Leadership from the invisible boardroom inside your tiny mind. “Clearly this person is intelligent. We need to add more complex titles to their email signature!”)

 I’ve noticed, also, that the more obscure and complex the title in your email signature, the more of a hurry you can appear to be in. Feel free to make jokes about your weekend drywall installation project, but make sure to clarify “it’s just your weekend residence.”

 You must master the “Disco Charlie Hang Up”, a bizarre communications ritual in which party “A”, attempting to cast themselves in an air of perceived importance over party “B”, will interrupt the conversation by smiling dentist big and nodding in agreement as they walk away from party “B”. Party “A” may also make a series of mysterious noises like, “Mmm-kay, umm-hum, all right, take care” as they walk away from party “B”. This is done to clearly illustrate that party “A” is a “mover” and a “shaker” involved in far more “important” things, and that they were doing party “B”, the little person, a favor by even talking to them. Understand, party “A” doesn’t have a meeting to go to, not at that moment. It’s just that they just can’t afford to be seen talking to someone who doesn’t have a drywall installation project of their own. Other useful phrases with which to pepper ones conversations with include: “I drive a Mercedes,” “I have a double Masters from Yale,” “I’ve got a briefing with leadership at the White House next Tuesday,” and of course, “I’ve got a dry wall installation project.” All of them delivered casually.

*sigh*

 Maybe I’M the idiot here. Maybe things would go smoother if I learned to play the game. Well, I can’t do that. I can’t even fake an orgasm, let alone fake The Game. (Your one-line reply to this entire missive will no doubt be: “Dude, you can’t fake an orgasm? Pft.”)

“The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.” Sometimes I feel like shaking these people; grabbing them, directing their faces to the heavens and shouting, “VAST REACHES OF SPACE! MOLECULES! SPACE DONUTS! WE ARE LOST IN TIME!” I wish that was my super power; to show them the molecules in their hands, the secret workings of plants, the blackness of space, the lights of distant quasars, the birth and death of stars, and the rings of Saturn. Then I’d step back in a hurry to avoid getting their melting brains on my freshly polished boots.  

Also Typed Zarathustra,

Re: ply

Dear Dave,

I enjoyed your review.

My only argument is that, as kids, we had the chance to see Kirk, Bones and Spock in all those early episodes, and in all those *unique* situations (the first inter-racial TV kiss: Kirk and Uhuru! So many plotlines torn from the pages of a tumultuous era of history!*), visiting all those worlds, getting with all those lovely ladies (and on a shoestring effects budget no less), over the life of the first series. We invited those pivotal characters into our homes week after week, and got to know them slowly, over a number of profound conversations.

Scientifically smooth.

You can’t really judge one movie against the dawn of a new universe. Besides, those early years, man, that was a time when “Star Trek” as an idea was coming almost completely out of left field. “What the hell is this, ‘Wagon Trail for the Stars’?” It was all acting, and very little FX.

So they’ve rescued the franchise. Fine. I’m in favor of it, I guess. (Though I much preferred “Enterprise” with Scott Bakula at the helm. “Deep Space 9″, not so much. “Voyager”, no thanks.)

I’m in favor of “Casino Royale” for the same reasons you are, I think: please, stop threatening-slash-saving the Earth, stop with the gadgets, and take us back to the days of strong heroes; a close shave, a strong drink and a good left hook. Give us back our Connery, our Lazenby (you can keep Moore and that Other Fellow. Brosnan was OK, I suppose. Cold War, and all that.) Put fedoras on our spies and cut back on the CGI. Give the world some much-needed CLASS. Not everything needs to be brought back BIGGER AND BETTER.

Does it?

There’s an endless list of ‘meh’ movies coming out now (“Knowing”, I’m looking in your direction) that, had they debuted when we were still young enough to consider Donkey Kong cereal as a balanced breakfast, would have blown our pre-pubescent minds and shaped our culture in countless ways. As Chuck Klosterman wrote in “Sex, Drug and Cocoa Puffs”, “In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam.”

Think about releasing something like “Close Encounters” now: Wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t happen! We’re too jaded. And that’s a shame. Movie-wise, we’ve had naughty limo-time with so many coked-up Hollywood starlets that the sweet, caring girl next door doesn’t do it for us anymore. There’s no way we’re gonna be able to get off properly because we’re over stimulated. We expect everything from our movies these days. If, in the next Die Hard movie (because you know it’s gonna happen), Bruce Willis doesn’t engage in a 128-clip gun battle aboard a burning QE2 which just HAPPENS to be on a high-speed collision course with Alcatraz Island, against a crack squad of martial arts-trained leather clad cyber-baddies hell bent on “ruling the world”, we’ll walk out of that theater bored, Tweeting and craving Starbucks. We’re spoiled. We’ve had it all handed to us.

I say start taking things away, but that’s just me…

TWM

*What “firsts” are left for us? Full frontal male nudity on the evening news? As if Bush wasn’t enough of a dickhead. Every day in every way we’re pushing back the boundaries set by the FCC, but it’s kind of a hollow victory. If you think about it. What purpose does it serve? And please, don’t tell me freedom of expression.