A Spartan Blog

Comic Book Guy Strikes Back

2006-04-25T12:38:00.001-07:00

It is a truth universally accepted that where exists a niche affiliation of enthusiasts of some subculture, affectation or esoterica, the retail outlet where such things are bought and sold will be staffed (if not owned) by a cadre of supercilious, sarcastic jerkasses. There's no winning with these people, you've entered their lair, be it comic book store, record store, gun shop, organic food co-op, or any other kind of specialty supplier. One time I almost had to kill the proprietor of a juggling supply store in Portland, for his insufferable insolence.
The ex-jarheads down at the gun range are like this. All I want to do is go down there with few friends, shoot some paper, have a good time, whatever. I don't need an education in the firearms laws of the State, I don't need a lecture on which cartridge is best for "combat", I don't give a shit, I want to get about my Sunday without having to stroke the ego of a 40 year-old virgin with a gun fetish. It's kind of embarrassing, actually. It's like these guys are still in high school.
And they're always guys. Middle-aged, greasy hair, huge gut, spatulate fingers, yeasty, beady-eyed, unkempt, twitchy, smug yet depressive, jocular yet antisocial, lazy yet self-righteous.
"Yeah, I prefer a .357 magnum jacketed hollow point, you know, for close quarters battle, such as you might see around urban landscapes such as this..."
"No, for your information, we don't pasteurize any of our juices, it denatures the vitamins and minerals from the fruit pulp - really, it would be a contradiction of the whole point of offering fresh unfiltered apple juice, don't you think?"
"Yeah, Wilco's new album is "good", if by "good" you mean "overproduced self-referential crap."
"Hey, this is not a library! If my pizza doesn't get here soon, I'm going grey Hulk on this entire minimall!"
This is their revenge. For all the years of dues they paid, in high school gym class, getting picked last for soccer, not knowing how to dress, girls laughing at them. So I have to pay. The sins of the jocks and preppies are visited upon the paying customer.
Fucking Hell.

Passive Aggressive people

2006-04-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

Friday, April 21, 2006
Passive Aggressive people
Scene: An idyllic summer's day in the islands. Family and friends lay about, reading paperbacks and Vanity Fair, drinking margaritas, napping in beach chairs in the sun. Bobby sits at a table under an umbrella, playing gun rummy with his mother. Jack walks up.
Jack: Hey Bobby, want to go out in the boat and pull the crab traps for me?
Bobby: Nah, I did that this morning, I'm okay. Thanks though.
Jack: Okay, awesome. I'll get you some bait and my life jacket.
Bobby: Seriously, no thanks. I'm cool right here.
Jack: It's just that I've got to be here and visit with some friends. Thanks for this, man.
Bobby: But I said that I'm not going to do it.
Jack: I appreciate this, seriously.
Bobby: Whatever.
Jack leaves, comes back with a plastic bag full of fish heads. He hands the bag to Bobby.
Jack: Here you go, have fun.
Bobby: You don't hear too good. I told you I wasn't going.
Jack: What's the problem? You're all uptight, this will be good for you. You can breathe some fresh air, relax a little...
Bobby: Hey, don't tell me to fucking relax. I was relaxed before you came over here, and...
Jack's phone rings. Bobby stands there, clenching.
Jack: Hold on a second. (picks up phone) Oh, hey baby, yeah, we're up at the island, chilling, oh, you got in to Seattle? Awesome. No, never mind the Space Needle. You know what's great? Pike Place market. Yeah, you know what you can do? Pick up a little salmon when you're there. Make sure you get the sockeye, it's the best. And maybe a couple dozen oysters? I don't know, ask the guy. Oh, you're great. No, you're great. Yeah. I gotta go. Love you too. Okay byeee...
Bobby: ...
Jack: So what were we talking about? Is everything okay, buddy? You look kind of stressed.
Bobby: I don't know.
Jack: You're mad, right? It's okay to be mad. Here (massages Bobby's trapezius with one hand) just let it go.
Bobby: Don't touch me.
Scene.

The worst thing about the Passive-Aggressive Person, in my opinion, is the refusal to acknowledge the conflict that has been introduced by the PAP's behavior. Denials abound, the PAP insists that he has been wrongfully accused of sandbagging the other, and above all claims innocence and ignorance of the very behavior that is in question: "What? I don't know what you're talking about! Why are you so angry? Are you stressed out? You need to relax..." The accuser finds himself in the absurd position of having to explicate the facts of the conflict to his clearly disingenous interlocutor, whose feigned ignorance is as good a method as any to make the accuser spin out long tales of the reasons for the grievance, get lost in the specifics, run out of steam, and finally give up out of frustration. And problem solved, for the PAP. A passive mode of combat has resulted in a default victory with no casualties.
In Humanities 110 this strategy was identified to us as the use of Socratic Irony. This is distinct from "irony" in its modern sense, which is more or less any kind of humorous or disjunctive juxtaposition of contradictory events and contexts. No, this rhetorical tool is Socrates's cornerstone of discourse. He pretends naivete or simplicity, and feigns sympathy for his opponent's point of view. His opponent finds himself doing double duty, both having to defend his own point of view and insist that Socrates disagrees with him. Under the pressure of basically having to supply both sides of the debate, even the most seasoned advocate will encounter serious trouble in making himself understood without appearing idiotic. As the debate draws to a close, Socrates snakes in and declares victory, having essentially allowed his opponent to paint himself into a corner. All he has to do is wait for his opponent to slip, to utter a fallacy, and he can spotlight it and lampoon the other's entire position. It's practically foolproof.
Which is how your garden-variety passive aggressive operates. If you hide the bone of contention under layers of agreeable blather, the other person, who is only looking for the resolution, for a little fucking closure, is made to dig for it, appearing outright aggressive, becoming confrontational, and finally being made to feel like an asshole.
It's like fucking Vietnam. The villagers smile and wave and ask for candy bars, but at night they let the Cong hide out there. And when you burn down the village after you've been attacked, all of a sudden you're the bad guy. Crazymaking stuff.

How about You miracle me un-hungover, L-rd?

2006-04-25T12:37:00.002-07:00

Thursday, April 13, 2006
How about You miracle me un-hungover, L-rd?
The whole thing about the four glasses of wine at Pesach is actually just a guideline. Contemporary Judaica makes it clear that there's no hard-and-fast rule for the conduct of the Seder; it just has to stick to the general themes, brief the gathering on the high points of Exodus and the Covenant, and eat various symbolic foodstuffs, and drink wine. Drink as much as you want, really, the four cups are there for a sense of scale. The thing is that once you get seriously into the prescribed drinking regimen, four cups starts to seem, oh, maybe somewhat insufficient, Dayenu notwithstanding.
So you begin the night at sundown, technically, but here in LA with daylight savings, that's kind of late to kick things off, so we get started with the drinking of wine a little earlier in the day. Like a cocktail while you're prepping the charoset, or a few shots of Patron with your uncle before the reading of the Haggadah. There's also a lot of talk about Zion, Babylon, the Lion of Judah, the tribe of Israel, Selah this and that, and a lot of reggae-esque language in there that reminds us all that Rastafarians are really ersatz black Jews who can't drink wine. So some prefer to ring in Elijah's annual non-appearance with other, non-traditional forms of libation, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
Anyway, the party gets started, and though the atmosphere is (and should be) convivial and fun, the text, which traditionally covers some pretty dark themes (oppression, slavery, poverty, slaughtering lambs, killing a bunch of Egyptian babies, etc.), only adds to the desire to alter one's consciousness with the drinky. By the way, a good rule of thumb, if you're planning your own Seder, is one full bottle of red per guest.
So we're allowed (or encouraged, depending on your brand of Jewishness) to go off text, to Ask Questions, to kibbitz. It makes for good talk around the table, but only if you can manage not to slur your words.
I was given the honor of leading the ritual last night, being the first born son, and the usual keepers of the faith in my family being sidelined by illness or death. I dispensed with the hackneyed old 1950's-vintage Haggadah that we've used since before I was born, with it's radical Blue-state Communist Judaism that, G-d bless, comes across these days as a little disconnected, I think. I found a good, if generic text online (www.chabad.org) and took a Sharpie to it. A few merciless hours later, I was left with a lean and snappy dinner reader, which came in, all bullshitting and cross-talk included, at just under an hour. Not too shabby.
Then we went to the Arsenal (www.arsenalbar.com) where the drinks (and the women!) are intoxicating and expensive. Okay, that was lame, but I couldn't think of anything better. It was dark and noisy, which usually works in my favor, but I was out of gas at that point, only looking forward to going home, daubing a little lamb's blood on the front door, and snuggling up with a good book, safe from the Angel of Death, from vexatious litigants, from Army recruiters, yoga instructors, and Crips, from Sallie Mae, from LA women, from junkies and crackheads and cops, from everything and everyone. Except myself.

Blowing yourself up is not that sweet

2006-04-25T12:37:00.001-07:00

Thursday, March 30, 2006
Blowing yourself up is not that sweet
The other night I went by the gas station on the way home from work, this Shell populated by bums and cops down on Olympic Boulevard across from FIDM (Fashion School of Design and M-something, I don't remember - ergo there are thousands of hipster girls and boys flouncing around in big glasses and tight pants and jewelry and whatnot - it's good people watching.) So I slide my card at the machine, take the pump out and try to put it in the gashole, but I've parked too far away - I can't stretch to it. You ever do that? So I turn to put the pump back and get back into my car to move it closer, but I'm distracted by this very attractive young woman pumping her own on the other side of the island. She's wearing a white peasant blouse with some sort of primary colored stitching on the front, and those tight black pants with embroidery of dragons or tigers or phoenices on them, and a blue do-rag partly holding back her sandy blonde hair. I usually don't commit the details of non-encounters like these to memory, but then that's because every single thing about that specific thirty seconds is now burned into my permanent record for all eternity. Let me explain.
You see, I turned towards the island and saw the girl, and looked away as she turned towards me, so as not to be so blatantly checking her out, and in that moment I missed the jack to put the pump nozzle in the island, and it bounced off the side of the thing and fell to the ground. The steel tip of the nozzle, wet with gas from the prior customer, hits the concrete at just the right angle, and WHUMP. It's on fire. The nozzle, at the end of its hose, lies on its side next to the pump, on fire, a small blaze that in context here, well, remember that scene in Robocop, where the thuggish bald guy, Emil, who is later melted in a giant toxic waste accident, gets into a gunfight with Robocop at a gas station, and shoots up all the pumps, and then ignites the spilled gas with his cigarette, and then zooms off on his bike. Of course Robocop, being a cyborg, is unharmed in the resulting massive fucking mushroom cloud explosion, but that was a Verhoeven movie from the eighties and this is not a movie and I am not a cyborg. But you can believe I've seen that movie two dozen fucking times and I have a pretty good idea what happens when you play with fire at the gas station. Maybe not, who knows? Anyway I thought about that scene, as I stood there looking at the pump on fire, and I thought about the hot girl next to me, who was about to get a whole lot hotter, and I thought about my life and my lovers and my family and all of the little disappointments and triumphs that have driven my life forward, and... actually no, I really was only thinking about that hot girl and Robocop. I only had a second.
Thinking back, I realize that I had a number of smart options with which to respond to this situation: Hit the gas shut-off button six feet from me, yell "Fire!" and get everyone to safety, grab the hot girl by the arm and run in slow-motion away from the explosion, jumping into a defilade at the last moment before we are immolated, like Forrest Whitaker and Jeff Bridges in Blown Away, really there was a lot I could have done. None of these things occurred to me. I reached down, picked up the nozzle, and ran my hand over the tip, wicking the gas from it and snuffing the flame. I waited for a few seconds holding the pump, expecting to explode. I did not explode. The hot girl finished up, got in her car, and drove off. I decided to buy my gasoline elsewhere that night.

Golf, bitches!

2006-04-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

Thursday, February 16, 2006
Golf, bitches!
So this week it's all about golf and horses. Yes, vacation time. I get a four day break from le job, and I'm going up to Santa Barbara for a little family time, ride the ponies, play eighteen holes, have a drink up and sleep in. I'm pretty much ecstatic. It's not that often that I make plans in advance of my weekend - too often lately it's been Friday night and I've decided that this is going to be the weekend where I stay home and catch up on my reading or pay bills, look for other jobs, watch dvds and waste my time. Not this time!
On another note, I've lost some weight recently. This job (attorney) involves a lot of sitting and staring at a screen, talking on the phone, drinking coffee and being bored. My previous job (carpenter) involved a lot of picking up and carrying heavy things, smashing them with hammers, prying them apart with crowbars, climbing ladders and eating four meals a day, plus a six-pack. I was Joe Sixpack. And I was about fifteen pounds of muscle more than I am now. Happy to say that's not all fat these days; it seems to have vanished without a trace, because I eat about 25 percent of what I used to, and do cardio on my lunch breaks. Downtown, it's all about the hillclimbing. So, on with the modeling career and the Hedi Slimane wardrobe.
No. Just kidding. I only dress up when I have to be in court. One of the better parts of this job is that I don't have to meet clients, ergo I don't have to impress them, ergo I don't have to dress up. Today I have a day's worth of stubble and I'm wearing singlasses indoors. Fuck it.
So, enough about me. Here are some recent things worth checking out:
Angel's Flight.
http://www.usc.edu/dept/geography/losangeles/lawalk/new/angelf.html
The funicular (cable car) that runs up the side of Bunker Hill in historic Downtown. It doesn't work but I run the stairs every day at the end of my route, which gives me the appetite to devour anything I have gotten my hands on from the market at the bottom of the hill, which is called:
The Grand Central Market: under $5 gets you a gigantic plate of whatever kind of food you want, with the opportunity to patronize one of the fine botanicas, bakeries, liquor stores or mexican groceries there. I always get the dried mango with chile and sugar. Fuckin' delish. They filmed a great gunfight there in the classic '70s LA buddy-cop movie, Busting, featuring Robert Blake and Elliot Gould as the kind of scruffy, unpredictable loose cannons that used to be so in style in the LAPD. Now they all have junior college degrees in criminal justice and crew cuts, Oakleys and machine guns, the thrill of old-fashioned undercover police work is gone, I tell you, gone. They would never let Baretta on the force these days.
The Fog, starring Tom Welling, from Smallville, the guy who played Boris the Blade in Snatch, and Selma Blair, who is married to Dweezil Zappa. It sucks. It's clown shoes and suspenders with a belt. It's a hack job. It's the kind of movie that deserves to be as bad as it is, because making it better would have cost them nothing. It's like they made it on a Sunday when their other plans fell through.
The Stewie Griffin Story: Great. I was in stitches. This is the kind of brutal, misanthropic, misogynistic, racist, cruel, prurient and wicked comedy that I eat with a big spoon. Everyone gets it with the sharp end in this one. It's actually three unaired episodes of Family Guy spliced back-to-back, which isn't bad in any case. I love this creative team because they're honest and they're not afraid to offend people. This is where the comedy comes from. You might think that a long string of gags about an infant who discovers and falls in love with alcohol might be risky or, gasp, "inappropriate" (my bete noir, I hate this most popular of today's catchwords with a hot white anger), but what would you say if the gags culminated in the drunken baby getting the keys to the family car? Brilliant! Laff-a-palooza.
The hot news this week is that Dick Cheney decided to be the big man and fess up to his responsibility in the shooting injury of his hunting buddy, Harry Whittington. One might think that would be the natural response, as it was his finger that pulled the trigger, but nothing natural seems to come naturally to our esteemed VP. I'm just relieved Cheney didn't finish him off with a round in the head and order him buried right there in the field. Cover-up, indeed. Now, I'm all for the Second Amendment, but please, people, check your targets! Safety Third!
Okay, got all the ranting out of my system. It'll steady my golf game come this weekend, inshallah.
pax,
Eli

my eyes, they're killing me

2006-04-25T12:36:00.001-07:00

Friday, January 13, 2006
my eyes, they're killing me
I've been looking at my screen for ten hours, and I can't run around the block again, so I guess I'll blog. Let's start with some books I've read recently, or am still reading:
The Big Red One, Sam Fuller. Great book, wall-to-wall action, a lightly fictionalized account of the author's experiences with the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division in 1944-1945 as it rolls through North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, and finally Germany, into the camps. Fuller writes like he directs: fast, hard-hitting and unsentimental. Like many who write about war from personal experience, he cuts out the glory and ladles on the gory.
Going Native: An NCO's Story, Alan Cornett. This one was lame. I got it for the story - it's a Green Beret medic's memoirs about the seven years he spent in 'Nam, treating Montagnard tribesmen and setting ambushes for the NVA in the North Vietnamese highlands. He could have used the services of a good editor, and he washes his hands of all of the violence in a not-very-convincing manner. He's the salty old vet in the neighborhood bar that you pray won't launch into one of his stories. Whatever. I've written too much about this one already.
The Odyssey, Homer. Odysseus is Western Civilization's Everyman. He's you, he's me, he's everyone out there struggling to make things work. Everything about it is still true today. The Odyssey is really about what it means to be a man, and the attendant value to a man(or woman) of such concepts as respect, loyalty, fidelity, property, humility, piety, bravery, and virtue in general. This book is like an old pair of boots to me. I hope it doesn't ever get the Hollywood treatment.
The SAS Survival Handbook, John "Lofty" Wiseman. This thing, which I am still reading, is thick as a brick and dense. In a survival situation I have no doubt it would be worth its weight in chocolate.
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James. Here is a motherfucker who knows how to write. His skills are on display from letter one, and not a misstep made. It's a ghost story, a love story, a comedy of manners, it's so many things. It's a short story that wastes not and leaves you wanting more. He makes me want to be a better writer. Just genius.
The Short-Timers and The Phantom Blooper, Gustav Hasford. The first here was the fiction that Full Metal Jacket, the movie, was based from. Both of them are red fucking hot. Especially The Phantom Blooper, which is about him going all the way native and joining up with some kool Cong kidz to fuck with the Green Machine. They're nominally about Gus' alter ego Joker's three years in Vietnam, but swing wide in both directions, getting deep into the details of daily life at Khe Sanh and elsewhere, blowing shit up and being a violent 19 year-old and so on, and over on into frankly surreal episodes, such as the one in which Sergeant Joker becomes convinced that his CO is literally a vampire. Weird, but gripping. I read it and smacked myself in the head many times at how close that war is to the one in Iraq right now. He was crazy and bitter and drunk most of the time, but Hasford was dead-on about War and the American Dream. They're both currently out of print, but they're available to read online on his website, free of charge. Which is pretty cool. I'd link to it, but why don't you just Google it?
The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell, John Crawford. Another shaggy dog dressed up like a rough-and-tumble year in the Florida Army National Guard, this time pulling security duty in Iraq. Crawford also needs an editor, and a writing coach, and a wet nurse, because all he seems to do in country is get high on pills and bitch about the heat and the dust and the smells of a poor country. Suck it up, pogue.
My War, Colby Buzzell. This is less a whole work than a compilation of the author's blog during his time in Iraq, during which he was ordered to shut it down so as not to compromise operational security. I don't see how even any english-literate jihadis could get a grip on U.S. Army tactics or whatever from this, because it's really just all about Buzzell's personal monologue, which I have to confess is very compelling. I feel like this is a guy I could really ID with: he's 26, bored and disillusioned with his shit jobs stateside, and joins up with the Army as an infantryman in Iraq pretty much on a lark. He's funny and honest and intelligent, and he brings a modern sensibility to the material that I had never seen before. I'm still reading.
Collapse, Jared Diamond. This is a book with which I do nightly battle. Fascinating stuff to be sure, about the ways in which societies throughout history have basically scuttled themselves with a combo of poor planning, poor politics, and poor environmental stewardship. I'd say more, but it puts me to sleep after two pages, so that's going to have to wait.
Lincoln, David Herbert Donald. I haven't started this one yet, but it's next in the queue(did I spell that right?), and gets good reviews. I'm a big Lincoln fan, and you should be too. The man was cool.
You might notice that a lot of the above entries are about war, or fighting in general. I'm on a war jag this month, but it's one of my pet topics anyway. I've always been a bit of a wannabe when it came to military things; I'm just glad that I made it to 28 without allowing myself to be recruited (came close though!). I may be young, but by now I'm old enough to sit on the sidelines of my country's wars. Not for me. Nothing but respect for the warriors over there, but not for me. I've seen dead people, and I've almost died myself a few times, and you know what I learned? Being dead sucks. And killing is not like in the movies.
I've also been reading Wikipedia entries on everything from Thomas Jefferson to the Prophet Muhammed to stir fry recipes. I must improve my wok qi! This butt-numbing job has given the unexpected side-effect of giving me me more time than I've had since college to just dump things into my head with abandon. My garbage mind. I will rule at trivia next week.
OK, I give. Time to pack it in and go have some sushi. Mazel tov to those out there who find themselves, against all odds, alive today after another day in the world.

Defense Against the Dark Arts

2006-04-25T12:36:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Defense Against the Dark Arts
I'm not a huge HP fan, never read any of the books, though I have managed to sit through all of the movies - it's just that they're on all the time, everywhere. They're alright, I guess. There is one scene that I particularly like, which happens in the third movie, where the DADA prof played by David Thewlis saves little HP from some kind of incredibly depressing and terrifying lich-like undead creature. A Dementor. Which has super soul-sucking powers that kill you and drive you insane, apparently. They're good with kids, too. Anyway, the Dementors are constantly trying to kill Harry while he's like on his way to class, but for whatever reason it's always a close call and he winds up escaping. And when he wakes up with a hangover, David Thewlis is always there, and offering chocolate. "Eat it, it'll make you feel better." I've seen these scenes a few times and always thought that was a silly piece of Britishness or something, but now I get it.
The funeral was not a good time had by all. But it was nice anyway. GM got a spot next to her husband, in a beautiful place. I know that she doesn't care, but it was nice for the rest of us. But grief and loss make everyone a little crazy in their own personal way, speaking of demented. I think that I actually got a lot of it out of the way before the fact, because I could see it coming for a while before it happened.
This all goes to say that Thewlis was right. I practiced a little Defense Against the Dark Arts myself on the day of. A little chocolate and a little Red Label just might get you over. And a deli platter. And some tequila. And twelve hours of sleep. I didn't feel all that good when I woke up, but I went to work anyway. Fuck it.
And then I felt better. And I still feel better. I'm going to Krav Maga tonight and I'm going to tell them to hit me as hard as they can. You know what? It actually works.

It's impossible to talk about without depressing people

2006-04-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

Thursday, January 05, 2006
It's impossible to talk about without depressing people
I can't decide whether writing about death is depressing because it's morbid or because it's hopelessly banal. A cliche in a world where you can sit down at your desk and be viewing terror-snuff in under four clicks. Still, it's different when it's someone you know. I saw GM in the hospital last night, now blessedly asleep from the Dilaudid they've started using. She won't be waking up. Watching someone die, I feel split in two: I analyze it without feeling, like it was a bug under glass, and all the while, behind my face, I cringe and whine in terror and loathing. There is something to be learned here: so shall we all pass, this is non-negotiable. Are you young? Rich? Attractive? Do you have a nice car, a great job, someone who loves you, a baby, a mortgage, a religion? You and I and everyone else in the world will one day lie flat in a hospital bed, struggling to draw breath.
I discovered that I was afraid, not of dying, but of dying without leaving anything behind. I realized that my influence on the world ends right now at the tips of my fingers. It's inspiring, in a dark way.
Being human is no blessing when it comes to dying. We have so many big thoughts that don't change the way that things are. However, there is an upside. We are all also animals, after all, which means that our true memories of pain and of death will fade, even if the images persist in our minds. Grief and loss, they cannot sustain themselves. Nature abhors a vacuum. And life goes on.
2005 was a hard year for me. I questioned myself and my work, what was it that I was doing, where was it that I was going, whither was I doing the right thing. Even so, I gave love, I got love, I got fucked over, got drunk and got better. Should I do the math? Here: I lived.
Res Ipsa Loquitur

Los Angeles

Happy Kwanzaa!

2006-04-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Happy Kwanzaa!
'Tis the first day of seven, n'est-ce pas? I may not like Christmas any more than I ever did, but this holiday vacation thing is just fine, now that I 've adjusted to sleeping in, drinking at noon, and watching DVDs in my PJs. Also scarves, and wool. It's cold up here. So the readjustment will be painful, that I can foresee, but whatever. I got a Nano and a set of Benchmade knives, and I gave a lot of presents too, and by golly, it feels good. Last week I bought hats and Kiehl's products in Santa Monica, and went to Fred Segal's, which is like the ne plus ultra of LA celeb culture. All the women are blonde and skinny with big breasts, and they are all wearing clothes that they bought there, and all of the men are buff in tight shirts and have shaved their heads (but are straight, I presume). I actually saw three (semi) famous people walk by while I was smoking outside and drinking a three-dollar cup of coffee. #1: Larry Fishburne. Morpheus. Larry was shorter than I thought he was going to be, but in pretty good shape. He was dressed like a house music DJ and was drinking water out of a bottle. He stood there, finished his water, and then walked off down the street, in no hurry at all. I probably wouldn't be either if I had been awakened to the true gnostic nature of the matrix. #2: Steven Gaghan. You may know him as the writer/director of Syriana, the writer of Traffic, and the writer/director of an underrated Katie Holmes mystery whose name escapes me. Famous former drug addict. Looked like a nice guy, dressed preppy for L.A. #3: Some chick from the show Laguna Beach. I have no idea what her name is but I recognized her and her OC lockjaw accent. I guess people really do talk that way. She was the one with kind of a wide face and chinese eyes, cute, but on the way to heavy? You know the one. She and her girlfriends sat right next to me and all lit cigarettes. They all had the same Jackie O shades and Uggs and they were so annoying I had to get up and leave. Whatever.
I'm still up at the island, shooting skeet and watching academy DVDs. It's kind of a Pacific Northwest Libertarian Intellectual Redneck state of mind. We went bowling yesterday and I once again proved to the world that I suck, suck, suck at bowling. Look, I don't know, okay? I just suck at bowling. I was beaten by my own baby cousin, a girl of fifteen. Whatever. It's sunny and warm here, a pleasant and peaceful Christmas. Would that it were the rule.
Guemes Island, Washington