Monday, March 30, 2009

The Sheer Dramatic Pain of Overly Long and Ostentatious Band Names is Only Mitigated by a Really Good Fucking Record



Name aside, I'm really digging the '80's shoegazer meets Bowie, Love and Rockets, and Smithyness of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.

What is your f-ing malfunction?!

It’s been a rough few weeks, dear reader, on the technological front. And by rough I mean frustrating, really. On the first day of a week-and-a-half long business trip, my computer basically took a shit on me. I couldn’t get online, functionality diminished and my little laptop actually looked a little pale. The IT guys told me it caught a virus or had worms or the gout or something and they needed to clean its clock and reformat it. I WAS able to get all my files onto our server, but reformatting a computer and getting it running the way you want with the programs you want kinda sucks. And, truth to tell, I think the little guy may still be a little sick, but work piles up like a mo’fo I’ve learned and I don’t have time for a virus right now, so I'm runnin' and gunnin come what may.

On top of that I sat on my camera and broke it. During week one of said trip, after a long day on Capitol Hill in DC, my lobbying companions and I decided to take a break outside between appointments. Not wanting to get the ass of my nice suit pants dirty, I brilliantly used my document bag as a buffer and sat on it, forgetting I stowed my camera there for the security screening. Hmmm what was that little snap I just heard? Oh yeah, the sound of $250 being compacted into nothingness.

So without computer and without camera, I’m essentially useless, I’ve learned. Maybe I’m useless with them too…In any case, I hope to rectify the situation soon and commence blathering directly.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Every now and then, justice prevails

So there I was sitting at the intersection on my bike…a crap crossroads really. A pretty big highway ends and intersects a busy street that’s overrun with motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists. A traffic engineering clusterfuck that’s exacerbated by the light’s long interval, which seems to bring out impatience in even the laid-back-peace-sticker-on-my-biodiesel-Volvo-Santa-Cruz-hippie-types. Even more affected by this traffic-induced time loss are people on the other end of the spectrum—the ones whom are dickheads as a matter of course. They wake up dick nasty, dick the day away and go to sleep in the same dickish manner.

Light green, I proceed forward...but about half way through the intersection, the hair on the back of my neck pulls a “Danger Will Robinson.” For to the right and rear—a space where sound should only be receding by virtue of a mandatory right turn—I feel the approaching Doppler effect of an undermuffled and over-tired bromobile. A peek toward the sound confirms my suspicions and a lifted dickhead wagon—complete with custom laser-cut skull grille—comes flying by in a non-lane then swerves left, cutting me and a steady line of cars off to take his rightful place at the front (see drawing).



To be clear, I actually never felt in danger nor threatened. He passed me on the right with plenty of space and cut in far enough ahead that I could’ve stopped if I needed to. Mostly I was just disappointed that said vehicle—which I believe at one time was a Jeep Grand Cherokee—didn’t have fake gonads hanging from its trailer hitch. The truth is, I keep an ear/eye out for this move as I’ve actually been passed at this same spot in similar manner on a number occasions. Usually, it’s a tourist looking to go up Highway 9 to the state park who got in the wrong lane, are apologetic, confused and use their signal as they give that ThanksI’mReallySorry wave as they peaceably merge. Today’s occasion was just a middle finger all the way around.

Predictably, this afternoon’s maneuver elicited a chorus of car horns…at least two, maybe three--it was the kind of thing where even people in the other direction honked. I joined in by switching gears emphatically—take THAT!—making what I hoped would be a perceptible clickety-clack of outrage towards the driver. This was drowned out by the rumble of a motorcycle from the left…a white and black motorcycle that made me smile.

“Fuck man,” I heard the driver say to the passenger as the penismobile pulled over. “Fuck man indeed,” I thought as the blue and red lights bounced off the brogo covered rear window like the flashing cherry on top of a caramel sundae of a lunch ride.

Tuesday, March 03, 2009