Exponential Detritus

I wake on a Sunday and my small children brag about how many bowls of cereal they can eat in one sitting. Apple Jacks. We went to the regular grocery store for a change, instead of the socially responsible grocery store. My vehicle is out of commission and beggars can’t be choosers. Listening to Rasputina on Rhapsody and wishing I had more money. I have been coveting a $399 Dell Mini “Hackintosh” netbook that keeps popping up on eBay - like I’m not using enough operating systems as it is. I am a Geek of all trades, master of none, and a fickle one at that. Egg salad on rye toast with licorice tea for my breakfast. Reading “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.” Finally getting around to watching “Heroes” on Netflix. Maybe going to see Ian Svenonius’s new band “Chain and the Gang” on Wednesday, if I can hitch a ride with someone or other. I love the crap out of Ian Svenonius. Saw his last band “Weird War” a couple years back at Solar Culture and no one would go with me, therefore none but I witnessed the amazingness that was a Weird War live show. One of the best Tucson live music experiences I’ve had of the last few years, I shite you not. I realize that all of this was very very boring, but I have to get back in the habit of writing before by brain dries up in my ripe Gen X old age. I can’t afford, like, basic transportation expenses, but somehow have stumbled into all of this technology on the cheap. I am spoiled by secondhand capitalism. Grateful, but spoiled and tethered to the house like one of the Lotophagi from the Odyssey. I need to get out and live a little before my skeleton completely fails on me and my taste atrophies from neglect.

Interesting discussion at my work: re advertising. People wonder what it is we “do” even when we stand in front of a sign explicity stating “We buy used I.T./We sell used I.T.”

Then, if they do “get it” they still misunderstand the “sell” part and think we are in the used Pentium II computer disposal business. “How nice, do you donate those to schools?” they will say.

No. We do not. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Try “Emergency Procurement.” Try “mission critical.” Think “warrantied refurbished” and out of production but still in use. We provide that “one missing part” to keep your legacy system alive. We help recoup your costs for that shiny new promising piece of equipment still in the box that your I.T. department decided against after all of that planning.

Any questions?

Here’s some of the stuff we do sell…

Me: I want a two piece chicken with potato salad for one of my sides and…
Safeway Clerk: No! You can only get the sides that go with the chicken!
Me: Ok, which sides go with the chicken then?
Safeway Clerk:You can only have the JoJo potatoes
Me: Then why does it say I have a “choice” of two sides?
Safeway Clerk: (Stares Blankly)
Me: Well, those don’t look very good. Could I get just the chicken?
Safeway Clerk: You could get an 8 piece of just chicken for $6.99
Me: No thanks. Um, can I have one of the “meals to go” maybe? The pot roast looks good.
Safeway Clerk: Those are cold, though, ma’am.
Me: Um, anyway you can heat them?
Safeway Clerk #2:I think we could use the microwave…
Safeway Clerk #!: No, those are supposed to be cold.
Safeway Clerk #2: You could always have the chicken meal, it’s hot and it’s really good. It comes with the JoJo potatoes.
Me: Never mind…

Here’s a link to the story about my father in theTucson Citizen. He would have written a better story, but the state of journalism being what it is…

…and so another year ends, in sickness and in health…good fortunes to perfectly balance the bad…a year that canceled itself out, more or less…I let it go out quietly, hoping for a louder season, a much much brighter, louder season this next circling of the sun…sometimes we relish the quiet…but may we not go gently this time around…life being for the living and all of that…Happy Janus’ Day…

This is a Basque tale that echoes the tale of Dante and Beatrice somewhat, albeit with a much happier ending…

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/basque/lbp/lbp11.htm

Good news for a new year…Reverend Glasseye is officially back together! One hopes this means they will be touring. One of the best shows I ever saw on the tiny stage at Vaudeville…

…and the girls we once were float down the River to time and go under. Drowned, we all assume.

But then again…lots of unexplained, feminine looking, sword brandishing hands emerging from the misty waters in these stories…had to have come from somewhere, originally…it’s not as though they ever found the bodies…dead is not always so very dead in faery tales…

Strange dreams and disrupted R.E.M. Sleep as a direct result of bizarre Jungian reading material…

Found a copy of a book I read when I was 17 or thereabouts. I remember the gist of it, but none of the actual story.

Forgot what an esoteric MythoLiterary Geek I used to be…

I asked for an Oxford Unabridged dictionary for Christmas when I was 15 and improvised a TV Tray podium for it and the purloined single volume patent leather bound Complete Works of Shakespeare that I had snuck off the family reference shelf to read for fun in moments of idle brooding.

I used to keep a photocopied black and white portrait of Percy Shelley in my notebook the way most teenage girls pin up bubblegum idols. Ask Lizzie. Lizzie was way more Lord Byron. Coincidentally, or maybe notsomuch, Bowie around that time did a short film for the “Blue Jean” extended video in which he played a character called “Screaming Lord Byron.”

The fish ate Shelley’s face. That’s how he died, or rather he drowned in Italy, but by the time they found his body the fish had eaten his face. It seemed important to us at the time, but of course by then he’d have been long dead anyway…

1)Listening to our local “pirate” radio station run by baby Anarchists:www.freeradiochukshon.org

2)Breakfast is hostess cupcakes and mexican dark coffee with cream on the porch with candles and incense and the Sunday paper. Dishes can wait…

3)We won, we won, we fucking won…I volunteered my time and $5 I couldn’t afford to a candidate that actually won! I kind of feel like a Timequake has occurred (apologies to K. Vonnegut) and the spiritual resurgence of Clinton era ideals actually makes me 19 again somehow. I feel like it’s finally safe to start my life over again and do things right this time.

4)Time is tight and money’s even tighter, but I am getting more resourceful by the minute. This morning, for instance, I have thrown a pot of beef stew in the oven for lunch,simultaneously lowering our heating bill and preventing wasteful takeout food spending. If it ever came down to it, I know how to make vinegar out of raw apple cider, for fuck’s sake, I got pioneer survival skills, I can certainly live without ordering pizza on a Friday night or two…

5)Spent this Friday night watching Jimmy Stewart movies with my 6 year old and eating white cheddar popcorn and leftover Halloween candy while my 11 year old wrote “littlest pet shop” screenplays in MS Notepad to be acted out with her sister later.

6)Got enough sleep for a change. I could have slept for years. I love it when the seasons change because in summer the daylight and the heat start seeping in early in the morning on weekends and you can never get back to sleep. The downside of our Arizona existence.

7)The depression I didn’t know I was in is slowly lifting. My mind is not blocked and I can write again. I feel like I can stand the company of other people again. My thoughts have time to drift again and it feels like the world will not suffer and drown for their drifting.