Category Archives: Lucubrations

TBT: !DMViva!

All I ever needed to know about the system, I learned in Spanish-language traffic school.

The letter arrived on my desk Saturday afternoon, but I didn’t get around to opening it until after midnight. It was from the Santa Clara County Municipal Court District. Although the actual text has been lost, the general tone of it went something like this:

Dear Shitbag:

The date for completion of traffic school has passed. In truth, we don’t give a fuck about the points on your record or the increase in your insurance. To us, you’re just another zit on the ass of decent society. But in a Christ-like gesture of mercy, we’re giving you one last chance. If evidence of completion of the course is not firmly in our claws by noon Monday, your fees will be forfeited, the case will be closed, the DMV will be notified of the conviction, and the next time you come to Santa Clara County, we will throw your insubordinate little ass in the cooler until you rot. Do you understand? Rot!

Fuck you,

The System

Hmmm. Traffic school on Sunday. I immediately began to work the phones and the Web for a traffic school offering driver’s improvement courses on the Lord’s Day. Once on the Net, I quickly found such a course — in Juneau, Alaska.

Shit.

Perhaps, I thought, I should stick to the local yellow pages. And after more than 23 unsuccessful calls, I finally found a course being offered down in the Mission District here in San Francisco. After I spoke with the woman on the phone, two things stuck out about the course. First, it was being held in the back room of a bar called El Gordo Loco. Second, it was going to be taught in Spanish.

Now I’m as Anglo as they come. But what the hell? I had a couple of semesters of high school Espanol under my belt, and besides, I didn’t really need to understand what was being taught. All that was required by the Santa Clara authorities was that my reckless ass sit in a state-approved seat for at least eight hours, and that I get at least 60 percent correct on a multiple-guess test. No problema. I signed up.

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Krampusnacht. Krampus Uber Alles.

Even when I still believed that Santa Claus was an actual dude with an actual mailing address inside the Arctic Circle, with an actual toy shop at the same address staffed mostly by elves, blah blah blah, I felt, deep down in that dark and vacant space where my soul should have been, that Things Weren’t Right.
Even as toddlers, children understand that there are scary monsters [see The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim and that study where children were given rewritten versions of fairy tales with the scary monsters taken out, and the kids got all pissed off and attacked their teachers’ kneecaps].  Rugrats know that evil lurks, and they resent the hell out of patronizing adults who tell them otherwise.  I certainly did.  Which is why the unipolar morality of the Santa story never really sat well with me: goodness is ostensibly rewarded, but evil goes completely unpunished.  All year long, the promise of every materialistic dream a child may have coming true on Christmas morning is dangled in front of the child’s beady eyes on the condition of “good” behavior during the rest of the year.
I always assumed there was some kind of sliding scale of goodness vs. toys spectrum: if your behavior was superlative and Christ-like all year long, then you get absolutely everything on your list, and perhaps even a few bonus toys.  If you were a minimally decent person for, say, 8 months out of the year, but a bit of a prick the rest of the time, then you might only get a third of the things on your list.  But what of little Adolf and Osama?  What about the little kid who is an absolute bastard every goddamn day of the year?  What of him?  According to the Santa story, nothing.  Not a damn thing. Hell, Santa will even still come by your house: he’ll just leave a piece of coal.  So what?  Who cares? This means that some little fucker can run around terrorizing the neighborhood, lowering property values and ruining everybody’s lives all year long, and the only thing he has to worry about is maybe not getting as many toys as the Goody Two-Shoes next door?  Alll little Adolf has to do is stroll over to Goody’s on the 26th, when the little angel is playing with all of his benevolently hard-earned toys, whack him over the head with a board, take whatever toys he wants, and swagger back home.

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TBT: Dancer in the Dark

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A couple of years ago I wandered into a bondage-themed nightclub looking for some good music and walked out with a job as a dancer. My descent into the weird world of fetish would provide many solid, pith-helmeted anthropological conclusions regarding the human condition.

To wit:

  • Everybody looks better in the dark.
  • Being onstage makes you really attractive, even if you are really not.
  • Females are very, very different from males.
  • There are some seriously disturbed people walking around free in our society.

Night #1

IT WAS A DARK and stormy night. Literally. I had just moved to the Bay Area and was dead broke. I knew some people who worked the door at the Trocadero Transfer in San Francisco who told me the music they played on Wednesday nights was right up my proverbial alley and never mind that it was a bondage club–there were really cute girls with complex hair and tight, plastic clothing there. And I could get in for free. Free is good. And so off I went into a night that would change my life forever.

My first impression of the club: lots of smoke, lasers and torches. A chain-link fence surrounds the dance floor on three sides. A glance to the right shows a girl removing her top and putting her arm around a statue of a crying angel. She poses this way while a guy with alarmingly greasy hair snaps her picture. She then nonchalantly replaces her top and the two head for the dance floor.

A very petite girl sidles up to the bar next to me, alone, forcing herself to appear like she is having the time of her life, although she obviously is not. I feel sorry for her, sort of, so I try to strike up a conversation, asking her name. This quickly gets far more complicated than it really ought to be. She doesn’t speak a hell of a lot of English. After much verbal wrangling and screaming at each other over what seems to be an ever-crescendoing level of noise, it is established to some degree of clarity that her name is Yvi and she is an exchange student from Hamburg, Germany. I try to bring the dialogue to a quick close, but she has fingered me as a nice guy and wants to talk more. Our intercourse is, needless to say, somewhat problematic.

“So how long have you been in America?” I yell.

“Vhat?”

“How long have you been in America?”

God only knows what she says in reply, but I nod at her encouragingly like I hear and comprehend. She starts talking about something and seems to like whatever it is she is talking about because she keeps nodding and smiling excitedly. The truth is I can’t hear a goddamn word she is saying. But I nod every few seconds and laugh when she does. She seems to get a lot of enjoyment out of the conversation.

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It’s About Time.

After the revolution, on my first day in office as President, or Sexy and Benevolent Leader, or Illustrious Potentate, or whatever of the United States, I will outlaw the observance of Daylight Saving Time.
A recent poll of random adults at the bar waiting for a table at Red Lobster in northern California revealed that 90% of all Americans think daylight saving time is an outdated and pointless exercise in arbitrary adherence to tradition.  The other 10% are idiotic twats.
I have never understood how so many allegedly intelligent, free-thinking people could be so-easily convinced to do something so fundamentally silly.  For four decades now, I’ve been listening to people embarrass themselves trying to explain their adherence to this absurdity, patiently enduring their assaults on logic and reason as they slowly reveal that they themselves don’t really understand this nonsense either.
There seem to be three basic arguments these pedants of chronology employ.  to wit:
  1. Benjamin Goddamit Franklin, may God rest his sweet, patriotic soul, invented daylight saving time just like he invented electricity and he was obviously a genius and how dare you or any other non-genius fuck with Uncle Ben’s ideas.   They didn’t put your ugly ass on the hundred dollar bill now, did they?  Alright, look…you need to remember a couple of things.  Absolutely, Ben Franklin was a genius.  A great many of his inventions propelled America and mankind into the future that we enjoy today.  However, Ben Franklin lived in a world without electric light and climate control.  His nights were lit solely by candles and oil lamps, and even though his idea of shifting the clock around was pretty clearly meant as a joke, and he had likely been into his cups when he wrote this letter, it did make some bit of sense then to suggest that opening business an hour earlier during certain months of the year would reduce candle usage. American businesses haven’t relied on candlelight or oil lamps in more than a century.  Even candle shops now use electric light and computers.  The position of the sun no longer has anything to do with when we can and cannot work, play, cook, read, et cetera.   If B.F. were alive today, I suspect he would want to pimp-slap all those who have mindlessly remained allegiant to daylight saving time.  He invented his stove to more efficiently heat houses: he would certainly acknowledge that central heating and air is a vastly more safe and effective method of climate control, and would likely insist on having it in his house.
  2. It will save energy and money.  Poppycock.  Patently untrue.  In fact, the exact opposite holds true: hundreds of millions of dollars are lost every year due to employees arriving late for work, conference calls and meeting missed, and overall productivity lost.  Doctors tell us that dicking around with the clock and one’s sleep schedule increases the chances of heart attack significantly, leading to hundreds of millions of more dollars lost in medical expenses.  Sleep loss, the disruption of the Circadian rhythm, greater susceptibility to illness…all of things lead to lost productivity, lost money, and ultimately increased energy resources. And having citizens in the work force arrive home at the hottest part of the day ends up using significantly more energy than would be used otherwise.  Just ask Arizona.  They ignore DST (as does Hawaii) and they do just fine.  In fact, neither of those states have nearly the same number of rolling blackouts during the summer as California does.  We have them regularly throughout the summer, during DSL.  There has never been a rolling blackout during Standard Time.
  3. The farmers need daylight saving time to order to harvest their crops and get all their work done during the summer.  I can’t even begin to understand this one.  And I think that’s because this one falls in to the very strange category of many of the other lines of rationale I’ve heard to justify the menace of DST: people seem to actually think that DST adds an hour of time to the day.  Like we ACTUALLY get an extra hour of daylight or the days are ACTUALLY an hour longer than they would be during Standard Time.  To these poor souls I can say only that I will include you in my nightly prayers and hope that you aren’t a registered voter.  Farmers go to work when the sun comes up, and they don’t spend the day watching the clock, waiting for 5 o’clock so they can knock off.  Hell no.  They quit work when it’s so dark they can’t see what they’re doing.  They don’t give the slightest of damns if you insist it’s 5:00pm or midnight: just stay out of their way.
The practice of hourly timekeeping only began in the United States once train travel began: people needed to know when the hell they needed to be at the station to catch their train.  Fair enough.  And today’s world is governed by the clock.  Fine.  But let’s just settle on what time it is and then leave it that way.
Uncle Ben's Wild Ride

Accidental Holiday.

Every now and then, it is necessary to point one’s car south, punch the gas, and scream down to Tijuana to dance with the girls in the red dresses.  Which is what happened in a fit of Halloween pique.  The first couple days were great, but then there were complications, and I ended up staying an extra week and a half as a guest of the state.  Which was fine: I have many stories.  All of which will be told in grand manner.   But now I’m behind schedule on everything.

As I crawled into bed this morning, I scanned the headlines to see if there was anything that needed dealing with before I went to sleep.  The first headline I saw was: ‘Scope Boffins Poke Inside Uranus for Mystery Spots.  I closed the computer and went to sleep, and had simply ghastly dreams about a roving band of amateur proctologists who called themselves The ‘Scope Boffins and chased me about the dreamscape of my already wine-dark psyche, trying to violate me in the name of preventative medicine and sport, as I ran and ran, scream the first rule of the Hippocratic Oath at them.  It was horrible and I was happy to wake up.

Taco Rain

Me Said, She Said.

She:  I could only get us 5, so we’re gonna have to split one of them.
Me:  That’ll work.
She:  I need to get a pill-splitter or something.  Because these pills aren’t scored.
Me:  You don’t have a pill-splitter?  You’re a health care professional.  I figured you got one along with the stethoscope when you graduated.
She:  Why would I split a pill?  I have never taken half of anything in my entire life!
Me:  My type of girl.
  Shower Wine

Something Has Changed.

“…health officials stressed that the nation’s most populous city need not fear his wide-ranging travel in the days before his illness began.”
My God.  How stupid they must think we are.  Okay, fair enough.  I suppose in many cases they are probably right about the stupidity.  But come on…not all of us are idiots.  They have no idea what you’re talking about…not really.  So why not just say it?  This is like dealing with a 5-year-old who is telling some ludicrous lie that they themselves know is ludicrous, yet they cling to it like a blankie in a blackout.  You just want to shake them and yell at them that they are not fooling anybody and just tell the truth, because we both already know what it is.
The tone of the government and “medical experts” has become almost patronizing now as they once again tell us that unless you’re receiving a blood transfer from a Liberian donor while simultaneously sharing needles with and bare-backing a howler monkey in estrus, you absolutely positively cannot get this disease.  “The virus is not airborne,” they say, their tone growing in impatient annoyance each time they say it.  “You cannot get this disease from casual contact.  And we know that you are not contagious until you are symptomatic.”

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Nope.

Is this fucking thing is real?

Nope

THIS FUCKING THING IS REAL!

Alright, listen.  Never mind ISIS or Ebola.  We need to bomb Papau New Guinea right diddy.  Burn the whole goddamn place into the ocean.  I know we have a few Peace Corps volunteers down there being awesome and building bridges and spreading the good will of America around…unfortunately we must assume they have been captured and eaten by these big bastard ISIS spiders.   Jesus!  Can you imagine fighting one of these things?  Nope.  Not with anything less than a shotgun.

See?  All you people who fear spiders (as opposed to those of you who, like me, hate spiders), those of you who live what must be a very anxious life, stuck in the constant struggle of what to do about the big-ass spider on your wall that’s looking at your pets and children the same way I look at steak: you know deep down the only real way to properly deal with this menace is to slay the beast then and there, in front of God, the Buddha, your kids, and everybody.  Cleft it in twain.  But no.  Your hippy side kicks in: “Just capture it in a glass, and take it out side, and let it go.  Free.  Alive.  Perfect.”  Yeah.  You know who thought of that idea first…the culture from which that idea originated thousands of years ago?  That’s right, hippy: Papau New Guinea.  And now look.  Spiders so big they’ve developed lungs, and are starting to grumble about equal rights.

As Charles Darwin said, “Every society gets the spiders it deserves.”  Papau New Guinea has gotten theirs.  Let’s get them before theirs become ours.

This message brought to you by the Let’s Bomb The Snot Out of Those Huge Spiders Before They Eat Our Pets and Kids Campaign and a grant from the You See? This Is What Happens When You Take Spiders Outside In A Glass Awareness Fund.  

Screw U2, Apple.

This was supposed to be about the impossibility of driving anything even approximating a speed limit when “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” the song by Ministry, is blasting in one’s car.  This was supposed to be how I would defy you, personally, to obey any sort of traffic law, particularly those regarding speed limits, when that song comes on at volume while you are behind the wheel.  I was going to suggest that if you were somehow able to maintain any semblance of responsibility or maturity while piloting any vehicle at all whilst listening to “Jesus Built My Hotrod,”  you lack basic humanity and are thus likely also a complete bastard.  [Sidebar:  There was supposed to be a rather lengthy footnote here about how I have always said that if ever I was in the position to hire employees, regardless of the job, I would put them in a waiting room for several minutes, where I could observe them (yeah, it sounds a bit creepy, but hear me out).  I would then insert “Mannish Boy” by Muddy Waters (the version with Johnny Winters, of course) into the playlist of the music in the waiting room and observe.  In order to seriously be considered for the position, they have to move, somehow…do something.  I would, of course, hope that asses would be actuated, even if the candidate remains seated.  Special points would of course be awarded if the candidate actually stood up and danced.  But if the candidate exhibits no change while the song isn’t playing, as in doesn’t even tap a foot or finger, they are out.  I could never work with someone like that.  Anyway, I digress.  Just saying.  If you’re ever in the same building as me and “Mannish Boy” comes on, it ain’t no accident: that shit is a test.  Resume story.]
For you see, there I was, a few weeks ago, tearing absolute ass down the California freeway, defying myriad speed laws and all common sense, just hauling balls, listening to the prenominate song, “Jesus Built My Hotrod.”  My trip was about an hour and a half, but for those four minutes and 53 seconds, I didn’t give the slightest of damns about much else other than going as fast as possible.  I quit looking in the rear-view mirror on the side of the freeway for lurking law enforcement vehicles.  I wasn’t going to slow down for shit.  I could have come up on a police funeral…I would have barreled right past them, screaming apologies for their unfortunate loss but saying also tough titty on the speeding, here, officers: it can’t be helped.  Ministry.  You either get it or you don’t.
Hell, I don’t even have a hotrod.  I have a Honda.  Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.

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