lost and found

2009-02-25T08:21:00.000-08:00

I have no idea what I will do next (after June). The most practical and probable option would be working as a nursing assistant in town for a while and applying to more schools next year but that doesn't guarantee anything considering my track record for impulsivity and impracticality.

For the sake of continuity consider yourself updated.

Recently I have had a lot of time on my hands. Aside from school, I spend a lot of time running and reading. Lately I've rekindled my interest in cultural/economic geography and in particular marxist geography. Geography of this sort is a synthesis of all of my overtly academic interests. If practicality were of no importance to me I would consider pursuing a graduate degree in it.

I was talking to a friend last night who told me about recent happenings in the economy on Dubai. Apparently they are bankrupt and many of the people that live their are massively in debt. Recently a phenomenon has started within the immigrant population where people will fly back to wherever they are from to start over and just leave their car parked at the airport. It seems in that corner of the world the financial system is not so integrated into daily living as to make evasion impossible. I wish it were that easy for those of us in this corner.

I sometimes have fantasies of the entire economic system collapsing to the point as to erase my debt. Perhaps a hyperinflation scenario that inflates the cost of a loaf of bread to 100,000 dollars like in Zimbabwe. Then being in debt for 75,000 dollars would just be an economic setback equivalent to losing your day pass on the bus. Of course I am probably being short sided here because the mass suffering and social strife that would accompany it would not be a good trade-off for feeling absolved of my student loans but assertions of reality such as this one do not have a place in fantasy.

2008-05-23T21:14:00.000-07:00

There is a definite prejudice towards men who use femininity as part of their palate; their emotional palate, their physical palate. Is that changing? It’s changing in ways that don’t advance the cause of femininity. I’m not talking frilly-laced pink things or Hello Kitty stuff. I’m talking about goddess energy, intuition and feelings. That is still under attack, and it has gotten worse.

--RuPaul

2008-03-07T18:39:00.000-08:00

So... going on three months and I've managed to find a job. Its at the starbucks at the airport. I know, I know. Right now my goal is to quit no matter what by the time the weather goes south in the fall and that's being generous. That is all.

Idling away hours...

2008-01-14T17:53:00.000-08:00

A nice day. My old landlord called me to tell me that he was sending out my security deposit, which is enough to live off in Portland for two months. I celebrated by getting a gym membership, hopefully I will actually use it. I am certain I will in the short term seeing as I have very little else on my plate for the moment. I have an interview on Thursday that I am really hopeful for. I would be delivering the mail. Last week I got my guitar back from my old house and I have been playing it whilst wearing giant headphones before going to bed. I want to get better. It's embarrassing how low my skill level is considering I have been playing pretty consistently for nine years. I definitely don't take it seriously but it would be nice to excel at at least one of my hobbies. I can only knit scarves and I can't follow a pattern. I bike on the slow side. My bread is always a far too dense. All of these things are far from being consequential.

Today I noticed that I have been unknowingly paying 12 bucks a month for a credit monitoring service. I called the service intending to cancel service and got suckered in. I guess it's good insurance to know where you stand on these things. I found out a few things about my finances:

1. (-) I have a little over 50,000 out in student loans (I had guessed around 30,000... I don't keep track of these things.

2. (+) My credit is now 769 ... my income is dismal and I have so much debt... How the hell is it so high? I think I might have to go draw up a ten year plan to buy a shack out by Foster. Although it's going to take a while to pay off 50,000 bucks on a mail man's salary.

I am enjoying my lack of responsibility for the moment. I have fennel wild-rice pilaf on the stove and no particular plans until Thursday.

2008-01-08T20:02:00.000-08:00

If this were a vacation I'd be home by now. School has resumed and I am still getting up at noon and doing nothing of note. Watching Youtube videos about the RFID chips. Trying not to stir myself into a nervous government fearing paranoia. Some days thats it. That being said.

I AM SO GLAD I DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO A TELEVISION. It would be a disaster. I would divvy up my day between Montel and Golden Girl reruns and in five weeks time I could stand before you a mere shadow of my former self. Not to be dramatic but the last few days have been painfully empty. The room I am renting out is quiet and the carpet softer by the day. I know I should enjoy these days more than I do because I know they're numbered and one day either by luck or an outfall of desperation I will be working and I won't have so much time to think so much. Hopefully.

2007-12-16T17:32:00.000-08:00

I leave town in two days and I've packed everything up in boxes. I am writing this from the laurdromat down the street from my house.

The other day a man in a car almost killed me on the way home from Westwood. I was so angered by it that I followed him home. When he got out of the car he was stumbling. I made a scene and all of his neighbors came out. It was in a rich neighborhood in the Cheviot hills. I called the cops to report him, which felt weird considering how many friends have driven me home drunk, but he almost killed me so any qualms I might have about hypocrisy went out the window. Three cops came and even though he was looking at us from his bedroom window he wouldn't come out. The cops said he seemed obviously drunk even from the fleeting glances they could steal but there was nothing they could do. I didn't really mind because all I wanted to do is to shake him from the idea that he could go around driving drunk with impunity. The cops were nice except that the first thing they said when they saw me was, "you should be wearing brighter colors". I had lights, front and back and a helmet. They gave me a ride home. It was the first time I had ever been in the back of a cop car. It was uncomfortable and smelled like puke.

I woke up the next morning with a cold.
Today was spent cleaning. I hate moving but this is a lot simpler than it could be if I had a lot of stuff, or kids.

we have ice

2007-12-13T11:49:00.000-08:00

Will be leaving town on Tuesday night. Feels weird. Like I'm ending some sort of extended vacation. I know Los Angeles from a different angle now than I had had known just by growing up (around) here. Nonetheless I am excited to be moving on to greener pastures. Some days here feel so isolating and hollow. Like there is nowhere to go that doesn't involve acquiring garbage. One giant highway.

I have been really sore ever since the night that I went to see Shearing Pinx play at the smell. I raced there really fast and I had tried doing this thing called "ladders" that my friend Kellie showed me over Thanksgiving. Ladders involves doing a series of push-ups in sets that increase incrementally by one to a number and then decrease back to one. I'm out of shape and my arms feel like they are going to fall off days later.

Yesterday I went with my friend Athena out to Pasadena to the vegan drive thru and we ate burgers and shakes and rode are bikes a little and then ate at vegan house. We like to eat.

I am now officially done with academics at UCLA but I still have business here until tomorrow. I am proctoring an exam for the class I am a teaching assistant for and I am grading the exams tonight, and returning them in the morning to meet a deadline set forth by the professor. By Friday I expect to be able to cut the strings and focus on getting my shit together in boxes by Monday. I will have the weekend to try and erase any visible artifacts of my 6 months of residence. Toothpaste in drywall, scrubbing a spot of turmeric from a patch of beige carpet. Defrosting my mini fridge is going to be a fucking pain.

update

2007-12-03T11:38:00.000-08:00

Although it wasn't forecasted, it rained all day on Friday. I skipped out of lecture and met up with a friend downtown. I took the bus. When I got there we didn't really do much. We had no business in the neighborhood. We had no goods to purchase. We were loitering. It was raining and that to me can constitute a holiday in Los Angeles. I got home after dark and was greeted by my cat's incessant howls. I remembered that I had to take my teaching competency exam the next morning. I sat on the floor doing nothing for a few hours, the clock radio may have been on in the bathroom. An hour or so passes and I began to leaf through my test prep book.

The next morning I woke up before dawn and turned off my cell phone's wake up call function. I biked over to Los Angeles High School which was in Koreatown and there were hundreds of people waiting in a conglomeration in front of the gym. A man that I can only guess was a coach started to bark at the crowd, "for those of you who need to use the restroom. FEMALES first and second floor, MALES first floor.". It was surreal. The man obviously could not turn it off. An hour passes outside the gym and they let us inside and we are seated. A pair of women comes by to take everyone's fingerprints giving instructions and criticism in equal doses. A trend became apparent. It validated a belief I have had for some time now that my teenage perspective was not totally obscured by angst and that many of the teachers I had had were insultingly condescending to their students.

The whole process from that point on became increasingly vexing. About twenty minutes into the exam the fire alarm went off. The proctors told us to stay put and continue taking the test. The siren continued to let out a piercing squeal for close to half an hour. I asked one of them if I could put in a pair of earplugs and after a short conference with the other proctors she returned to tell me no.

A few hours pass and I was happy to leave. I returned home and tried to make my apartment look as presentable as possible for an open house I was having to find someone to take over my lease. I'm leaving.
Leaving Los Angeles. Leaving UCLA. Leaving. I have a lot of reasons but I haven't paired it down to just a few or even down to a set which isn't somehow contradictory. One reason is that grad school, in the sciences at least, is mostly preparation for a career. I've come to a point where I'm sure that those options are not for me. Formally, I am only taking a leave of absence from UCLA but I don't see myself returning.

In the mean time, or for winter at least I'm going to be living in Portland. In fact I already found a room. I am looking at moving to Oakland in the spring but who knows. I found a taker for my apartment lease. I started cleaning. In two weeks I will be gone. I'm going to have a lot of free time. I don't really know what I am going to be doing. I am going to try not to jump into anything.

update

2007-11-12T10:25:00.000-08:00

Weekend has been very relaxing, Friday I did nothing, Saturday I rode forty miles going to Pacific Palisades and back in the afternoon and then to the Smell and back at night. Sunday I woke up around two and tried to be productive but failed miserably. I went on a long walk and enjoyed the anomalously cool weather by wearing a flannel I purchased recently. Today is my brother Joel's birthday, he is going to be 26. Pretty soon almost all of my siblings will be in or past their thirties, it's strange.

Saturday night I was in love with L.A.. L.A. is weird like that. Half the time I am in love with it and half the time I am loathing it. Saturday night was spent doing the former. It started with my now pseudo-routine bike ride downtown. I was full of banana bread and feeling kind of tired when about half way down Venice Blvd. the road was blocked off for a carnival. I walked my bike through and savored it. There are carnies in my family, I think they are the ones that live in Florida.

I am unsure who was throwing the carnival and I didn't get to go on any rides, but i didn't care. There's something about randomly running into something so busy and happy in the middle a usually quiet sober bike ride that cheers me up. Tons of kids, kids that get excited for crappy carnivals. Probably kids that don't get to go to Magic Mountain much. Eight year old Mexican kids in Metallica t-shirts. Random big rigs parked next to rides. White trash carnies. Timeless.

The show I was going to that night was supposedly going to a rave theme so I asked this man wandering about if he was selling the glow sticks he had in his hands, (he had a lot). He asked me directions to the greyhound station and after I told him he gave me a free glow toy. It was a epileptic seizure inducing pacifier on a neon lanyard, (kind of like a chinese jumprope). Too perfect. Although I didn't get to dancing with them at the show because that sort of thing does not come naturally to me.

The rest of the ride went by really quick. Sometimes it doesn't feel like I am from here. Most of the time actually. Westwood practically feels like it could be on a different planet than where I remember being from. The same could probably be said about where I am from. Its important to remember there are differences in respect to location and time. Time is a little harder to pin down, maybe it also boils down to perspective. This is probably closer to the truth but its easier to externalize it all and resent time for taking away what's familiar. This is a logical outcome from adopting the theory that we are all in a steady trajectory towards destruction. I realize the overtly dramatic nature of that statement, but it remains a salient one for a large portion of people. I am in no way meaning to imply that there was a time in the historical record when this wasn't so. The indicators have just evolved in such a way that it all seems more imminent from my perspective.

I can't remember where I heard it. Probably on the radio in connection with a political platform, it was said that people, (probably phrased as Americans), were the least hopeful about the future now than they have been since the great depression. The politician was running on the platform of restoring hope. The concept is ridiculous and as far as I can tell the rising tide of cynicism is not going to ebb anytime soon. Anything else would fall short of confronting reality. I realize that public sentiment is always cyclical and is in no way a definitive characterization of the state of the world so I guess what I am intending to say in all of this is that it should be viewed as just another piece of evidence to be used in the case for the rise of a new dystopia and the approaching population collapse/extinction in the relatively near future (ranging from a few decades to the next few centuries).

The "climate change" discussion is yet another piece of evidence. Recently a group of researchers converged at Harvard to discuss climate mitigation plans. The majority of these plans revolved around the idea that we could counteract any troublesome abrupt changes in climate with elaborate engineering projects. It sounds like science fiction or a rumored soviet plot during the red scare but its not.

It's logical under the assumption that if the earth is under the dominion of humankind, than surely we can have control over all of its processes. This is evidence to a desperation. When this is considered there isn't much to hope for bettering society. Dominion, not stewardship is what the underlying assumption is in all the carbon sequestration regimes celebrities and other millionaires are so keen to. Lately the whole issue just seems to be a sink for a lot of energy that would be better applied to an issue we had some sort of control over. If all this attention were somehow spotlighted on abuses of corporate power, maybe towards abolishment of corporate personhood, (a pipe dream I realize but it's nice to think about), maybe then we might be able to talk about the environment for the environment's sake instead of some dramatized struggle to save mankind. If it were only that, I wouldn't give a fuck and I don't think the world would miss us much. But the fallout of hundreds of years of taking dominion is not an explosive event with respect to human time scales, it's slowly bleeds out but impacting everything. Environmental degradation is just a symptom and dominion is the disease. Exercising control over things that do not belong to us. It goes back to power, its abuse and its limits. Trying to control what doesn't belong to you, whether it be people, animals, or the environment. The sane approach would be to a lessening of this abuse and towards an intentional liberation of that which is under dominion.

My fluid dynamics professor recently quoted Marx, something like: Know necessity and then you can know your freedoms. I would not take on the Marxist label but it makes a lot of sense to me. Needs are loosely defined, increasingly so, with the most recent additions seemingly taking precedence over the core of what we need to exist; food, clean air and water, a sense of purpose, healthy relationships, etc. We seem to be so far away from knowing what necessity is, so far in fact that to state that profit and luxury are not essential to life seems kind of kooky. Of course this all comes at a cost that is hard to realize. Losses in personal freedom, loss of diversity of life, losses in terms of true quality of life.

There must have been some time in western society when a divergence occurred. Thousands of years before kingdoms and serfdom, before territorial borders were established where we (I am referring to westerners because it's the reference i'm familiar) were closer to knowing what it was to know what are true freedoms are. Perhaps this is unintentionally hinting at some primitivist leanings, to which I have little, but from our more primitive stages and through the irreversible progression of history we have arrived at our current state and that much is inescapable. The most that we can possibly do is be aware our distorted sense of necessity, and our contributions towards our growing dominion, not in hope that we can undo any of it but rather in hope it might slow the speed at which we approach its logical outcome.

2007-11-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

Things have seemed to be gelling lately for me. I am still at or near the bottom of my dynamics class, but I no longer care so much. I was panicking, thinking that I was going to flunk out of the term but many of my more experienced grad school friends have tried to assuage my fears, going so far as to say that grades are meaningless. They aren't. I mean, you have to pass but apparently passes are given out as long as you can demonstrate that you have a grasp on the topics, realize your mistakes and apply yourself. This is what I am wagering on. I got a 36% on the midterm, which was only three questions long! Someone got a point less than me so that takes a bit of the sting out of it. Odd. Today we are going into the second half of the class which is supposed to be quite different, so hopefully it will come easier to me than thermodynamics.

I slept eleven hours last night because I could and I couldn't think of anything enjoyable to do. I have been really into the dotearth New York Times blog series. People should check it out.

The weather in Los Angeles has been gray all week and I have enjoyed it for the most part. I am still trying to figure out whether the heating vents on my wall are at all functional. If they are indeed hooked up to anything that generates heat it seems that the thermostat is probably set to around 60.

I have absolutely no plans for the weekend and it feels nice. I'm thinking about taking my bike out for an extended ride somewhere but I have no idea where I would go. Any suggestions including but not limited to bike trip ideas would be appreciated.

2007-10-22T08:53:00.000-07:00

I just came back from the Bay area on the overnight bus. I had a nice time. The main purpose of the trip was to surprise my friend Kellie on her birthday and go camping with our bicycles in Marin County (just north of San Francisco). I had a lot of fun but probably at the expense of getting a lot of work done this weekend. It did however allow me time to expound on my current existential crises to my friends. They were receptive to my marathon bitch sessions as always and for that I owe them. Currently I am wavering in my resolution to finish grad school. I came to this giant realization over the last month.

I am uncomfortable with status, "bettering myself", or advancing on the socio-economic ladder. The thought of going through "professional" school and winding up a upright professional makes me uncomfortable and overall I don't see it as bringing much substance into my life other than making me comfortable financially. It feels as if I am giving away too much of myself.

The question I've been asking myself is, "why would I give up this chance?"... But a chance at what really? I just don't want to end up miserable because I am taking the path towards professionalism without first considering other "lower" options. Am I selling myself short? Am I just too immature to see the forest through the trees? Why do I invest so much worth into the hierarchy of it? Am I just a sorry schlub without an iota of self-discipline? It all feels like a pointless pursuit towards self-preservation. My point being that there is seeming to be no point to living beyond avoiding death, not that my life is horrible by any means, but it is kind of pointless and what is touted as success seems to ring just as hollow.

Self administered pep-talks fall short of what I am needing right now. The best I've been doing is "its only two years".... I can't help but feeling like I don't fit the mold to go through it all. I've been thinking about teaching high school. My reasons for wanting to study climate/weather have always been rooted in humanitarian/environmental concerns but the rate at which I am becoming disillusioned about the presence of opportunities to effect change via painstaking research on climate processes has been running at full tilt. I am able to appreciate now how young and naive I have been in my idealism.

It all goes back to entropy; during any process there must be at least one interaction that is irreversible. The effect is propagated and compounded throughout time forever. Albert Einstein expressed it better when he said that the minds that created the problems of today will not be the ones who can solve them. The sentiment can be taken in many different directions but it seems applicable to the situation here. Technology and engineering will not solve anything, we are not capable of saving ourselves from whatever sensational doomsday scenario is being told by buying world music compilations, priuses and compact fluorescent bulbs. Trivial actions bring about trivial results. The past century and a half of rampant progress towards full industrialization/commercialization has left an indelible mark on the planet. Entropy (disorder) is propagated process by process over hundreds of years. We are merely living downwind of the model T, modern refrigeration and the coal boom. It is a cause/effect relationship but of impossible complexity with a response time that exceeds human scales. For these reasons science seems ineffective and while I am still far from the primitivist camp I can't help but feeling something more humanistic in approach would be more worthy of my time.

What I'm referring to I am not too sure of. The closest I can come up with is teaching high school kids about the planet. This may be grasping at straws but brainstorming sessions have been less than fruitful with alternatives.

2007-10-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

School has been getting tougher. I had a totally demoralizing day yesterday but that's alright. Right? I just don't always feel up to snuff. My background seems is not as impressive, I lack foresight and wherewithal. I am not an engineer. I do not work nor have I ever worked for the aerospace industry. I am a gas station attendant, a factory worker. I work retail. I never, one: was ambitious enough and/or two: had enough free time or opportunities afforded to me to do internships with any geoscience firms.

It's odd really. I remember telling a friend that when I moved to Portland from L.A. that it was a jarring experience. That all of a sudden I felt that at least in the social sense, my peers were largely of middle class backgrounds seemingly everyone had expensive hobbies, traveled internationally and worked part-time . Now I'm back in L.A. I almost get doored daily by troll-like taut skinned octogenarians and college freshman drive luxury cars. Brentwood is just down the street and west L.A. is beginning to feel normal.

I am three thousand in the hole with my bank. I have no experience with velocity field divergence and I have very little faith in myself at times. I am fearing sounding like a burnout although I am not letting that prevent me from continuing to put a significant amount of work into the program. I know that if I get through this term okay, I will have proven myself to myself and hopefully some of this will go away. Currently I just feel like I don't have any business being here but I don't know what business I would have anywhere else.

whine. whine. whine.

I'm hoping to try to have a lot of time to myself to recoup this weekend. I want to ride my bike along the coast until I hit the fog bank but they are forecasting Santa Anas and it will be 85 degrees everywhere and you will be able to see the smog bank off of Santa Monica bay.

Boring new school post.

2007-09-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

I started school and everything is new and I don't feel too stressed out yet. This is partially due to the fact that I decided to limit my work load, which was partially due to the fact that I hadn't realized how involved my teaching responsibilities were going to be.

Whats really nice is that I already feel like I have a home at the school. I have office space complete with two huge metal desks pushed together in front of a frosted window and a crappy wooden chair with a chartreuse velveteen chair pad, and some bookshelves. It is huge and on the 9th floor adjacent to the planetarium. Everyone is very warm, in fact I feel most times that I am the one who is the most cold and reserved. I am shy because I am straining to try not to feel intimidated by all the brilliant people and research I see around me -- its hard to see them as peers but I'm getting there.

So far everything is tenable, although tomorrow whose to say? That's my current philosophy. This weekend is going to be swallowed up with preparing for my first week of lectures, (preparing notes and making hand-outs). I had been told that I would be conducting a discussion section but after meeting with the professor I was told that the structure and composition of the class merit an "old school" resuscitation section where I do a pared down lecture on the sticky points and allow for more questions and participation than can be permitted during the large impersonal lecture. This also means at least for this term, (I'll be doing this same course all year), that I will be required to show up for lectures for the class. I found out that it wasn't the Air Pollution course like I had thought but instead is the general meteorology course. I would have been happy with either of these but maybe this course will help me cement the basics. I've had a tendency to flub them up when I am flustered lately.

Home

2007-09-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

Sharin came to visit and she had a car so we went to the San Gabriel Valley and I got to see where I grew up for the first time since I left.

The view from my front yard.

My house is transformed and is going for 2200/mo.

It wasn't quite as much of a powerful experience than I had expected it to be. The man that lives in the house saw us walking around the cul-de-sac. He came out and asked us what we were doing. He said he almost called the cops.

On friday I went to graduate orientation and I found out that I am T.A.ing a class on air pollution for three terms. This is great news, I was fearing that I would be saddled with a class I wasn't prepared for. I have T.A. training on Monday.

It rained last night and it shut down the city. It was only half an inch but it was enough to cause black-outs and mudslides. I discovered that when rain hits my apartment it sounds like i'm in a tin can. I spent the night reading about cloud seeding and cloud physics. The book was originally published in the early 1960s and it gives a lot of mention to Kurt Vonnegut's brother who was a pioneer in silver dioxide ground based cloud seeders.

2007-09-18T09:05:00.000-07:00

I'm back from Northern California and I had tons of fun. I love my friends up there so much. We went bike camping in Sonole and there was tons of old oak trees and huge hills. Everything was perfect.

Yesterday on my way back to Los Angeles I just sat and stared out the window and tried to make sense out of the geography. Subdivisions a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Brown hills increasingly denuded southward. My friend Jill told me that Wanda Coleman, an author and L.A. resident, calls Los Angeles "the pit of hell". A bit dramatic, but it seems fitting sometimes. Everything is so hopelessly disordered and the progress and public awakening I can see as feasible in other cities becomes unfathomable here. Urban design as a form of planning, something that raises the collective quality of life... is anathema to what L.A. is. It is even arguable that it is impossible for only the logistic reasons related to infrastructure, but still somehow it retains its appeal to me. It rewards my patience - a two hour commute home from a show, five months without a drop of precipitation. The arrival of the bus and the raindrop. A cloudy day, a kind open stranger, a new friend... all unexpected some due to the simple facts of location others due to the sometimes ubiquitous shallow consumer culture and the weight of 20 some million lost souls.

Upon waking up this morning I received a present in the form of a forecast from the NWS forecast:

Tues: 73 cloudy
Wed: 72 cloudy
Thurs: 67 rain?
Fri: 67 rain?
Sat: 67 rain?

This is unheard of for this time of year. Strange. The rain will probably amount to nothing. Even still the temperature is very anomalous for the season. Just minutes after reading this I heard a story on the radio about how a key indicator of a La nina year, a tongue of cool water protruding westward of the coast of Peru, was observed alongside a one degree drop throughout the eastern Pacific has signaled the likeliness of yet another drought year along with another potentially horrendous fire season. Hopefully the drought not as bad as last year, which was the worst on record. Combined with the recent court rulings that have decreased some water withdrawals from critical environmental areas, real conservation efforts may be necessary.

The unseasonably cool weather in addition to all the orientations, meetings, and workshops will probably send my head spinning as soon as I have the time to process them. I'm excited to be at a time in my life when there is so much to look forward to and there are so many clean starts to make.

worries

2007-09-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

Happy patriot day everyone! Lets celebrate jingoism, a deepening collective amnesia and miniature car mounted U.S. flags! Enough about that though.
My preoccupation with environmental degradation has led me to some conclusions. I have gotten to the point where I am confident we are on a crab-walk towards self destruction as a species. The question that remains is whether or not we will take all other biota on the planet with us. Dramatic? Yes, but truthful. Every species goes through this cycle and human history doubtlessly will be a short one in a geologic context. What now weighs heavily on my mind is nuclear war and waste. I do not have faith that we have the knowledge or the willingness to responsibly deal with nuclear power/weaponry.

So for me, nukes are where it's at right now. Every other worry I might have pales in comparison. It's too bad that it is one issue where individuals are largely powerless. Perhaps I will take this as a cue and become more frivolous in my thoughts.

I leave for the bay area in two days. I have been eating horribly lately. Grease and sugar do not make for slender hips.

I think I'm channeling Dr. Bronner

2007-09-08T15:48:00.000-07:00

I can't wake up early anymore. I made a first attempt at seven, back to bed at nine... woke up at two to hear a man's voice fill the court yard in a short punctuated, "tone it and bone it". Laughed a little, made some coffee, and read more of "The World Without Us". It's so nice to be able to be so leisurely. It helps having nothing but a cd-clock-radio and a laptop to distract me. It's amazing how people can be so occupied by doing nothing at all if given enough toys and errands to run. I really like having little, little apartment, little things, little to do. I'm making a conscious effort to enjoy the feeling while I can. In two weeks I will be immersed in a busy world of tackling new, complicated and hopefully interesting topics. Grad school and all the dedication it might demand of me and a long term plan coming to fruition. It all adds up to make me almost feel spoiled... I feel as if I'm getting everything I want lately. Well... leave it to me to find guilt in there.

Anyhow... the amount of free time i'm sitting on gives me a lot of time to think and read up on things. Like how in Norway they're banning claims by any car manufacturers of "clean", "green" or "environmentally friendly" cars. It's dishonest in part because it gives people a feeling that somehow these lesser evils are somehow helping to counteract damage done by other cars and trucks when in fact the only claim these corporation should be able to make would be comparative to other cars. Now is not the time to be smug and complacent because you dropped down a few extra thousand for your Honda. It is encouraging to see a more centered and realistic approach being taken at a time when greenwashing seems to be in full swing everywhere. It's not so much that everyone and everything needs to be perfect starting right now... that's unattainable and unrealistic, however if we all could just see the effect of our daily actions in more tangible terms -- even if we all continue to go about our days unchecked -- we would still manage to ground ourselves in the reality of what it means to live where we do when we do.

A good example is plastic. I will doubtlessly continue to accumulate plastic bags to some extent despite half-hearted attempts to the contrary. I will throw my garbage away in these plastic bags and every time I do I think of the plastic polymers that will someday enter the biosphere, the marine ecosystem, the animals that will ingest them the small piece of havoc I create. I am aware even though I continue to do so. The point is not to change all your actions as much as it is to be able to fess up to them and understand your place in all of it. Personally, I aim towards lessening the damage I own, but I am also beginning to realize it as a symptom of being human. Maybe then the goal is to become less-human? The argument could be made but it is nothing more than an exercise. We are highly conscious creatures, with the ability to think, plan and regret. These qualities can make us innovative, while at the same time lending towards destructive acts and excess. Yes, that is all human and that is all we have at our disposal to bring lessen the guilt we all must feel for the damage we cause to other organisms, (people included).

It would make sense to believe we can be happy this way. The first step might be by really truly understanding your place in the world, then being able to accept it and then being able to love it--the world in all of its flaws and complexities. That might be my goal in life. To really feel that in myself.

This is honest but the cynic in me says, (not audibly), that I sound new age and that I am a pretentious fuck and that I sound like I'm trying to sound like I'm so fucking enlightened... blah, blah, blah. I'm just thinking aloud, (or rather silently through keystroke).

2007-09-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my last day! I will no longer wax poetic about serving coffee too fifteen year olds with nose jobs and cranky rich people. Last night after work I went out for sake and sushi with one of the servers from my work, following that we went to see, "The Eleventh Hour". As much as I can see almost the entirety of the celebrity environmentalists as shallow and short sighted, the film was actually great. It didn't try to give people too much hope and what it did give was honest. It actually made me feel better than I have been about the state of the world.

That and I've been reading this book called The World without Us, which basically describes what would happen to the planet if every person on earth were to die tonight. The process which nature would take back cities, the geochemistry behind decomposition of synthesized materials, the continuing breakdown of plastics in our oceans, and what lasting artifacts we would leave behind and what plants and animals would take our place. This is one of the first popular works I've ever seen that actually makes the point that anthropogenic (people-caused) environmental change has an inertia to it. Nearly one hundred years from today we would still be causing minor reverberations in natural systems due to our activity following the industrial revolution. Even one thousand years from today there would be minor reverberations.

There will never be the sort of return to Eden, rocket to the moon, zero impact hydrogen panacea that many hope for but that's okay. The conversation today should focus around planning, mitigation, and personal responsibility. The last point here is the most important but also the most far-fetched. People are fucking lazy and they are happy being miserable as long as they maintain buying power to shop recreationally, wants become needs as long as your wants are accessible and people are selfish and lazy and that's okay. Despite the fact that attempts by movie stars to address shit like this bothers me, I enjoyed it. It tried to criticize consumerism, bravo 4-stars. Also Thom Hartman was in it, he was great.

short update

2007-09-05T10:45:00.000-07:00

Second to last day of work is today. There will be no mylar balloons for me tomorrow. I will come in the next day to pick up my check. The weather seems to have let up a little for the time being. I woke up without an alarm at ten and there was a nice breeze blowing through the blinds. A total of 14 people died due to the heat wave. 14.

2007-09-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

It is official so it seems. September is here and the last days of summer are here. I am going to have a ton of shit coming up in the next few weeks... mostly fun stuff though. I am going to quit work (6 more days, I am in the midst of working a nine day streak, [overtime??]). Mariel is going to come to visit (9 days). Jill and two friends are going to stay with me while they go to a queer women of color conference (7 days). I am going to take a bus to san francisco to hang out with friends (12 days). The day after I get back from the bay area Sharin is coming to visit (16 days). Right after she leaves I have an appointment with my advisor and I have to go to a campus wide workshop for teaching assistants. School starts and then it will all be over. My first weekend of school I am going camping with a bunch of other grad students from the department somewhere on the ventura county coast. I am happy to make the most out of these last days. If all goes to plan my life will be about 99% school oriented for the next two years at least so I might as well.

I am kind of obsessed with impending natural disasters lately, whether it is ecological collapse and large scale flooding from global warming (see: Flood Maps), the potential for tropical cyclones in southern california, or the imminent event on the eastern extent of the san andreas which will likely reduce the los angeles basin to rubble. Just when I though I had heard it all I was talking to my ex-boyfriend on the phone and we were having our normal geeky conversation when he started talking about the New Madrid Fault. My mind is blown. The fault runs along the mississippi basin. Yes, and it's centered right over Memphis. There was a large event in 1812 that rang church bells in Boston. The thing about an intercontinental fault line like New Madrid is that the event could be felt throughout the continental plate (easily 90% of the continental U.S., whereas Pacific coast earthquakes take place on smaller plates and hence have more of a localized extent. To make matters even more pseudo apocalyptic there is no infrastructure to manage such an event in the areas that would be most affected. Lots of old houses with basements.

It is a very interesting time to be alive if only for the fact that we as humans can surmise on the unexpected more than ever before. Environmental changes that are perceivable, anthropogenically forced and quantifiable. There is some pretty horrid shit masquerading as environmentalism these days. It's pretty awful. The worst would have to be this carbon capture technology bullshit that has been hinted at throughout the media lately. At best it is still in its most nascent of stages at worst it is just a shiny distraction and a window of opportunity for a new coal boom. From the mouth of George Bush we receive new phrases like, "clean coal technology". China and India are both on the brink of an industrial revolution, (India more so), and the only major hurdle to a complete and total transformation aside from cultural factors is increased power production. Both india and China are building coal plants at breakneck speed. Clearances are even being made for new coal plants in the U.S. and U.K. (goodbye Kyoto, what a commitment!). The greenwashing has already began, the plants are being put online and the technology to make them "green" is always forthcoming. Forget emissions from combustion for a moment. What about extraction what about the carbon reserves that are released from extraction alone?! The new coal plants are being rushed into completion while a cooperative government is still a guarantee. Guilianni is already making the media circuit telling the American people that, "we need to increase our reliance on coal".

It is all horribly irresponsible and short-sighted. Oh well what effect does two hundred more coal plants have on the world really? It's amazing to me that the same attitude that disables individuals from taking personal responsibility for their lifestyle choices can be effective on such a large scale. What difference can one nation of only 300 million make while India and China are just beginning to catch up. Just a drop in the bucket... I wonder how long we can disable ourselves from making any sort of significant progress? Will I be an old and grey muttering angrily about Leonardo DiCaprio's private jet. I hope not.

it's good and it's everywhere

2007-08-29T16:42:00.000-07:00

It is hot and it isn't helping my disposition today. I rode my bike to the trader joe's down the street. I continue to try to scrub the Tecate stank out of my carpet (long story). I wilt like a lily. I fall asleep on the carpet after eating a cold soy meat taco. I listen to Neil Young records.

I am eager for all the plans I've made over the past year to set in motion. I registered for my Teaching Assistant orientation today. Yesterday I rode my bike all day. I went to an in-store at Amoeba records and saw the band "No Age" for the first time. They were awesome and make me happy to live in Los Angeles where I will doubtlessly get to see them again. I finally got to riding my bike into Hollywood which wasn't quite as terrifying as I had made it out to be in my head. I can take Venice Blvd. East to Fairfax North which goes all the way up to Sunset without much pain, although it is still far from ideal. Also yesterday I got my hair cut and it looks awesome. After washing it this morning the glory had faded a bit but it was still a really great feeling to like the way it came out.

Foolish vanity, I know but as foolish as it may be I still tie up a great amount of my self-worth in my looks. It's a delicate balance for me at times to not let it become an unhealthy preoccupation. Nothing uncommon, nothing severe but it asserts itself in my life and it might always. Probably some sort of hold-over from teen years spent at 250+ pounds. I've met other gay guys with similar issues. It's funny really, somehow at 5'8" and 145 I can feel like nothing has changed. Anyhow, my point in all of this is that recently I've felt more confident about my looks, mostly due to having an exercise regime involving a portable ballet bar. It's all very absurd. I sound like my mom. Now is the time I give you all an unsolicited detailed description of what I ate during the last 48 hours. Intellectually I can reason all this shit to be totally fucking shallow but somehow the more immediate and visceral me is at the helm.

I've taken a liking to check the west coast visible satellite (see last entry). It's beautiful really it's like an ultrasound over the pacific full of swirls and spots full of meaning and consequence for millions of people. A Grainy greyscale wetdream. Right now a high pressure system retrograded from Arizona to Southern California and has put a damper on my day off. No marine influence. No gray mornings. No sea breezes, just hot. I was planning on going to the beach again earlier this week, waking up at noon and getting to the beach around four lying out on the sand watching the mass of white swallow the shore up. The beach empties out and it's only gulls and tangles of seaweed left on the sand and it is a lot to take in. Although the water is churning with swill and planes buzz overhead you feel for a moment nature reasserting itself and you are aware of your position on the globe. Grounding maybe. This gives me goosebumps. This makes me feel alive for a moment or so.

If ever I feel the need to explain my fascination with the weather it is this (or that last sentence of the last paragraph); The earth and it's natural processes are a constant of our collective existence, it is beautiful and tragic and inspiring all at once. It's temporal variation, over a year, over a season or day form much of our impression about what is true and what is familiar and comforting about our places. The tangibility of everyday life. When I was a ten I had a best friend that would come over whenever it was raining, we would stand out and get soaked, drink tea on the corner out of gaudy christmas mugs and run around the street. Walk to the top of the street where the houses ended and just sit and take in the smell of wet dirt. I have so many memories that are more based in the conditions outside, the exact lighting, humidity and winds than the interpersonal. They alone are enough to bring me to my knees. I guess it's all about paying attention, being present to feel it. That is when I am truly content, everything else is peripheral. It makes me want to sing, to lie still and love everything despite perceived imperfections. It is what makes me dream of my little mini-house off the grid somewhere. It is what gives me hope for the future despite all there is to fret over whether it is corruption of governments and corporations or the collusion of the two, ignorance, hate, fear, greed, or environmental destruction.

I know at this point I sound like i'm posing as some sort of new age guru but this is what really matters to me above all else. I feel as if everyone got to appreciate it just once in their life we would all be better off. As long as the value of all of it goes ignored we will look for it other places. We will shop and buy in excess, hate ourselves and others, kill and destroy biological diversity, ecosystems as well as ourselves to no end and manage to remain miserable throughout the process.

etc/misc.
-I have 9 days until my last day at the cafe.
-I have started seeing someone.
-I have been reading random shit on the internet: Oldest supercentarians, world's tallest women, the ongoing experiment involving emitting radio waves into the ionosphere out into space in hopes of contacting intelligent extraterrestrial life.
-I have rediscovered the joy of bike-riding

2007-08-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

Maybe I shouldn't get excited too soon but it seems I was right in my uneducated guesses about the remnants of hurricane Dean... Northeast Pacific Visible Imagery - Satellite Services Division
(note the moisture pluming up from baja). It might just be really muggy for a few days but I don't care it is still good news.

2007-08-21T11:09:00.000-07:00

I had no idea that Los Angeles could get occasional tropical cyclones. I just read that one hit in 1939 and killed 40 people in Long Beach. There was another that swept the coast from San Diego to Long Beach in the 1850s. wow. There's a chance that it might rain here next week if we get remnant from some sort of tropical storm, depression, remnant, most-likely not hurricane Dean. The only limiting factor for tropical cyclones in southern california is sea surface temperatures. During El nino events the pacific is a lot warmer. The intensity of these events is expected to increase in magnitude as long as global mean temperatures continue their current rise. In light of current events, (see Brazil below), it wouldn't be out of the question to see a low grade tropical cyclone hit Santa Monica bay during the fall preceding the next el nino event.

I've been fixated on environmental change the past few days. It's a natural fascination but some aspects of being a spectator to it all can still come off as being sadistic.

Some facts:
-Last year was the first year ever that a recorded Hurricane hit Brazil. (Denied by Brazilian gov't but confirmed by remote sensing imagery).
-Coldplay payed for carbon offsets in the form of planted mango trees in India to offset the release of their album and tour last year. Nearly all of the mango trees are now dead because they were not planted in suitable conditions.

Okay, so the whole carbon offset fad is really enraging in general as it seems to function as some sort of justification for the excessively extravagant lifestyles of the rich. Carbon offsetting is used by tons of celebrities so they can appear to be environmentalists. It's an awful band-aid fix. There are a lot of things like this going on right now. Stories touting the salvation of humankind in the form of cane-sugar ethanol are becoming more and more frequent. Although it is true that cane-sugar is superior to corn in terms of , extraction as well as efficiency, what these articles fail to mention is all the problems that would accompany a global economy that relies on sugar cane ethanol for a large portion of its fuel needs. There are two main problems, one, the increased strain on the land for cane-sugar would doubtlessly lead to an accelerated encroachment into the amazon basin. The destruction of more tropical rain forest in the name of minimizing our collective carbon footprint is horribly short-sighted when these same forests function as gigantic carbon sinks. Not to mention the importance the area might hold to the aboriginal groups, flora and fauna that live there. The second major flaw is the impact the shift to cane-sugar ethanol would have on agriculture. A shift of the magnitude proposed by many would send the prices of many crops skyrocketing, heavy government subsidies would serve as partial relief. Maybe Ted Turner and Sheryl Crow could will buy more carbon offsetting credits for their private jet travel and the Amazon basin could be reforested entirely with wilting mango trees. Surely that is the solution. "I am doing my part" they will all say.

-Al Gore and others are still trying to claim that it is possible for industrialized societies to make the fundamental shifts required to become much more sustainable without any economic sacrifice.

This is the one that really bothers me. This will never happen. This is the key to our collective failure globally. Business and profits come first. Property rights = pursuit of happiness. blah blah blah. Corporate greed in the name of personal freedoms while simultaneously our government seizes its opportunity to gut our civil liberties to the point that nearly any form of domestic spying, internment, torture and asset freezing can now be both justifiable as well as legal if invoking concerns relating to "the global war on terrorism".

I am in no way purporting to be perfect by offering up these criticisms but when our most public,"environmental leaders", spew shit like this from there multi-million dollar mouths it makes me frustrated.

It is my day off and I think I might go to the beach. I wish I had a parasol.

2007-08-19T00:41:00.000-07:00

Listening to coast to coast and knitting plastic bags together. Yes. This is how I'm spending a Saturday night; conspiracy theories and garbage crafts.

I want to cover my walls in plastic bags like these. I will hang ornaments on them, found objects and more garbage, kind of like a christmas tree. I don't really knit as much as I knot, it started out as knitting. I'm starting to count down the days to when I get to leave my job permanently. I'm considering a trip up to the bay area for a few days, aside from that I need to do more reading. I gave up on reading any more of the fluid dynamics text I've been trudging through for the past month and started on a more basic and classic atmospheric text from the seventies. It's a real page-turner compared to fluid dynamics, (I am going to have to start a year long sequence on the topic in the fall), at least I have a small skeleton of a background on the subject.

I can't help but feeling a little daunted right now for the start of school. I am looking forward to the challenge but at the same time fear coming up short. Typical concerns for someone in my situation, I know this so I am not letting my fears get the best of me.

Speaking of fears:

The banking system, (see above mention of conspiracy theories).

The Atlantic hurricane season is finally picking up.

It is hot in Los Angeles.

Fires burn out of control in Santa Barbara county.

Huge earthquakes happening everywhere, (Peru, Indonesia).

The USGS held a press conference on the south-eastern extent of the San Andreas fault. It is over a hundred years over its periodic event cycle. It could erupt in one giant event.

Southern California is ringed by mountains. Vital infrastructure and fault lines both lie along mountain passes. Beach toxicity events in California are way up. A major seismic event could eventually cut off the aqueduct from the Colorado, power-lines, gas-lines.

I am not stock-piling water and canned goods as of yet, but it is a preoccupation.

Warrant-less wiretaps and asset freezing are no longer considered to be abuses of government power, and are now constitutional.

Greenhouse gas emissions are on track for a record breaking year.

hopes:

Boyfriend or at least a few dates in the near future.

A new better body thanks to my fluidity (portable ballet) bar. My posture is already improving and my back doesn't hurt me anymore.

Building a tiny shack someday, somewhere beautiful.

Living off the grid.

Finishing school and getting a job doing something I love. Researching environmental change, teaching earth-science, government forecasting.

Being out of bank-debt by next month.

Getting my 600 dollars worth of pinky-stitches debt subsidized or written off altogether by the hospital.

Trying Taran-Noah-Smith's (the youngest sibling from "Home Improvement") line of vegan cheese.

Liking Taran-Noah-Smith's (the youngest sibling from "Home Improvement") line of vegan cheese.

That my neighbor will stop blaring music on their stereo soon so I can get some sleep.

2007-08-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

I've had a lot of fun the past couple days. I broke my near two month long fast from alcohol went to a few museums. I still haven't been to the MOCA or the museum of Jurassic Technology. Maybe during my next weekend.

I'm not sure if I had mentioned this but I was under the impression that I was 1900 dollars in debt with my bank earlier this week. Luckily for me I failed to realize that it takes a while for my paychecks to clear and I am only 900 in the hole, which is awesome. My goal is to be even by the start of school. I really don't know how realistic that is though considering how meager my tips have been as of late.

Even though they are forecasting mid 90s downtown tomorrow, I still feel as if summer is coming to a close. September inches closer day by day and I lose motivation at work, I shower less, my hair grows longer and sticks more out of the sides of the hat they make me wear. If it were not for starting grad school it wouldn't mean anything here. Hot days are possible pretty much year-round here. The rainy-season is unpredictable in behavior and occurrence, but somehow I still seam to care.

I have nothing else to say

update

2007-08-13T08:29:00.000-07:00

I went to San Diego. It wasn't that bad although it had its moments.
I was talking to one of my cousins and was telling them about my job and I was telling them about how I answer the phone. He responded, "whoa that's really gay" and walked away. I did not really take offense, it seems callous to say something like that and assume it to be in good taste. A minor faux-pas in the scheme of things. When all is said in done they appear to be exponentially more functional than my immediate family. They are quite warm and nice people... so much so that I don't care for the most part that they are evangelicals. One of them said he would visit me here sometime. I exchanged emails with my aunt. I probably seem very cold but considering how crazy my parents were acting I am probably seen as a sympathy case. All in all it was not a mistake in going.

2007-08-12T10:02:00.000-07:00

I have the day off today and I'm going to be spending it at my cousins' house in suburban San Diego with my parents. It will be a little more social interaction then I've become accustomed to over this summer. I will have a good time despite myself.

It's odd. It really is. I can remember how I felt when I was a kid. I told myself that I would break free the moment I could, and now I ride in the same mini-van on my own accord. I think it is partially due to letting go of the resentment I carried but also partially because I have forgotten so many of the horrible stories. The fights. The constant yelling and spoken and silent threats of violence.

They're old now. They have long drawn out discussions about socialized medicine and labor issues when I need someone to talk to. I feel like a sell-out still. I spoke to my sister last night and she said she thought I was the favorite. Twist the knife. Despite my rampant homosexuality I still can take the blue ribbon. I'm also the youngest and the house had mellowed some by the time I was older. Despite not receiving any assistance financially from my parents I feel spoiled in comparison. My other siblings had it much worse to the degree that I can start to view my limited functional behaviors and attitudes as a privileged position. I don't want to be the one who made it. The weight is heavy considering that there are nine other contenders besides myself and it is the natural result of my parents tempered praise. I honestly don't know what point is with all of this so I will stop here.

I cleaned my apartment because I am having a friend stay with me for a couple days next week. I found a lucky bamboo plant left outside the dumpster and i am nursing it back to health. My skepticism about the inferiority of los angeles curbside finds has melted away. The other day I even found a nice table. I can't decide whether I love it or whether I think it is tacky.

Zoe likes it, particulars it's rubbing against its edges.

Zoe:

My one eared 13 years old companion... She has been with me with only minor pauses since I was eleven. She only gets sassier and louder with age.

I get to give my notice to my work in the next couple of weeks. Something to look forward to. Despite the fact that I enjoy the company of several of my co-workers and I've becomes accustomed to the unreasonable demands of customers; I've become very comfortable with all of it. I will probably end up giving myself less of a vacation than I had planned before, especially since I do not know what I would be doing with my time between quitting work and starting grad school. It is my guess that it wouldn't be anything too useful. I also have to consider that even though i am making around $13/hr I remain over a thousand in the hole with my bank. For the present I've decided that I can't give my two weeks until after I have my meeting with my department to discuss funding and job duties as a TA.

err.. uhh... my parents somehow bypassed my security gate, (I didn't give them the code) and they are knocking on my door...

Cactus Flower Tea

2007-08-06T21:32:00.000-07:00

I've had the past few days off, so I filled them the only way I know how to at this point. Ride buses go to parks, go find food, walk constantly. Always somewhere new, always something novel. This is the honeymoon period. No hiking was done, no ferries were taken, but I had a good time. I went to East Los Angeles to see the Los Angeles version of one of my favorite places in Portland; the Goodwill outlet center. Something was lost in translation. I was horribly disappointed by nearly everything about the place, (well maybe everything except this artwork):

THE MAGIC of GOODWILL

The inside of the "clearance center" was quite possibly the worst thrift store I've ever been to. There were maybe a dozen small bins altogether, they were all shallowly filled with the worst of the worst of items, (mostly giant tommy hillfigger jerseys with bleach stains, soiled teddy bears, and airport novels). All of them were never changed. I got real lost beforehand and I asked some guys working at an autobody shop for directions to an intersection. I was surprised by how eager they were to help me, I walked for over an hour and eventually ran into Los Angeles River Park. Which was both depressing and uplifting at the same time.

This is the L.A. river:

THE RIVER of ANGELS

I snapped the photo from a road overpass and there is a man bending over and washing his face with the water. I was gawking in disbelief that someone would think to cleanse any part of their bodies with L.A. river water -- truly photo worthy. The park was uplifting because the river is still presumed to have some value to it, and depressing for many obvious reasons. It still remains vital though. It floods in the winter. It swallows up someone every year. Its concrete embankments are a taggers paradise. The primered patchwork is evidence to that.

I took the new (to me) Metro rail to get to East L.A., then I decided to go to Health Express, the oddly placed, and affordable vegan drive-thru in Pasadena, (adjacent to KFC, roscoe's, and McDonalds on Lake Street).

Too much shopping was done, not too much spending but I think I must have been in seven thrift stores today. Plus a bunch of Japanese stores on Sawtelle. I feel like I have a hangover. Too much want instilled in me. Too much everything. I need to keep things as simple as possible. Next weekend I will have to focus more on outdoor activities. The city is what I make it... and if I want to make it into a giant fucking mall, (which is very easy in Los Angeles), then I have no right to complain. Perhaps my tone is too harsh but I feel like sometimes I must fight against myself and old habits. Constant want. Constant void. Constant boredom. Constantly uninspired. Self loathing. Everything becomes ugly. Negativity installs itself.

The way I see it, it's pandemic. It's compulsive and it's familiar. It's a lifestyle and a package deal. Not having a television helps but feeling very isolated geographically from anything I can relate to my more recent self does not help. Like the L.A. River, it's brutal in its honesty. It mostly dead, because we mostly killed it. It is diverted and channeled, and if you unfix your gaze on it appears to be just another highway to nowhere.

I can't really explain it. I feel this sense of authenticity about it. It's something to both wallow and revel in simultaneously. I feel it walking downtown, east of downtown, the san gabriel valley. Walking helps, the weather helps more. Everything is as it has always been for a moment and i have no concept of time or age as I have known it. Road tar is seen to have been spilled haphazardly and exhaust can fill the air at times. underpasses smell of urine, discarded blankets and shopping carts make it hard to pass. Sidewalks disappear, crossings become rare. In the dark underpass-like pedestrian tunnel I come with a couple inches of stepping on a limb or two. I walk down the stairs and it feels and smells like entering a sewer. The limbs owners are either too fucked up or sick to take much notice. I make it to the other side, walk up the steps to daylight and I am not fazed by any of this.

I am losing my humanity. I am more aware of the fact after a children's toy, (a four foot tall stuffed panda) left in the underpass elicits more of a reaction in me. Part of me even entertained taking a photo but thought better of it. The flash would stir something up in a junkie's mind that would undoubtedly yield bitter fruit.

My point in all of this is that everyone must admit to reality of life on Earth. That the awful and the beautiful are perpetually coincident. This is especially important if we care at all about living our lives in a way that reflects this reality. Responsibly. The river is a grounding force. It is meager. It says to us, "this is all you get". Like the children of the rich, we lack necessary boundaries. Abundance gives way only momentarily, but when it does it's powerful, sufficient to serve as reminder of a more balanced view of the world.

2007-08-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

I'm in much better spirits now than earlier today partially due to the fact that I realized that it is the first of August and I will not be working as a barista for much longer. In less than a month I will give my two weeks and I won't have to sway to the whims of capricious customers any longer. Part of me will probably miss it though, not the actual work but the structure it brings to my life. Although grad school should have me down to a whole new routine in no time.

My frustration mellowed today at work. Now that I am fairly up to pace people, (co-workers only), are downright nice to me. They crack jokes we talk shit about customers and managers. It's become pleasant at times.

After work I rushed over to my bus stop and waited for nearly an hour. All the other commuters were cranky. A man started cursing angrily and part of me felt somehow threatened by it. As if among the people waiting for the bus he would somehow hand pick me from the lot for a transparent exchange of anger. We watched pair after pair of little white lights appear on the horizon, some in the street for a better view. I had saved a large bag of pastries from the dumpster and was planning to give to the bus driver and gave it to the woman who was sitting next to me. I made use of my primitive Spanish skills. I told her they were cookies and I think she may have been disappointed. When I fi nally caught the bus and transferred my connecting bus had half taken off without me and I chased it down. She stopped which was really atypical from experience. Take the good with the bad I suppose.

The past two days I have been using my French multiple times throughout the day. I feel like I might be getting a lot less timid about using it. Today a woman from Quebec came in and was really excited for me to speak to her. Then a couple from France that were both really stuck up. The woman came in and kept repeating obstinately, "Sandweech wit haam an' sheeze" slowly. I thought it was due to language so I switched over but it made no difference. The man had aviator sunglasses propped up on his head was wearing a green tennis shirt with a white wool sweater tied around his neck. He looked like he belonged in an ad for Newport cigarettes or an 80s Perrier ad.

I have a tendency to place importance on the change of month and other pointless mile markers particularly in the transition from summer to fall. Anxiously waiting for a change of seasons to arrive dramatically. I peruse the daily average high temperature charts. I am always waiting for something that never comes.

For anyone who cares the statistically averaged hottest day of the year in Los Angeles is August 5th, from there it is a gradual decline down about twelve degrees to the high in January.

a short rant

2007-08-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

Things have been looking up lately. I had a couple of days off recently and decided to go on a hike in Topanga State Park. It was thoroughly enjoyable despite tripping hard on a rock, running out of food and taking a wrong turn that ended me on some canyon road in Malibu frequented by assholes in sports cars. For some reason the road wouldn't stop reminding me of the short lived TV show, V.I.P.. It was a TV series starring Pamela Anderson as a detective.

It ended up being a twenty mile hike. It left me sore and tired. I know it was hot and I know the terrain was difficult but it has still put a damper on my dreams of hiking the entirety of the pacific crest trail. I want to buy some camping equipment sometime soon. I've been reading up and a lot of places are very accessible by public transportation; Catalina Island, The San Gabriel Mountains, Malibu creek, some places in the desert and even a few places in the sierras.

I think a lot of the things people take for granted as apparent truths about Los Angeles are total lies. I say this mostly due to things in other cities I've lived have said about Los Angeles. Telling people you are from Southern California often elicits a violent reaction, sometimes empathic in tone. However, even local people I meet mirror the same attitude towards their city.

Yes you can ride the bus without too much hassle.
No it is not really that hot, (unless you live in the valley).

however

yes it is dirty, yes it is fucking polluted.
yes a lot of people commute hours daily.
yes people drive their cars to the corner store.

The problem with Los Angeles is its suburbs, not the city itself. There may never be the proper infrastructure in place to support the giant expanse of highways and clapboard mansions that blight the landscape for hundreds of miles in all directions. Peak-oil and other apocalyptic enthusiasts have a field day. Implementing sustainable practices seems impossible. Lawns need watering, pools need filling, air conditioners crank on for half the year.

The culture of materialism that runs rampant everywhere, but particularly in Los Angeles, doesn't help matters either. It has always seemed funny to me that the people who often try to appear the most environmentally conscious are moneyed. It is not too surprising considering the added costs of eating organic and "sustainable" alternatives to household products. But there's something else to it. There is a tendency for people who can afford to buy environmentally branded products to somehow think that they are "helping" the environment when in fact they have just chosen a lesser evil. This is especially true for non-essentials. People who think buying a Prius for your 3 hour commute is going to save the world. Okay, yes it is a good alternative to a standard car but what about not having a car altogether. The same goes for buying flax and hemp wardrobes, buying biodegradable disposable dish ware, remodeling your palace every few years with sustainable materials. Plastic shopping bags thank customers for "making the right choice".

It seems like so much of what is deemed environmentally friendly is completely hollow, luxury accessories and inaccessible to 9/1o of the people. I am convinced that people will have to alter their lifestyles fundamentally to really allow for any sort of sustained environmental restoration. I am also mostly convinced that this will never happen naturally as it would go against human nature. Instead just like in nature, we will compete for resources, nation against nation, class against class until, war after war until the buying power of the upper middle class slowly declines, but all of these are national if not global problems.

So keep Los Angeles out of it, its bigger than that. Its because places like LA, Phoenix, and Las Vegas have shown outward signs of lowered quality of life stemming from sprawl and environmental degradation that they have become emblematic. No matter where you live it still comes down to personal choices. Burning my trash in Los Angeles is just as bad as someone burning their trash in Washington. The natural differences in geography and added stresses of some 10 odd million additional people just make the action of more impact.

In short being a rich asshole in Portland, makes you just as much of a rich asshole as someone who lives in Los Angeles or Beijing for that matter.

Dalila, Dalila

2007-07-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I left the house and walked to my usual corner. I waited on the corner for the bus, under the shade of an apartment complex. My back was tired so i leaned on a brick wall. A freshly painted brick wall. So I got white paint on my only work shirt. I was really angry about it until I started thinking about the mentos commercial where the same thing happens to the man on the way to a job interview.

I got to work and no one seemed to notice the paint. One of the aestheticians from next door saw the gnarled scar on my finger and feigned concern, (my finger is pretty much healed now so I decided yesterday to stop wearing my band-aid), she showed similar concern for my red peeling skin on my nose the day before. She must think I'm a wreck. That was really it for work. Started conversing in French with my euro manager. I spoke to a server in the break room while we were eating. She asked how old i was. She divulged that she thought I was 18. "Throw your shoulders back and project yourself", the delivery was equivalent to a plea to "get-yo'self-together" end.

I have Sunday off, I will most-likely go hiking. The weather has been interesting here lately, we've seen edge effects from the north american monsoon. Last weekend when my friends were in town it actually started to rain. I was on the bus and the driver even turned on the wipers. No one else on the bus seemed to care. Lawns are maintained by automated watering regimes and Mexicans. Water comes from pipes. I left the bus and the sidewalks were still pale. Sidewalk color to me is a sure litmus test to whether or not rainfall is significant in southern california. Tropical depression dalila was churning off the coast of baja but it has since died and will soon be to weak to operate under its own power. It will be carried by the prevailing westerlies and will likely bring showers here or more likely just make it really fucking muggy for a few days. August comes in a few days. The maximum average daily high temperature is on August 6th.

I am trying not to anticipate a dramatic transition into fall as i can remember 90+ days well into October. When rain comes I will be dancing and singing quietly in my mind. I will take-in the chemical slurry that fills the air after the first rainstorm. Chlorine and oil slick blacktop will fill my lungs. mmm.... That is a long way from now.

I haven't been reading my fluid dynamics book lately. I blame the ballet bar and the internet.

mensiversary

2007-07-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

As of tomorrow I will have been living in Los Angeles for a month. One month. This is great because it means I only have about a month and a half left of working at the cafe. The job has become more comfortable for me recently. Horrible things, (customers, accidents, managers, etc.) still happen but I expect them to occur more or less. I've accepted my situation for what it is for the time being. It helps that the past week has been filled with excitement. My good friends Jill and Kellie took the greyhound down from Oakland and we spent the weekend riding buses, laying out on the grass, eating at awesome vegan restaurants, going to museums and walking along the beach. I even finally got to see the La Brea tarpits. I can see why so many people seem to be disappointed by them, but if you really take the time to consider the unique nature of the site it becomes pretty interesting. The smell of tar, the giant pulses of methane bubbling to the surface. Its fenced off so that no one falls in, it is free and surprisingly not very crowded. I would consider taking the two buses over there just to sit on one of the benches overlooking the pits to write and make sketches of the mastodon statues. It is also just four blocks away from LACMA. LACMA is free everyday from 5 PM to 8 PM. Right now there is a huge installation from an artist who only works with colors and simple shapes, mostly tubes, of fluorescent lights.I am thinking about a trip to MOCA soon, but it is downtown which is a farther trek for me, still under an hour though.

It's has been an eye opener for me to remember all the opportunities there are so close to me here. I've decided that from now on I will make better use of my time off from work. I am thinking that next weekend I am going to go hiking at Topanga state park, apparently there is a weekend bus that will take you there from Santa Monica. Jill told me about it, there are red-rock formations, a lagoon, mountains, a 13 mile hiking trail and it is also where they filmed m*a*s*h.

Griffith park might be a possibility sometime soon. The huge observatory that has been closed since I was in high school is reopened and even though it was scarred by the worst brushfires in decades just months before I moved here, the park is also reopened. The angeles nat'l forest is also an option but the temperatures there will hover around one hundred degrees until the middle of fall.

I'm also really thinking about seeing if there is a way i can go to Catalina. For those of you who are unfamiliar it's a sizable island off the coast near Long Beach. There is only one town on the island and most of the rest of the land is recreational/wildlife areas. I'm guessing that there will either be an affordable bus or I will take my bike on the ferry. My ultimate goal is getting over to an area I scouted out on the map named Twin Harbors. Twin Harbor is located on the middle of the island where the land narrows considerably. The distance from shore to shore is small, hence the name. Twin harbors has an average August high of 71 degrees because of the extent of the marine influence. The metropolitan area is my oyster.

Having my friends visit me was great. I feel like I made a great decision coming out here, (instead of Kansas). Los Angeles is growing on me despite sunburns and near daily harassment. I feel like some examples are needed. A couple of days ago when I was with my visitors we were walking towards my house down Venice and two men passed the first was older, obviously drunk and started to mumble angrily about spare change the younger one told him to calm down from behind, he was his son. I walked around the younger one by walking on the grass. He took it as a slight against him and yelled something incoherent about how skinny I was and how he was a linebacker and how he could use me as a toothpick, (and here I was concerned about my recent weight gain). I was called a faggot on two separate occasions on the bus last week. I was talking on the phone both times, it's my guess that my voice, particularly when in the midst of an entheusiastic retelling of a ridiculous anecdote is a dead givaway.

Here is a picture of me sitting in the grass in Echo Park, wearing kellie's glasses is also a dead givaway:

Buying a home fitness ballet bar is also a dead givaway. But I don't give a fuck. It came in the mail on Monday. My mom recommended it to me on account of all of my back trouble, It seems to have worked wonders for her. It came with a series of instructional DVDs that I follow along with on my computer because I don't have a tv. So far it is much more difficult than I had anticipated but it is also a lot of fun. Definitely worth the money if any of you have been considering the purchase.

LA Guns

2007-07-12T16:24:00.000-07:00

I'm going to try to not let this turn into an outlet for me to vent about work, but it's hard.

With that said, I must inform you that people are mean. People are really mean. One customer in particular made my blood boil today. I was making drinks this morning while my manager was taking orders and the customer orders her, "extra dry iced cappuccino" -- impossible by the way -- and my manager shouted the drink order to me. The lady asks her, "can he do that?". The intonation is very important here however I can't find the words to convey the contempt for mankind she seems carry with her on an everyday basis. My manager defended me half-heartedly, but also walked away leaving me to charge her because the line had thinned out. I saunter over to the counter to ring her up and I charge her for a double.

She chides me.

She tells me she ordered a single.

She tells me that I shouldn't charge people without asking first.

She tells me that she caught me doing the same thing yesterday.

I apologize each time but it only makes her worse.

I thank her for pointing it out to me.

She repeats to me that she caught me doing the same thing yesterday.

I thank her for pointing it out to me twice.

She has an obvious face lift, huge sunglasses, coral lipstick, a slinky sleeveless black dress with white piping and pearls. She is indignant. Her brow gives clues to the expressions her eyes complete under her shades. I give her her drink. She lashes out "too much foam!".
I can tell she just wants to piss me off at this point -- it's obvious. But then it gets worse, she actually takes the lid off her cup and shakes the foam out onto the counter in front of me. I try to control the rush of blood i feel pulsing to my temples. with all goods received I thank her, I tell her goodbye, I tell her to have a nice day.

Her eyes narrow behind her shades to what I imagine now to be metallic spears, she extends her hand palm up, "didn't I give you a dime in that change."

"Here's your nickel ma'am, have a greeeat day!" -- I over annunciate in hopes she'd pick up on what to me is an obviously sarcastic statement. She storms out lidless with non-fat foam on her hand but she'll be back tomorrow. She's there everyday.

In the scheme of things I've had fairly little interaction with this woman but still the mind wandered at the bus stop. I daydream about leaning over the counter and slapping her upside the head. I wonder if anyone has ever called her out. I wonder if she could be shamed by a lesser. Even the transitory thought of the possibility of a scenario occurring is enough to run over my sensory system.... my mouth waters.

I'm not letting it bother me though -- no really, it's true. Since I'm fairly sure that most people capable of these behaviors are dumb as fucking tacks, I'm going to try to let a silent but all encompassing air of superiority be my guide. I'm not pompous.

It's justified under the assumption that the particular ilk of customer in question has some sort of luxury fetish. They have become well off by inheritance, marriage or under some sort of venture capitalist boondoggle -- I'm not too well informed on the subject but two good guesses would be either Chinese strip mines, or investment in chain luxury themed shopping environments (like the one I work for). Finally, they decide to invest their piles of cash in some gaudy mansion in the hills, terrifying plastic surgery and a ridiculous car. So, its easy to see why I feel justified in my blanketed statements of condemnation.

Themed shopping environments like the one I work for are on the rise, (they apparently just opened one in Dubai). What is so insidious about places like these is their gratuitous claims on authenticity. People come expecting a very controlled environment -- much like Disneyland. The menu is bilingual, with French being dominant. People opt to order in ridiculously bad French. Ask me if the bread is French. Our tables are made from wood salvaged from 19th century Belgian box cars. The yeast is from a culture taken from the founder in Brussels.

In a way Beverly Hills itself is a themed environment. Tourists wander the streets taking pictures of elaborate window displays for Imported lines of thigh cream and tasteless couture for the modern well to do working woman. Passersby gawk at luxury sedans, if traffic is light they rush to point them out to their companions. It defies reasoning but it remains an everyday occurrence on the walk to my bus-stop.

Perhaps my two weeks here has intensified my class consciousness. Perhaps it has that effect on a lot of people. Maybe the fact that I see these tourist gawk, pose and strut down the street is solid evidence for the prevalence of this collective class conscious. It's blatant here but it's pervasive throughout other areas of Southern California as well. It stymies most efforts towards any real progress in civic, and regional matters. Everyone wants theirs. It acts out with minor regional variations on a national level, (is this why the Wheel of Fortune is still on the air?). Brown-outs, and droughts function are more reasons to expand, more reasons to build palaces with near Olympic sized pools on marginal land, to increase bus fare and pay increased attention to the more pressing issues of the day.

Like what you ask? -- White flight in Orange County, of course.

UCLA released a study based on the most recent census data that reveals that the state is increasingly Latino. That for the first time ever in California history more people left the state last year than came in, (what about after the gold-rush?). A lot of the people leaving are white, they're leaving for places like Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Arizona, where new sub-developments remain plentiful and homogeneous communities are more or less present. That is the American Dream I suppose.

Watching the news in L.A., while not particularly shocking still manages to make my skin crawl. A reminder that the media is inherently racist. It creates a depiction of the world that manages to maintain the marginalization of the regions majority ethnic groups. It is unbelievable. It would be conceivable under isolated enclave conditions however that is nowhere near reality, some twenty-odd million people. It's amazing and it will perpetuate itself indefinitely. This is familiar to me. I know this. I grew up with this. It reintroduces itself to me like an old friend. Experience draws me to remark on new particularities.

Something in me enjoys place; The feeling that one location is distinct from any other. Despite worsening conditions, homogenization is nowhere near complete. I decontextualize a location first by looking at a map. I see a field of blue. An ocean. I see some mountains nearby I will never go to. I see a basin and a desert. This is my home. I look at an irrational grid system of streets laid out with north-south and east-west running streets all running roughly at 45 degrees. I get lost on paper. I am seeking some sort of distinctive feature that doesn't seem prefabricated.

Los Angeles. Mini malls, hazy pale skies and graying asphalt. The original dream of everyday resort living that drew millions of White Midwesterners a half century ago in a gradual decay. That is the only truth I can really find. So I embrace it, I wallow in its filthiness, its littered streets and orange street lights. The would-be paradise. I love it. It remains distinctive despite it's better efforts. Buildings erected twenty years start to show signs of their use and the indistinct borders of neighborhoods take shape. City erected wrought iron gates isolate neighborhoods. A dying cactus. A giant handmade sign warning children not to play in the yard. A faded poster photograph of James Dean in the kitchen window. I am looking for small things.

I read the cryptic text forecasts from the local branch of the national weather service. Temperature inversions hold in the basins toxic out gassings, winds veer north one day and back the next. Temperatures fluctuate in a four degree range for weeks. It's the driest water year on record for nearly all of California.

In remote rugged areas of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties goats chew on the chaparral. The thinning effect of the grazing suffices for fire suppression where more formal means are impractical. This year the goats aren't eating, the shrubs too dry and brittle to be palatable.

The other day I mentioned that I dropped my cell phone into a stream running along the side of the road. That stream, that stream that i have grown to resent more and more with each use of the poorly designed menu options on my replacement cell phone, is inauthentic. Maintenance for the omnipresent verdant theme park some 25 million live in. Gardeners scramble for time, robots water front lawns and I take the morning bus down Santa Monica Boulevard. The few open hillsides are dessicated to a dull brown, they are mottled with short brittle trees. They exude authenticity.

In this spirit I embrace the oncoming fire season. This gesture, while both reactionary and short sighted, has helped me find my bearings.

I am here.

Tropical Depression

2007-07-10T19:04:00.000-07:00

I hear a sound that I strain to decipher. I wonder if it a dog or a flock of geese, terribly lost over Venice Boulevard.

Yesterday == sunburn;
today == judge judy at my work;
tomorrow == work later;

endl;
endl;
endl;

I spent the afternoon clipping coupons, binging on fresh strawberries and looking at cryptic text forecast discussions on the national weather service pages. The marine layer doesn't want to give in today. I still couldn't help but think my fifteen minute wait at the bus stop wasn't helping my condition. I had a pounding head-ache and my throat felt as if I might be catching something. I took a walk to the grocery store past the stucco sea foam green hubbles that line venice boulevard to the market to buy cat food. Obscenely cute guys both wearing YMCA polos in front of me at the check out buying tons of frozen lean cuisine entrees, and a representative of every member of the Kashi product line. I couldn't understand if they were related or if it was some sort of gay analog to the pets-looking-like-their-owners thing.

I've decided that I want to learn spanish. It seems like a lot of the nicest people I encounter, at bus stops and co-workers, people I ask for directions half the time, don't speak english very well... It's frustrating, so I want to remedy it. Maybe It'll be my summer project until school kicks in.

The customers at my work, while predominantly english speaking, are very snotty. A lot of people on the west-side are snotty. People at bus stops and people walking are generally a better lot, but you know what they say, "One bad apple...", right? I could give a single example but my mind boggles at the sheer enormity of cases I could choose from. These people are sick wastes of human flesh. Parasites that suck off the blood of anything accessible to their position in the social fabric. People who take courtesy for granted while not extending even the most basic consideration to the feelings of others. sick. sick. sick.

My work is next to a plastic surgeon. Every day I've walked home, through tinted windows I see some old rich lady in huge designer sun glasses bandaged and bruised up six ways to sunday barreling out of the alley in some tacky fancy car. Depending on my mood I extend my hand to feign a signal that expresses my right of way, somedays I take the side of caution and stand there and wait for a break in the alley traffic. I pray for sudden engine failure followed by an engine leak that precipitates a series of sudden punctuated fiery explosions, but to no success.

Well maybe that might be going a little too far but I do hate these people. These people who request a bag for there bread, a box for their bag and a bigger bag for their box. Their snotty kids with their tiny dogs. The overpriced cupcake boutique across the street, (choke choke choke. choke on it!). Ahhh....

Work can be nice sometimes too though. There are moments of unexpected kindness and ease. Nurses from the clinic down the alley who deign to attempt simple conversation. tips. cloudy days and a random man named Dion who introduced himself as follows: " Hey hey! (loud and short, punctuated) my names Dion and I'm one coooool cat." He introduces himself to the matronly blonde lady in a pantsuit, Dior sunglasses and pearls similarly. He manages to get a limp hand-shake after three attempts. He walks to the door and stops to pour some cream in his coffee. The blonde woman orders some order with too many special instructions, most of which make no sense and pays... The drink is made with all obnoxious requests ignored. She takes the drink and steps aside and waits there with pursed lips and a blank face. The man behind her starts to order and congenially asks her why shes still standing there. She responds in a low hiss, "I'm waiting for him to leave".

A sunburned old man walks in (possibly french but the accent seemed suspicious), asks me if the baguettes are french. I want to to make some smart ass comment but I resist. I say yes and he orders two. He tells me to save two everyday for him from now on, and there are easily 50 behind me. "surrre thing sir".

Windows

2007-07-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago while moving all of my possessions from the basement where I had slept for the past two years up a narrow staircase to the living room where I had lived with room mates, a television, and multiple animals I managed to break a window. The window was small and most likely original to the hundred year old house. The window did not open, and only looked out to the dank underside of my upstairs neighbor's staircase. A mint plant had managed to forge a few of its branches into the house along its top. I broke it, and the panes just sat in place - busted - like a large scale model of a clean bullet hole. I had been trying to fit a box spring upstairs through the steep and narrow staircase with no success. I had the box spring angled half way up the stairs with the weight rested on a washer which was in front of the drab grey stuccoed utility sink which was in front of the window. I tried a lot of different angles to get the bed up the stairs, one of them had one of the corners of the bed against the window. I hear the ephemeral crinkle of glass and I feel defeated. I continued to move my things but did so through the back door and around the garden on the side of the house and up the porch steps, through the front door and back to the living room. Eventually my room had few clues left of my time there and I felt accomplished. I decided to walk up the stairs and confess to one of my room mates.

I had never broken a window before. It's a unique feeling, very permanent, very consequential. So I made it up the steep and narrow staircase, with its steps covered in brown shag carpet, cat hair, dust and tracked in kitty litter. I bent over the last steep step to form a posture similar to being on all fours. I walked into the living room and casually inserted the broken window into conversation. It barely elicited a reaction. I felt relieved.

Windows were always being broken in the house I grew up in. One time one of my brothers threw one of my sisters out a bedroom window out onto a thorny dwarfed lemon tree, (it was a ranch style house, so it was only a 1/2 story drop), but I guess I was too young to take note of how involved the replacement was.

Then there's the story of how I ended up renting a room in the house to begin with. I had been living a couple of blocks around the corner on the other side of Alberta street with a few people who put an ad on craigslist but people were moving out of town and the whole thing fell apart. So I repeat myself and answer ads off craigslist. I get a response to show a place on the 30th of December with only two days left before the end of my rental agreement. I took the five minute walk over to the other side of Alberta and walk up the porch steps. I knock after drilling my thumb into the derelict doorbell with no success. A woman I met at a craft fair some months back answers the door. We're both a little surprised and I had a good feeling that it could work. Another woman and a man introduce themselves, a couple, and the craft fair woman shows me around the house. A few minutes in the coupled woman yells to the craft fair woman from the basement, she asks her to bring a baseball bat (on this point i'm not completely clear). The craft fair woman excuses herself politely and runs down the steep and narrow stair case without bringing down any sort of improvised weapon. I just stood at the top of the stairs awkwardly for some sort of indication for me to walk downstairs. It came a few minutes later and I walked down the stairs and met them halfway. We walked down to a doorway into a converted basement bedroom. The coupled woman laughed nervously as she opened the door to reveal a frigidly cold room, (it snowed the next day), with fire engine red shag carpeting, a wall comprised of cork strips and artificial wood paneling, an absent closet and a broken window. They stood there awkwardly and asked, "so, what do you think?". I look around pretending to take stock of its few amenities and responded, "i'll take it." The next day I moved in. The window remained broken for about a week. I had some friends from out of town come in on the greyhound and we put up a black hefty bag over the window but snow still managed to drift in overnight.

It turned out the guy who lived in the room before had broken the window while trying to move a giant keyboard out of the room. So my act of breaking a window in the basement could be viewed as an act of continuity I guess.

I had anxious dreams the night before reenacting the window breaking, each one having slight variations from the one it proceeded. I woke up knowing that it was not a dream and I had indeed broken the window. I told my other roomate, (the craft fair woman mentioned earlier), over the phone about the window. She told me that we fixed the window ourselves last time and that it wasn't very difficult.

The next day I loaded up of my things stacked in boxes on the living room floor onto an old primer grey toyota pick-up my room mate had borrowed from a friend and we headed off to the train station in old town to freight my things down to Los Angeles. The service was prompt and it only cost me a little over one hundred dollars to send just about everything i own down the coast.

The following day, a sunday, two weeks ago. I went down the steep and narrow staircase and picked up a measuring tape and set out measuring the window pane I had broken so that I could set everything right before I left town. First I measured the pane horizontal, I did so with some difficulty as I had to lean my body over the utility sink to get near enough to the window, which threw off my center of gravity somewhat. I managed to get a close reading, and continued to measure horizontally without too much effort. I then tried to measure diagonally as an extra control to make sure the measurements were correct. As I was measuring my I placed my weight a little on the hand that was measuring the upper limit of the glass. All at once my hand went through and the shards which had previously been assembled like a delicate jigsaw puzzle fell apart. I yanked my hand back and it was covered in blood, I shouted nervously and walked briskly up the steep and narrow steps up to the main floor and walked into the kitchen and turned the sink on and placed my left hand underneath the water. The blood washed away and a 1/2 inch thick v shaped flap of flesh wriggled underneath the stream of water revealing what looked like, (and actually turned out to be), bone. I went into the bathroom and my room mate and room mate's friends from out of town crowded in to see. I sat on the toilet with my arm in the air laughing nervously. One of the friends turned out to be a med student and told me to go to the ER. After a few minutes of resisting on financial grounds I decided to give in.

My room mate that didn't have friends in town drove me to the ER and we sat there for a hour until they saw me. I ended up going into another room where a middle aged woman dressed in a white lab coat with curly red hair and glasses came in to see me. She gave me four shots along the base of my pinky finger, which made it swell up to the size of a small pale purple hotdog. She put seven stitches in and dressed the wound and I was on my way. The next couple of days I couldn't stop replaying the cut in my mind. Stewing over the permanence of the reaction.

A couple of days later I took a flight down with my cat aboard. My parents picked me up and we spent the day getting lost, in traffic and at the Target in Culver City. I moved into an apartment that was tiny and barren and I slept in a towel on the carpet for a couple of days until the freight came down, (it was delayed due to a derailment).

I went on a couple of job interviews barely able to write and managed to find a job. The day before my first day I took a pair of manicure scissors and tweezers I had purchased from the Long's up the street and took out the stitches on my living room floor. Although the hanging lip of flesh managed to adhere itself back onto my finger while it was stitched, it still looks as if a small gale could have it detached. Even after I will continue to buy bandaids from the Beverly Hills Rite Aid down the street from my work because the scar would doubtlessly disgust the patrons.

My new apartment doesn't really have windows, instead it has fiberglass shudders that operate like venetian blinds.