The Plan

• I’m writing in this from the beautiful new library in the heart of Santa Monica. I say ‘new’, but it actually opened in January - it’s new to me, and that’s what matters - and it’s pretty fantastic. Huge windows, high ceilings, large rooms, many many computers and volunteers….nicely done.
• There’s a Google building at the corner of 6th and Arizona. I don’t know what goes on there, but I’m constantly tempted to walk in and start asking them stuff in the hopes that it’s a brick-and-mortar version of the website. “Where’s the post office?” “Cognitive dissonance!” “Define: alabaster!” I also like to imagine that anything that comes out of the building (reports, bills, etc.) comes out accompanied by a healthy stack of pornography.
• My search for a decent late-night laundromat was ended by my friend Jasmine, who pointed me towards Lucy’s. Lucy’s Laundromat seems to be designed to cater specifically to the domicile-averse. I’ve seen a few, but thus far only patronized the one near Sunset and Western, which combines a 24 hour laundromat, a 24 hour Subway, a late-night Burger King, a Wells Fargo station and an Ace Check Cashing place into one building, along with a few other useful services like water bottle refills. It’s kind of kooky but insanely useful - a capitalist commune, as it were.
• Just to hint: The song I’ve been working on with Darrel is coming along incredibly well. I’m itching to get it done - ideally by the end of next week or so. Whenever we finish, it’s going straight to the MySpace page, so please check it out. He’s spending a well-earned week in Hawaii with Kara, partaking in what I like to think of as a wake to their pre-parenthood lives. I can’t wait for him to get back, and I mean that in an entirely non-gay way. Mostly, at any rate.
• I had my first open call audition yesterday, and it was kind of fun. Silly, but fun. ‘Cattle call’ doesn’t begin to describe it; this was like being inspected by the person who tosses out inadequate Hershey’s Kisses as they scream by on the assembly line. On the other hand, I said I wanted to read for a voice-over part and they suggested an on-screen one, so who knows….

I don’t know why it took so long, but I had my first experience with the 99¢ store today. The only word that comes to mind is ‘enlightening.’ I have, once again, been humbled.

Combine the wonder that people must have felt at Barnum’s Museum with a sort of real world Where’s Waldo? and I think you can understand how I felt it. At first, I kept thinking “that can’t be 99 cents. No way! That’s 99 cents!?!?” After a while it became a challenge: I was determined to find the one thing that cost more than 99 cents. You know what? I never did.

You can see pretty quickly how it works. The merchandise is a mixture of stuff that generally hits $1 or so fairly often on sale at your regular grocery stores (say, Pringles), stuff from what had to be the Fifth or Sixth World that nobody would ever buy unless it was 99 cents (like an 8 pack of different paper cutters) and products that failed at the big time. A container of malk would not have been out of place.

Whatever drug the Trader Joe’s folks spray to make their customers completely forget how to navigate an aisle is clearly a dilution of the stuff they use at the 99¢ store. People just STAND there. Blocking EVERYTHING. Combined with the fact that the clientele seems to skew towards geriatric, I would guess that the 99¢ has a much higher than average percentage of their customers just drop dead in the aisles. I think that’s what some of them were waiting for.

I was there looking for one of those foldy-sunshade things for my windshield, partly for camouflage, partly to make my car less burny and partly to quiet the rage of the eight-year-old me who doesn’t understand why all the cars have sunglasses except ours.

I didn’t find it (although I was told it would be ‘about a dollar’), but I don’t care. I’m going to stop at as many 99¢ Stores as I can until I do find it. It, or a Hello Kitty stapler. Or a pack of gum that tastes like the Beatles. Or a jar of Pumpkin Butter. Or a six-pack of cans of tuna with Extra Dolphin. Or….

* I’m still trying to decide if this would be awesome or horrifying: what if, instead of billions of microscopic guys, sperm came out as one big one? Like, say, three inches long? Masturbation could only be enhanced by the possibility of a gladiatorial finale; blowjobs maybe not so much.

What if the thing could bark?

* What is language to an individual? I started musing about the evidence that a second language learned in adulthood is handled differently by the brain than is a second language (or a primary one, for that matter) learned in childhood, and then started kicking around the well-known fact that a language (especially/particularly a second one? I don’t know) that isn’t used can be forgotten by the user. The next question, for me, was: if you only know one language and you don’t use it, can you lose it? Be left language-less? My hunchy answer is ‘no.’ I think silly things, like someone talking to themself while doing a solitary job, point to the fact that language isn’t entirely about communication. There are two key elements of your standard dictionary definition of language: communication, and the use of arbitrary symbols to encode information. I think the second part of this is where my answer starts. The question has to become: can there be anything that we would recognize as ‘thought’ without language? Is there a machine language (haha) for the brain? I suppose Sapir and Whorf would have something to say about it, but not much (obviously the language one uses, with its unique collection of metaphor and rhymes and so forth, would influence the way one looks at the world, but since the language is still a symbolic construct regardless, saying that it affects thought after the fact doesn’t tell us much about thought BEFORE the language is obtained.) I’m so running this one by the Doctors Beatty.

* As a recent initiate to the twilight times, I realize I’m not the first person to visit. I realize that there are any number of people of various genders, ages and cultures who claim this area, as with any other. But I need you to do me a favor: whatever bizarre physical ritual you engage in when there aren’t many people around, I really need you to explain it to me so that I know it isn’t the astonishingly obscene act that it appears to be. I’m simply not up to the task of rationalizing what I’m seeing. I’d like to able to say ‘Oh, that’s Betty - she’s praying’ or ’she’s got The Trembles and that’s a therapeutic exercise.’ All you’re giving me is ‘that’s Betty. She thinks that it if she masturbates violently enough, world peace will happen.’

* I realize that what we theorize and what happens in the world are light years apart, and that thoughts don’t change anything on their own, but how is it not blindingly obvious that when we act violently it is a perversion of what we are? As far as we know, we are the only species that can apprehend its own mortality, that can think abstractly and that can communicate those thoughts. These are things that make us human - if we choose not to use them, we choose to be less than we are.

As many of you know, my intention was to either repair my broken laptop or replace it at some point. Right before I made the final plunge, it became clear that replacement would have to be it. See, I’ve never been very good at soldering. I knew this going in, but after comparing motherboard replacement costs to new laptop costs I figured I would go ahead and take a shot at it.

Smoldy

2004-2006

I tried.

So I need a new laptop, and it has become pretty clear to me that I need to obtain this replacement ASAP. It turns out that I don’t actually like to write with pen and paper anymore. I was pretty shocked; like everybody else I have any number of notebooks full of….stuff, and I’m pretty sure this confession is costing me some serious artsy-guy credibility. Nevertheless, I like the glow, the hum, the tapping of keys, the ancillary programs, the distracting programs, all of it. I’ll use a notebook, but I’d much prefer that it be an addition to the laptop as opposed to the whole of the thing.
Financially, it looks like it’ll have to be next month, which gives plenty of time for the plea I am about to plant to take root.

The last laptop was the cheapest Dell available at the time ($650 or so) plus an upgrade or two. This is still the bottom rung pricewise at Dell, Best Buy, Circuit City, what-have-you, and is what I’ll probably end up paying this time around.

However, I figure I know enough people that there’s a good chance that somebody has seen some crusty little used thing on craigslist or knows a place with some crazy sale. I’m shooting for $400, mainly to see if I can. It needs to read DVDs, have built-in wireless capability, and have a couple of USB slots - I’m not super-concerned about the rest of it. My $650 will get me 512MB of RAM and a Celeron/Turion or simliar. That’ll do: play movies and my archives, let me surf and write, play a few songs and an occasional emulated Castlevania and I’m happy.

Keep your eyes open!

When I ask you on Friday how you are, you say things like “Can’t Complain! It’s Friday!”

When I asked you today you said something like “I’d say it’s a Monday, but it isn’t!”

Listen to me, because I want to help you: You are going to die.

I don’t mean that in the ‘we-all-die-someday-sense’, I mean you are going to die right now, as we speak. If you’re lucky you’ll realize it and flop down immediately, but there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll go on stumbling around for another forty years like an idiot.

I know that you don’t like your job. Lots of people don’t like their jobs. Maybe most people. Most people also don’t like malaria, but I’m not really sure that’s relevant.

If you let your job define when you can be happy and when you can’t, you are going to die and not even realize it. My dad you used to say you can only give your job 75% of your attention, and that’s assuming you LIKE it. If you internalize the TGIF mentality then you make yourself the little wheel-running hamster you were always afraid you would turn out to be.

• The Kinko’s on Wilshire and 6th is open 24 hours. I love them.
• Money is going to be tighter than it was supposed to be for the first month or so (assuming no other changes) but good friends are assuring that I will stay clean. By which I mean shower-wise.
• I’m going to try to find a place with an Open Mic in Santa Monica tonight to play at. Because I can.
• Sleeping in the car is really easy.

On the other hand, the combination of newness and stress and freedom and solitude and everything else is making me act sort of bipolar. Not that I just lost my mind so much as highs are really high right now and lows are really low. I just need to be aware of it until I adjust, I think.

• The empty car/super-organized storage unit element of the plan is laughably unsuccessful thus far. It’ll work, it’s just going to need a lot of time thrown at it.
• I’m revamping a few elements: I will have a blankie or two, and while I’ll still get one of those windshield blockers, I’m going to relax a fair bit about people being disturbed and/or the legality of this. As long as I’m not in Beverly Hills or directly in front of a house (or, I suppose, in the same spot for a week) I just don’t think people care.
• If you’re tired enough, anyplace is a happy comfy bed. I almost feel like last night shouldn’t count since I was barely aware of, well, anything really.
• I need to find a way to make my phone stop dialing Tracy whenever it feels like it.

It takes a lot of the humor out of silly little sarcastic temptation of Fate when Fate responds with a roundhouse kick to the face. For starters, I don’t think Fate should be kicking people. Not cool.

The tire died. Angry. Downtown. I was stuck Downtown with mere hours left to get out of the Hoover apartment with no money and no spare.

There may have been weepage.

I called three people: Elia, Tanya and Richard. I left messages saying that I needed help - messages that I imagine carried an appropriate level of despair and terror. Within fifteen minutes I had spoken to all three, and all three had various ideas and/or offers of help. Elia ended up driving over to lend me her spare tire. When it didn’t fit, she drove me to a shop and helped me get a tire (all monies rendered will be full repaid today.)

The first thing I need to say to everybody involved is ‘thanks.’

When I was sitting on Flower yesterday with my ruined tire and no escape hatch, I wondered if this was a signal that this whole endeavor was a bad idea. That wasn’t the lesson at all.

It was a reminder that this isn’t about me being able to handle things alone or about me trying to get through things without anybody else. I need this reminder because I every so often I get all Crocodile Dundee about the whole thing. But ‘alone’ is how I was living before. Me alone with the consoles and DVDs and CounterStrike, sure - but alone all the same.

This is about me getting out in the world and amongst you riff-raff. And yesterday was about me realizing that just because you don’t see the net doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Thanks. I hope you guys know I would do the same for you.