The Plan

Sometimes, it’s all you can do.

I’m very grateful that, when things get a little too rough or scary, I can still find solace in the almost incomprehensible absurdities of existence - the most absurd being, of course, that there is an existence at all.

My life is pretty ridiculous. I mean, I sleep in a car. One of my grandest ambitions is to spend the rest of my life pretending to do things in front of people. I suffer from inflicted celibacy, but that’s OK because I seem to be single in the bones. I find that I can finally commit to a fitness program when I leave myself no alternative. I have some serious debt issues, and I’ve ensured that my chances of having a ‘normal’ future are virtually nil. The way things are going, it looks like I’m in exactly the right place at the right time.

I love it.

The gag, of course, is that your life is no less ridiculous than mine.

The nuts and bolts of the universe - such as we understand them at this point - can squeeze the brain until understanding drips out your ears, but there’s no reason to cast so far afield for befuddlement. I’ve mentioned it before, but bread blows my mind. Well, not bread exactly - I mean, I can accept that there is such a thing as ‘Rye’ - more the process by which someone (or some group) managed to envision bread in grains, and then make bread happen. Don’t bother looking it up - the early history of bread is filled with ‘probably’s and ‘perhaps’s. Wikipedia puts the emergence of bread in the Neolithic era - around 11,000 years ago, at which time the Food Network was only available in France.

Even simple bread takes a lot of steps that, to me, are astonishingly non-obvious. You have to start with whatever grain you’re going to use, many of which don’t really look like food in their natural state. You have to grind your grain up into flour, which is tough to imagine happening by accident, and sort of weird to imagine happening just for the hell of it. You have to mix your grain with water, which is quite a bit easier to see happening than the other stuff. Then you have to cook your mush. I kind of figure that immediately after gaining the ability to control fire, early people went around cooking and burning every damn thing, so this one doesn’t boggle me too much either. All of them together, however, sprain my noggin.

Robert Spuhler and I were discussing gelatin not too long ago -a substance whose provenance is so unlikely that I’m pretty much convinced gelatin doesn’t actually exist.

These things shock me because the road from their initial appearance to their final product - the processes by which they are refined - are so distinctive and unnatural. To see bread in wheat amazes me.

But there are plenty of other ways to be shocked. You want to marvel at the age of the universe and the interconnectedness of all things? Try this one on for size: Gold.

Most of you know this, so in brief: the order of introduction of elements (according to current evidence and theory) in the early universe goes hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen, and then helium as things cool down enough to allow the formation of atoms, and so on through the Periodic Table, adding heavier and heavier elements until we get stars. Yay! The thing is that if we end there, we’re missing a lot of elements (obviously, since several are essentially manmade.) It turns out that, as far as naturally occurring elements are concerned, anything heavier than iron can only be synthesized in a supernova - including, of course, gold. So for Earth to have any gold at all, many many stars had to be born, live out their entire lifecycle, and explode - before our planet was anything more than the tiniest cloud of dust.

That’s pretty cool, but now think about the California Gold Rush. Think about South Africa. Think about your idiot friend who thinks he NEEDS gold Monster Cables for his home theater system. Wonder if The Wizard of Oz really is an allegory about the move away from the Gold Standard. Think about that spike in Promontory. Look at your wedding ring, or those earrings. If you’re me, you can think of the ruined motherboard in your sorely-missed laptop. Hell, in all likelihood you have trace amounts of gold inside of you. Every bit of it, every last ounce, came from really far away.

The stuff that started out as some undefined potential, became hydrogen, became a star, became gold and became the frame for your glasses has been around for a LONG time. The stuff that makes you is no different.

Now THAT is ridiculous.

I said that once I got a crappy camera I would illustrate my preliminary categories of Car People. Well, sir, I got myself one hell of a crappy camera.

 The Pro:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/63458644@N00/259208534/

This is the only Pro photo I have. The Pros are tough to find during the day…..because they’re Pros.

The Hippies:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/63458644@N00/259217890/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/63458644@N00/259221360/

These aren’t very good photos, but the camera is crummy, and I was afraid to get closer.

The Goddamned Idiots:

I call these guys idiots because they make no effort to hide or, I don’t know, be clean. I figure they’ll eventually ruin it for us all….but then, nobody’s stopped them yet. It’s kind of tough to call them idiots knowing that this guy is somewhere out there:

Larger version: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=259210278&size=l

And, of course, The Wannabe:

What a maroon.

I’ve been thinking about love a lot lately, possibly because I’m in the enviable position of not currently being in it. Equally likely is that I’m starting to obsess about it because I live in a car and don’t have the first clue what I’d do with it if I had it.

Unfortunately, I’m almost in love all the time. I spend a lot of time in the company of awesome woman, because I myself am also awesome. Being almost in love generally isn’t a problem, but it requires maintenance. It’s a lot like herpes. The key thing to watch for is love sneaking up on you when you’re weak.

In the car, the weak times are at night if I’m not quite tired enough to sleep, and those liminal half-asleep places I find myself in over and over. These are the times when love comes tapping at my window like a sparrow, or a parking enforcement officer. Sometimes, when it’s really desperate, my mind does a little tour of women I’m attracted to but with whom any attempt at anything would be an extremely bad idea. Crossing-the-streams bad. Not bad in a legal sense, but in just about every other, including electromagnetic. My mind is a whore.

My technique for dealing with love when it sneaks up is pretty simple, but difficult to describe correctly, so consider this description metaphorical. Actually, go ahead and consider it to be delicately yet intricately metaphorical, full of subtle beauty and strong lines. That’s probably the way to go.

When love sees me in quiet repose in my Toyota, and pads over softly like an innocent fawn, when love looks at me with ancient eyes full of promise and hope and a little pain and offers it all to me, I grab that fucker by the throat and beat the everloving shit out of it. I beat it like there’s candy inside. I beat it like it kicked my dog, and then I send it out into the street broken and bloody and stupid. That’s love.

As a rule, I like being in love - I just don’t think I can do it right now. It’d be like trying to drive a car that’s being rebuilt. The transmission is still hanging in the tree. Maybe it’s been so long that I’m a little intimated by it. Maybe I just want to make sure it’s right. Maybe not, maybe I just want to fuck it up a few times really quick.

Sex is another matter entirely. There’s no reason sex should give me so much trouble. I mean, I know several people - stupid, stupid ugly people - who have all the sex they want. This is why prostitution should be legal: I would like to remember what it’s like to touch a woman, and somewhere out there a mother needs to buy her baby formula. That sounds like a win-win to me.

The Horse Lady was there right at 6, making fun of my house as expected. Oh, and it was a Horse Dude.

I can’t begin to describe how confused I am right now.

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….

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!

• 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.

I tried to plan everything so that I would have lots of time for relaxed contemplation as I started this little thing. Of course, it hasn’t really worked out that way. I’m looking at another three or four hours of desperate packing and cleaning as I race against the Angry Landlord clock. But that’s okay, sometimes that’s how it goes. At any rate, we’re more or less underway - it’ll just be another day or so until my brain speeds up enough to start making worthwhile observations.

Sorry about the plane, but I found that cassette.

8.37am