the world has turned and left me here

we shall overcome

Hrm, harum, not much to say, drifting back into normal grump and grind mode after an exciting Spring Break. At a party in Ft. Collins this weekend (ultimate tournament) I hit on a cute girl. Things go remarkably well until Andy decides to drop his drawers. Terrified, she leaves, letting suitor #2 collect her digits and completely ignoring subsequent advances from me. A crazy party though that eventually gets busted decisively, leaving the owners $1000 in the hole. Ridiculous.

This party was definitely the highlight of the trip: we didn't do so well, as usual gale wind forces prevailed and the tradition of losing in the most heartbreaking manner possible was extended to yet another tournament. This will go down in history as the rookie season I am sure, just wait another year or two you powers that be. We are big and fast and we eat corn. We shall overcome.

system change problems

Sorry to all who may have tried to post comments over the last week...my host made a system change that broke MT. Thanks to Yun for finding a fix.

the divine earthquake

On the return trip, outside of Denver, I pull up to a gas station in some non-existent town by the name of Hudson. A guy at another pump notices the keyboard in my back seat & strikes up a conversation. He also plays piano. He talks about the music industry & then lets the cat out of the bag, he is a charismatic preacher in Lamar Nebraska, and plays mostly worship music he says.

Am I a man of faith he asks? Nope I say and heroically wrestle the conversation over to something different. He asks me about job prospects and I tell him I am looking coastal.

"If you value your life don't go to the coasts," he tells me. He had just come back from San Fran. Everything we've seen recently points to a disaster that's going to completely wipe out the coasts. "A seismic earthquake," he says, stressing the word seismic, which must feel uncomfortable in its new role as a superlative, I think.

Now, I can't help but chuckle over this. Just a few weeks ago I predicted, jokingly of course, that with the end of the conflict in Iraq, the extreme right would probably want to bomb the hell out of San Fran next. Now I learn that they are instead invoking a divine earthquake. Okay.

"You think?" I ask Ron. Ron's his name.

"Think?" He laughs at my naivete. "I don't think. I know!"

Give me that earthquake already Ron. Anything is better than this. West Coast, here I come.

explosive trucks

By far this is the weirdest installment in the whole Spring Break in New Mexico series. So last night I drove up to Los Alamos--it's in the mountains you know, the place they dropped the first atomic bomb, and still a huge secret bomb research facility--to see Eric, who was doing a physics collabo over his Spring Break.

After dinner we went for a spin around the facilties. Eric showed me this sign that said "Explosive Trucks" with an arrow pointing up the hill. We thought this was so funny we got out to take a picture in front of it.

Well. It was dark and the flash didn't work. However we were spotted almost immediately by a security guard in a truck, who slowed down as he passed us. He pulled up as were getting back in my car. Uh-oh. Eric's flipping out. I'm trying to stay calm. Dude walks up & informs us that pictures are not allowed anywhere near the facilities & starts taking down our info. He comes back with my license after a while & says we will have to wait for his supervisor to come.

The supervisor dude arrives. By now there are a total of six security trucks parked at all angles surrounding my car. Supervisor dude is wearing fatigues & carries a metal box the size of a notebook (in which he will lock up & transport notes?). Eric's flipping out.

We explain how harmless & touristy we are. I even get out my camera to show him the only picture (pitch black of course), delete it at his request, revealing a picture of me with my Grandma.

He says yada yada about this just being the policy & hopefully he will not have to file a report. Eric's flipping out in the seat next to me. The dude lets us go, and then we have to drive around for about an hour to calm our nerves listening to some irreverent Burroughs. Every once in a while the conversation hits a lull and Eric looks out the window, says, "That sucks."

The old fear of authority & that mortified feeling you get when you're busted is all we can think about, though we try to talk about everything else. Six police cars surround you, they shine lights in your eyes, a man in fatigues walks up, and you're back in grade school ready to throw up or crap in your pants because you've been sent down to the principal's office. They sure know how to evoke that feeling. They've got it down to a science.

We go to a grocery store & get a six pack and six york peppermint patties. I realize we're acting like Joseph K in Kafka's Trial, who starts behaving like a convicted criminal just because they suspect he has committed a crime, though he knows perfectly well himself that he didn't. Almost, almost, it was as if we were feeling guilty for having such a strange sense of humor. Only to supervisor dude had we (reluctantly) admitted that we had just found the "Explosive Trucks" sign funny. Why did we hold back this detail, ashamed?

"I'm sorry boys, I just don't see what's so damn funny about that." Supervisor dude's mouth droops seriously at corners. "Would you please come back to the station and attempt to explain your abnormal sense of humor to us sat-is-fac-torily..." He draws this last word out. "We just want to make sure everyone's on the same page here."

Well back at the hotel the beer & peppermint patties calm us down & we talk of other things genuinely, Eric explains some physics, tells me a nasty but funny problem devised by a Russian physicist, conversation dissolves into saying stupid things like "I am a butt machine" in Chinese & it's practically one subconscious talking to another at the end when we fall asleep.

Explosive trucks. "The explosion will be of extraordinary magnitude."

the velvet elvis painting sanctuary

Last night with Nicko down in Cruces. We were gonna play a big intense game of Risk with John but Nick & I split a pitcher of a porter at some local brewery, got kind of loopy & started arguing about the crappy paintings hung on the walls. Some artist thought it would be cool to blatantly rip off a Van Gogh starry night background and then, in the same style, have two sisters looming gigantic, piggybacking and laughing, in the foreground beside a cypress tree. The title of it was "Sisters." Barf. There was also an impressive sanctuary of velvet Elvis paintings in the back by the bathrooms.

John drove us home, then instead we just sat around laughing at Aquateen Hunger Force mostly, getting sleepier every minute. But Nick & I got a second wind and had a great conversation on into the night about how things are going for the both of us. Gonna miss him a lot...Nick is one of my closest buds.

I take my leave of the grandparents shortly. My bro Ed shows up tonight on a Greyhound to take my place. I will completely miss him. Bummer, big bummer, that we couldn't have road tripped down here together..."Al & Ed's Excellent Adventure" Mom was calling it until we found out our Spring Breaks were different weeks.

Now I'm gonna go visit Eric. Coincidentally he is in Los Alamos right now finishing up some research project or another. So tonight I will put a four hour leg on my return trip, and see a friend I haven't seen in over a year. Hi ho what a Spring Break it's been.

sunburn is funburn

Yesterday Grandpa & I hiked up Turtleback mountain together. It was a nice time, the weather cooperated, and it took us 6 hrs round trip. We were going at Grandpa's pace of course. Hey, if you can climb a mountain like that at all when you're 78 maybe you've got room to talk.

But I got burninated bad. So bad that later that night my lobster nose started to weep some sort of fluid, it gathered on the end every thirty seconds. Sure you wanted to hear this.

In the evening, after a few hands of bridge with the old folks, drove myself down to Las Cruces for St. Patty's day with Nick et. al. There certainly are some weird cats over at Kent's...Evan was eating soggy Ramen noodles with a cake knife...some crazed Creole pizza guy just walked in wanting to use the phone.

Nick & I & a few of his buds went over to this house party where they had green keg beer. There was something unusual about that house party...and it wasn't the green beer. I dunno, maybe it was the crowd, there were about 4 mohawks there, pretty favorable ratios, and no fratmosphere. Definitely not the kind of house party you'll find in Lincoln Neb. except maybe at 12th & D. But those guys are moving out I hear. Anyhow I digress.

Nick threw yogurt at me later that night, I'm not sure I even remember why, and then I somehow pissed Meghan off too & got yogurt smeared on my face. Again I fell asleep at Nick's. Awoke to drive back to T or C listening to Death Cab for Cutie, which is great music for the aftermath of just about anything.

new mexico and almost bust

Update on my whereabouts. Made it to NM okay, though just barely. I got out of Lincoln at about 10:30 and before you know it I had crossed all of sleepy flat Nebraska. When you finally hit the sandhills and the landscape starts to undulate off to the right and left, it's really a hell of a surprise, almost makes you jump after all that flatness.

I saw my first ever moonrise. A giant angry orange peel of a moon appeared off to my left, it was so orange and huge that it lit up orange layers of cloud around it.

Passed the fog belching factories of pre-Denver Colorado. By now the moon had paled enough to illuminate scrubby skeleton trees, and throw a ragtag assortment of rail cars standing still on the tracks into sharp silhouette. I thought some deep chord was being struck within me until I realized it was just that activity book they made for me in church as a toddler. Remember the train page with all those different buttons for wheels? Yeah, that's the chord that was being struck within me.

7 am found me crossing the tail of the Rocky Mountains, and the sun rising over mountain fields. An amazing sunrise is crucial to the success of an all-nighter.

Coming down into Northern New Mexico I entered a thick ground-hugging fog. It seemed to be coming up off the ground itself, and for a long time I wondered if I was driving into the smoke of a giant grass fire. Nope, it had rained the night before, and things were warming up so quickly that the grass was steaming, just like the ponds used to steam as I looked out the school bus window on winter mornings.

By Santa Fe, after 12 hours of driving with a few stops only for gas & coffee, the engine was starting to get pretty hot. I waited in a hotel parking lot in the shade for it to cool down. I read a newspaper. But to no avail, the remaining 4 hours of the trip were on pins and needles as I watched the engine temp push about as close to the danger zone as it could come. I called ahead though, and the grandparents, unworried, offered to come pick me up however far I made it.

I arrived in Truth or Consequences, NM at 2:30 mountain time. Grandma fed me & then I had to head off to Las Cruces by 4:30, in order to see the Nickman at his first ever public guitar-playing appearance. I started off in my car but then turned back, as it threatened once again to overheat, and a thunderstorm seemed to be brewing in the west. The grandparents (bless them) let me drive their only vehicle down there & arrived at the coffee shop at 6:00 on the dot, after a paranoiac hour of speeding and then freaking out and slowing down.

Nick & Meghan & I picked up right where we left off last summer, no weirdness or distance having crept in. We went over to see Kent, who now has a broken foot from trying to climb on the ceiling & is an even bigger hippie. At Kent's we met Jason, a Beat scholar who impressed me with his thorough knowledge, but later in the night was to inflict some rather derivative poetry on us. Slept over at Nick's apt. after 38 sleepless hours, and awoke to have great conversations with Meghan too about the evolution of man & America & television & education & growing up & form vs. content. All that wonderful crap. All that wonderful crap which it will soon be our duty to do something about, rather than just talk about.

Took my leave in the afternoon--not to interfere too much with their studying for tests and such. The plan is to divide my time between my Las Cruces friends & the grandparents anyway.

off to new mexico

It is 10pm and I am going to New Mexico to see the grandparents, and pals Nick & Kent & Meghan. 16 hours of driving and I'm gonna try to do it straight through. Dumb idea but it's got me excited. So long and thanks for all the fish.

words of wisdom

At a party Brennen & I search for the right exit song. "Let it be" plays. What words of wisdom are we whispering this time I ask him? "We're not gonna get any action, so we might as well go home," he says. Let it be, let it be.

breakers

Headed over to Bricktop last night, Lincoln's most Euro dance club, for their 2 year anniversary celebration with Mark. Saw some of the coolest breakdancing ever man, these breakers were going wild dancing on their heads with feet spinning like mad propellers above them.

Then afterwards to Dan's. I invited my Czech friend Jana over and realized an hour later that all of Selleck was present; was afraid to leave, as with all residents sleeping I was the closest thing to a resident, since I go over there a lot. A slick-haired Italian who "spoke five languages, owned his own company, and was a student too" showed up and for the benefit of his lady friends commenced to yakkety-yak into his cellphone in Italian. Occasionally a word like "Cornhusker" would cut through the static. He looked and acted so much like Jesus from the Big Lebowski that we all started calling him that.

Tried unsuccessfully to get people to play Twister with me but their mindset was the tiresome I want to get drunk & do nothing one. This poser who gets on my nerves more every time I see him at Dan's tried to get me into an "intellectual conversation" in which he claimed some TV show or another was actually worth watching because, in order to get the jokes, you had to be intelligent. Apparently knowing some trivial piece of high school world history qualifies you as intelligent...you know that old mistake of believing knowledge = intelligence which is generally exhibited by those who have a shred of the former and none of the latter. My database is bigger than yours, so whoopdeedoo? Whatever. I'm getting really tired of these extremely insecure types with small penises.

the real thing

A remarkable short story by Henry James in which a husband and wife, fallen from their social class and finding themselves utterly useless, resort to modeling for an artist. As former members of the nobility they believe they are (obviously) the perfect choice for any painting which deals with that subject. Because, after all, they are the Real Thing. However, after making an honest attempt, the artist realizes he prefers a scruffy Italian and a "freckled cockney" named Miss Churm to the Real Thing. In trying to paint the Real Thing he found he had produced dismal crap instead of art.

So it is with the movie & the video game. At the outset of each, the medium was held in check by technological limitations, and as a direct result these early days were in my opinion the most fruitful artistically. But as soon as technology caught up to art, it became possible to merely imitate reality through the medium. Ever better imitations then became a permanent obsession.