Pit Bull Breeders

This was supposed to just be a comment here but that beastly and odious commenting system Haloscan wouldn't let me post it because there were too many carriage returns and I couldn't be arsed editing and editing all night until I happened to get under the unknown magic number so I'm putting it here instead. Indeed, now Haloscan won't let me comment at all. Glad *I* don't use it. (I don't feel like filling in the rest of the back story.)

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In related news, the Northern South Carolina Synod of Lutheran Churches prepared a statement to issue but it was long and boring so Art and Larry who work at Auto Barn issued the following press release instead:

"We completely agree with the Vatican that to apologize for hurt feelings over denying the Holocaust is no apology. It is an insulting evasion of the fact that anyone who denies the Holocaust is a hate-filled dumbfuck with halfwit pitbull breeders for parents and a small dick."

"Hey. My parents breed pit bulls. I have a small dick too, but never mind that."

"Oh, yeah. Sorry, man. Sorry if I hurt your feelings."

"What the hell kind of apology is that?"

"Well, I mean, I didn't mean to offend."

"But you did. You're just as bad as that other guy."

"Nuh uh."

"Uh huh."

"No, look, dude. Denying the Holocaust is hateful and stupid because it actually happened. Millions of people were killed and to deny it is not only fucked up but a deep and direct insult to all those people's surviving relatives, descendants, friends, fellow human beings, everybody."

"Yeah, so? You made fun of pit bull breeders."

"No, no. It was a humor line. You know, for laughs. I wasn't making fun of pit bull breeders. I was making fun of all those people who think pit bull breeders are hate-filled dumbfucks with a genetic propensity for small dicks."

"But we're not."

"I know!! That's the point! Some people think you are, or used to, or something, right?"

"Right ..."

"And those people really were, or are, dumbfucks, right?"

"Right ..."

"So I'm making fun of them."

"And not making fun of pit bull breeders."

"No!"

"So what did you apologize for?"

"Cuz I didn't mean to offend. I meant to be funny."

"I'm not sure of the difference."

"Dude. The Holocaust happened. It was fucking horrific. To go around denying it isn't just hurting people's feelings. It's goddam violent. It's as close to violence in speech as you can fucking get without actually yelling so loud at someone their heart stops."

"Yeah ..."

"But using the hoary old prejudice that pit bull breeders are dumbfucks with small dicks wasn't saying they are, it was using the fact people used to think so as a device."

"A device."

"For humor."

"For humor. A device for humor."

"You got it."

"How'm I supposed to know the difference?"

"Fuck. I don't know. It's what I intended. If what I meant doesn't mean what you thought I meant, what am I supposed to do, know that ahead of time and shut up? Then what's the point of talking at all? We might as well all just talk about the weather. Cake recipes and dress patterns and purple lizardskin shoes and shit."

"Are you making fun of my small dick again?"

*sigh*

Obama At Risk

Just my quick unqualified thought. I never supported the bailouts or the big economic stimulus package but I'm nobody and don't know much. (I gotcher stimulus package right here, baby!) I just have a bad feeling about government taking the reins to save people from themselves. Plus the rhetoric has been dishonest. They keep blaming Bush, who actually tried to regulate the FMs some more and was stymied by Congress, and Greenspan, who was Clinton's darling if I recall, and of course the set-up so people could buy houses they couldn't afford, which was absolutely not a Republican deal, never has been. In other words, I deeply distrust the public discussion on this, and am not convinced that the current power has any better a combination of competence and good intention than the last.

So. These bold moves have Mr. Obama's imprimatur, these vast trades of money for control, these tax-funded infusions to try and jump-start an ailing economy in the mold of FDR's programs to end the Great Depression. Everyone's a Keynesian all of a sudden. But the markets so far have responded poorly. They keep sinking. And it isn't that markets are all Republicans who would rather lose money than see Obama get a win. Markets are self-interested and thus can be trusted as an indicator set of the wisdom of the crowd. If the market, which is forward-looking, doesn't like something, maybe that something ain't so great.

So we have a situation where mere weeks into his presidency, Obama has hitched his wagon to an unproven and expensive program about which the non-political self-interested crowds outside the Beltway are gathering doubts. It's not hard to predict what may happen next. Mrs. Clinton and her husband were dogged for years by the failure of her bold program to reform healthcare. Mr. Schwarzenegger was rendered relatively ineffective once his early and bold proposals to correct California's more intractable problems failed at the ballot (thanks in my opinion to the pernicious influence of self-protecting power centers called "unions" but that's fairly moot now). Obama is at risk of losing his momentum, initiative, popularity, whatever it is that enables a politician getting things done, and winding up kind of a meh president and risking a GOP comeback in '12.

That's all. Half a long unedited essay is better than none, if I'm just bleating to the net before cranking up on yet another day here in corporate America where we are living the dream.

(Bonus round: "Young Chuck in Montana bought a horse ...")

The Long and Winding

At San Luis Obispo we said goodbye to the freeway and took the narrow coastal ribbon. Hearst Castle looked down from its distant hilltop as we cruised on by. I've never gone there and don't care if I ever do. Just another grasping mogul's overbuilt mansion turned into a state park because no one else could take it over. The West is filled with such places. Bill Gates' home will become one of those someday too.

By vehicle-mile Highway 1 must be a right expensive piece of road. The ever shifting coast pitches parts of it into the sea regularly. Sometimes cars go with it. Earth-moving equipment is parked here and there, permanently stored near their only job site. It is not heavily traveled -- not anyway on a Wednesday afternoon in February. So all that labor money to keep it open is really spent more for aesthetics than economics.

It is a work of art -- the coast, the road, the bridges. The bridges were mostly designed in the 1930s when the road was built. Prior, much of the coast was pretty much inaccessible. Engineers were paid to display their art in those days. The bridges are justly famous.

The mountains loom, the cows low, the mist rises, the sun sinks into the peaceful Pacific as the road winds along. No one who hasn't driven it quite knows what they've missed. It also has curious residents strung along: Driveways and gates here and there, sometimes odd fences, all else but part of an occasional rooftop obscured by the trees and plunging terrain. It is its own community, I imagine, a small town a hundred miles long and fifty yards wide, subject to fierce storms and winter solitude and slow summertime lines of oversized RVs.

Hard to take decent pictures when you're driving and the light is failing and the road resembles a goat track. But this straight and easy stretch gave the chance to capture sea and snow and open road. Yes, snow on the seaside mountaintops.


Just as the sun hit the edge of the world we hit a vista point famous for giving a view of the Big Creek Bridge.


It's here if you're curious and like to zoom around on maps awhile ...

That Was Close

Facebook has sucked a lot of the energy out of the blogs lately, and since it evens and leavens and homogenizes everyone it isn't nearly as interesting. In a weak desperate moment I started browsing misc.writing, where verbose idiocy reigns supreme and begs, begs for one to put foolish people into their places. But I already know what good that'll do so I backed out again. Geez. Looking for online interaction -- that's mighty pathetic. The obvious answer is to get off of this crap completely.

Well, except for posting pictures now and then, and random things that Must Be Said. It's the looking for interaction online that is simply nowheresville. Yup. That was close.

Going South Smiling

As I watch the unsurprising results of electing an inexperienced and relatively left-leaning president come in much faster than I expected (and no I haven't forgotten that Bush kicked off this particular debacle by forgetting the economic principles he probably never understood -- or just as likely, he simply didn't care anymore and went along with the ideas flowing out of the initial panic), I decide not to worry about it and pay attention to what matters: Never mind the Educational IRAs being cut in half, we probably have enough equity in the house to send the boys to college anyway. Well, so long as our lending institution thinks so. I guess nothing's guaranteed.

All the same, Skzx and I had a look at UCI and UCSB. Once it stopped raining (and snowing in the high passes), the weather was beautiful. I've never been a great fan of Southern California, but that is largely my petty Northern California prejudice talking. I have to admit, oftentimes the winter weather is gorgeous. Hell, all year, what do I know. There is some scenery I haven't seen yet. Some nice plants here and there ...

Okay, look, I'm trying, okay? Point is, the kid took this trip with little intention of actually moving down there, but seeing the places for himself opened up some possibilities. Maybe he'll go down there after all. We'll see.

We spent the first night across the street from John Wayne Airport. I enjoyed the wafting aromas. Jet fuel always smells like going places. We had a free evening so we went up into Huntington Beach to see The International after eating at Islands. Pretty good: A slower pacing than Bond or Bourne, a more contemplative and realistic movie. Plus it was cool to recognize a tile floor in Milan I've walked on (you may now roll your eyes). Next morning the fact that the hotel soap looked like a slice of cheese was not nearly as annoying as the three bottles of ... whatever they were. One, shampoo. I understood that. But I couldn't figure out which of the other two bottles was a hair conditioner and which a conditioning cleanser for the skin. To a rube like me they just weren't clear, and I really didn't want to put skin lotion in my scalp. Pissed me off.

UC Irvine is mere blocks from JWA but it is also in Orange County so it took me over half an hour to find it. That place! There are freeways every which way, the boulevards are continually curving in different directions, and somehow I couldn't get my compass bearings (didn't have a detailed enough map either). There's a lagoon or something and we wound up on the wrong side of it and had to go around. It was nuts. But what the hell, the weather was nice. Once there we got some coffee and walked around until it was time for the tour to start at the Visitor Center.

"Are you interested in taking the noon tour?"

"Sure, or we'll take the old tour, either one, never been here before anyway."

Sometimes having rock-and-roll-and-firearms hearing makes me such a dork.

UC Irvine was built in the 1960s during those flush times when California had a top-notch educational system and the growing aerospace industry was paying for everything from exhibits at Disneyland to freeways and subdivisions. The architecture shows it. Most of the buildings have a late-60s concrete-future look to them. They're not at all unaesthetic. Just somewhat quaint, in that way buildings are whose architecture is about halfway between ugly out of style and cool retro. I don't mean to criticize. The place is a park. Lovely, green, full of trees and sculpture and sunshine. And students, duh, full of energy and promise and mischief. It was a very cool thing for Skzx to see. Plus one of the housing sections is named Middle Earth, which is sort of dorky but sort of cool. We were only disappointed that it was run by "Administration" and not by a High Council.

The late afternoon drive across L.A. and into Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties wasn't bad at all. Never really hit what I would call bad traffic. Can't account for that but not complaining. It was neat to see the famous names on the exits -- Sepulveda, Wilshire, Hollywood, Beverly Hills. Some day maybe we'll check them out -- yes, I've never really been there. But just as every other time, we had somewhere to go. Enjoyed the drive along the coast. We were pretty impressed with this palm-studded island out there on the end of its own pier. Thought, damn, someone's got some MO NAY. Only later learned it's a dressed up pipeline terminus built by Richland Oil in the 50s. Okay, whatev.

At UCSB I dropped Skzx off to hang with a couple high school friends going there and found us lodging and hung around the room feeling brain-dead. Not from the drive. I just wasn't as energetically creative as I thought a free evening would inspire me to be. Funny how we get. At least I didn't watch TV. Next day he audited a couple classes (well, visited) and met me for the noon tour. Same deal, different campus. Santa Barbara is weird to me. It's its own little world. There's really nothing out there but ocean and students. Not much in the way of a local town. This makes it a very pleasant cocoon and to someone whose idea of a university sits smack in the middle of Berkeley and in view of San Francisco it is kind of weird. But hey, great school, all that. I liked the trees. Oh, and apparently Blu-ray technology was invented there. That doesn't impress me, and I doubt it anyway, but that's the sort of selling point a smart university puts out in front of its prospective freshmen. Maybe the consortium funded a little research. It's all good.

Majors? Engineering or Physics, that sort of thing. Watching me grow into an embittered old man for dropping the various arts I was good at in order merely to make a living doing the weird and incomprehensible things engineers do apparently didn't scare him off it. Besides, he wants to save the world. Alternate and inexhaustible energy development inspired me at first, why not him a generation later. God knows we need some good people working on that stuff and this kid, if he doesn't lose the vision, will make a difference.

So: It's all good. The same applies to my snarky comment up top about current political events. Whatever mistakes our new president makes now, I -- this is hard to admit but it's true -- I trust the guy. I trust him and his abilities and his intentions. Weird, iznit? So it's all good, selling half the house back to the bank to pay for a child's college degree notwithstanding.

Wordless Wednesday with words added

Drove 500 some odd miles to get down to So Cal on Monday. The Grapevine was closed so we went around. I took pictures of train tunnels. I like train tunnels. That probably reveals something weird and sexual about me.


The pass at Tehachapi was clear enough. Years ago I worked up in them thar hills amongst the wind turbines.


Mojave was the point where traffic jammed up, our direction first going in, then for northbound traffic also going in. Theirs was worse, or looked it.


This went on for miles.

In Tribute to a Quiet Hero

Recently attained one hundred years of age, the last survivor of those who kept the Frank family safe for over two years of the Nazi terror, and preserved young Anne's diary.

Two Hundred

I have a lot to say about both Darwin and Lincoln. They were born the same day. Darwin was to humanity the more important man. Lincoln had his points, obviously. Yes indeed, lots to say. And no time! Time enough just to express my regrets that I haven't the time.

Road Trips

Local boy. Twenty seven. Riding his motorcycle. Had a few drinks, a good time. Cop picked him up going seventy on the boulevard. Figured he'd burn the cop: turn this way, that, up the two-lane side streets. Ran the stop down from my house, sideswiped a van, bounced into a telephone pole.

Helmet didn't help him.

Many comments at the news site say he was a great guy and so on. I don't doubt it. I don't know anyone who doesn't make a foolish decision once in awhile.


Quiet valley town.


Trains pass through often. Fast. You just have to pay attention to the signals. Now and then someone doesn't.

Roadside memorial caught my eye.


I parked, walked around. Sat on the cold steel for a minute, listening to the night. Cars rumbled over. I don't know who or what.


I wish their families peace.

Mal-Mart

This vid was recently posted. These were our neighbors at BRC. Didn't see me in it, oh well. Glimpses of our camp. But anyway watch it, it's a fun way to get a sense of the scene -- a teeny, tiny fraction of the scene. Seriously. The Burn is about eight and a half million person-hours of indescribable experience and this is just one: Mal-Mart.

Desert Crawling

My previous post resulted from an accident of crawling about the desert via satellite photo. I went to Gerlach and saw the dragster and went, whoa. But why did I go to Gerlach? To find this place.

Permaburn is some guy's idea of making a permanent Burn, a Black Rock City that does not evaporate in the September sun but pulsates all year long. Personally I think he's nuts. BRC's gift economy is not viable outside of Burn Week. People save up their resources all year long to blow it on one great week-long spirit quest and bacchanal. After that, it's back to the grindstone of real life and prepare for next year.

Of course, what he really has in mind is a commune of some sort, except less communistic and more individualistic. Maybe he has a viable vision, I don't know. It wouldn't work for me. Especially in winter. But if a few hundred well-heeled and burn-hip yuppies can build summer cabins and create a space of love and beads and nightlights and flame bikes for a few months out of each year, fine. Color me skeptical, but fine. What do you think?

Dragster Corpse

Funny how strongly we keep images.

I have a shitty memory and can barely remember what I was working on yesterday. Last September I came back from Burning Man with an overload of impressions and a dearth of coherent tales and memories. Yet all of it is stored -- I just can't extract it.

On our way through Gerlach at exactly the speed limit I looked out the driver side window and saw the remains of a dragster shoved against a fence. It was partially sunk into the ground and the color of dust, a relic of a bygone age. It was in my view for just a few seconds.

Seeing it again in Google street view brings it back again. This is exactly it. The rest of the roadway as well, recalled as if driven just this past weekend.


Wish I had this magic for life in general. Or even just a few important conversations.