xtcian

dotting i's, minding p's, q's

12/27/05

I'm taking this week off and so should you. See you next year, and be safe! TO THE EXTREME!

breast your cards

12/26/05

When my grandmother was a child in western Colorado during the 1910s, Christmas was a big deal, even though nobody had two farthings to rub together. Still, every year, my great grandma Pearl and her husband John Evans used to find a way to get an orange for each of their five kids.

An orange during the winter in Red Mesa, Colorado in 1914 was about as precious as, say, stock in Google right now. And so, they woke up on Christmas knowing it would always be there. My mom carried the tradition with us, without even sharing the story until someone had the balls to ask why we were always getting a frickin' orange in our stocking every year.

Once I found out, it was clear. And now Lucy will always have the same.

hope everyone out there had a fabulous holiday

you are responsible for your rose

12/22/05

If you are reading this, it is because I am gone. To be frank, I haven't been feeling well lately, and when my owners showed me the age chart on the wall - and pointed out that I was off the chart and two inches up on the stucco - I have been feeling as though it might have been time to allez-donc into the great warm lake in the sky.

I'm pleased to have a last word, as so many of us are hit by cars or felled by leukemia, and I am happy to have lived long enough to say a proper goodbye. If there were two rules I lived by, they were "assume nothing" and "make proper salutations." Frequently the two mixed together.

I am almost sixteen as I lay down for my last, and have seen my fair share of the world. I was often mocked, however, for my single-mindedness, my mode dogmatique, if you pardon the woeful pun. I had but one love of my life, leading lesser-minded souls to whisper about my supposed sexual confusion, or even asexuality. I am a reserved dog by personality, but I am now free to say this: I loved only her, and my duty to her was greater than love. Why? Because I was chosen.

My mother lived on a farm in Brenham, Texas, where she killed everything in sight. We were not close. I don't know that she even had the mothering instinct. She gave birth to many of us brothers and sisters by the side of the creek, knowing (I believe) full well that many of us would drown in the first rain. Indeed, three of my brothers did just that.

The four of us who survived did so by scavenging, until a kind little boy found us, and brought us up to the farmhouse. We were to be rescued by whomever would have us, but nobody came. Days went by, until a blonde person, about 21, came to look. My sisters and brothers, all white and playful, licked her and yapped about in their usual style. I didn't even bother: I knew there was no chance she would take me. I sat in the corner and tried to think of other things. Perhaps I would be cast out into the farm again, and pass away amongst the thrushes.

And she chose me. I hadn't said a word. Despite all my vivacious siblings, she chose me and I went away with her; she took me to many different parts of the country and never left me. She called me "Chopin" - pretty much the only word of English I know, along with "no," "sit," "heel," and "get out of the kitchen" - and that was that.

What are the responsibilities of the chosen? We serve our chooser. Antoine de St. Exupery said "we are responsible for what we have tamed," but I would add the inverse, namely, we are tamed by our responsibility.

It grows late, and I would like to say my goodbyes now. First, to all of my owner's friends who played with me, took me for jaunts, and succored my idiosyncrasies; I nod to you. I would also like to say a little hello and goodbye to the baby they call "Lucy" - I hope she has an affinity for black dogs later in life, without knowing why. Small inklings are big victories.

To my adopted red-headed owner, who came to dominion over me later: we may have not always seen eye-to-eye, but the years have given me a grudging respect I know you share. By my calculation, we have driven almost forty-thousand miles together, across the country six times in as many years. I thank you for allowing me to relax a little, as being an "alpha male" was always more façade than reality. I will miss having my "tummy" scratched.

And lastly, to my owner: I am happy I was able to see you from college into your major life change at 24; I was honored to bear your ring at the wedding, and am relieved to see you through the birth of the young one. I am tired. I would have followed you to another mountaintop if only my flesh were willing.

One emotion is truly undying: my affection and loyalty, for I know full well you could have done anything else. You could have taken any of them home with you, and yet you chose me.

horse must think it queer

12/21/05

You could feel how far away the Earth is from the sun, how far we've tipped in one direction. The night came on so quickly, like the day hardly put in an effort. The wind up the Taconic Valley was so cold, so achingly shrill, that it made you contemplate the same things Robert Frost did when he wondered how lovely, dark and deep those woods really were.

These are the nights that took young settlers from their parents, took fathers while they were hunting. It's no surprise they would move the birth of the Christ Child from April to this cruel week, just to let the story luminesce from within.

When the ancient pagans and druids celebrated the solstice, they were not celebrating the longest night of the year, they were thanking their gods for letting the days get longer. It is a holiday of "this cannot get worse," which gives freezing comfort to those looking out over the endless hills of ice.

I always look to one of my favorite poems ever, "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

ground to a halt = good coffee shop name

12/20/05

Manhattan Bridge, 10:30pm last night

Those of you who don't keep track of these things should know there's a transit strike in Manhattan right now, which really has to be experienced to be believed. I guess the equivalent in the rest of America is to have all four tires slashed and nobody to fix them, and it's up to you to get to work sixteen miles away in the dead of winter. Oh, and all of your friends' tires are slashed too.

You can't drive into Manhattan without three other people in your car until 11am, and entire city avenues are closed to normal traffic. Out front of my apartment today, the normally-quiet side street was gridlocked with furious horn-honking. You'd think, in this era of nanotechnology and obsession with efficiency, that it would be hard to shut down one of the most important cities in the world, but MAN IS IT EASY!

Being a softie, a leftie, and a commie, my temptation is to side with the striking workers, but their demands seem (to this layman, anyway) to be a bit extreme, with ridiculous retirement ages, a payment structure that fucks new arrivals, and a median income that puts many of my friends to shame. That, and the head of the Transit Workers Union seems like an enormous boob, shouting into the cold wind demanding "respect."

Then again, the MTA apparently pulled some last-second pension demand that would only save them $20 million, which is infintessimally small given the billions NYC is now losing every night with the strike.

Like I said, I'm sure there are things I don't understand, but this time, both parties are leaving a funny taste in my mouth. It's damn near impossible, with a city that has so many competing agendas and penis-measuring contests, built on sediment comprised of favors, payoffs, Mob contacts and lazy corruption - to find the truth. As I always tell Tessa, I'm amazed, in any given apartment in the East Village, that you turn on a faucet and actual water comes out.

In the meantime, it's a few days before Christmas and the city has slowed to a glacial crawl. My entire family just got here from California and Iowa, and they'll have to be creative to get into Midtown to buy underpriced musical electronics. As for us, we're getting out of here, even if the first two hours of the trip take four hours. I have a pine sapling to cut down and adorn with bizarre pagan knick-knacks.

long, dark pee-time of the soul

12/19/05

So it has come to this: Chopes has a tumor just about everywhere you can have a tumor, and his back legs are so weak that I have to push him up the stairs. He started peeing uncontrollably on all our carpets, and every once in a while takes a dump in the hallway. He wipes out every time he tries to make a right turn - and the night of the party, he ate a box of chocolate. He is about to be sixteen years old.

And yet, he still waggles his tail, prances around the entire place like a scrounge hound, barks at all the delivery guys, and once I get him going outside, he even runs alongside me. In short, if you weren't cleaning up after him - and if you didn't have an ultrasound providing a window to his insides - you'd swear he was about five.

Tessa and I are in agreement: you don't kill a dog for your convenience. Even though he threatens to turn our apartment into a third-world jail latrine, he has given us so many years of loyal service that you just have to keep cleaning up. Put it this way: he was conceived in the 1980s. He howled outside Graham Hall when I was still a student at Carolina. The dog stays until he explodes.

Which does bring up an issue. There are no good dog diapers anywhere on the market. The disposable ones fall off when he starts to walk, and the permanent diapers with removable liners don't cover his wiener. So I have to ask: there are a lot of frickin' aging incontinent dogs in this world, and nobody has the cajones to step up to the plate for a real diaper?

Finally, I had to think outside the box. The last time I bought Depends™ diapers it was Halloween 1991 when I tested them myself, and I didn't think I'd be doing that again until the year 2060. But there I was at the Key Foods on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn with a giant MonsterPak of Depends™ with every chick in line looking at me like I was about to pee on them. Man, it's great to be married.

Anyway, I got them home, cut a tail hole and strapped ol' Chopes in. And I have to say, so far, so good. If an adult diaper works on Señor Poopypants, then he can fade into the sunset for as long as he likes.

people, look east

12/18/05

We had our little Holiday Soirée for the neighborhood last night, and I got as drunk as I've been in about two years - well, since this night at least. I'm here to report that the Chaser™ pills actually work quite well, because by all rights I should be dead right now, but I'm only dead tired. I don't get how you functioning alcoholics do it, man. I'd be exhausted and have acid reflux every day if I tried it.

The best part was going through all the liquor we had in the house, thus my perfect 4-hour buzz was composed of Cuervo 1800 Anejo tequila shots, Stoli and cranberry, Jack and Coke, and 18-year-old Macallan. It was like being a kid and trying every flavor at the 7-11 because you have a $20 bill burning a hole in your pocket.

I found a picture we took three years ago last night, so I did a little before and after:

2002

2005

Today we jaunted over to the upper Upper West Side to St. John the Divine church to attend "A Choristers Christmas," which was heartbreakingly fabulous. The arrangements and singing were delicious, and it was made even better by a surprise: the choir sang my mom's arrangement of "The Sycamore Tree" without knowing that the woman herself was in the audience.

Lucy was cool for the first few readings and then decided to go "WAWAWAWAWA BOOP! Maamaamaaamaa BLURK!" during all the quiet parts, so Tessa put her in the sling and breastfed her in the wings until she fell asleep. The rest of the afternoon was imbued with the story of Kringle told as if it were a lost chapter of the His Dark Materials books, and it was quite magical.

I didn't even mind that my ass fell asleep on those chairs; it really put us in a mystical holiday mood, my rants on a Plastic Noise Christmas© notwithstanding. Like I said, there should always be something quite scary and subversive about Christmas to go along with the treacle, a sense of awe that comes with good theater.

One Christmas when I was eight and gathered with my 40 cousins, someone shook sleigh bells outside our window at 4am, and the fear and excitedness that raced through our veins still feels palpable. I can't wait for the Lucy tot to start getting aglow for the holidays, although sometimes it seems she already has.

through the clouds it breaks

12/15/05

I know when we have a big deadline I don't write anything meaningful and instead post pictures of my li'l punkinboots, but tonight I couldn't resist.

with babysitter Brenda at lunchtime

patapan!

12/14/05

Every year, the same damn article gets written about Christmas: some whiny wet blanket starts kvetching about how they've "stopped the insanity" in their household and now they don't buy each other anything, and it's a quiet time of reflection and homemade crafts and all that crap. This year, Newsweek has a doozy, but it could be the same article any year for the past two decades, so I'd just like to say ENOUGH ALREADY.

I'm sorry to break it to you Luddites-come-lately, but the crass commercialism of Christmas is what makes it so great. The anticipation, the trembling hands, the excited giggles of kids tiptoeing down the stairs on Christmas morning at 5:45am is not for the Christ Child, nor is it so that parents can unfurl their woodcarvings: it is for PLASTIC STUFF, and THINGS WITH BATTERIES, and ELECTRONIC GADGETS and CRAP THAT MAKES NOISE.

listing all the shit I want, 1969

Boy, you anti-Xmas people with your whimpering about the traffic and going on for hours about how crowded the malls are, you should be penalized for cliché. Christmas is Christmas because anything worth doing is occasionally difficult. Now with the internet delivering anything you want to your doorstep, you have nothing to complain about anyway.

When I was a kid, I got lots of presents - we all did - whether it was a flush year for Dad or not. When I was broke during the crazy '90s, I still got people insane gifts. Now that I have two dimes to rub together, I not only host Christmas, but I'll even shave the Christmas goose with a Mach 3 if I have to. While the rest of the hoity-toity world tut-tuts when their neighbors put up plastic reindeer and 7-foot-tall candy canes, I think "well at least someone's TRYING!"

I've got news for you, O Blog Readers, we came of age in the Christmases of the '60s, '70s, and '80s - and that means those football games that vibrate, Cabbage Patch doll mania, Green Machines, and my orange Huffy 10-speed with pistol-grip handlebars. The only "memories of Christmas past" come from various lyrics of the Chestnuts Roasting song and "Sleigh Ride" (which wasn't supposed to have lyrics anyway). All this pining for some lost meaningful Christmas is a bunch of crap.

Do you know where meaning is? It's in STUFF. As in getting it, and receiving it. So go ahead and break out the aerosol cans of window frost, and the multicolored lights that blink to music. Get a real tree and wear gloves if you're scared of sap. Spike your eggnog, get dressed up, and indulge in material things. We live in a society so bereft of ritual that we should be happy to have a day when anything can be bought, including love.

There's 12 people coming to my house for Christmas, and they all got each other something. That's 144 presents! Or something like that, I failed calculus. Either way, I get to see a lot of people opening up a lot of crap, and that's all the spiritual warmth I need.

Editors note: the author's wife does not agree with this blog entry

Biv, Roy G.

12/13/05

I've always been a sucker for old photographs and re-creations of photos within my own life - I don't know where this comes from, as nobody in my family does anything like this for a living, but it's made me an archivist. I can see myself enjoying ancient JPEGs in the year 2063.

A friend forwarded me the Bound for Glory online exhibit at the Library of Congress, and it is pretty amazing: color photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration from 1939-1942. See what I mean:

I love this Arthur Rothstein pic from 1942 because the girl at left is exactly the same age as my mom (turned 74 yesterday!) and yet no color pictures exist of my mom until well into her late twenties. There is a sunset of vision that usually occurs when we delve past 1955 or so: everything is black and white, and thus hard to relate to our own lives. But look at this picture from 1939:

The negative has gone a little red, but that's people dancing, with their actual face color, and sweat, and you're there. As for bigger canvases, I like the thunderstorm in this one...

...because in other B&W pics, it would look like a menacing metaphor for the American Dream gone sour, but here it is obviously that slick hot moment before a downpour. Of course, this everyday downpour happened in 1940, sixty-five years ago.

Images of the Great Depression are always in gray, but here's a school recital in 1940, where if you look closely, half the kids don't have shoes:

And this one, where the girl on the left looks like she's dressed for a musical set in 1939, but no, she's actually in 1939:

Finally, here's a storefront by John Vachon taken in 1942. Every single product for sale can be bought in 2005. Corporations are evil, sure, but they do give us a nice pervading feeling of Omnitopia that stretches back to the casual glances of our grandfathers.

newton's first law

12/12/05

I remember the winter the beast took over: it was 1979, I was twelve, and I didn't talk to anybody for about four months. My beast is not alcoholism, nor sex or drug addiction - it is, simply, inertia. It's a slothlike monster, mid-yawn, that swallows energy whole and leaves me with little desire even to do the things I love.

I have fed the monster everything I could throughout the years: in puberty, I fed it testosterone and unrequited love, and it just got fatter. In college, I fed it wine coolers, then bourbon and cokes, then tequila, and it grew despondent.

In the last decade I have fed it espresso after espresso, enough caffeine to power a ferris wheel, and though it shows temporary signs of excitement - a raised eyebrow, the nod of a head - it soon slips back into coma. Welbutrin couldn't pierce it, nor can I play enough basketball games to outrun it.

It's an open maw into which has fallen so many projects, so many bills, and the occasional friend. It has a slow digestion, so glacial that you cannot see it move, thus convincing you perhaps everything was okay while you were sleeping. It was not.

I'm caught in an arm-wrestle with the beast, from the mystical to the mundane, making it hard to think about the future, and hard to get up to change the laundry. We go at it every day, and I win 51% of the time, not hardly enough.

When I am old and no longer have the dexterity of my current body, I don't want to feel like I was rooked. I don't want to wake up and reflect upon a life four-fifths lived. I want all burners on, all thrusters go, all stops pulled, all canvas out. My oar drags, and the water is brown.

muddle through somehow

12/11/05

Just got done with a major deadline on our script - the next one looms on Friday, but at least we can breathe for the time being. DirecTV now offers XM Radio, so I've been listening to Classical Christmas™ for three days, and I have heard the Nutcracker Suite played on everything except, perhaps, someone's nuts. I've heard it done with a string quartet, a mandolin duo, steel drums, a saw, three vacuum cleaners and a sextet of ferrets.

Which leads me to today's CODE WORD entry - what is your guilty pleasure Holiday song? Mine has always been "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," because it's actually so damn sad, and there's always something about Christmas that has to be twinged with sadness to go along with the mystery and excitement. When Judy Garland first sings the tune in "Meet Me in St. Louis," it's almost a eulogy for happiness. The whole movie, despite the "zing zing zing go my heartstrings" stuff, may be the most secretly subversive American musical ever made.

While you're thinking, how about an almost-solstice December sunset up at the farm?

saturn shrugged

12/8/05

It's very, very late and it's supposed to snow like krazy tomorrow, but I thought I needed to add an addendum to the Oprah story. First off, I can't believe I had a blog for almost four years and didn't remember to tell the tale, for which LFMD's Opraphilia has proven useful. I'd also like to add that Oprah herself seemed quite gracious, even though she never really met with us, there were no autographs or pictures or anything like that. Remember, this was 1994, and although her show was huge, she had not geometrically progressed to the Hera-like status she currently enjoys.

That particular show was another day at the office for her, and probably a not very satisfying one. None of us Gen X folks really stepped up to the plate, myself included, giving us months of l'esprit de l'escalier afterward. I swear to god I replayed what I WOULD have said about forty thousand times.

Some of us who were on the show remained friends for years through (the then-new technology of) email, particularly the schoolteacher Melanie, who actually did quit her job and then married a Scot and moved to Scotland, you know, where the Scots are. The European-American kayak instructor went on to instruct kayaks.

The day the show was to air, all of my friends gathered at the Purple House in Chapel Hill, and my dad had a "watching party" on the West Coast. Dotted throughout the country, several friends sat in front of the TV at the allotted time. When Oprah came on, I was horrified to learn than my show had been pre-empted for Fat Teen Week, and the only place it aired was in the Mountain Time Zone. Thank god my friend Christine in Sandy had taped it.

My dad called, my mom called, friends called, etc. until I finally had to answer my phone "I'm not on Oprah, can I help you?" The insult had been added to injury, and I'm sure a lot of folks thought I'd been lying about the whole thing.

It did air the next morning, and I was told it was repeated about ten times over the next few months. In many ways, it was a blessing nobody saw it, because when I watched the tape, I was absolutely horrified at the way I looked. Something about that year, my body had changed, and I no longer had the sharpness of my early '20s - in fact, I thought I looked tremendously bloated, with a neck like an amphibian.

To be honest, I freaked out. I was so disgusted with my physical appearance that it was all I could think about (this was pre-Celexa, and, y'know, I was still dating). In an ironic twist of fate, my wisdom teeth erupted later that week, and I went to the oral surgeon to get them removed. Apparently, during the re-surfacing from anesthesia, I was crying inconsolably. The nurses called my mom and said, "your son is having an episode - he thinks he's a frog."

In the tiny molecules between the conscious and the subconscious, my image of me on television had transformed, Kafka-esque, into a frog, with a bloated neck, unable to speak, just sitting there being fat and stupid. It took me three days and about a kilo of Vicodin to get over it.

That following winter, with the help of Annie and Greg at our farm, I lost 25 pounds and began the slow turn-around of my life. Sure, there were valleys later on ('98 and '01 were, to put it mildly, treacherous), but I had weathered my first major mid-20s/Saturn-return/nervous breakdown.

So I have Oprah to thank for that. Not many people have the opportunity to share that couch and turn limes into limeade, and for that - and my Oprah coffee mug - I'll always be grateful.

later that year

home of the Big O

12/7/05

It's April 1994, and I'm 26 years old and just getting back from the usual afternoon game of hoops at the Lodge. The phone rings and it's the lady in charge of booking at the Oprah Winfrey Show - she says they're doing a whole hour on the movie "Reality Bites," there's going to be some "stars" there, and they want me - as Official Spokesman of Generation X - to be on the show.

The year previous, we'd put out the 13th-GEN book, and that particular month I was one of sixteen writers that had put together Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation. The book didn't sell that well, but it was on President Clinton's booklist, and we had all sorts of great parties when it came out.

So I said yes, and two weeks later they flew me to Chicago and put me up in a swanky hotel. By airtime, it became clear that this show was no longer going to be about "Reality Bites" nor was it going to have Ethan Hawke or Winona Ryder as guests: it was going to be a Baby Boomers vs. Generation X slugfest and whomever had the most snark was destined to win.

The Oprah show, at that point, had two "green rooms" - in one, they stuck a bunch of Baby Boomers in their 40s, and in our dressing room, we had a cool chick from an indie bookstore in Atlanta, a wonderful 25-year-old schoolteacher from Missouri (hello, Melanie Finnell!), a 26-year-old junior exec at American Airlines, a very shy girl that ditched college to be a kayak instructor, and me.

Nervous as hell, we all began to blather at each other, and in the hour leading up to the show, had the best "generational" discussion I've ever had - honest, heartbreaking, funny, and precisely the sort of thing that should have taken place in front of the cameras. Obviously, they were keeping us separate from the Boomers so that the fireworks would happen on stage, but the strategy backfired.

The show starts, and those not on stage watched the action on the monitor in the green room. First up: the American Airlines guy had to go head-to-head with some lady who had been in an email war with him for months. Next, the indie bookstore chick had to justify her existence to a "self-made millionaire" in his late 40s whose only expertise seemed to be getting Reagan-era economic facts completely wrong.

Then came the schoolteacher who said she didn't want to be a schoolteacher anymore, with a round of opprobrium from the audience. Worse yet, the shy kayak instructor basically got booed out of the studio for not "getting a real job." Leading the charge were two African-American women in the front row, who said their lives had been fraught with hardship, and that all whiny Generation Xers should probably kill themselves and save America the trouble.

I mean, how do you complain about your rotten job, lack of real romance, and pervading depression when there are two ladies who "clean toilets in Toledo" every time you say anything? You can't, actually.

Finally, they called me out to the stage, along with Susan Mitchell, who edited "The Boomer Report." All I could think was, "thank God they mentioned my book." Oprah's head was very, very large. The lights were amazingly intense, the audience surrounds you like a Roman gladiator amphitheater, and the whole energy of the place is positively nerve-fraying. The last thing the producer tells you before you go on stage is, "You are about to be seen by 10 million people in 43 countries." I wanted my mommy.

Have you seen the new Harry Potter? That haircut is cool again!

I was hoping that the argument would turn into something intelligent now that us "experts" were on stage - remember, this was days after Kurt Cobain's suicide - but it only got worse. More name-calling between audience members, silly irrelevant stories about young hardship, sprinkled with a few confusing statistics to keep things misleadingly sociological. Half-baked tangents were swirling around me, the audience was getting riled up, I felt my hair start to get large, the lights pounded... when suddenly Oprah turns to me and says "Ian." My stomach tightened. "What do you think about all of this?"

And for a split second, I've never had less to say in my life. In a mad rush, my brain wanted to say "I think this is the most pathetic argument I've ever eavesdropped on in my life," but I managed to tell them a nice paragraph full of bullshit. Basically that the two generations can't play tit-for-tat because it's an argument that nobody ever wins. And that dreams are not transferable across eras - what causes me great pain may seem like a luxury to you, but I still feel pain nonetheless. And that it's okay to be a kayak instructor.

Oprah said, "I don't really get what you mean," then cut to the last commercial. And that was it. There were 40 seconds left in the show, they started playing that Oprah "time's up" music, and I couldn't believe it. Oprah herself wondered aloud if they had accomplished anything, and I got the feeling it had been one of their worst, most pointless shows. I buried my head in my hands.

They unhooked the mike from my flannel shirt and I wandered off the stage in a daze, very angry, very confused and wondering why they would ship us across America to embarrass us like that in front of 43 other countries. And as us Gen Xers wandered out of the studio together into the cold Chicago wind, we saw the Boomers - including the women who had "cleaned toilets in Toledo" - all drive off in a limo together. The ladies had been a plant.

So we spent the rest of the day walking around downtown Chicago. We felt like we'd been used, like we'd been reduced to the same idiots who sit in those very chairs on stage in years past, the transvestite mothers who eat their children. We'd sold our private moments to Oprah for a chance to suckle at the great giant teat of the American underbelly, and we were all horrified.

Four hours later, we were still doing tequila shots at the hotel bar.

recant buy me love

12/6/05

You see, you go and talk shit about the internet, and then she throws something nice at you: Professor Andrew Wood at San Jose State, the inventor of the concept of "Omnitopia," just left a nice message on the blog. I encourage y'all to visit the page he put up discussing the topic. Frankly, I could keep an entire blog on Omnitopia, as I find it endlessly fascinating.

Speaking of endlessly fascinating, did you know I was born mere blocks away from San Jose State U?

I was going to tell my Oprah story for LFMD today, but I just spent two hours at Neighborhoodies ordering various Christmas presents, thus I can't get into that whole emotional mess. One preview tidbit: I don't know any other American working in media today that gained as little from his Oprah appearance than me. In fact, in some ways it was so disturbing that I woke up one afternoon thinking I was a frog.

Really. More on that tomorrow.

barnacles on the ship

12/5/05

At some point in the last two weeks, the hits on this blog went from the usual ten thousand-ish a day to hundreds of thousands (corrected from earlier). I thought I'd been slashdotted or BoingBoinged or something, but when I looked at the referrer list, I understood the culprit.

A few years ago, this site started getting serious comment spam, to the tune of about 150 a day. MT's blacklist kept a lot out, I'm sure, but spam sites always worm their way in. Finally, Steve found a trick that has kept 99% of it away, and now I have to delete only 2 or so each morning.

Then came the "trackback spam." By this summer, I was sometimes getting 300 of these a day, sites for penises and hair loss remedies and bestiality, tracking back on all the old entries. It took us forever to find the "off" switch, which is why there are no longer trackbacks on this site - a major cool functionality that I've had to completely abandon.

And now, my site is being hit 15,000 times a day by bullshit spam sites in what is now called referrer spam, which, as far as I can gather, is a way for spammers to get on my "referrer" page on the off-chance that I would ever publish one.

First question: has any of these spammers, or the asshole human beings behind them, ever made a FUCKING DIME screwing up people's websites like this? Or is it just like trolling the Atlantic, killing all the porpoises and not catching any tuna?

This referrer spam has effectively made it impossible to see how people get here. I used to be able to spot if someone had linked to me, then occasionally established a friendship (or at least linked back), but those days are over. In essence, spam has shut me off from the community of links, and has rendered me blind, like a submarine that has lost its periscope.

I realize all giant living entities like the Net are going to be subjected to parasites at best (and cancer at worst) but I'd just like to send out a giant FUCK YOU to all spammers glomming their horseshit onto those of us who are trying to make the internet a more intelligent place. From now on, every time one of you hits my site, I'm giving you karmic ass warts. Long may they throb in agony.

a mall and the night visitors

12/4/05

Omnitopia Chapter LXVII: Enclosed Shopping Structures

My birth year cohorts (1967) were probably the first to truly come of age in a mall. In the beginning, there was "downtown," and Cedar Rapids, IA had a damn fine one back in the early '70s, including a Curiosity Shoppe of some sort where you could buy globes of the Moon and my brother Steve got his H.O. track supplies.

Then came the "plaza" and its dirty cousin "the strip mall," where you could find those awful Michaels places and the occasional cafeteria restaurant (we had Bishop's). In my quasi-hometown, ours was called Lindale Plaza, and it had the first arcade place in Iowa, featuring Pong, Tank, Lunar Lander, and a game where you used a continuous puff of air to guide objects (lit by blacklight) through various hoops (Steve, do you remember this one?).

Lindale Plaza, of course, became Lindale Mall - check out the before and after pics - and so did everything else. Some genius figured out that people shop more when their toes aren't falling off from -20 degree wind chill, and voilà, my youth was born.

I bursted into puberty inside a really crappy mall called Military Circle just off the freeway in Norfolk, Virginia. Outside, they had a Flipper McCoy's arcade place, and inside was the record store chain, a Sears, a place where you got huge cookies, and the theater where I saw "Return of the Jedi." Despite its nastiness, we found ourselves there most weekends, and I learned every quirk of every store, much the way all of you did in your hometowns.

Tessa doesn't get malls, nor does she understand why I love them. Perhaps I get the sense of infinite possibility with protection from the weather. Maybe it's because the food court allows you to get two entrees from two different places and fries from another, and a dessert from somewhere else. When people talk shit about malls, I think they don't know how good they've got it.

That said, let's look at some more "ubiquitous environments," shall we?

Dillards, Belk's, Saks, Macy's, Nordstrom's, etc. - Yes, I know some of these are supposed to be "better" than others, but at the butt-end of every mall, you'll find one of these behemoths trying to separate you from your wallet. Not trying very hard, mind you, as customer service in these places can be abysmal for things you want (pants that fit, non-itchy sweaters) but lugubriously overzealous for things you don't (Britney's new perfume).

The floors in these places always depress me - the chipped, scuffed linoleum, juxtaposed with a pair of pleated dress pants - and the amount of makeup worn by the ladies at the counter usually competes with Queen Elizabeth I. The only lady I ever liked was Tessa's mom Sandy, who was the Estee Lauder salesperson in Kerrville, Texas. I'd buy anything from that woman.

Record Bar, Sam Goody, etc. - Can you smell the desperation? When entering these over-loud cheese factories from the outside, you get the feeling that you may be the last generation to pass through these shoplifting alarms. Piss-poor selection and CDs that cost $17.99? Why would any self-respecting 13-year-old bother, when he can get the Shins album for ten bucks on iTunes (or free from Limewire)?

I still go into these place to look at the posters, which, if you haven't noticed, are the same ones from 1981: Bob Marley smoking weed, Janis Joplin with a bottle of Southern Comfort, and a bunch of dancing bears courtesy of the Dead. Throw in the Doritos Girl wearing a bikini, and you sense that Sam Goody will be about as relevant in 2030 as the zoetrope.

Delia's - I never though I'd be jealous of teenage girls, but SHIT they sell cool clothes at this place. It's what Urban Outfitters would be if they were as cool as they think they are, and everything cost half as much. I'm dying to fit into a 12-year-old girl's Orange Crush T-Shirt! I'll just have to wait for Lucy to get old enough to be vaguely ironic.

Urban Outfitters - Speaking of which, I really wish I liked this place better. I know you have to be underweight and preferably a white hipster DJ living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to have a shot, but really, can't they make stuff for us aging fratboys as well?

We would have been outraged at U.O. back in 1991, selling our irony back to ourselves at $24 a shirt, but now we just sit and take it. How can you possibly wear that "Getting Lucky in Kentucky" T-shirt when 45,000 other too-cool-for-school future art majors already have it?

Banana Republic - I admit, this store hits my sweet spot. Bold, interesting, colorful and classy, I could wear nothing but Ban Rep for the next year and not care what YOU think. It's come a long way from those pith-helmet and bizarre loincloths of the early '80s. And though it can get sort of "guido" every two years or so (and is expensive), I would encourage each of you to get a pinstripe blazer.

Spencer's Gifts - How have these guys managed to stay around for so long? Their current incarnation is of the lowest-common-denominator beer-pong Beavis-humor, but back in my mallrat days, it was the place to go for all your Edible Undie, Joy Jelly and "tobacco water pipe" needs.

They always had the Halloween market cornered with fake teeth and blue hair dye, and usually sold out of Ouija Boards. Spencer's Gifts: if it didn't exist, we'd have to create it.

The Apple Store - Oh, my sweet sweet Apple store. Your white curves, your translucent stairs, your roomy bathroom. Let me fondle your Nanos, rub my hands along your G5 towers for warmth. You're as cozy as a Georgia O'Keeffe flower. How can anyone use a PC when they've been inside your sugar walls?

Athletic Attic, The Foot Locker, Athlete's Foot - I know they're all about sports, but why do they seem so bereft of motion, so funereal of pace? I know some people like to "try their shoes on" and all that, but if you are pretty sure about your size, everything can be had on eBay for a ninth of the price.

God knows I had my share of retail jobs, and bringing out shoes for people with an 8% chance of them actually buying them has to be a big fucking drag, but STOP MAKING ME FEEL BAD FOR ASKING. And would you please have a size 13 or bigger in there? Lindsay and I can't buy your shoes if you don't have them for us manly men.

The Discovery Store, The Sharper Image - I'm fairly sure your massaging chair has been sat in by seven-hundred people today, and it is going to give me the flu. No, I don't need a USB-powered dental flosser. Why are your executive dart magnet sets $379? I'm sure that pillow stops migraines, I'm fucking sure. I have nobody to play backgammon with, thanks. This radio picks up Lisbon? *sigh*

Old Navy - Those who can, do - those you can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym. Those who can't teach gym, purposely walk around America with the name of the store emblazoned on their chest in six-inch letters.

players only love you when they're playin'

12/1/05

Alas, I shall have to wait until Monday to continue Omnitopia Week here on the blog, as we just had a huge work deadline spring up like a friggin' jack-in-the-box (which is itself one of the worst fast food places in California). However, I must say seeing all of you on a comments roll is something truly to behold. Any time I mention fast food, pop music or lefty politics, you guys, as Fleetwood Mac sang, make bloggin' fun.

In the meantime, Lucy wanted to give everyone some holiday cheer: