Here's an interesting site about Roy Orbison and cling wrap.

It's fairly important.

SpamQuest

Received an e-mail this evening from one Caspar Xrrioe. Something about, I don't know, mortgages or toner cartridges or adding 3" of length or XANAX CIALIS AMBIEN.

Who are these people? I want to write a book about spam...no, a movie, in glorious 35mm Technicolor, a modern-day remake of John Ford's The Searchers, called Finding Caspar Xrrioe. Two men set out on an epic quest to find the spammer who has smashed their dreams of a connected, utopian information age.

In the end they meet up with Caspar in a cheesy office over a convenience store in Hackensack and it ends bloody.

The Condescension of Young Chinese Men

Went to Fry's Electronics this evening. It's is an experience you put off until it's absolutely unavoidable. And, long story short, it was unavoidable. Now Fry's... Fry's stores are these vast yet cluttered places, not undecorated so much as underdecorated. Warehouse Gothic married to a patchily applied, kitchsy Wild West theme. Tiffany-ish, fake gas-lamps and Buffalo Bill motifs tossed here and there amidst raw aluminum shelving units. Your basic, deconstructed, warehouse/storage/industrial attitude can be knowing, muscular and full of promise. But this is decorated just enough to make you depressed -- and no more.

And oh, the people. The humanity! The milling, teeming multitudes with home electronics predicaments, children in tow, elderly grandparents being wheeled along on gurneys, women with baskets on top of their heads, chickens under their arms. All with whatever few posessions they could gather together before joining the tide of displaced peoples heading to Fry's. Brown people, Jews in yarmulkes, Russian babushkas, whole Sudanese villages. Water buffaloes with rings in their noses. The wretched of the earth.

But I'm straying from the point here. My issue this evening is that I got talked into getting the faster, $179 Hitachi 60GB internal drive as well as the $35 three-year Fry's warranty. Which I am now quite sure I shouldn't have gotten. This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened. The cell phone with the camera in it: classic example. A daily reminder of my craven timidity, of how easily I can be sold something beyond my needs and over my budget.

Now, I'm fairly hardened against your basic white sales guy. The hype, the mousse, the wide football stance. The relentless pressure to get the Caprice with the undercoating. "What's it gonna take to get you into this car today?"

Pfft. Doesn't even register.

No, here's the one you really gotta look out for: the young, Chinese geek.

Fidgety, post-adolescent, looking at the floor and flicking black hair out of his glasses, it's not like he's trying to sell you anything; he's not interested in being there. He's not interested in customers -- or people, for that matter. He doesn't even particularly care about making money. All he wants is to be at home playing Halo.

And if you knew anything about anything -- which clearly you do not -- he wouldn't have to waste his time explaining to you that 60 GB represents the minimum level of technology you have to have to exist in the world. He's like, Duh!

For your part, well, you want to have the esoteric understanding brought by this visitor from the future. You want the secret of fire. So you buy the damn thing. And the warranty.

He's too young to have pity for you, and in a few years he's going to be extremely busy running his own company. So in all probability he's never going to have the opportunity to develop the emotion at all. But if he felt anything towards you it would be pity. Because my friend, you are the wretched of the earth.

I like you a lot, but I only want to be your friend

I think in general my high school experience was a good one, a largely enjoyable time, amusing, supportive, nourishing...all that crap. But still, even in the most positive high school environment, you can't avoid the fundamental cutting cruelty, the angst of adolescence. You can't avoid pimples, and saying cripplingly awkward things, and feeling deeply, suicidally melancholy on occasion. And most of all, you just cannot avoid someone like....oh, who was it, anyway? Someone like Leslie Graham (Jesus Christ!!) who takes you on the balcony at a party to tell you: "I like you, but I ONLY WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND YOUR FRIEND YOUR FRIEND FRIEND friend friend friend...." and having that echo in your ears for MORE THAN TWENTY FIVE YEARS. I mean, to this day I CANNOT TALK TO FEMALES. And it's all her fault.

OK, that's putting it a little strongly. But still. I sometimes think adulthood is about recovering from adolescence.

Sequence...the book?

So, now, there's this idea of a book. Taking the blog, a collection of undirected, unstructured musings, and turning it into a book. A small, oddly-shaped book -- I'm thinking some kind of irregular polygon -- filled with small, odd reflections and impressionistic reportage about...whatever. Sneezes. Toupées. Street shouters. Triathlons. Execrable Mexican food. Yes, I like it. Going to move forward with it. It is, unless I want to change the way I write, which I don't, the only way to go, and I'm well on the way via my blog. I mean, the blog is the book, in the process of being written.

A colleague has stepped forward with moral support and the offer of designing the book! I am psyched. She has suggested a pithy title: On Sneezing.

The main problem, as I see it, is not so much that my writing is monumentally pointless -- it's that it's offensive.

Within a mere eight blog entries I re-read this evening, I managed to denigrate Catholics, poor people, victims of Tourette's syndrome, the homeless, Chinese gang members, and the proprietors of the La Imperial restaurant in Hayward, California.    

But...well, it was all very loving. In the spirit of fun. Or, that is to say, not insulting in spirit...really. Except perhaps for the La Imperial piece. And...OK, I showed the entry about Easter services to the Catholic friend I attended them with, and she was not happy.

But you know...I can only say that I am a slave to my art. These things are not necessarily things I think about, hold deeply or have any desire to propound for the sake of simply propounding them...it's what comes out. It's my voice...no, more accurately, it's what my fingers do when I let them. It's intuitive. Reflexive. Spinal.

Jackson Pollock, now, there's an example. Lord knows he had his critics, but when you think "American Art," when you think "abstract expressionism," who do you think of? Who's the man? Jackson Pollock. And how did he become immortal? He let it all hang out. He let the muses use him completely, thoroughly. He was an unapologetic vessel for the creative sense. He was who he was and he did what he did and that was it.

So OK, maybe I have a mild degree of literary Tourette's syndrome. But often, I find I craft shapes with my prose that trace the lines of societal templates -- mocking them, caressing them, turning them on their heads. And I think after so many years of not doing things, of not knowing which way to go, of rejecting my voice as an…all right, as an artist, a writer…it's time for me to reject doubt. To close my ears to the imagined scolds of critics.

I remember the words of the master sculptor with whom I apprenticed in days of yore: "Be ruthless in the pursuit of your art." That is what I must do.

Of course, he did end up leaving his wife, taking up with another woman, alienating his children and moving to Maryland.

Here's what to drive when you're making for the border with your girlfriend's child.

You're thought the kid was yours when you left, but now you're not sure.

He wants grape juice.

Shouters

The Preamble: Here's my thesis tonight: for the San Francisco Bay Area, Ronald Reagan's most vivid legacy is not the corporatists and yahoos who now run our country, but rather the shouter.

As Governor, Mr. Reagan slashed funding for the state's mental hospitals, casting into the street thousands of patients, many the casualties of the previous decade's experimental excesses, for whom a lifetime of medicated, institutional restraint was clearly indicated. As such, the sidewalks of early 1970s San Francisco and Berkeley filled up with a subspecies of the homeless distinguished by oratory fervor -- Tourette's-like declamations on any range or topics, though more often on no topic at all.

The Shouters: There was a gentleman known as Serge, who anyone who attended the University of California, Berkeley in the late '70s and early '80s will remember wandering up Telegraph Avenue in his tattered green army jacket, uncut, unkempt, unwashed red hair reined in only by a large half-circle of styrofoam tied to his head with a rag.

Rumor had it that Serge had been a fellow at the Rand Institute until he burned himself out on acid. He now spent his days staring fixedly at the ground 30 ft. ahead of him and muttering, "at which point they went to operations and performed in-out reverse loop procedures over time defined by certain sequences and parameters fourteen fifteen sixteen eighteen twenty-seven times any previously indicated bi-metallurgical route established by convention with consideration of the subassigns," as he cut a swath through the crowds of students by dint of his sheer stench.

But I've gone astray. Serge wasn't a shouter. Serge was a droner. Your shouter...your shouter may drone, your shouter may mutter, but only as preamble to a forceful exclamation, sometimes accompanied by a jump, thrashing action, or other violent gestural activity.

For my brother the paradigmatic shouter is the African-American gentleman he saw lurching down Market Street in a raincoat one day, a large hood draped around his head, saying "I AM NOT....CHICKEN! I AM NOT....CHICKEN!!!!

Robert was my all-pro shouter: Robert had a guitar, some kind of rasty Gibson clone, an electric with no amp. He spent his days "on the Ave," Telegraph Avenue, in a rarified, Hendrix high, cutting chops that only he could hear. He'd walk a few steps then stop to gyrate, drop to his knees, play the guitar behind his head and generally get, you know, down. "Voodoo Child" was blasting in his headphones 24/7. But of course there were no. . .headphones.

There was, however, vocalization. "STAND UP NEXT TO A MOUNTAIN," he'd yell, and that was all you heard for a while, because he was crouched over his guitar, coaxing forth a solo well beyond your range of hearing. Then he'd jump out of a doorway, "IF I DON'T MEET YOU NO MORE IN THIS WORLD THEN UH I'LL MEET YOU IN THE NEXT ONE MMMMM --"

Sorority girls would scream, Blondie's pizza slices flying into the street.

Like Serge, Robert wasn't on the street with anybody else. In his world, there was only him. And, it appeared, Serge.

But Robert wanted to be alone.

As he outwieghed Serge by about 75 lbs, that was a problem for Serge. It may have been his only problem, aside from establishing quadrant sector coordinates in the logistics bay and proceeding within the bifractal time-period procedures established by previous loop reversal cycles. Many was the time he'd be droning up of Telegraph with Robert making right for him -- "HEY!!!! GODDAMN MOTHER SHOW YOU DO THAT KIND OF MOTHERFU -- MOVE OVER ROVER!!!!!" and simply adjust his course for the other side of the street without missing a beat: "...modeling a categorized subassign without reference to previous substantive operations during which in-out loop procedures loop procedures loop procedures could be generally classified over the seventy-three-four-five point five point five point five aspect ratio of a scalar uptake continuum..."

Anyway, you just don't really see the good shouters anymore. Oh sure, there are a few at Powell and Market, and some MUNI lines have their resident shouters...sometimes I think they should rename the bus lines, in fact. The 38 DIETETIC GODDAMN HOUSECATS...the 5 FUCKING SON OF A BITCH!!!...the 42 YEAH THAT'S THE DEVIL'S SPOON ALL RIGHT -- YOU WANT IT, YOU CAN PAY WHAT HE'S ASKING. ME, I USE A FORK.

But in general, the shouters have pretty much either died or been forced out by a more mercenary, addictive class of professional homeless. Though I can't imagine where to.

Ross? Blackhawk? Manteca? I'm not seeing it.

It's significant

Now this....this is really quite important.

I'm sure you'll know what to do.