Reanimation
I'm back. I had planned to start this update with "no, I haven't been killed in traffic", but... well, you'll see the irony of that in a moment. Numerous time sinks, some of them holiday related, have surfaced in recent weeks, and as a result LJ has fallen into the "non-essential chores" category on my list of priorities, the rank just below "sleep". But those things are (mostly) finished now, so to appease you all, I now spew forth a list of riveting events that have befallen me during my silence in one mighty über-entry.
-Got hit by a car. No, not at the Devil's Intersection, but a whole 2 blocks away. In a crosswalk, appropriately enough. I was crossing via bicycle when a SUV sped out of the right turn lane (i.e. the "traffic lights? What traffic lights?" lane) and then... SMACK. I remember earlier in the day I'd passed a squashed orange tabby in the very same lane and thought what a bad omen it was. I got up off the street and took a mental inventory. "Not dead. No urgent bleeding. No known fractures. I bet I can just get up and be on my... dammit." The bike was broken. Bent frame, bent pedals. Some people, after just surviving an accident powerful enough to warp metal without serious injury, would either be hysterically shaken or praising the heavens for being alive. I however, being the enormously petty creature that I admittedly am, immediately became annoyed that I had just blown $50 fixing the same bike the day before, that this happened just two days before the date when I wouldn't have to cross this intersection again for months, and that I was probably going to miss the bus now. The woman who hit me had stopped and gotten out of her BMW X5. She was very apologetic and quickly offered to transport me somewhere for repairs and to pay for the damages, so I wasn't angry... although she might have just been concerned about a lawsuit. It turned out the bike was beyond repair and needed replacement, though the replacement bicycle is actually superior to the original and has decent brakes, so I guess some good came of it. Later I visited an excessively expensive doctor, which she also paid for, and after what seemed a less than thorough examination he found nothing seriously wrong. I'm reasonably healed now, though my hip is still mildly sore. All in all, the whole experience was irritating and time consuming.
-Endured the holidays. Celebrated by sleeping, when permitted. Some see the holidays as a spiritual time of family togetherness, others see it as a soulless corporate grab for our wallets... to me, it's just another time sink. There was a minor family gathering with a vegan sibling present. They brought their pair of rampaging pit bulls, one of which has one white eye and must wear a muzzle or it will annihilate all life in the area. It resembles Marilyn Manson crossed with Hannibal Lechter crossed with Satan, and its name is "Tofu". Xmas dinner was spent sitting directly across from my sibling who remained fixated on my plate while attempting to convince me of the merit of "tofurkey". You know, I'd have more respect for vegan foods if there weren't so many imitating meat. A vegetarian meal ought to be able to stand on its own merits, because when something tries to be meat it creates an expectation inherently unfulfillable by pseudomeat. Pseudomeat is for vegetarians who don't like being vegetarian, and that sends a bad message to the rest of the world.
-Had my camera break. It was a piece of crap to begin with, slowly losing functionality over time, so I wasn't terribly shocked. I'll see if the warranty will cover it. Beware the Mustek DV5500. It has since been replaced with the Canon SD300 which works better so far and can record video at up to 60 fps, but with which I am much more concerned about breaking due to the larger investment and shorter warranty.
-Encountered new buslings:
The Future: Something about man slumped over in the back seat of the bus, unconscious, wearing a McDonalds cap and a hoodie with the words "I AM THE FUTURE" printed on it is just so... poetic.
Mass Transit Messiah: A round, scruffy old man wearing a flannel shirt and corduroy pants. He also wears an assortment of ivory beads and rocks bound together by leather straps around his neck, and carries a wooden staff with faces carved into the double-pronged top end and parrot feathers hanging off it from a leather cord. As we pass through a rural section of Southern California on our route, he points out the window and excitedly exclaims "Look! Sheeps! There's sheeps!" to his large, Native American (?) wife (?) sitting nearby. Without thinking, I remark "yeah, there's horses back there, too". In doing so, I have violated the very first rule of bus-going: You Do Not Speak to People You Don't Know. I realize my error too late... conversation is imminent. He turns to me, and the sermon begins.
He starts by showing me his rock, the grey one around his neck. He shows me the various bumps and grooves on it, claiming they form the image of eagle. "These are the wings, this is the beak", etc. I don't see anything, but whatever. This isn't so bad. But then he points to a dark spot on the stone and says "and this is the blood of the people of Afghanistan spilled by the United States, crying in out in pain as they are killed in their beds by American bombs."
Oh, shit.
You see, this is no ordinary grey rock, it is "the Holy Grail written in the Earth" by Jesus Christ himself, revealed to this man while walking on the beach on the morning of September 11th. I smile and nod like I've never smiled and nodded before. He points to more unintelligible rock bumps. These allegedly spell out "fin" (as in the French word), which signifies the end of peace or the world or something. Then he talks about his stick. He made this stick after losing his other stick, fashioning it from the lower section of a lemon tree outside his apartment. You're not supposed to cut sticks from that part of the tree, but he did it anyway because the voice of God instructed him to do so. He colored the stick using "candy apple red" from Pep Boys. Then, for some reason, he starts to tell me about his lawsuit against an auto repair place for ripping him off while repairing his pickup. On command, his wife produces a black folder filled with legal documents and photographs of his truck, which he hands to me to examine. His gear thingy is broken, or somesuch, and this is the mechanic's fault. His stop looms closer, so he goes back to the Grail. The "f" in "fin" stands for "philistine" which means "Palestine". The "i" stands for "Iraq" and the "n" stands for "North Korea". But if you turn it over, the "n" is also a "u" and "nu" stands for "nuclear war", so the apocalypse is on its way. And with that, his stop comes up and he asks me for change for $5 before being unleashed upon an unsuspecting city.
I'm reminded of South Park:
Jeff: Wait a minute! Butt sex!
Chef: Butt sex?
Jeff: Butt sex requires a lot of lubrication, right? Lubrication. Lubruh... Chupuh... Chupacabra's the, the goat killer of Mexican folklore. Folklore is stories from the past that are often fictionalized. Fictionalized to heighten drama. Drama students! Students at colleges usually have bicycles! Bi, bian, binary. It's binary code!
Chef: Who's havin' butt sex?"
Vagabond Bus Pirate: He has long, blond hair in a bandanna, one white eye (milky white, not Manson pit bull white), no front teeth, and a bucket full of stuff. He boards the bus and asks if he can sit next to me. And that's all it takes. Conversation is imminent. He first accuses me of looking like Keanu Reeves, and from there we speak of many things (fools and kings, haha... eh)... the drum sticks in his bucket, the miniature toy drum in his bucket, why Megadeth is way more awesome than Kiss because Kiss wears makeup and that's for girls, the weather in Chicago, the virtues of bathing in streams, why you need to not be afraid and embrace your potential because death could come at any moment, and finally, his upcoming trip to the casting call for Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3. Before he gets off (just 2 stops short of mine... he apparently lives under the bridge near my dwelling), he gives me the phone number and tells me he'll see me there. I called the number which referred me to their website, where they said "Missing teeth, wandering eyes and serial killer looks are best with real long hair & beards." I think he's got a good shot.
-Attended the casting call for Pirates of the Caribbean. It's not every day I'm given a casting recommendation by a homeless bus pirate, so I decided I may as well act on it. I took a freakishly long bus trip down to Universal City, during which I read The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. "At the Mountains of Madness" is painfully pedantic and inexplicably penguin-filled, but I'm determined to finish it. I also read through Lovecraft's take on weird fiction, in which pours out his bile and contempt for the human condition in a series of sour discourses. It's great.
"Only a cynic can create horror - for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them."
Once at my stop, I had to take a subway train the rest of the way into Hollywood. I'd never taken one before, so it was an experience. This opens up a whole new possibility: trainlings. I didn't encounter any such creatures on my short trip, though I did run into two unusually chatty handicapped men on separate occasions. I got off at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and the entire population of California was there, though I did not see Vagabond Bus Pirate. The line for the casting call wound around the block through a poorly schedule farmer's market and back to its beginning, like an Ouroburos. Many people dressed as pirates and wenches and many had naturally long, curly facial hair (just the pirates). The line moved with surprising rapidity, however, and before long I was entered in the database and on my way. Those chosen will get to go to "pirate boot camp", where they will suffer 16 hour per day training for nominal payment, if any. Joy.
An announcement: I will be attending Further Confusion this year, for the first time. I will be bringing my laptop so I will theoretically be contactable online (AIM: Trikotomi). I don't mind seeing people, so if anyone reading will be there, you may look me up. If anyone reading doesn't know what Further Confusion is, it's a convention about... confusion.
-Got hit by a car. No, not at the Devil's Intersection, but a whole 2 blocks away. In a crosswalk, appropriately enough. I was crossing via bicycle when a SUV sped out of the right turn lane (i.e. the "traffic lights? What traffic lights?" lane) and then... SMACK. I remember earlier in the day I'd passed a squashed orange tabby in the very same lane and thought what a bad omen it was. I got up off the street and took a mental inventory. "Not dead. No urgent bleeding. No known fractures. I bet I can just get up and be on my... dammit." The bike was broken. Bent frame, bent pedals. Some people, after just surviving an accident powerful enough to warp metal without serious injury, would either be hysterically shaken or praising the heavens for being alive. I however, being the enormously petty creature that I admittedly am, immediately became annoyed that I had just blown $50 fixing the same bike the day before, that this happened just two days before the date when I wouldn't have to cross this intersection again for months, and that I was probably going to miss the bus now. The woman who hit me had stopped and gotten out of her BMW X5. She was very apologetic and quickly offered to transport me somewhere for repairs and to pay for the damages, so I wasn't angry... although she might have just been concerned about a lawsuit. It turned out the bike was beyond repair and needed replacement, though the replacement bicycle is actually superior to the original and has decent brakes, so I guess some good came of it. Later I visited an excessively expensive doctor, which she also paid for, and after what seemed a less than thorough examination he found nothing seriously wrong. I'm reasonably healed now, though my hip is still mildly sore. All in all, the whole experience was irritating and time consuming.
-Endured the holidays. Celebrated by sleeping, when permitted. Some see the holidays as a spiritual time of family togetherness, others see it as a soulless corporate grab for our wallets... to me, it's just another time sink. There was a minor family gathering with a vegan sibling present. They brought their pair of rampaging pit bulls, one of which has one white eye and must wear a muzzle or it will annihilate all life in the area. It resembles Marilyn Manson crossed with Hannibal Lechter crossed with Satan, and its name is "Tofu". Xmas dinner was spent sitting directly across from my sibling who remained fixated on my plate while attempting to convince me of the merit of "tofurkey". You know, I'd have more respect for vegan foods if there weren't so many imitating meat. A vegetarian meal ought to be able to stand on its own merits, because when something tries to be meat it creates an expectation inherently unfulfillable by pseudomeat. Pseudomeat is for vegetarians who don't like being vegetarian, and that sends a bad message to the rest of the world.
-Had my camera break. It was a piece of crap to begin with, slowly losing functionality over time, so I wasn't terribly shocked. I'll see if the warranty will cover it. Beware the Mustek DV5500. It has since been replaced with the Canon SD300 which works better so far and can record video at up to 60 fps, but with which I am much more concerned about breaking due to the larger investment and shorter warranty.
-Encountered new buslings:
The Future: Something about man slumped over in the back seat of the bus, unconscious, wearing a McDonalds cap and a hoodie with the words "I AM THE FUTURE" printed on it is just so... poetic.
Mass Transit Messiah: A round, scruffy old man wearing a flannel shirt and corduroy pants. He also wears an assortment of ivory beads and rocks bound together by leather straps around his neck, and carries a wooden staff with faces carved into the double-pronged top end and parrot feathers hanging off it from a leather cord. As we pass through a rural section of Southern California on our route, he points out the window and excitedly exclaims "Look! Sheeps! There's sheeps!" to his large, Native American (?) wife (?) sitting nearby. Without thinking, I remark "yeah, there's horses back there, too". In doing so, I have violated the very first rule of bus-going: You Do Not Speak to People You Don't Know. I realize my error too late... conversation is imminent. He turns to me, and the sermon begins.
He starts by showing me his rock, the grey one around his neck. He shows me the various bumps and grooves on it, claiming they form the image of eagle. "These are the wings, this is the beak", etc. I don't see anything, but whatever. This isn't so bad. But then he points to a dark spot on the stone and says "and this is the blood of the people of Afghanistan spilled by the United States, crying in out in pain as they are killed in their beds by American bombs."
Oh, shit.
You see, this is no ordinary grey rock, it is "the Holy Grail written in the Earth" by Jesus Christ himself, revealed to this man while walking on the beach on the morning of September 11th. I smile and nod like I've never smiled and nodded before. He points to more unintelligible rock bumps. These allegedly spell out "fin" (as in the French word), which signifies the end of peace or the world or something. Then he talks about his stick. He made this stick after losing his other stick, fashioning it from the lower section of a lemon tree outside his apartment. You're not supposed to cut sticks from that part of the tree, but he did it anyway because the voice of God instructed him to do so. He colored the stick using "candy apple red" from Pep Boys. Then, for some reason, he starts to tell me about his lawsuit against an auto repair place for ripping him off while repairing his pickup. On command, his wife produces a black folder filled with legal documents and photographs of his truck, which he hands to me to examine. His gear thingy is broken, or somesuch, and this is the mechanic's fault. His stop looms closer, so he goes back to the Grail. The "f" in "fin" stands for "philistine" which means "Palestine". The "i" stands for "Iraq" and the "n" stands for "North Korea". But if you turn it over, the "n" is also a "u" and "nu" stands for "nuclear war", so the apocalypse is on its way. And with that, his stop comes up and he asks me for change for $5 before being unleashed upon an unsuspecting city.
I'm reminded of South Park:
Jeff: Wait a minute! Butt sex!
Chef: Butt sex?
Jeff: Butt sex requires a lot of lubrication, right? Lubrication. Lubruh... Chupuh... Chupacabra's the, the goat killer of Mexican folklore. Folklore is stories from the past that are often fictionalized. Fictionalized to heighten drama. Drama students! Students at colleges usually have bicycles! Bi, bian, binary. It's binary code!
Chef: Who's havin' butt sex?"
Vagabond Bus Pirate: He has long, blond hair in a bandanna, one white eye (milky white, not Manson pit bull white), no front teeth, and a bucket full of stuff. He boards the bus and asks if he can sit next to me. And that's all it takes. Conversation is imminent. He first accuses me of looking like Keanu Reeves, and from there we speak of many things (fools and kings, haha... eh)... the drum sticks in his bucket, the miniature toy drum in his bucket, why Megadeth is way more awesome than Kiss because Kiss wears makeup and that's for girls, the weather in Chicago, the virtues of bathing in streams, why you need to not be afraid and embrace your potential because death could come at any moment, and finally, his upcoming trip to the casting call for Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3. Before he gets off (just 2 stops short of mine... he apparently lives under the bridge near my dwelling), he gives me the phone number and tells me he'll see me there. I called the number which referred me to their website, where they said "Missing teeth, wandering eyes and serial killer looks are best with real long hair & beards." I think he's got a good shot.
-Attended the casting call for Pirates of the Caribbean. It's not every day I'm given a casting recommendation by a homeless bus pirate, so I decided I may as well act on it. I took a freakishly long bus trip down to Universal City, during which I read The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. "At the Mountains of Madness" is painfully pedantic and inexplicably penguin-filled, but I'm determined to finish it. I also read through Lovecraft's take on weird fiction, in which pours out his bile and contempt for the human condition in a series of sour discourses. It's great.
"Only a cynic can create horror - for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them."
Once at my stop, I had to take a subway train the rest of the way into Hollywood. I'd never taken one before, so it was an experience. This opens up a whole new possibility: trainlings. I didn't encounter any such creatures on my short trip, though I did run into two unusually chatty handicapped men on separate occasions. I got off at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, and the entire population of California was there, though I did not see Vagabond Bus Pirate. The line for the casting call wound around the block through a poorly schedule farmer's market and back to its beginning, like an Ouroburos. Many people dressed as pirates and wenches and many had naturally long, curly facial hair (just the pirates). The line moved with surprising rapidity, however, and before long I was entered in the database and on my way. Those chosen will get to go to "pirate boot camp", where they will suffer 16 hour per day training for nominal payment, if any. Joy.
An announcement: I will be attending Further Confusion this year, for the first time. I will be bringing my laptop so I will theoretically be contactable online (AIM: Trikotomi). I don't mind seeing people, so if anyone reading will be there, you may look me up. If anyone reading doesn't know what Further Confusion is, it's a convention about... confusion.