Deconstructing Reality

I’ve been sunk in work up to my neck but I reached the end of back to back shows and for the first time in two weeks I’ve been able to indulge in some crappy television.

Reality TV.

The epitome of modern America culture.

The Idiocracy in effect.

I was sleep-deprived, overworked, eyes numbed by staring at scripts for 15 hours straight. My thoughts drifted in and out, and my hand was too tired to press the buttons on the remote.

Hogan Knows Best was on.

The whole family was disguised as white trash. Surely they must have grasped the irony of this.

Hulk was riding a Hoveround and had a scraggly fake beard and crappy fisherman hat. Brooke had her hair in an ugly wig with bulky glasses and fake zits. The mom likewise. Nick, ah, who cares?

They seemed to be conducting a social experiment of sorts, ala Tyra, and it looked to be going bad for them. Brooke complained of nobody gawking at her and taking pictures. The wife whined of not being allowed to cut in line at the hot dog counter. Hulk pretended to be a drunk and fall out of his handicap moving wheelchair do-hickey. It was like a moving M.C Escher painting.

This is America: White Trash watching White Trash acting White Trash.

Over on The Pickup Artist:

Mystery was putting it down.

His Zen-like approach to predatory dating is pure compelevision in action.

Forget his ridiculously tall, fuzzy hat, the fact that he wears goggles on his forehead and paints his nails black. The guy is a master, makes the ‘get the bunny’ philosophy from Swingers look like Kindergarten hour.

(This is why I love Wikipedia; while researching Mystery, I came to find out there are notable members of the ’seduction community‘ — such as Neil Straus and Juggler — and one of the most famous techiniques being the ‘cocky and funny’. Real deep!)

Mystery’s sage advice has turned former nerds into Casanovas, apparently… they tell us. He deconstructs the art of macking to girls in clubs, it’s all in the mind… apparently. Mystery teaches us that confidence is appealing and supposedly women are easily guiled by psycho-babble.

Still, it’s better than watching Hulk’s stupid ass and his soul-sucking family act better than his fellow Americans, most of them probably his fans, mocking them for the cameras, the ratings, and the cash.

At the end of the show the Hulkster gave his family permission to whip off the wigs and peel off the makeup and strut around the park like imbecilic royalty. Brooke had her bleach blond hair flowing and teenage boys drooled because she’s on MTV and oiled down and the moral of the story was if you’re going to be vapid and spoiled it’s best to be famous.

The best part was when Brooke-in-disguise asked a boy if he thought Brooke Hogan-from-the-boob tube was fat, and the boy replied to her, “not really.” She grimaced, because even though she’s a touch daft, she gets that that means he thinks she’s kinda fat.

• The Internet is chaos theory at work.

That was unexpected.

Earth Pixelated

Tonight I saw that the Earth was nothing but a pixelated dot on an eggplant-colored screen/sky.

But first I took a walk to the store…

and discovered that Autum might really might be around the corner. The winds whipping down from Coldwater and Dixie Canyons into the valley boldly pushed up on me, taunting me for leaving my sweater behind — and there was that moment, when I reached for it, but thought at the last second I didn’t need it — and so I hurried to the store in a t-shirt with a Picasso-esque guitar player all contorted on the front as fast as my twig legs would allow.

The moon came up all pale and slim, curved like some lunar supermodel.

The concrete river smelled like garbage and fish, of which I’m sure there’s plenty of the former and not much of the later. The moon cast a silver hoop on the dark, dark water.

I got to the store and momentarily forgot what it was I wanted to buy. It was something. Something random. Oh yeah!

Martinelli’s apple juice.

I was craving the little 10-ounce bottle. I wouldn’t settle for Tots, didn’t want plastic. It was a stubborn craving.

Back in college I wrote a collection of short stories called Craving the Cringe. One of them was about two teenage lovers getting stuck in an abandon house on New Year’s. It was funny, sweet, and total crap.

I bought a Twix bar while I was there because I figured I needed something to go with the apple juice. That’s how it starts; every need, want, desire creates a new need, want, and desire. Thus the endless chain of acquiring your happiness piecemeal. It’s as if we see our lives as objects we must pick up along the way, and every time we think we’re about to have the complete set, a new version/product/line is announced and the process begins again.

That’s what buying candy is like for me. I don’t go into the store and buy a Twix bar without contemplating the entire advertising/capitalistic mindfuck of it.

Without feeling like a sucker.

It is with these thoughts in my head and the taste of chocolate and caramel in my mouth that I stumbled across this historic event captured by NASA. I drank my juice, humbled in a life-altering way. All our commotion, the daily business of being a human and trying to survive, the epicness of it, suddenly felt petty and small.

The first ever picture of our planet from Mars:

That’s what the rover looks up at and sees.

Not much.

You have to zoom in to see it, a tiny blip, a few pixels; but that’s us. Earth. All that living and dying, building and destroying, lovemaking and cruelty is nothing more than a slow outpouring of light.

Although not as glamorous as a live television feed of an astronaut planting the stars and stripes on the surface of moon, this little unassuming image had a great affect on me and after viewing it, zooming in and out on the dot-known-as-Earth, I felt as if the world was slightly smaller, and bigger, and somehow clearer, and yet, more perplexing.

It’s as if our species were the smallest Russian doll and we’ve just lifted up our lids and discovered the larger Russian doll we’ve been hiding in.

The universe is nothing but layer upon layer of mystery.

And that’s a good thing.

I write this in Los Angeles…

on September 15, 2007.

The signal goes out everywhere.

It’s a Shit Friday

I watched Me, You, and Everyone We Know last night, so I have to try this out:

))<>((

“Back and forth. Forever”

Curious movie, I recommend it.

Speaking of scat. Have you ever considered the implications of our modern day toilet seats?

The plumbing of the human anatomy is arranged to work in the squatting position.

When a person squats to defecate, the recto-anal angle at the end of the anal canal straightens out to permit easy evacuation. If a person sits, the sharper recto-anal angle forms a constriction and so pressure is required to force the contents of the bowel though it.

According to this website we were meant to squat over the earth and defecate, like monkeys and heavy metal fans on a bender. The Romans did it out in public. They were smart about some things. And if it’s on the Internet it must be true, right?

But it does makes you think. A little.

I once threw bobcat poop at my friend in Joshua Tree, truth be told it probably wasn’t from a bobcat but more likely a hawk or an eagle, but I couldn’t convince him of that. He was indignant. As if bobcat pellets were worse than a bird’s.

It’s gone down in the small history book of my life as the bobcat poop incident, leaving a black stain upon our relationship.

“You threw bobcat shit at me, man,” he’d often remind me as if it was a major strike against my character. Maybe it was. We were perched perilously on top some boulder columns and he had nowhere to go. I took advantage of the higher ground.

I often wonder if people stand and wipe afterwards, or reach under while still kneeling and do the deed.

Not often, actually, but I have.

It’s always weird when you’re using a public stall and a really tall person takes a leak in the stall next to yours. Even if they’re not peeking, the threat of a wayward glance hangs over your head and makes it terribly hard to relax enough to let one drop.

It’s probably weird for the really tall dude too.

Damn, it’s a shit Friday. Got to work the next 14 days straight, no wonder my mood is shitty.

Anyway, toilets have been around awhile, or at least squat boxes.

Toilets appeared as early as 2500 BC. The people of the Harappan civilization in Pakistan and north-western India had water-flushing toilets in each house that were linked with drains covered with burnt clay bricks.

There’s a park in China that attracts tour buses of people who line up to use a grotto-lined one.

“Sometimes they waited in line for one to two hours. We told them there were also other toilets nearby, but they insisted on seeing the legendary one,” said a toilet cleaner.

“Visitors are curious about what all the money was spent on.”

The inside of the man-made cave that housed the toilet is decorated like a grotto, with canes hanging on the ceiling, stalactite-like water faucets over the basin and huge stones inlaid in the walls.

Okay, okay, enough of this shit, my inner voice barks haughtily at me, and my literary mind agrees, so I write it down, type it in.

Enough of this shit.

Sometimes, folks, you just need to take a break from all the seriousness.

Thoughts on 9-11

9-11 happened.

It sucked.

It made us sad, then angry, then vengeful.

Now, we’re just sorta numb to it. Tired. What the attractive newscasters and blow-dried pundits are calling 9-11 fatigue.

What can you do?

Some people want to move on, find peace. Others never want to forget, make war. This has been the ongoing argument for the last 6 years.

It happened 6 years ago today.

Every anniversary they replay the original footage from that day.

Twice now, two years ago and this morning, I’ve woken up in bed, turned the TV to one of the cable news channels, and thought some serious shit was going down. Not until I saw the scroll at the bottom say ‘previously recorded’ or whatever it says, was I able to breathe.

The deal is, 9-11 didn’t “change the world”. The world can’t be changed by us. We live and die, fight each other along the way, write books about it, both the living and fighting, and eventually we turn it all over for future generations to fuck up. Our world is constantly being updated with murder and evil, especially when your side gives in to it. But the ant empire has nothing to do with the real world.

The only thing that has changed is the severity of the cruelty, the paranoia. The script. The videotape. Both theirs and ours.

The reason they (media/government) make a big deal of it is because they want to instill that panic, that hate, all over again. There is nothing like fear to make the populace forfeit their morals.

We will never forget.

They won’t let us.

9-11 has been burned into our consciousness, it reminds us that we’re vulnerable and hated and live in a dangerous world; the exact thing the terrorists wanted, and the neocons.

Not all of that is untrue.

But the solution is not more empire. Not more power in the hands of a few.

The solution is how we think about the world, ourselves.

It’s not so much the decisions that we make, it’s how we make them.

Of course, if the technique is pure, the results should be too.

(a ninja once said)

Notes From The Ant Empire: Terror in Friedmanstan

Life looks aflame from afar, but close up it’s just fireflies in a jar.

Is it possible to filter the amount of information we receive constantly? Drive down the road and you come across dozens of billboards, each with customized messages to get your attention, the radio relaying mood and news, your phone keeping you instantaneously connected with your lover halfway around the world; the sights and sounds of the modern world would have a dizzying effect on someone transported here from just a century ago.

Can we stay afloat in the sea of radio waves, television signals, flashing LEDs, Matt Drudge, I-Phones, Bob Dylan hawking shoes singing the times are a’changing? How is it possible to interact in a world of which so much we don’t understand?

Where everything is blurred.

And by not understand I’m not talking about the eternal stuff. Not the big guy up there or what a black hole is. I mean, the basic stuff, the stuff that makes us go.

Look at my hand there, it’s holding a steering wheel. That’s about where my knowledge of the mechanics of an automobile ends, and yet, I’m confidently sailing it down the highway at 75 miles per hour, and snapping a picture, of which I haven’t a clue what makes the image stick to the film.

Our monkey brains can’t possibly understand it all…

There’s too much knowledge, technology, and information out there. The problem is it’s becoming increasingly easy to not learn anything. All our gadgets and doo-hickeys think for us. All the newspapers have cut off their limbs and bodies and nothing remains except the big, black headlines.

The president tells us not to question him; he knows what we don’t and it’s terrifying and tyrannical and we’re better off worrying about something else and letting him protect us.

The effect is we’re a numbed populace distracted by our beeping, glowing, singing oppressors, our pockets buzzing with them, our homes proudly displaying them.

The juxtaposition of thought is a schizophrenic experience. You’re watching a moving, a tragic documentary on the horrors of the Holocaust, cut to a bald genie all in white mopping a woman’s floor while the domestic housewife looks on adoringly, saying ‘Mr. Clean, what would I do without you?’

On the side of your Satrbuck’s cup is a Zen koan.

Standing at the urinal reading the stock ticker in live time.

Star or satellite, what is that I see tonight? If I wish on one and it’s the other, do I still get to find my lover?

******************************

Once again the Japanese have triumphed on the world stage in the other international sport they excel at besides hot dog eating contests: Air Guitar.

OULU, Finland – A Japanese man out-”played” challengers to win the Air Guitar World Championship for the second consecutive year at a contest in northern Finland.

[...]

“It’s great. We’ve seen all the nations, united nations, ‘rocking on the free world’ and that’s good, that’s great,” de Tonquedec said.

One of the favorites for the title was American Andrew “William Ocean” Litz, whose act ends in a spectacular backflip onto an empty beer can. He finished 11th.

What? A backflip onto an empty beer can smashing it only got our Yank 11th?

We. Were. Robbed.

******************************

Hey everybody, the latest in health trends, right around the corner: picking your nose and eating it!

Dr. Friedrich Bischinger, an Innsbruck-based lung specialist believes that people who pick their noses with their fingers are healthy, happier and probably better in tune with their bodies.

He says society should adopt a new approach to nose-picking and encourage children to take it up.

“With the finger you can get to places you just can’t reach with a handkerchief, keeping your nose far cleaner. And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body’s immune system,” Ananova quotes Dr. Bischinger, as saying.

Somehow I’m guessing Dr. Bishcinger either has a tremendous sense of humor or is a nut. To extoll eating boogers as a cure-all is taking it too far.

Personally, I can see how a good pick is therapeutic. Remove the tickling gooey feeling from right in front of your brain. Every animal does it so why can’t we? But I won’t eat it. I don’t go there.

I’m a boogerflicker.

******************************

A short film by Naomi Klein of ‘No Logo’ fame and Children of Men director, Alfonso Cuaron will make that hamster on the wheel up in your head run a little faster.

The same thinkers that say there’s no free lunch, espouse the “utopia” of a Free Market. You can’t get a free lunch but there can be such a thing as a whole gatdamn Free Market? Malarky straight up.

“For me every day is an anniversary of Sept. 11.” – Rudy Giuliani.

******************************

Miles from town, deep into the mountains, over a series of hills, a dense thicket of trees protects a small secret clearing. The hiker found it by accident, followed a humming sound that he heard, knelt to the earth, sniffing it, staring at it closely.

He put his ear to the ground and listened.

His heart beating with the news.

Ba dum. Ba dum. Ba dum. Ba dum…

Bob’s Big Boy, Buddha, and More

This weekend some buddies and I went out for a late night dinner at the wonderfully old school Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank. It was filled with USC fans that looked like they were members of the class of 53′, barrel-shaped bellies proudly wearing the red and gold held up tables of food. I was surrounded by their voracious appetites, the men wiping crumbs from their lips and excitedly talking about the game.

Since when did Bob’s become the after party spot for senior Trojan fans?

Even though my friend and I weren’t sharing plates we each held fundamental reservations about both ordering the chicken fried steak. We felt uncomfortable ordering it if the other guy was too.

“What’s up with that?” I wondered aloud. “What does it matter?”

“I don’t know, but if you’re getting it I’m going to get something else,” he grumbled.

“No, you can have it,” I told him. “I’ll get the fried chicken.”

More and more gray-haired Trojan fans arrived and took their places in front of plates of food and their wives as we enjoyed our meals and talked guy-talk while the Saturday night revelers sped by in their dark cars, heading for some apple martini-flavored salvation.

A gentlemen strode in casually wearing sandals, shorts, and a thin white tank top and with the longest, flowingest white beard to give God himself a run for His money. The man’s eyes were tiny marbles set deep in a cheerful face. I could see from across the room they sparkled with a kind of mad joy only found in the truly enlightened, or insane.

And right then I understood the Truth, the one with the capital T , there is no difference.

The saints and the syphilitic both shiver under the weights of their consciousness. The asylum inmates talk in tongue, the churchgoers shout out nonsensically to imaginary people. Rock stars author gospels more in tuned with my living soul than a dusty hotel book.

I used to think this homeless guy near my house was Buddha because he had a round stomach and never talked and had a sorta serene look on his face always. He seemed at peace with his possession-less existence, as if it was by choice, he never begged. Something else unique about the man, he never made eye contact, always aimed his stare at the space in between people.

He was suffering, assuredly, yet somehow for some reason I nominated him my personal Buddha. I looked at him for inspiration, taking some cue on how to be, admiring his ability to sit on the bus bench for hours and not give in to want or boredom, as if he hid a secret in his bedraggled being.

Then one day I passed him a few miles from where he normally hung around. He was stumbling forward with a determined yet faltering gait, as if some immortal beast was nipping at his heels. I was surprised to catch him muttering and snapping at the air around him. He was indisputably mad, out of peace within himself, it was crushing to see a saint of yourself come crashing to earth so predictably.

Since then I’ve left the random idol worship alone, until the man in the tank top with the white beard that ordered pancakes at midnight on Saturday. Just when we were touching napkins to our lips and symbolically dropping them on our plates I turned around and quickly studied him sitting there under the amber lamp with the ridge veins cascading down the chandelier forming an oval over his head, his soul radiating a holy glow. (I’m assuming I don’t need to explain the image he cast.) As he poured maple syrup, he caught me staring, gave me a knowing wink and took his alms with one giant, jaw-grinding bite. His wife sat across from him smirking over his rude table manners. He might not be Buddha, but there was something there to aspire to, a gentle contentment and glow.

Outside, the night hadn’t cooled down at all, it was almost 90 degrees at one o’clock in the morning. How could it still be so hot with the sun nowhere to be seen?

Driving back to the apartment, saying goodbye to my buddies on the sweltering sidewalk, the stars above mere pin-sized dots on the mauve roof of the world, I had a vision of myself twenty years from now, eating pancakes, a long white beard sopping up the syrup, my wife shaking her head at something I said, and I didn’t mind it at all.

The Heat. The Humanity.

The heat does strange things to you.

I must admit I’m not a fan of 100 degree days where you want to climb out of your skin like some Shel Silverstein poem but you can’t because then everybody at work will look at you differently after that, so even in shorts and a thin t-shirt you cook like the proverbial brains in 80’s era anti-drug propaganda; no, I’m not a fan of those days at all.

The heat was so intense on Wednesday a hiker was gored by a bison on Catalina Island, flipped upside down in the air. I bet the buffalo was sick of being stuck on the island and was burning up under all that hair and fur and took out its frustration on the unlucky hiker that crossed paths with the creature.

The heat was so bad on Thursday it felt like the wind could light your hair on fire should someone strike up a cigarette nearby. The air was practically combustible.

The heat was so intense yesterday the studio sent out a bulletin to conserve energy so all the lights were turned down low. Everybody wore lifeless, hangdog faces. I walked by the breakroom and could have sworn the top of the table was on fire, a slow blue flame spread across its surface. In the dark it was hard to tell if someone was deep in thought, or sleeping, and if there was a difference.

The heat today was like a vicious ex-lover, determined to ruin everybody’s weekend, angry and oppressive. My thoughts were woozy. (No, I’m not trying to be funny) I swear the neurons in your brain slow down on days like these. I can’t write in a furnace, as you can clearly see. Even Shakespeare would take the day off, hop in the convertible, pop in the The Decemberists, and head down to Malibu.

“Forget the fucking sonnets, the waves are calling, dude.”

The heat will be back tomorrow. It is now midnight and the palm trees are on fire. The asphalt has finally cooled off though. Outside the window I can see that the roadkill is now cooked well-done, burnt to a crisp.

Tomorrow I feel like heading to the beach, cut over the hill through Topanga to the Pacific where the cool ocean breeze hides. I wouldn’t be surprised, upon arriving, discovering it all dried up, the fish bellied up on the beach, gasping for water.

Stay cool, L.A.