The Party Boy Rorschach Test

There was a young man in Melbourne who had a party. “A little get-together with mates”, he called it. The problem was, he posted it to Myspace and hundreds of kids showed up trashed and rambunctious.

Of course, the cops were called and they rolled up with the dog squad to put a clamp on things. The party didn’t end there, though, it spilled out into the streets, into a mini riot of sorts. Broken windshields. Taunting of police.

Tipped-over bird baths.

Not surprisingly, the neighbors were less than thrilled.

“There was jumping on cars, just horrendous. Just like a football crowd, the noise was really bad,” one woman said.

“Just hundreds of kids, big groups, large groups coming up and down the street and they were basically throwing bottles, smashing things, picking bricks up and smacking them against the lamp-posts,” said another.

A man said people were in his front lawn, trying to rip a metal stake out of the ground.

“[It] just was out of control. Just didn’t quieten down for a couple of hours. The police helicopter was up about, looking around,” he said.

But as the host of perhaps Melbourne’s biggest-ever teen party, Corey Delaney isn’t able to recall much of the big night.

“I can’t remember. I was just off my head. Can’t remember,” he said.

The Australian media reported the events with hyperbole equal to American standards of “The Youth of Today are Out of Control!” People were shocked, SHOCKED! There was a cry for his punishment, all the parents of Australia wanted to line up and spank him. Other kids wanted to beat him up.

With one party-turned-bad, he turned into the poster child for teenage rebellion/stupidity. Not surprisingly, the events of that night were carried by all the news networks and became the story de jour. While war wages in Iraq, a giant ice sheet breaks off in Antarctica, and the world economy sits on the edge of recession, this wayward ‘get-together’ took over the Australian news. Because of this, Corey Delaney became an instant celebrity.

He appeared soon after on the Australian A Current Affair, in an interview that would kick up his 15 minutes of fame to 20, become an Internet sensation, and forever divide the public into two camps, a Rorschach test of sorts.

1. Corey as rebel, turning the media’s bullshit back on itself.
2. Corey is nothing but another spoiled, hedonistic brat.

You make the call.

It’s no wonder why Corey is a ratings magnet. He brings in young viewers who fell in love with Corey’s defiance, and their parents too. The media can sell it as a symptom of youth culture gone amuck, the drinking and materialism and lack of traditional convention. (nipple rings!) The boogeyman known as myspace also has a role in this circus. It’s a perfect storm of parents’ nightmares.

There’s that old saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I realize that if I was around Corey Delaney I would probably be annoyed by the kid, but given a choice between the reporter’s scolding and Corey’s blunt and truthful answers, I’ll go with the yellow glasses.

The party boy from Melbourne has such an innate grasp of marketing and media he played that reporter effortlessly. This is a 16 year-old that knows nothing but the major machinations of culture: style, soundbite, attitude.

Most amateurs get on T.V and babble, waste their time stumbling through mediocre, safe, talking points. Most kids would have acted contrite, played the role of punished and repentant. Corey, however, hurled a beautifully concise rebuttal to all her silly points. He refused to play along with A Current Affair’s charade, instead using it to his advantage to further his notoriety and its economic potential.

“Take off your glasses and apologize to us.”

“I’ll say sorry but I’m not taking off my glasses.”

“Why not?”

“Cuz’… they’re famous.”

Fashion faux pas? Or Marketing chutzpah?

Isn’t it ironic that while the reporter is chastising him for his actions and belittling his persona, she’s helping to perpetuate his celebritihood. This is the clip that has gone viral and has been seen all over the world. She helped him rise to Internet glory, as documented by Gawker.

It’s a mutual relationship. Afterwards, I bet you, the producer walked up to Corey and told him he did great. Thanked him profusely. Gave him a card and told him he’d be calling him again.

In fact, the show did do a followup. And plenty of others bit at his heels for an interview. Even while the party boy was still ducking his parents’ cell phone calls. One DJ paid him to come on the show and then tried to rip off his glasses. Corey fled, his iconic sunnies intact, but returned to collect his fee.

Despite what we may think of him — his fluorescent clothes, his bleached locks — it’s undeniable that Corey embodies confidence, comfortableness in a televised realm, and bold defiance; and thus represents the essence of today’s youth, as silly looking as that is.

“You’re pretty happy with the way you look and the attitude you got, are you?”

“Yeah, my parents aren’t, but I am.”

He’s spun this media attention into a job. He’s now a professional promoter. They’re calling him the next Paris Hilton, a celebrity party-goer.

16 years old.

Nipple rings.

Corey gloated about his fame last night on A Current Affair.

“A week ago, I was on the building site working hard, and now they put me on national tour,” he said. “I’ve got an agent – life’s good.”

Being a child of Andy Warhol, Cell Phones and the Internet, A Current Affair and Paris Hilton, he recognized the opening and took it. The media spotlight produces gold coins. In America, a hooker caught having sex with the governor of New York nets a million dollars; in Australia, the going rate for a party boy who threw a destructive rager is $100,000.

“What do you have to say to other kids who are thinking of partying when their parents are out of town? “

“Get me to do it for you.”

However you view the Corey Delaney phenomenon, there’s no denying that it involved a natural gift of spin, self-promotion, and an inate recognition of iconography. The glasses. The Barbie blanket. There’s also a video of him getting into a fight, which some contend is a hoax. If so, it appears Corey could be playing both sides of the controversy, as some shirts on his website that say BAN COREY would suggest.

I am exactly twice this kid’s age, techinically old enough to be his father. (Geez, can you imagine me with a 16 year-old son? – shudder) I don’t relate to the look, the music, or the scene that this kid inhabits. (mega dance parties?!) When I was in high school I threw parties while my folks were away that were attended by 30 individuals — where we stood around the pool, staring into the chlorinated water, drinking Boones and listening to A Tribe Called Quest — and these were considered thrashing successes; so, there’s not a whole lot the two of us have in common, however I’m all for making the tabloid media look like fools.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

“We got to go but I suggest you go away and take a good, hard, long look at yourself.”

“I have. Everyone has. They love it.”

If only we would all believed that about ourselves, and had the kiwis to proclaim it on national television.

G’day, mate.

Dispatches From Los Angeles: Buffalo Meat and Drunk Drivers

It was an interesting Friday night in the City of Angels.

It was such a day where the city almost lived up to its name.

The weather was perfectly cast for the first day of Spring. A blimp drifted lazily across a dependably blue sapphire sky. After seducing the flowers to bloom all day the sun was laying down to rest over the Pacific in a soft hum of orange light, punctuating the sway of palm trees in the foreground.

L.A is beautiful when it’s a set.

The freeways were light and fluid. I zipped towards the Westside with ease.

It was the kind of traffic that allowed your mind space to roam.

As I passed under a bridge a calcium stain caught my attention. It had an evil grin, wings, and eyes the followed me. A demon of decay. I momentarily questioned my sanity, but then — reassured that I had questioned my sanity, and therefore perfectly sane — I thought about Daniel Johnston, and how he went insane, believing the devil was after him, and suffered from a mental condition, which made his eccentric lyrics appear touched by madness, and therefore, genius; an artist, like Van Gogh, aided by the mythology of insanity. I concluded that it’s good Daniel Johnston lived in Austin and not in Los Angeles, so he wasn’t behind the wheel when he had his mental breakdown; because he probably would have really believed — as opposed to my mere quirky reveries – that the stain on the bridge was a demon; and probably would have swerved into traffic and caused an accident.

Whereas, I just make a mental note to write a blog about it later. That doesn’t quite add up to a mental condition, just weird.

Then again, isn’t the very act of driving, willfully submitting yourself to a “mental condition”?

The fragility of the ego exposed, driving turns everything into a ‘you vs. them’ dynamic. More than just a battle for lanes, it’s a battle for personal space, for respect. Road Rage is impossible in a supermarket. The metal frame of the car and the anonymity it provides allows us to act in an aggressive manner we never would in public, on the street, or at work. You wouldn’t see your co-worker approaching the copy machine, happily singing along to Umbrella, and run to cut her off, sliding your document onto the glass tray a second before her.

I got to my friend’s without any more demonic stains on bridges. He was having a burger and beer chillfest on his balcony in Culver City. Holiday lights adorned the scene, illuminating little pockets of air and lending their charm to the festivities. The beer was kept on ice in a big red tub and the breeze had “seaness” to it, salty and cool.

We chowed down beef burgers with hearty chunks of 100 year-old cheddar; buffalo burgers with garlic and onion and liquid smoke all mixed in, served on a kaiser roll with sauteed mushrooms and muenster cheese.

A giant jug of punch the color of bat blood sat on the wooden table. We freely ladled it into our cups as the moon, inflated and white, rose over the city like a giant spotlight.

We talked about silly things, things I don’t really remember, just the fact that they were silly.

It was around ten o’clock. The party was winding down when the sound of a loud engine caught our attention. We leaned over the edge of the balcony just in time to catch a quick glimpse of a screaming, yellow sports car tearing down Washington Boulevard, a couple of cop cars following behind.
From out vantage we couldn’t see what happened, assumed the chase had passed, but we could see people emerging onto the sidewalk and heading towards the direction the car was flying. The sirens weren’t fading away either.

We decided to investigate, joining the crowds headed east on Washington. Two blocks down we came upon a yellow sports coupe crumpled into the back of a parked truck. A trail of smashed cars lined the road in front of the accident. The cops were still in the process of stringing yellow tape when we arrived. I don’t know how we didn’t hear it because the aftermath, at least, looked violent and loud.

I had my video camera in my car and I brought it along and started filming right away. I zoomed in on the shirtless chollo, in a daze, sitting on the curb, clearly intoxicated, while policemen spoke in his ear. There was an empty beer can on the roof of the car. Other policemen went around asking onlookers if anyone had seen the accident.

“This guy is fucked,” we jabbered to each other.

Within ten minutes there was a news crew on the ground. I filmed the cameraman’s viewfinder, filming the drunk driver, as he was being fitted with a neckbrace. An image within an image. There were maybe 80 – 100 people on the sidewalk, checking things out, chatting. Neighbors were buzzing around, asking each other if they saw what happened. There was a festive feel to the scene, a weird electiricity permeated the ocean fog. We could even smell our barbeque two blocks away. Buffalo meat grilling away. Little ripples of information swept through the crowd. “I heard he was going 100 mph.” “It started at Jack N’ The Box.” “It was a stolen car.”

There was a strobe effect from the red sirens on top of the fire engines, causing our shadows to appear and disappear phantasmagorically against nearby apartment walls.

Plato came to mind.

Meanwhile, the moon continued to rise, and cars, after making a quick detour, continued into the night. The rest of the city was oblivious to the little bit of excitement on Washington Boulevard.

I got some great footage of it all.

At least, I thought I did.

Later, when I checked out the scenes I shot, it turned out that I was pausing it instead of recording it, and recording when I thought I was pausing. So all I had were quick scenes of me holding the camera down at the ground. The cement going by. Glimpses of shattered glass.

By the time I realized this, the perp was already rolled away on a stretcher and fire engines blocked a view of the car. All the good stuff (for lack of a better word) had already happened.

In other words, I failed. Some citizen journalist I am.

Oh well, it’s a new camera, and I learned my lesson.

RECORD/PAUSE

You get one chance at life.

Action!

Ashley Dupree and The Buzz of Myspace

I like to think of media as a storm.

All the various forms of communication and marketing work together, and off of each other, like elements that form a type of weather. Like weather, the conditions of the storm affect us all. A swirling mass of radio and television signals, newspapers in Starbucks, the scrolling headlines in supermarket checkout lines, impossible to avoid.

Some call it “Buzz.”

From Nobrow

The air was fuzzy with the weird yellow tornado light of Times Square by day, a blend of sunlight and wattage, the real and the mediated — the color of Buzz. Buzz is the collective stream of consciousness, William James’s “buzzing confusion,” objectified, a shapeless substance into which politics and gossip, art and pornography, virtue, and money, the fame of heroes and the celebrity of murderers, all bleed.

I think that what was buzz around the turn of the millenium has turned into something much more overwhelmingly universal and damaging to the culture.

It has turned into a storm.

The media weather is always stranger, heavier, during election times. Blog traffic is up. Cable News ratings too.

The passions that are espoused from politics feed the storm, and at the same time are nourished by the storm. It’s a weird-little loop. An exponentially growing loop, however, as every new media draws on other pre-existing media in a symbiotic relationship. An article goes out from Reuters, immediately the cable news puts the content of said article on T.V screens, and at the same time a million hack bloggers like myself go to work dissecting the article, pontificating on the article, the million readers of those blogs (1 blog=1 reader, yes, sad) either agree with said analysis or disagree, but the effect is everybody thinking about and talking about the same thing, at home or at work.

Soon, the entire country is engulfed in that one topic, wading through the media storm.

The tragic and sordid tale of Elliot Spitzer is a perfect example of the “media storm” at work. The story of a governor that was known as an anti-corruption crusader getting busted for prostitution is a sensationally rich one, it involves all the classic elements of the American public’s fasinations: Politics, Sex, Corruption, Hypocrisy.

It injected itself into the public’s conscious at a time when passions and interest were high due to the election and the thing turned into a perfect media storm.

Following that, the pictures of the prostitute, the suddenly infamous Ashley Dupree, hit the media. Interest in the girl and the story spiked as millions of men out there suddenly imagined Elliot Spitzer having sex and were surprisingly jealous.

The storm is now passing through the life of this 22 year old girl, an aspiring singer, like a tornado. (for some reason, whenever I see mention of her singing it’s accompanied by quotes – like we’re supposed to doubt her sincerity… weird)

T.V.
Internet.
Newspapers.

They all rummaged through the pictures and her Myspace page like salivating dogs through a tipped-over trash can.

In these strange times, myspace is treated like a public relations communique. A resume/headshot/press release all in one. Allowing us a sort of personal spin, myspace is private myth-making in action.

That’s why everyone poses like they’re in a magazine on myspace, preening for the camera while partying like “rock stars”.

We know that we’re being judged and gladly offer ourselves up for it.

A comment on her page strangely illuminates the irony of the storm’s attention…

Hi Love,
the Best thing is to take All this Media Attention and Remind the Public there is a War Going On. There are Important Elections, and Many Women Around the World who are Struggling to Survive and Need Help…..You are a Beautiful Human Being…. with the Power to Use Your Voice, Your Music and Your Light…to Make a Positive Difference. I Know it is Within you…..You are a Beautiful Human Being…Take good care of your Self

What’s funny about this comment is that of the 8 million views, hundreds, perhaps thousands were from so-called “reporters” looking for her story. The very people this commenter is addressing.

What’s it like to be Ashley Dupree? A household name overnight?

Millions of people saw the picture of Ashley in her bikini, on the yacht in St. Tropez. Her copper skin glowing with suntanning lotion. Her sunglasses stylish and expensive, her face mysterious, sexy and badass.

She became a superstar, a supernova, as everyone around the country told someone else yesterday, “hey, did you see the pictures of the hooker Spitzer was caught with? She’s pretty hot.”

She had the country biting to find out more about her, without ever even hearing her speak, or knowing more about her than the information on her myspace, her one mediocre song. She might even get a record deal.
The demand for this high-priced call girl is at a fevered pitch.

NEW YORK, New York –

As her instant celebrity status continues to climb in the wake of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal, Ashley Alexandra Dupre has now received a $1 million offer to bare it all.

A rep for Hustler Magazine has confirmed exclusively to Access Hollywood a seven-figure offer will be made to the call girl.

“Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine will be offering $1 Million to Ashley Dupre to pose for Hustler Magazine,” the rep told Access. “We want this to happen as soon as possible.”

Good for her, I say.

She should get a bigger reward for having sex with rat-faced Elliot Spitzer, a man her father’s age, than four thousand dollars an hour.

It also raises the odd aspect that being outed as a hooker is going to net this young girl millions of dollars and fame. Not the kind of message we as a culture should really be sending, is it?

Even stranger, and yet perfect for our times, her myspace page is quoted by news media like it’s an official news source. The media, probably unintentionally, is therefore encouraging the perpetuation of the Myspace delusion.

If there can be a God delusion, there’s certainly a Myspace delusion.

Constructing an identity we present to the world.

Engaged in wishful self-promotion.

Resulting in a dishonest projected image of ourselves.

This is me… I’m interesting, different, thoughtful, fun-loving.

Please like me.

By covering these accounts, the media storm reinforces the idea that we will be thought of the way we would like to think of ourselves.

Mine goes like this:

This is me… I’m well-read, well-traveled, and have great taste in music.

You should like me.

Myspace allows individuals to give the media the narrative of their lives, should something news worthy happens to you.

It’s a development that will change our culture.

Yes, the media storm is our culture. It decides what is culture, delivers the culture, and explains culture. The media storm is the platform for everything, the tool through which we consume, and now with web 2.0, participate in culture. In another sense, it’s how we interact with the world.

Right now, you and me, through the very existence of this blog, are contributing to the media storm; even as I critique and lambaste the culture of celebritihood, sloppy journalism, and low brow interests, I add my own shrillness to the buzz, my own sloppy journalism.

I participate in the very act I advocate against.

The devaluing of our culture.

I sip Sunkist from a bright orange aluminum can and ponder this a little while the breeze sweeps into my San Fernando Valley apartment, cooling it off. Down the road, the 101 is swamped with idling cars spewing exhaust into the atmospheric, mettalic blue.

I ponder the media storm while looking at a billboard, a block away on Ventura, advertising a religion that worships at the very intersection of Hollywood and myth, delusion and money.

Scientology.

To me, Scientology seems like the perfect religion for the media storm, supplying believers with a entertaining genesis story and feeding them an exaggerated sense of self-worth, all the while trading spirituality for money.

Just ask Tom Cruise, he’ll testify.

Cletus and Pearl on the Meaning of Life

Notes From The Ant Empire: The Legend of Zelda and Wolf Parade

My wife is downstairs playing the Wii right now.

A peaceful, synthesized soundtrack trinkles up the stairs and overwhelms the loft with a sugary, hypnotic melody. I am trying to concentrate on my political blog but can’t help feeling lulled into a somatic sleep by the music, a wakeful dream.

She is playing The Legend of Zelda, a little blond dude running around collecting coins by busting open pumpkins.

I think it’s a front for a Leftist cult, imbedded with secret codes.

After hours of playing, you reach a secret level that exposes an organized conspiracy of shocking proportions. You discover the Illuminati’s underground chamber, with the plans for world domination hidden behind a wall.

Link, and therefore, you, go through a sinister portal to nefarious ideas.

Mind Control from Nintendo.

That’s why I don’t trust video games.

There’s too many flashing lights, it fucks with your head, like the banned Gnarls Barley video.

There’s just too many ways for programmers to invade your mind. Too many senses to be stoked.

Plus, too many buttons to push.

________________________

I walked to the store tonight.

The moon hung upside down and looked like a melon rind, a smiling face without eyes. A star blinked, or a satellite. Fast food bags lay flat and run-over on the asphalt, bugs hovered over grimy black puddles. The city felt like a video game to me. A place of constant danger or amusement. A maze of role playing.

It seemed unnreal.

I’m an old fashion Atheist looking for a religious experience in a modern world.

A world where neon restaurant menus stay lit up all night after they’re closed.

Where it’s acceptable to dance in public with headphones on, but not to share the music with everybody else.

Where everybody pisses their pants when the stock market tumbles, whether they own shares in AT&T, Apple, or ACME Anvil Company, or jackshit.

A world where people look at me like I’m crazy when I say that fire hydrants are cartoon dogs that smile at me.

The truth is, if there is such a thing anymore, we’re masquerading mannequins. In a hyper-trendy culture, where anti-trendy is ‘in’, we pantomime ourselves all day, then come home and don’t know what to do with ourselves, sit on the couch with our arms folded on our chest.

There’s a general, suffocating fear of the future, still, we drunkenly continue down our path of energy-sucking consumption, like cows being led through the slaughter house, traipsing through the deadly conveyor belts with Dolce Gabanna blinders, while disco balls throw light around promiscuously.

We know something terrible is coming, but we all have different ideas of just what that is. Environmental Destruction. Terrorism. Economic Collapse. Health Epidemics. Who knows?

The modern world is a shifting kaleidoscope of entertainment and stimuli, fear and media manipulation. Anything of note and weight is discarded by the side of the Super Information Highway, nothing heavy than a feather can fit through those tubes.

Truths change daily. With each hasty news cycle.

Religion is a television show.

T.V is religion.

There are galleries that sell $100,000 works of art by a grafitti artist that tells the Rich they’re rats and Capitalism sucks.

To coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website with a new image of an auction house scene showing people bidding on a picture that said, “I Can’t Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit.”

The machine wins when it devours its dissenters by putting them to work.

When college kids film themselves rocking out to Lincoln Park with Che Guerera posters behind them and posting it on Youtube.

Perhaps Earth really was settled by the rejects of Golgafrincham.

> The Modern World by Wolf Parade

______________________

Sometimes I get a case of the ‘don’t want to leave the house’, but nothing like this woman.

The boyfriend called police on Feb. 27 to report that “there was something wrong with his girlfriend,” Whipple said, adding he never explained why it took him two years to call.

He said the boyfriend had brought the woman food and water during the two years and told investigators he asked her daily to come out of the bathroom.

“And her reply would be, ‘Maybe tomorrow,’” Whipple said. “According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom.”

The house had another bathroom he could use.

It reads like a Raymond Carver story or maybe Bukowski, but this woman is real. This happened. She didn’t want to leave the toilet, she didn’t want to get up. She was that dysfunctional, that depressed.

You could say she was really down in the crapper.

[Rimshot]

_________________

“If life is a game of ping pong, I’d rather be the ball than the paddle.” — Buddha’s remarks upon seeing the sport of table tennis for the first time in 1937.

Waiting for Obama

I’m at work but there’s nothing going on so I decide to kill some time the usual way, surfing the endless summer of the Internet. That’s usually a good way to waste an hour or two.

I’m flipping through the news while dawn’s shapes and colors change into morning and brightness, while I’m waiting for something to happen.

I come across this picture of a spiral galaxy, known as the Sombrero Galaxy. It shows me, if pictures are worth a thousand words these words be a few of them, that life is an elegant question mark — we’re just now trying to jump from the period at the bottom to the hooked line above.

?

With my mind not yet fully blown, I travel back to Earth, to the North Pole, where the Norwegians are building something strange in the snow. It seems their government is putting together a seed vault for the purpose of restarting civilization if things continue to get much worse.

Norway has launched its “Noah’s Ark” of the plant kingdom, an underground vault built to protect millions of crop seeds from climate change, wars and natural disasters.

Which reminds me, I filled up my tank on the way to work today and the bloody price of a gallon was $3.69. I’m lucky I have a smallish/gas-efficient-ish car.I can afford the jump in price, but it still will send our economy sputtering some more.

Every day the news gets a little worse.

Eight soldiers died yesterday in Iraq; for their families, the news definitely got worse. As much as Republicans would like us to forget, or not care, we’re still over there getting shot at, bombed, threatened, and more. The SURGE IS NOT A SUCCESS. We’ve paid for the decrease in violence with bribes, but you can’t buy off every enemy.

Iraq is an open sore, festering and pussy, that we’ve merely covered with a band-aid: the surge. At some point the band aid comes off, and then what?

Right now we’re in desperate need of a hero in a cape to show up and save the day, and since that won’t happen the next best thing is a leader we can believe in, a captain who’ll steer us through the turbulence without the doublespeak, the politics-as-usual bullshit.

Like Pepsi, Barack Obama is the choice of a new generation.

He is someone like us: a child of moderate circumstance, far from privilege, lived in different places of the world, his background is a combination of various cultures, religion, and races. He is a mutt, just like a vast number of us, making him supremely “American”.

He grew up in the 70’s. In Hawaii. He went back to graduate school after some time in the real world. He shoots hoops.

He is a regular guy, but with immeasurable acumen and potential for greatness.

Obama is a leader for our times.

Unless, of course, you think that marital connections and name recognition make a leader. Like how Hillary “led” on Iraq by by giving George Bush the power to launch a unilateral attack on the country without peep or protest. Or her “experience” of being first lady; (all except for the adultery – which she would like us to forget) helping her husband push through NAFTA, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and doing zero on renewable energy while there was still time to head off a coming crises. While the Republicans were destroying the nation, Hillary was plotting how to become president, so much so that she missed the whole point, which is to inspire and lead us, not just how to learn to navigate D.C with the proper protocol and backscratching so you can claim the mantle of “experience” while running for higher office.

If Hillary Clinton thinks she is going to steal this nomination from Barack and still win the votes of every loyal democrat she is in for a shock. Already I’ve spoken with a few ardent Democrats who are expressing revulsion at the prospect of a brokered convention and have uttered those dreaded words, “I will not vote for Hillary no matter what!”

I’m not there yet, I don’t want to see a President McCain, not if I can help it.

I will fight tooth and nail to see President Obama become reality. Tirelessly. Passionately. Steadfastly.

I will simply pull the lever for Hillary.

That’s it. A mechanical motion without any other real option.

I want to believe in this country again. I want to believe in the American Dream. There’s only one candidate that can pull us together again. That symbolizes that specialness we find enthralling in our political figures.

Not John ‘100 years in Iraq’ McCain. Not Hillary ’speeches are just words’ Clinton.

That person is Barack Obama.

This is our time to take over the wheel, tell Mom and Grandpa to rest for awhile, they’ve done enough. It’s our turn to drive.

The Ghosts of Road Trips Past

I wrote about it last week.

In another blog.

I analyzed road trips, past and present. Got a little carried away.

I was excited about a pending trip to San Francisco. I rambled carelessly on the subject, breathing in the road, the smell of rain on asphalt, the long periods of day dreams that road trips allowed, and how they always cheer me up. I mused about the open highways. Big rigs. Windmill farms. Themed restaurants… the like.

The whole Jack Kerouac experience.

I practically salivated over the keyboard as I imagined the good time that lay ahead.

It’s a true American pleasure.

Driving along a long, flat interstate through open country is one of the few times we’re apart from the constant barrage of people and their media and thoughts and stores. Your mind is finally able to rest and a calm focused world appears. Especially when driving alone. I imagine there’s a certain Zen that truck drivers tap into.

The way your mind opens up, how the road lulls you into a focused meditation; road trips have a certain divinity to them that I worship with a good mix tape and a bag of beef jerky.

I’ve made the drive up north so many times, visiting friends or girlfriends, or work, or camping, they’ve all blended together. Memories wander around, like loose sheep, on the hills of my mind, mingling with other memories, drifting places they don’t belong.

The time I visited an ex-girlfriend in Santa Cruz and we got lost in the woods; somehow got mixed in with New Year’s 1997, walking through Golden Gate Park and getting lost in the fog and watching the fireworks explode over the Pyramid Building; intruding on the memory of touring Alcatraz at the knee of my dad, looking into a cell and seeing the empty Carlos Rossi jug from Bay to Breakers, 2007.

It’s comforting, in a confused sort of way, that all these memories get along.

But, after all that anticipation, I didn’t go.

Guilt hung heavy in the cobwebs of my head. Something that wouldn’t have stopped me three years ago prevented me from going — my eco-conscious voice, nagging me to stay put. How could I justify using up 40 gallons of gas for one night of frivolity in the Bay? As enticing as it is?I had the money, that wasn’t the problem. It was the scarcity of old dinosaurs.

We don’t come close to the dinosaurs on size, but one day there may be so many of us that when the earth consumes us and we decompose, we might make the best fuel yet.

It’s selfishness — I think to myself every time I see one — that makes some asshole drive a Hummer.

If I took the trip to San Francisco — all by myself, just for one night — I lose all my moral standing when it comes to my driving habits: the way I coast to red lights instead of braking hard and them speed up gradually; and on steep hills I don’t floor it, like the 405 at the Sepulveda Pass.

It’s called hypermiling, and it would kill me to be robbed of that smug self-satisfaction.

From Wikipedia.

Generally fuel economy is maximized when acceleration and braking are minimized. So an effective strategy is to anticipate what is happening ahead, and drive in such a way so as to minimize acceleration and braking, and maximize coasting.

So, you see, I drive slower these days.Not because my reaction time is decreasing, but because it’s the simplest thing you can do to have a quick environmental, and economic, impact.

Speeding up from red lights is a giant waste of gas. It’s like gulping beer so fast you spill half of it down your shirt. Picture Ted Striker from Airplane. You’d look like a fool doing that, but people still think it’s cool to take off speeding down the street like drag racers in an “edgy” 50’s flick.

I saw a Prius hitting 50 mph on Ventura Blvd. the other day, on a string of red lights, pouring out the gas like Jeff Gordon at the Indy 500 just to slam on the brakes a few blocks later. The thinking of the driver left me irritated, fuming to myself in a 35 mph rage. I look at that style of driving as a relic from another time: like stoning a criminal or washing your clothes in a stream.

Barbaric.

In the words of Kayne West, drive slow, homie.

The world(s) are changing. Both the one at large, the cities and towns and people navigating around them.

And my personal, little intimate one.

The one going on in my head… how I behave. The emotions I feel and fling and hide from… and sometimes address. I just can’t swing up to San Francisco on a whim anymore. Whether or not my sacrifice changes anything — about where we’re headed when the oil runs out — at least I know, when I look back, that I tried to change my ways.

I’m adapting in my own little auto-way.

If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem, right?

And also, I know, it’s partly an excuse.The truth is, I don’t have the same will to be trapped in my car for six hours; and eat Fosters Freeze while slack jawed teenagers fawn over Lincoln Park, behind the counter popping bubbles with their bubble gum; and to sleep on the cold floor of my friend’s apartment, when I have a nice warm bed that is 10 seconds from my computer.

I’m * gulp * getting older.

I can tell by the amount of new fast food places on the road. When I first started driving this treck there were more gaps in the road, fast food dead zones where your hunger gnawed away at your stomach and you clung to the steering wheel watching for signs of arches or giant cowboy hats.

In 2008, you’re never more than 30 miles from one, like the missions on El Camino Real.

Two flags forever joined.One flag, secretly telling the otherhow to flap

And the world at large is changing because that’s what it always does.

It’s just that our perception and awareness of its changing is pixelated, causing it to feel more intense. It’s like we’re ants underneath a magnifying glass, but instead of a child viewing the ant, we’re viewing ourselves, and it’s starting to get real hot.

A man in the 1800’s, in Missouri, say (picture Micheal Landon but probably a lot less strapping) plowing his field and waiting for the trains to bring him a small bag of mail a month hadn’t a clue of the spasms and jitters and perpetual change and chaos of New York City. But New York City at that time was full of scared little people just like now. Not to mention the middle east. Europe. Asia. In fact, most of the world is doing a whole lot better than 100 years ago. But it’s hard to tell we’re better off, it’s just not the way it feels.

Because nowadays, wherever you are, technology delivers a daily IV drip of sight and sound, making us hyper-aware of each blemish and flaw of our world, like a teenager going through puberty.

And I’m not comparing Iraq to a zit.

Or saying we don’t face serious, end-of-the-world threats.

We do.

But we also have choices we can make, slight alterations of behavior.

We can’t let sensationalism and fear prevent us from adapting, surviving.

Truth is, we should never have hit the road as fiendishly as we did. When Henry Ford rolled out his cars the country was forever changed in their image, Americans took to the highways like a junkie on payday, abandoning all other modes of transportation in favor of the privacy and freedom and Big Macs that the car offered.It’s no longer possible to do the things we once did so freely.

That’s just a fact.

There’s a price on everything, a burden. If not at the pump, then in your consciousness.It shouldn’t take the last drops of oil purged from Babylon to wake us up to the fact that we live in a Stock Car Syndrome.

Slowing down a little and taking an extra minute or two on your commute should be the least of your worries.

Drive slow, homie.

Life is Special In California

Lately I haven’t been feeling myself. I’ve been more short-tempered, ponderous.

Existential and angry.

Like life is nothing but a glancing thought and the Nihilist have got it right. Thinking to myself, why pay a man to kill the already-dead?

In a flashing, synthetic, chemically-addicted culture, what’s it mean to breathe all that carbon, the newsprint, the radio waves; what’s it do to us to drink down the plastic?

I’m not sure what all the Rimbaud morbidity is about?

Life is pretty good. I’m well-fed, maybe too well, and I’m married to the love of my life. We’re saving for a house even, everything should be fricken’ peachy.

Perhaps it’s the stress of the campaign, the uncertainty of our times, the voices at work, trying to save up for a house, but I feel like my brain has been under a gentle assault that’s picking up steam, and it’s all weighing on me something heavy.

Like the gravity is twice as strong as normal.

I look in the mirror and my eyes look tired, older, somehow, in the last week.

The open road is calling, and I’m answering it, tomorrow. Setting north on the 5. Through the Central Valley and Steinbeck Country.

Road trips let me think: behind the wheel, a good mix tape playing on the stereo, watching the landscape blur, the trucks moving the world around. I get my best thoughts out on the road. I lose myself in them. Lose myself in the world I’ve created in my head. I am not the writer but the character. A bottled-up philosopher. Wondering what it means to exist… after all, reality is nothing but layers you peel away, like a blooming onion at Outback Steakhouse. Our lives spool like twine, and time pools in our eyes… what’s it all for? Is there a God? Is Suffering the Noble Truth?

We are One with the Sky and the Rock and the Ground… and then again, we’re not.

I’m eating at Outback Steakhouse, a typical American Restaurant, Australian themed, boomerangs fixed to the walls, surfboards hanging from the ceiling — but also, at the same time, I’m driving in the middle of California, the middle of nowhere — and the waitress comes over and takes the plate with the discards of the blooming onion on it, after I devoured every layer until what was left was nothing but the fried batter crumbled on the plate, and she asks if there’s anything more?

I tell her, “Cogito ergo sum.”

I’m heading to San Francisco for the night. The city by the bay.

Golden Gate Bridge, trolleys, surly homeless people, mysterious misty nights, all that stuff. The plan is to visit some friends, drink some micro-brews and quote George Saunders.

Maybe I can change my mood around, you know?

I’ve already got a story going and I haven’t even started driving. A story about a man eating a Blooming Onion. What should he do next? Mope some more? Any suggestions?

I’ll pick it up later, when I’m on the road.

Right now I’m just settling in from work, starting to type, deciding what to put on the I-tunes playlist. The one titled Stunted Wonderment©. I try to relax by detaching myself from the media onslaught, the technological blitz, but at same time I’m feeding it. I write diatribes designed for deaf ears. In many ways I’m the worst offender, a bottom feeder. Blogs and Reality Shows, Links and Videos and Flickr flicks.

Turtle shit all the way down.

A series of disappointments, one after the other.

Did you know Yertle the turtle is based on Hitler?

Isn’t that a twisted thing to do to a child?

See what I mean?

Just plain crankiness; really unbecoming of me.

I’m beside myself like a Siamese twin.

I look out the window at the hills, but it’s so foggy it’s hard to see the expensive glow of the million-dollar homes perched perilously on top the craggy ridges of the Santa Monica Mountains. The only West/East mountain range in California. Proof that the Los Angeles Basin has been spinning around in circles forever, and it’s nothing new. There’s no heaven above, just the thick, soupy fog reflecting the amber city lights down on us, so everything stands sepia-drenched and blurry, like fossilized saplings, in a dripping, waxy smear. It’s like looking through scorpion eyes, I’d imagine.

This is the view on a clearer night.

And that’s when it comes to me… what I need.

What my soul is craving at this precise moment.

There’s one song that always makes these February Blues go away… this philosophical bummer-kick… this traveling solipsistic cliche’.

• California Stars, by Billy Bragg and Wilco.

I’d like to rest my heavy head tonight
On a bed of california stars
I’d like to lay my weary bones tonight
On a bed of california stars

I’d love to feel your hand touching mine
And tell me why I must keep working on
Yes, I’d give my life to lay my head tonight
On a bed of california stars

I’d like to dream my troubles all away
On a bed of california stars
Jump up from my starbed and make another day
Underneath my california stars

They hang like grapes on vines that shine
And warm the lovers glass lke friendly wine
So, I’d give this world
Just to dream a dream with you
On our bed of california stars

It’s not the best video, but the sound is good and it’s at the Greek Theater, here in L.A, underneath the stars… so you gotta love it. Every time I hear California Stars, I picture Woodie Guthrie, who penned it, riding the rails, camping out with migrant workers, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, playing his ‘This Machine Kills Fascist’ guitar, and scribbling the lyrics in a weathered, dusty journal.

The image makes me smile.

Don’t worry, I tell myself.

Everything mellows out eventually.

Remember, life is special here in California. That’s honey in the sky, kids.

ENJOY