you really don't want to know

If you haven’t seen I am Legend, and wish to maintain the mystery, stop reading now.

Went to see it with Liz the other day, at IMAX San Francisco. I guess it’s true that the bigger and louder it is, the more fucking scary it’ll be. We’ll sell you the whole seat…but you’ll only need the edge!

Anyway, if you’re gonna watch a movie about worldwide plague, armageddon viruses, etc…be careful what conversation you spark up when you’re accompanied by a scientist who works for a medical school and gets her funding from NIH. You’ll scare the bejesus out of yourself. Apparently, all that shit you see in Outbreak and I am Legend? Yeah, it ain’t so unbelievably far-fetched. I mean, the crazy-rabid superhuman monsters thing is pretty much fantasy, but the concept of a virus mutating and making the leap to airborne transmission? Apparently that’s not only not-unheard-of, it’s kinda not-unexpected, considering any human that’s infected with a virus is just a giant petri dish with millions (if not billions) of instances of a virus each taking different paths and often mutating. So, yeah, talk of SARS, multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, HIV, etc, ensued. And we both had bad dreams.

I gotta rent Suberbad for me and Liz, stat!

Funny, how, pretty much the only times I have the opportunity to reflect and/or entertain deep thoughts these days, are during my commute when I’m listening to a podcast.

This morning, I listened to an episode of This American Life, the theme of which was “Home Alone.” One of the three chapters was devoted to a person whose sole job it is to figure out what to do with the belongings of people who have died alone, and have no obvious next of kin, nor friends. You know how, every year, there’s a wave of deaths associated with severe weather, be it a heatwave or a blizzard that knocks the power out? Well, each year there are at least as many folks who just plain die for the usual reasons, but they’re just not noticed or claimed.

They follow this lady, Emily, around while she does her job of trying to find any living soul that’s related to one such woman who has died. The narrator expresses his surprise when Emily classified the decedent as being a “moderate pack rat.” He thinks the house is rather extremely pack-rat-ish. To which, Emily says “Oh no. You can see floor here. You can walk, unfettered, across the room. This is moderate.”

When I was working as a delivery driver in Ithaca, I once had a delivery (in the middle of the day) to a house over on Rte. 13 near the Purity Ice Cream parlor. I had to park several houses down and run to the place, since there’s really nowhere to park on the street. I found the old dump, went through the gate to the back of the house where the main entrance is, and stepped in through the outside screen door to knock on the inside door. In the breezeway, I was surrounded by garbage bags full of kids’ toys and dog toys, bits of detritus just covering the place. The linoleum was destroyed, there was a broken coffee table in a pile of stuff, and the place looked like the town dump had been relocated. The woman who answered the door was in her bathrobe. I’d seen all of this before, in several places throughout my life.

When I was dating Tricia, during college, we often went to visit her mom, who had two young kids. The house resembled what I’ve described above. Junk everywhere. Broken toys, broken furniture, piles of used and unused stuff that someone might care about, or no one might care about. One thing’s for certain, nobody cared enough to make the place presentable.

My dad and my stepmonster lived with their dog, Indy, in a house that transformed (over the course of a decade) from the shiny, beautiful place where I grew up, to a cluttered container for the ever-growing piles of stuff that could hardly be explained. As time went on, I watched the golden house from my childhood memories take on a dingy patina. When my dad died, I spent days and days going through the place to separate the junk from the things anyone would care about. And by junk, that often meant “brand new products, never opened, left in the bag in which they were brought home a few years ago.” And the important things were often buried under tons of…things. This is what lonely people do. They build nests. They surround themselves with things, and cut themselves off from everyone else.

The thing is, my dad was alone. And my stepmonster was alone. They just happened to live together and occasionally get visits from people. They hated each other, but my dad was too stuck in his own “depression” (my word, not his) to actually pull the trigger on divorcing the woman. He distrusted her. He disliked much of what she stood for. He was dissatisfied with what his life with her boiled down to. He was left very alone when my mom died in ‘92, and while indeed my stepmother deprived him of privacy, it’s debatable as to whether or not she ever really provided him with company. And two depressed people in a house can be just as bad as (if not worse than) one.

It’s not something I ever expected to put much thought into again, but hearing this radio show this morning kinda brought it all back fresh into my mind, and actually kinda taught me that this is a universal thing. I’ve seen it a bunch of times, and it’s all over in the world today. People lose touch with reality and withdraw into themselves. Maybe it starts with bad decisions, maybe it compounds itself with more bad decisions. It’s funny to think that the people I’ve known in my life who were “low income” were the same folks who were highly likely to do anything in their power to acquire a vehicle with an expensive car payment and terrible gas mileage. There’s not much sense in it, and it’s a problem that feeds itself.

Really uplifting story, I know, but I just wanted to get it down. I drive through these affluent suburbs every day, and I think to myself that so few of these people have ever seen hard times. It’s not just that they don’t get it, it’s that the concept might not even exist in their minds. They don’t have a memory of the smell of it.

Several years ago, after I was let go from a good career-level job, I fooled myself into thinking my downward spiral was a conscious choice, that I was just willingly taking it easy for the better part of a year before picking up and carrying on. I was unemployed for a long time.

This morning, as I was washing the dishes before heading to work, I thought about the holiday cards Liz and I were filling out last night, and thought to myself that I’d really like to send one to some people who helped me open my eyes and reach for the stick so I could pull out of the nose-dive.

The story is this: after spending the better part of a year unemployed, I finally woke up and started looking around for a job. Eventually, I saw a little shop on The Commons in Ithaca, a place that just opened. They had big chrome wheels and a few car-related trinkets in the windows. The sort of place that kinda turns my stomach, but I needed a job, and I know cars. I walked in and asked the dude if he was hiring, and after a bit of awkward conversation, he said to bring in a résumé. I brought one the next day, and he said he’d hire me for minimum wage. Said a lot of things about growth potential, he seemed to be an ambitious young businessman, and although he kinda struck me as more than a little thuggish, I figured hey…it’s a job.

My first day on the job, I showed up to the crummy narrow storefront, walked in and introduced myself to Eric’s pregnant wife. She seemed to be caught in a world out of her control, and was basically hoping her man would find some kind of money pot to take care of things for her. Nice enough girl, but they both just seemed like they were grasping at straws.

Anyway, first day on the job. One stool behind the counter, which I obviously made sure was available for Eric’s wife. But she needed a real chair. So did I. Eight hours on the job with no real product to fluff, and no customers coming in. After nearly a year unemployed. I went home with a very hurt back. I know, I deserve no pity. But, to illustrate how not-right the whole situation felt, Eric kept his pitbulls locked up in the back room of the shop, and the place smelled of dog piss. The dogs barked and howled constantly, and all Eric did in response was to shout back to them to shut up. Which never worked, of course.

Second day on the job, Eric asked me to help him replace the thermostat on his Mazda 929. I went and looked at his thermostat housing, held the new thermostat up next to it, and it’s twice the size. I went back into the store and told him either that’s not where the t-stat goes, or he’s got the wrong part. He laid into me, said I don’t know what I’m doing, I defended myself, and a half hour later when I showed him, he saw.

I ended up working for him for exactly one week. On the final day, I posted this to VW Vortex:

Final Chapter

Yeah, I’m done. No more Jim at that job. I’d rather bag groceries at the local supermarket than work for that bag of shit for one minute longer.

We go to Autozone to pick up some items to sell at his store (yeah, I know), and he’s telling me why he hates VWs and all German cars: “because those fuckers built Hitler’s parade cars” (btw, he’s jewish…and from what I can tell, not a practicing, worshipping jew). So while I’m trying to bite my tongue, he continues pushing obvious buttons. I ask him why he hates Mercedes if Volkswagen built Hitler’s parade cars. He says Mercedes built all Hitler’s other cars. OK, so I ask how many car manufacturers there were in Germany at this point. He answers two (which I don’t know is true or false, but I accept it anyway). I ask “ok, so if VW and Merc refuse to built Der Führer’s car, then how many people die until they change their minds?” He says “oh, so it’s a debate now, I see how it is” and he’s kinda good-natured about it, and changes the subject since he knows I’m not likely to demurr every time he asks a question. Anyway…

We went over to his “new location,” which is an abandoned, derelict former Jiffy Lube, to scope it out. We run into a friend of his there, who will be cleaning up the landscaping (if you can call it that), and they start talking about the installation of the lifts, and the “big-ass heater” he says he’s getting. The friend says “man, that thing’s heavy, how we gonna get it down into the pit?” The boss says “we’ll get some shvatzes to do it.” Yes, that’s right folks. He’s not only a douchebag, but a racist to boot.

My facial expression must have given away a fraction of my revulsion, because he asked “WHAT?” I said “nothing.” He said “what, come on, what, did I offend you?” I said “nah, nothing, forget about it.” He says “no, really, did I offend you?” I said “yes, that was really offensive.” He says “what, why, are you black?” I said “are you kidding me? You say you hate volkswagen because at SOME point in the history of the company someone decided that they’d build the cars for one of the biggest racists in history, and then not 15 minutes later you say one of the most racist things I’ve heard in years. Yes, I’m offended. No, I’m not black.” and I walk away. I was tempted to just walk back across town and not look back, but I figure maybe he could at least give me a ride. He comes back to the car a few minutes later, we start driving across town, he’s telling me I’m really hard to get along with, that I just get offended at everything, and I ask him if he would have said his “get some shvatzes to move it” remark in front of the black man behind the counter at AutoZone earlier…he says yes, he would. I said I believe you’d get your ass beat for saying something like that. He says he doesn’t have to deal with this shit, pulls over to the side of the road and lets me out, tells me I’ll get my check in the mail. Good luck finding another job, he says.

He’s a liar, a cheat, a deadbeat, a racist, he’s rude to his pregnant wife, his store smells like dog piss, he has no taste or knowledge when it comes to cars, and I know for a fact that his store will never make it.

I’d rather bag groceries.

I walked back across town, feeling rather distraught, needing a job, marvelling at how bad I can feel even without being an alcoholic. I got to my car, opened the door, threw my jacket in, paused for a second before getting in…and spotted a “NOW HIRING” sign across the road at D.P. Dough. It felt like divine providence.

The sun came out. I closed the car door, walked across the street, down the little alley where the calzone shop is nested, and walked up to the counter to ask about the job. Behind the counter was a woman named Tammy, probably my age (late-20s). She was the assistant manager, and she totally made me feel at home. They apparently go through delivery drivers like water, and were always in need of someone for the job.

I worked at D.P. Dough for maybe six months before setting off on a more drastic course to change my life and get it all under control, but that one day really did mark the beginning of my turnaround. Throughout those six months, I had a lot of experiences that brought me out of my shell, sharpened me again, and generally just brought the hermit out into society. I became human again, looked at myself favorably again. Saw something there worth saving. Stopped wallowing.

At the end of a really late-night/early-morning shift at the shop, a lot of us were drinking in celebration of something or other, and Tammy’s husband Jota (a 6′4″ tall muscle-bound Chinese-American karate champion, nice as could be) mentioned that he’d had some D.P. Dough shot glasses made, and there may be one or two left, said he’d see if he could get me one. I was touched, silly as it is, and really impressed that he’d give one up to me, even though I wasn’t one of the “veterans.” A few nights later, Jota pulled up in his truck, while I was walking through the parking lot to head home. He rolled down his window, and held out a shiny pint glass with the D.P. Dough logo on it.

It’s silly to think how much that stupid pint glass means to me. I mean, if it were to break I’d be perfectly fine about it…but every time I pull it out of the cupboard, I’m reminded of that day I quit my recently-acquired, first-job-in-a-year job, walked across town after being dumped off on a side-road, and immediately got a job at place where everyone liked me, and started my upward turn.

I posted a thread on vwvortex the other day, in the regional NorCal forum, asking if anyone knows of any motor-swap cars that have passed smog testing at the State Referee station. I’m within inches of passing my car, after a year of changing and fixing things to comply, and I’m excited to finally get my CA plates. And I wanted to know how rare it was for someone to follow the process to completion without circumventing the rules.

Immediately, and persistently, people posted things like “go to so-and-so, they’ll take care of you,” and “250 bucks and I can get you passed, you won’t even need to take the car anywhere.” This was after I was totally up-front about the fact that, hey…I’m good. My situation is sorted. Don’t need a hand, but thanks. Just want to know if any cars had passed the “legal” way. And of course, since nobody posted saying “I did,” or “my buddy put in the work and passed his,” or anything like that. So, I guess, there’s my answer. People usually either give up and sell the car, or they go to a shady shop and pay a bunch of money to squeeze through an obscure loophole.

I started thinking about it, and there are so many facets of this whole situation that are just sad. First…people somehow think that the rules are there for no reason. I mean, I’ll be the first to note that yes, the CA smog testing system is a bureaucracy that is, at best, only marginally concerned with clean air. More often, they just want you to conform to their arbitrary rules, even if your non-conformist method makes the air even cleaner. But, in a broad way, at least the system weeds out the really bad cars and cleans the air a bit.

If you’ve fucked with your car in such a way that the check-engine light is no longer functioning properly (i.e. you can’t trust that the light actually means there’s a problem, and yes, there are a ton of people out there who’ve done this), then that just shows a lack of concern on many levels. No concern for exhaust gases dirtying the environment and destroying the climate, no concern for taking care of a rather expensive piece of merchandise, no concern for whatever safety you may be diminishing, etc.

I work on my own car. This kinda stems from the fact that, when I was young, my dad made it clear to me that a) the car dealer is the best place to get parts to fix a car, and b) the car dealer will charge you out the ass for labor and parts, because they know they can, and they know people will just pay it. So, at a certain point in my life, I decided I was never going to pay someone to do something I could take care of myself. Started doing my brakes myself, doing my oil changes, fixing things like broken door handles, etc. Trips to junkyards were enlightening experiences, and eventually I started looking at cars just as they are: big puzzles, some of which are easy, and some are a little more complicated.

This saves me a lot of money, but makes for a more difficult life, with less free time.

But most people don’t work on their own cars. They’re more familiar than I am with the mounting costs of auto repair. But, in the face of this fact, my experience tells me that those same people don’t actually maintain their cars. They avoid the cost as often as possible, and they find new and exciting ways of getting around the regulations that are put in place to ensure that certain levels of disrepair aren’t tolerated.

When I came to CA, I started researching what it would take to get my car CA-legal, given the fact that my engine isn’t the one that came with the car. Most of the info I found were ways of registering the car as an “alternative fuel vehicle” to get around the law. Take it to a shop, hook up a propane tank for a 1/2-hour test run, and a couple hundred bucks later, you’ve got a “legal” car in California, even though you’ve just basically orchestrated a big fat lie. To get around what? To get around having to make the car actually function the way it’s supposed to function.

When I was in college, I had a boss (at one of my three jobs) who gave me a lift home one day. I mentioned to him that I really needed a car, and his response was “if there’s one piece of advice I can give you, it would be: ‘For as long as you can be without a car…be without a car.’” He didn’t go into detail, but I could pretty much figure it out. Cars are nothing more than a big pile of oxidizing responsibilities. And, as with anything, those responsibilities are yours to do with as you please: handle them, or shirk them. Most people, sadly, don’t get this. They figure, one more rusted-out junker that’s spewing shit into the air…hey, no problem. Then, on another end of the spectrum, there are the folks who just HAVE to have a pimp SUV to do their thang. Never think about the fact that the tires cost hundreds of dollars each, they just gotta roll in style, till they’re rollin’ on threads. Gas station trip costs $150? Huh. Well, it’s worth it, right?

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Update: I PASSED!

I’m usually impressed, but this one was scathing. In his response to the fact that the iPhone made it onto the list of PC World’s 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007, the Macalope pulled no punches. First, the obvious:

If that’s a tech disappointment, the Macalope hopes 2008 brings Apple a slew of similar disappointments. It’ll be a banner year.

But then it got better:

“I think the biggest debacle of 2007 is the iPhone pricing bait and switch,” says Peggy Watt, a PC World contributing editor and professor of journalism at Western Washington University.

Wow! That’s some statement! Which is to say, that’s some absurd statement with little to no basis in fact!

First of all, Peggy, a bait and switch is when you get someone in the door by telling them the price will be lower than it is, not higher than it one day will be. Or you tell them they’ll be getting a “professor of journalism” and then just give them an assistant professor of journalism instead. That’s a bait and switch.

Yeah. He did. Holy crap, hahaha.

My coworker is out on vacation during the holiday office party, so she left cards for each of us. Inside mine, I found a lottery ticket. Pretty nice idea, though I’m sure it’s not a new one.

But when I saw the ticket, I was instantly baffled, because I have no fucking idea how it works. Aside from the proper way to pronounce Yolanda Vega’s name (tip o’ the hat to you CNY’ers), I haven’t the first fucking clue about lotto. There aren’t instructions on the feckin’ thing.

Interesting episode of This American Life today, in which the second act focused on a local news channel that “broke” an exclusive story about a registered sex offender who was working as a hockey referee for the local youth hockey league. They made a huge deal about it, expressing outrage and getting the community all riled up. They showed a very old photograph of the dude (it was a color photo, but they broadcast it in B&W to look like a mugshot) on screen with mixed-in video of 5-7 year old kids skating around. Like he’s a child molester.

The truth of the matter was, when he was younger, he slept with someone who was just under the legal age of consent. Further, he was never convicted as a sex offender, the case was dropped, and he was required to register as a sex offender as a condition of his probation. Fourteen years later a well-informed hiring committee deemed him acceptable for the job.

The news report ruined his life.

When I entered college, I was dating a girl who was just under the age of consent (17 in NY). One day, while she was visiting me and I was setting up my dorm room, things got hot and heavy, and I put the brakes on just shy of removing her underoos (kidding, they weren’t really underoos, but this post needed comedy). To this day, I’ve been pissed at myself for stopping. Pissed because a) we cared about each other and the time was right, b) seriously, who the hell was gonna report an 18-year-old sleeping with his slightly-underage girlfriend? and c) I’ve always wondered if somehow I made her self-conscious because I stopped so abruptly.

But that was until this day. Today, I changed my mind. I’d fucking die if I were that guy. Those vultures didn’t give it a moment’s thought. All they fucking wanted was ratings.
Sorry kiddo. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings if I did, but hopefully you understand.

When we moved in, our landlady’s husband was in hospice. As a result of one of his illnesses, he constantly cleared his throat, loudly and at length. We heard him through the wall

After he passed away, my own chronic throat-clearing got worse. It got better for a while, but these days it’s pretty bad in the morning. I often wonder if it reminds her of those terrible final days. I really hope not.

Just found out that Six Apart sold LiveJournal. As far as I know, it doesn’t really impact my life, but the details mentioned in the article got me thinking.

I don’t like MySpace, but it’s the social network that most people recognize and are drawn to when they want to contact old friends, etc. Facebook is gaining popularity and recognition, and thankfully is SLIGHTLY less obnoxious and shit-strewn than MySpace. But the fact remains, even if I prefer Facebook, I can’t not have a MySpace account if I’d like people to be able to find me.

For keeping an online journal, I originally created an account on LiveJournal (with some trepidation) after noticing my friend Libby used the service. I didn’t end up using it much, since I was just not inspired or moved to make entries at that point. After many changes in my life, I decided to start posting entries again, but at that time I was attempting to build a presence among friends on MySpace, so I used the built-in blog there. I posted a whole bunch of entries for the better part of a year, and finally realized that A) I hate MySpace and what it signifies, and B) as a blogging software, it rots. Back to LiveJournal. Ahhh, much better, a piece of online software that kinda has a purpose it works to fill. I ported over all my MySpace entries in a couple hours on an idle Sunday.

The thing that bugs me is that, in the social networking arena, competition is the complete antithesis of their mission. Bring people together, make it easier to find old friends, make it easier to communicate. When there are dozens of portals to get it done, and none of them interface with each other, you’re gonna have a bunch of not-so-tech-savvy people (the bulk of the market, I’d say) looking around, slack-jawed, two rooms down the hall from the person they’re looking for.

Facebook seems to be the only service I can find that kinda has a solution for bringing it all together. Having the ability to add applications that interface with the APIs for Twitter, LiveJournal, Flickr, etc, is probably the best thing they could have done.

The article about the sale of LiveJournal also confirmed a sad truth I had thought all along. Not much new business going their way. Everyone wants to get into Facebook and/or MySpace, because they want to put together big, flashy colorful pages without any thought or effort, or they want to get in on the hot vampire-on-zombie action. It’s sad, really. The majority doesn’t want to have a worthwhile exchange, the majority doesn’t want to express themselves openly, and the majority doesn’t want to peruse the open expressions of people who have something to say.

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Yes, today is a bitchy day. Sorry.