b l o g b a n d i t

Work saps my energy to blog. This is unfortunate. I watched Helvetica the other week which was funny because I work at a very Helvetica-esque company. Trust me… it’s hard to keep my credentials as an anarchist when I’m working as a corporate drone. Plus, not being a bum means I have to pay taxes. So far I’ve contributed $56.95 to our military, which is enough to buy nearly 200 M16 machine-gun bullets to help kill Iraqi children.

In other news, I played a $4 Minesweeper tournament on Friday. By dodging all the bombs of 179 opponents I ended up sweeping my way to 1st place for a solid $216 payday.

Nearly 85,000 days have passed since John Hancock signed our Declaration of Independence. Yesterday we celebrated with triumphant patriotism and copious amounts of gunpowder, imported from our chief creditor. One of the ironies of this is that our nation was borne out of the Enlightenment, a true product of its age. Fingerprints of the zeitgeist are all over our founding documents. Yet many of the Enlightenment thinkers despised patriotism and nationalism. They felt that the world was now so multicultural and cosmopolitan — this is 18th century remember, before even Thomas Friedman — that narrow-minded allegiance to one country above all others was ignorant, shallow, backward. Over two centuries later, perhaps the United States of Amnesia has forgotten a few things.

Don’t blink or you might miss this: I’m actually kind of happy right now.

I got the job with Exel (pays $11.75/hr) and I start training Monday @ 10am.

My replacement motherboard arrived and my computer is back up with almost full functionality — I lost 1/4 of my memory sticks, and my onboard ethernet port isn’t working, but that’s relatively minor.

My kitten is also OK, though he’s now a pothead.

And lastly, tonight I played in a few Sudoku tournaments with Remy. In one $2.22 tourney, there were 996 entrants and I puzzled my way to 4th place for a $232 prize. I made $33/hr.

For all of 2007, the big three network newscasts devoted 1,157 minutes for the war in Iraq. Halfway through 2008, they’ve offered up a meager 181 minutes. Instead, the mainstream media inflates generic non-issues into The Most Pressing News Story of the Week. The latest hullabaloo is over one sentence by Gen. Wesley Clark, during an interview with Bob Schieffer:
“Well I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”
To which ol’ Bob startles and blurts out: “Really?!” [Read more →]

Here, for your amusement, is one single sentence from David Foster Wallace. It’s from the short story “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR.”

[The Account Representative] administered CPR, beating at the soft dent of a chest’s breastbone, alternating quartered beatings with infusions of breath down through the senior striken executive’s full but faintly blue lips and tilted head and into the rising sunken chest, the chest falling, the Account Representative taking affordable time and breath at every possible four-beat pause to call “Help” in the direction of the quiet street as, using CPR, he kept the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production minimally alive, until help could arrive, as he had been trained and certified by the petite new-Bohemian almond-eyed Red Cross volunteer instructor — by whom, he remembered, all the students had volunteered to be straddled and infused, and whom the Account Representative had, one spontaneous and quartz-lit evening, bought a cup of coffee and a slice of nine-grain toast, and had asked to the Sales Trainees’ Annual Formal, and had married — certified by her to do, one never knowing when it could save a life, he seduced utterly by his fiancee’s dictum that you erred, in doubt, always on the side of prepared care and readiness to preserve minimal life-function, until help could arrive, his arms and lumbar beginning to call “Help” again and loosen his own stiff collar, sweat moving oily on the tight skin beneath his own newer lined topcoat and gray knit clothes, his own breath coming harder as he kept the incapacitated Vice President in Charge of Overseas Prodctuions minimally alive, pending the arrival of help, at well past ten, amid complete emptiness, calling “Help” unheard, the happily married and blankly kind grandfather of one person’s own life now literally the junior executive’s, to have and to hold, for a lifetime, amid swirls of forgotten exhaust, beneath the composed and watchful eye of his decapitated cycle’s light.

I mean really, this one sentence could serve as the complete story. This one sentence is better than half of the entire books on the NYT’s current bestsellers list.

So, awesome: a lightning storm stole my megahurtz last night. And fried my motherboard in the process. Wish I were in Dublin with a broken heart.

There’s a strong possibility that when the replacement does arrive, it won’t work. Or it’ll work, but my memory will be shot too. Bad news comes in threes, so I’m now also fully expecting not to get the job with Exel & get my kitten run over by a  truck. And I don’t even have a kitten.

Jehovah-Jireh… God will provide. Do you believe it?

I went to a friend’s wedding this weekend in Willoughby, Ohio. The number of bachelors I know is dwindling steadily. My sister, en route to a wedding in Warren, took me to the NE outskirts of Akron so I could hitch the rest of the way. I barely got onto the road before I was greeted with “fuckin’ hippy!” by a pack of testosterogues — bored male teenagers with IQs matching their speedometer reading. [Read more →]

I’m back in Columbus again after a weekend in Cleveland/Sandusky for Dan Gifford’s wedding. I hitched a bit both ways for a total of about 100 miles. The rest via rides with Katie, Kraig, and Brenton. I will do a trip report tomorrow since I’m too exhausted tonight. Here’s some Douglas Coupland (from Life After God) instead:

…I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.
But then I must remind myself we are living creatures - we have religious impulses - we must - and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion? It is something I think about every day. Sometimes I think it is the only thing I should be thinking about.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming. Here’s an excerpt from Slaughterhouse-Five by the inimitable Kurt Vonnegut:

…The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought:
Oh, boy - they sure pricked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things in said in the Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

Moral of the story: don’t be rude to the bum-looking old man eating alone in McDonald’s, because he might just end up giving you $20 to help you hitchhike to Seattle and then you’ll feel like an asshole for traveling 2000 miles and yet still being a shallow narcissist.

Wwwho’s in Ssseattle? THIS GUY.

I arrived at 10.10am yesterday via a Spokane-Seattle Amtrak train and was completely FUBAR. For brevity’s sake I won’t explain, but it did involve paramedics (one of them suspiciously Luke Seelye-esque), vomiting, and a minor panic attack. After medication and a 3-hour nap at Bryce Bahler’s house, things turned around and today I’m feeling well — still fighting the tail-end of a cold though. I’m in Seattle’s incredible 11-storey public library, an architectural wonder. I just visited the St. James Cathedral, which was beautiful, but I think it’s beat by Spokane’s awesome Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist (but maybe it’s just my Protestant prejudice: Catholic vs. Episcopal).

I’m in town til Thursday, when I fly back to Columbus in the evening. I had planned on taking a train, greatly looked forward to it in fact, until I discovered that by “Columbus” Amtrak meant Wisconsin, not Ohio. A train to Cinci would be much more expensive, almost 3 days long, and still way out of the way for my siblings to pick me up. Hence one of the reasons I didn’t hitch from Spokane — also because I’ve been sick. Needless to say, being sick while homeless in Spokane wasn’t that fun. I had in fact been sleeping those nights at the Catholic House of Charity on 1st & Browne, a place for which I have nothing but praise. It was eye-opening too. Their “Sleeping Program” goes from 7.30pm to 7.30am, but lights out isn’t really until 9pm (before the sun even sets!) and the shades are pulled up at 6.45am so that I was generally sipping McDonald’s coffee and reading the paper before 7.15am (I took leisurely 3-hour breakfasts).

The House sleeps close to 110, split between two unequally numbered dorms (about 85/25). I tended to amble in around 8.45pm when there were less people so I got a little privacy while showering. You get a locker & bed (I was #73) but you have to walk dripping wet and naked across the room to the nice people at a window dispensing towels and pajamas. The mandatory showers and pajamas are primarily for hygenic reasons, secondarily for security. By “security” I mean that it’s more difficult to hide weapons in faded, nearly see-through cotton, but they’re also pacifying because it’s just hard for anybody to look threatening in pajamas.

My first night, one guy tried. You see after lights-out the dorm becomes home to a symphony of snoring, a sonorous score punctuated by all manner of bizarre interludes: farting, burping, wheezing, moaning, sneezing, and so forth. This is naturally upsetting to some, usually just met with cries of “shut the f–k up!” But one guy got up and marched over to yell at my neighbor: “Roll over! You’re snoring like a motherf–ker! I told you to roll over and you’re just staring at me like a… like I don’t know what the f–k what, but you’re snoring and I can’t sleep!” I almost laughed out loud. Again, the second night, different guy: “Dale! You awake?” He was calling to one of the counselors (I think they call them proctors). “Let me out of here! The snoring’s so f–king bad I can get more sleep on the streets! Jesus Christ. I can get more rest on the streets!” It’s true, the snoring is bad.

More stories to come at a future date. Library time is almost up, so I’m out. Don’t know if I’ll blog again before I fly out. Be well.

Hi friends, Halfbeard the Barbarian checking in from a public library in Spokane, Washington. I arrived at a rest stop last night ~1.30am Pacific time and have essentially not slept for 36 hours (save for several cat naps when I holed up in a single-occupancy, lockable handicapped restroom to escape the cold). June 3rd I woke up in Buffalo, Wyoming and caught two rides to get to Billings, Montana where a crazy middle-aged lady coming from South Dakota (after a week of branding calves) took me all the way to Post Falls, Idaho. Montana is unbelievably huge… the Rockies are unbelievably awesome. I even drove her rickety ‘94 Geo Metro (manual; 40 mpg) for a stretch. I got into Spokane around 6.30am this morning – after the obligatory run-in with state police on the highway — and was pretty overwhelmed by the city for a while. My fatigue, hunger, body odor, and 44-degree temps did not help. I got a little more oriented this afternoon thanks to the library and a helpful Spokane visitor’s center. I have to chill here til at least June 9th, then onto Seattle. I’m on the waitlist for a bed at a Catholic mission / homeless shelter; if I don’t get in (I won’t find out until 9pm) then I’ll boondock it at a local park. I wanted to kill time by seeing Wasson in Pasadena but somebody forgot to tell me that Pasadena is hella far away and a bus ticket, let alone train, is $300+ so that’s out. I owe a lot of you phone calls but will probably wait until I’m at Suz’s in Seattle and can breathe a sigh of relief. Thanks again for all the encouraging txts & voicemails… and obviously, Obama ‘08. Peace.

Your favorite vagabond is in a public library in Rapid City, South Dakota… no cell phone reception, but at least the intarweb tubes reach out here. I spent Wednesday in Cactus Flat, a non-town that is comprised of gentle prairie hills and no cactus. There I played with prairie dogs and probably contracted rabies from the one that nibbled on my finger. Thursday was Wall, a town that’s sprung up around the ridiculousness that is Wall Drug. This whole part of S.D. is a bizarre mix of nature wonderland & crass commercial tourist trap. The history in & around Wall Drug is fascinating, but I could do without the miles of Western kitsch. I caught a very clutch ride straight to exit 59 in Rapid City and hoofed it here to the library, in spitting distance of SD-16S which should take me to Mt. Rushmore (if I can get a lift). I will probably spend tonight & tomorrow around here, also trying to see the Crazy Horse Memorial and Custer State Park (home to the largest buffalo herd). There’s a ton to do & see in the Black Hills, but not a) without wheels b) without lots of cash. This area is beautiful though and very different from IN & OH etc. My computer time is about up… thanks for cheering me on and all your prayers.