I hate it when this place becomes my personal venting and blathering space…

I also hate how the little toolbar that allowed me to insert links excessively isn’t around for me to abuse…

But I’m really starting to love television, the most revolutionary communications tool devised by man prior to the invention and wide-spread use of the internet… Not just because I can watch Charlie Rose and Spike Lee argue about whose turn it is to talk and what the other one means but because it’s really a good way of keeping up with community events… For instance, what do you do on Labor Day weekend? May Day has never really caught on in the states as a celebration of the worker bees busy sweeping up Walmart or calling you up at home to tell you about this great new loan you’ve been pre-qualified for but Labor Day is an all-American tribute to the values and traditions held dear by the proletariat such as beer drinking and BBQing and getting paid time off…

To take advantage of this day of introspection and appreciation of our forebearers Golden Gate Fields, the local racetrack over in Berkeley, is having a free towel give-away September 4th… The beach-towel has a wonderful graphic of a horse and jockey in a modernistic style and, on television, is enticingly displayed by a young woman who is apparantly underdressed behind said beach towel… Yes, people do wear clothes with no shoulder straps or other support but I like to think of her as some sort of gambling nymph (I wanted to use succubous but this seems to have a botony definition, not a Greek mythology definition… Anyone who can tell me what the fuck I was thinking wins a free GGF beach towel…) luring the unwary or oversexed to the promised land of debt and alcoholism…

Free towel day is exciting as all hell and certainly more than enough of a good time to BART my ass over and play the ponies, but the Einsteins behind GGFs marketing have doubled down on this event by having the giveaway coincide with family day and beer fest! Mom and dad can get soused and pass out on their beach towel after gambling little Johnny’s future on the third race while the children are happily occupied kicking the shit out of the poor ponies forced to trudge endlessly in their tight circle… Au hasard Balthazar indeed!

Family is important, it’s true… One night wired on copious amounts of amphetemines after Krupted Peasant Farmerz played Gilman a couple of friends and I wandered over to the fields to hung out… Little Johnnies were crawling all over the arcade, stealing toys from the cherry picker and kicking the candy machine while mom and dad were watching the Australian carriage-race simulcast with telling desperation…

Community out-reach is important and hurrah for Golden Gate Fields’ intimate knowledge of their neighbors… Let’s all spend Labor Day at the track– if we’re lucky someone’ll get knifed in the parking lot…

In other news I was at Safeway last night buying soap and mayonaise and a couple other essentials… The baskets usually found by the door were gone and scattered throughout the store but since I only needed a couple of things I figured I would be alright… I’m usually wrong and this ws achingly clear as I stood in line burdened with bags of bread and 24 rolls of toilet paper– boy I can’t wait for my turn to dump this shit on the fucking conveyer belt… First I had to chase the spotted old bastard off who thought that hugging the asses of those ahead was the proper way to stand in line, but in order to whisper sweet nothings in his ear I had to cross the throughway and huddle up as well which, with the spotty old bastard behind me, caused all sorts of people squeezing by and having to shift around and, at some point, getting bumped by the spotty old man and having to wonder angrily if he was trying to start some shit or just decrepit and clueless…

Anyways, three douche-bags ahead of me buying a box of Safeway bakery cookies and the last of their party has his arm stretched across the conveyer while engaged in their petty conversation… The cookies advance towards the register, the arm remains in place… There’s enough of a beachhead to begin unloading my burden and perhaps readjust so that my wrist isn’t twisted around and bent back trying to keep the mayonaise from causing an embarassing incident but I’m trying to give dickhead the opportunity to, as the cookies advance, notice life on Mars… This doesn’t happen so I nibble on his ear a little with an excuse me and try to indicate, by beginning to put shit on the counter, that the ample space provided might enjoy company other than his arm… He turns to look at me in a languid fashion and pauses… for a moment… before moving his arm and continuing the petty conversation…

Their cookies cost $5 and change, an event which warranted excited “dude!” and would have resulted in high-fives except it’s not traditionally cool to high-five after a certain age…
-wow, this home computing shit is nice– I’m making beans right this moment…

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I’m rarely incited to genuine anger over media biases, at least not the kind that everyone in the media seems to think I should be upset about. Here’s a good example of the kind of bias that actually bothers me.

So, this mom basically can’t take a joke, goes apeshit over her fucked up cars - all in the name of being a rolemodel for her kids - and now some douchey high schoolers are facing felony vandalism charges. The subtext of this article is that this mom’s a hero, and oh my, isn’t it great that Mrs. Housewife took matters into her own hands and found those obviously evil adolescents. By the end of the article, we’re supposed to be jumping up from our seats calling for the blood of these little assholes.

Whoever has TP’d someone’s house in high school raise your hand. Wasn’t it great? I’m not going to sit here and bemoan the end of a Golden Age of toothless suburban vandalism, but things have taken a turn for the worse.

First, I know this is on par for the immovable ’slice of life’ category of articles. It will always be around as long as there’s war and suffering to make us look for something a bit lighter from our daily news. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

What really totums my scrotum is the celebration of a vengeful property owner amidst a dirth of publicized civic activism. Where’s the story about a mom investigating where all the money went that used to go to her kids’ music and art programs at school? Is it going towards a media blitz during her kids’ cartoons trying to preen them for future military service? I guess not, since all the recent cuts for student loans won’t really leave them much of a choice. Or whatever the parallel would be for this news turd. (This one’s just for fun)

I know, even I’m bored at the idea of reading that story. But there’s got to be a better way. The pleasure of reading the original article is the American Beauty syndrome, where the routine of not having much to worry about is broken by someone breaking their mold and people feel empowered to do something that’s not expected of them. The image of a regular old mom, or any denizen of normalization, going through security footage at her local grocery store is just too seductive to bear.

This is activist journalism for the economically wronged. It’s condoning vigilanteism as long as a quantifyable crime has been executed against your estate. Most papers try to adopt the neutrality of silence on most boringly relevant issues facing their community, taking a pro-economy stance on everything else. When a civic issue is raised, no matter what the angle, they’re immediately condemned for taking sides.

I think it’s sad that the mom took things to the police and pressed charges. Finding out who the culprits were is one thing, calling for the heads of kids from your community is another. I think these things are possible because no one really thinks of it as a community. Suburbia’s adopted the facelessness of big cities without the excuse of social overload. People are pulling back from the terror of uncontrolled interactions, building castles on the hill, and releasing the boiling oil on anyone who knocks on the door. Meanwhile the anger of isolation just builds and builds, waiting for that first fateful roll of butt-rag to be lobbed through the bare branches of their favorite tree.

Let’s all just get to know our neighbors and try to calm down a little.

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In case anyone read my last blathering, and then thought me cynical or something gay like that, I thought I’d put up a link to a Lebanese blog directory of sorts I found on the internet. There’s probably better (by which I mean more easily navigated) directories around but I’m supposed to be working right now:

http://openlebanon.org/

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I recently just got back to New York from Boston. During the trip I continued a long standing meditation I have with myself — figuring out what relatives a city would be.

Example

If San Francisco is a nurturing mother
then New York is a strict father
and Los Angeles is a bastard child
Under the circumstances that caused me to visit Boston (an aritifical intellignece conference), I came to the conclusion that Boston is your dweeb cousin.

But the relationships are not set in stone. They fluctuate depending on the organizing analogy. In other words. The following only holds IF we imagine SF as a nurturing mother.

If San Francisco is a drunk uncle
then New York is a distant cold father
Los Angeles is your bitch step-mother
Boston is your pretentious older brother.

How do you see the cities that you know best? Holla at a brother.

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One obvious benefit of never leaving the greater nest of one’s birth city is that old friends always end up having to return because Jesus is blowing out the candles again or, as the case may be, some relative is getting married.  After the ceremony time was set aside for a confluence of old faces round tables with first burritos and then beers littered about in various states of being.  Somehow conversation wound its way round until my friend began to recount various experiences of being a single woman in Rome which is most easily compared to that of a young and startled ewe in some run-down iner city petting zoo.  Women walking alone don’t endure just cat calls or hungry stares but actual groping, grabbing, pinching, petting and other less than sophisticated forms of degredation.

Those rascally Italians, gold chains and body hair and the pasta and those antiquated attitudes towards any woman who’s not their mother.  Everyone’s heard stories about Italian men and everyone files it in their greaseball dossier next to the file that talks about Germans’ affection for mixing sex with their shit, or shit with their sex, or whatever the fuck that’s all about.  That’s how it is, how offensive, but what are you gonna do?

Meanwhile I’m busy looking back at the documentary Z Channel and a clip of Jim Jarmusch talking about seeing an Antonioni movie (I think it’s La Notte) on television.  A woman crosses a piaza choked with tight stripes shirts and deep set eyes that follow every move she makes, every shift of the hip and the turn of an ankle.  She walks through the center of this maelstrom of simmering blood acutely aware, I’m sure, of a very curious power.

Walking home from the bar I duck a woman trying to beg a cigarette off me.  I apologize but deny her request and turn away as quickly as possible– I know her.  Almost ten years ago I worked down the street at a record store and she would come in with stolen CDs which I would buy for nothing so that she could get crack.  At the time I didn’t feel anything about my efforts on fencing hot wares but I was certainly confused about what to do with this periodic visitor.  I didn’t wanna deal with her, I never gave her money for nothing, but I could never kick her out of the store.  It seemed easier to give her a couple of bucks so that she could go be a junkie instead of treating her like a junkie and kicking her out– I don’t think I did the right thing and I don’t think it led to anything remotely ‘good’.  She would see me on the street and she would never hit me up for anything other than a hello.  Sometimes she would walk with me down the block on her way to God knows where and it always kinda bothered me until some outreach center stopped us on the sidewalk and tried to insist we used condoms at which point it really bothered me.  Eventually she burned her own bridge by running around the store one night flying high– she insisted on sweeping and cleaning the bathroom in exhange for all I had done to help her out.  She ended up ripping off some shit from the back and I didn’t see her again.  At least my stupid behavior up until that point was clarified.  Almost ten years and while she doesn’t look any worse she’s not doing any better.  Mostly I was amazed that she was still alive– something of a revelation to think that a strung out junkie can cut it so long on the streets.  In a way you almost hope they overdose so they don’t continue to live in their rat cage world– it’s just too terrible to even imagine a week of being her let alone a year or five or a decade.

The other night my roommate’s bleaching the living hell out of the shower curtains to quell some rebellious mold and I’m being as polite as possible about her use of chemicals.  She mentions someone who had worked for a while with us at Amoeba, a girl who’d fucked up quick enough to be fired without any emotionally charged discussion or, well, mention at all.  She’d come in the store that day strung out and beat to hell, out of her head with a black eye and bruises down her arms.  Some sort of incident ensued and she staggered out of the store after screaming at security.  A co-worker who lives in the Mission said he’d seen her turning tricks around his house.

Last time I’d seen the girl I ducked her as best I could but she was too clever for me and looked back through the clear class bus shelter wall and got up to say hi.  She was pretty well dressed, adult looking department store outfit and a little professional bag and a little handheld device of some sort.  Said she’d gotten into the wonderful world of personal assistants for a couple people she knew– keeping track of appointments and running errands for them, that sort of thing.  She didn’t look fucked up at all, but I always thought she was a little bonkers when I knew her and every time I’ve been trapped on the street in conversation I’m always trying to break away.  Sure, sure, we’ll go have a drink some time, I’ll see you.

But now instead of annoying she’s just become– what?  What has she become?  A ghost to haunt me ten years down the line?  Probably not, probably she won’t be alive much longer.  It’s the most horrible thing I’ve heard in a long while, hearing about her.  What can you do?  That’s how it is, how offensive, but what can you do?

You can’t find SFPD statistics on prostitution on google, that’s for sure.

-Q&D July 19th SFPL 3rd floor MAIN350 (General Collections)

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