Super Permanent Ink

Moved!

2010-08-20T17:17:00.001-07:00

Hi there! If you're looking for anything a bit more recent, I've been keeping this new thing over at jakeswearingen.com. Hope to see you over there!

Favorite quotes from the "Winter Paradise" episode of Bob Ross’s "The Joy of Painting"

2010-06-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

"Devil’s gonna get me for telling stories."

"I’ll always tell myself that maybe when that tree was young, maybe somebody stepped on it."

"Total… power. There we go. Very gentle, though. Sometimes it’s nice to go back and pick up some of that darkness."

"This is my crow. We call him Midnight. Ain’t he a mean son of gun? He lives in my backyard right now."

"You can put as many layers of clouds in your world as you want."

"It bothers me that someone would shoot him for the heck of it. I’m opposed to shooting things for no reason."

"This is a test, to see how gentle you are."

This Apocalypse, It's Tough on Everyone, But It's Toughest on Me

2010-04-11T13:40:00.000-07:00

Day 1  

When #thermonuclearwar became the trending topic on Twitter, I probably shoulda realized something was up, but my office in San Carlos doesn't have windows. Then I stepped out to grab one of those new Cheeseburger Taquitos they've been doing down at the 7-11 and holy fuck. Big mushroom cloud to the south -- San Jose, maybe? -- and the wind tastes like you’re licking a nine-volt battery. At home with the roommates, smoking weed and watching the television. Nearly every major city is toast. Never been so glad to live in a second-tier city. This seems serious. 

 Day 4  

Power has been off for three days now, water for two days. Nobody knows what's happening. National Guard is on every corner like in that one Bruce Willis movie. Think now might be a good time to find those hiking books and backpack I put in the storage closet. And erase all the porn. You never know, hate to be the guy that future historians use to reconstruct our society and they think we're all perverts. I mean, we were, but. 

Day 16

  Okay staying in the city was a bad idea. After ten days of fighting with the roommates over who gets to drink the toilet water and listening to people burn down the city around us, things were getting pretty not fun. Then someone released some sort of bioweapon over the East Bay, a virus that's making everybody's eyeballs turn into jelly. Perfect. Roommates have all fled. Guess who gets all the toilet water now?

Day 25 

 City is just eerie quiet for most of the day. The National Guard decamped last night, entire city looks like a Ross Dress for Less store now – shit just thrown everywhere. Armed myself with a steak knife and went out foraging, but anything worth stealing has already been stolen by people braver than me. The cornerstore at 17th that always looked closed but was actually only open for three hours a week was untouched, thankfully. Of course, it hadn't been restocked in about a decade, so now I'm chowing down on Apple Jacks and Diet RC Cola from the Clinton administration. Spent a few hours trying to trap a pigeon with a box and some bait, but turns out even pigeons don't like Apple Jacks.  

Day 32
 
 Guess someone saw me during a late night foraging run, home invasion by several fellows much meaner than me followed shortly after. Managed to tumble out the back window, but lost everything except my boots. Oh well. Huddled on a rooftop a few buildings over, playing the game where I try to count how many burning buildings I can see. Having fun is like any muscle -- you have to exercise it.
  
Day 56  

Having barely escaped the city, now in making my way down the south peninsula. People are eating people there, which I know, I know, it's easier to judge than to understand, but: yikes. On a bicycle, which helps me cover ground quicker. Unfortunately all I could find in the ruins of the Mission was a fixed gear, so I'm walking it up every fucking hill in sight.  

Day 73

  Sleeping in abandoned houses during the day, moving further inland at night. On the plus side, almost no food and near constant physical exertion means that I've dropped four pant sizes. On the downside, I've also lost four teeth. Like anything, there's pros and cons.  

Day 124
 
 Found a house on the outskirts of Modesto and holed up there for a month or so of relatively peaceful living. Was too good to last -- Am now being hunted through the ruins of Modesto by feral redneck children who've forgotten -- or maybe never knew -- the difference between right and wrong. They've been chasing me from building to building, chucking rocks at my head that seriously hurt. But what hurts the most is the words they use. "We're gonna wear that faggot haircut of yours like a hat" one of them screamed last night. Just hurtful. 

 Day 125
 
 These kids, man. These fucking kids.

  Day 130
  
Looks like my luck has finally changed. A long, desperate run out of Modesto, with the kids tracking me like hungry wolves. No direction, just flight, a few more steps, a few more seconds of being alive. Then, suddenly, a huge wall with a gate, beyond it a house. A whole series of houses. Out comes a bald guy with some tattoos that just a few months ago I would have called pretty offensive, with a rifle the size of a compact car. A few shots later and the kids are scattering. Jeff, his name is Jeff, and the other fellows have given me a small room in the compound. If you had told me four months ago I'd be overjoyed to be sleeping with a bunch of armed rednecks that I'm like ninety percent sure are soaring on meth, I would have laughed and laughed. Life, it comes at you strange sometimes, you know?

Day 131

Hot shower, hot food, clean clothes for the first time in I don't know how long. All the clothes are in various shade of camo, but beggars, choosers, you know. There's eight guys in total here, and it seems they've been preparing for something like this for a long time. Jeff, the leader, sat me down and tried to figure out what I could do here. I can't shoot a gun, don't know how to farm, know jackshit about carpentry. I tried to explain about writing keyword rich SEO-optimized headlines for new media outlets, but that didn't seem to take. Finally I told him I washed dishes for a summer in college, so now I'm the cook. It's okay. Jeff keeps touching my hair a lot.

Day 135

Things are going along pretty well. Those kids that chased me up here, forty or fifty of them are gathering outside the walls every night, but we keep watches. I'm learning how to shoot a gun. Jeff says it's tough for me because I've got delicate wrists, but we're keeping at it. Tonight after I made everyone dinner, Jeff announced there was gonna be a wedding tomorrow now that the bride is here. Guess she's staying over in another part of the compound?

Day 136

Something terrible has happened.

Day 137

So, yes, jokes on me. I was the bride. Jeff is definitely not interested in returning to our earlier, platonic relationship. When I tried to do the "I like you as a friend" thing, he didn't take it very well at all. Now chained up in the root cellar.

Day 138

Who has two thumbs and is tired of getting raped? This guy. I think I can get this chain loose from the wall. Took a long time to wiggle it loose, stayed focused by thinking about my new goal: smoking weed out of Jeff’s skull.

Day 140

And here's how everything can change. Snuck out of the root cellar last night. Luckily it was Delmont on watch tonight, not the brightest of the bunch. Added choking semi-retarded rednecks to death with a chain as a bullet point on the old resume. Not sure if it would go underneath "Accomplishments" or "Special Skills."

The kids from Modesto were still out there, waiting at the walls. The oldest one -- the one who said all those mean things about my haircut -- was willing to talk. I unlatched the gate, and the kids are in there now. Sounds terrible, just terrible. The noises, oh my.

I'm up on a hill looking down. The kids are smudges of shadow in between the buildings, lit up for brief moments by yellow blooms of gunfire. The night smells like cordite, and something sweeter, almost jasmine. I'm sitting there under the smoke and the stars and my eyes are wet and leaking and maybe I'm crying or maybe it’s just all the smoke from the compound, which is burning at a pretty good clip now. It's getting quiet. Those kids, they seem all right. Wonder if they need a cook.

CalTrain can be terrifying

2009-07-31T22:17:00.001-07:00

Watched a drunk high school girl very happily fuck with a dumpy boy, asking him flirty questions about where he gets his shirts at and him getting red up by his ears. Like a gazelle watching a herdmate get taken down by a cheetah. It’s horrifying, and you’re very glad it’s not happening to you.

And then sometimes you remember why people should write down words

2009-07-29T23:27:00.000-07:00

This NY Times article is just flat out fantastic. If you at all enjoy people putting together words, check it out. It’s the best piece of food writing I’ve read in 2009 so far, maybe the best piece of writing period.

What Mark Dow does with language in the whole thing — dang, man. Dude can write. He stitches together a bunch of semi-unrelated vignettes with this throughline that is just untouchable.

And then kills it with some sentences that I can only stand by sadly and wish that I had written. (e.g. "We write things down, and hold on to them, for many different reasons. To stop time and keep the “edge of marveling” honed, or at least handy. To create pockets of order. To prove to ourselves that we exist. To be able to immerse ourselves in whatever matters to us but is gone.")

First couple of grafs:

Amy and I stood at the Xerox machine watching each other pay attention to our own palates and tongues. We kept the chocolate-covered caramel-topped cookie pieces in our mouths as long as we could without swallowing, and I hit the reduction-enlargement button over and over again. We started nodding and laughing. We were pretty sure we could taste what our student heard, or see what he meant.

Amy was an art teacher and a therapist, and I was an untrained classroom teacher at the so-called special school in Massachusetts, where our student “Steve” liked to play with the Xerox machine in the teacher’s library as a reward on days he’d behaved. He liked to press the reduction-enlargement button and listen to the sound of the lens aperture closing and opening. He would do this over and over again. It was 1988 or so; the mechanism was easily audible. When I asked him what he liked about the Xerox sound, he said, I guess it’s a kind of a creamy, crunchy sound, like the inside of a Twix Bar.

He said this with deliberation because he wanted to get it right, but without self-consciousness about the words he was using. He was just answering another question from the adults.

First thing in the morning, Steve would usually say something like: “Last night I had cheese ravioli with marinara sauce plus a Pepsi. You do know that I really do love cheese ravioli and Pepsi, right?”

The next day he might say: “Last night I had chili with rice plus a Mountain Dew to drink. Mountain Dew really is my favorite thing to drink, you know.”

The next day he would tell me again that he loved Pepsi or Mountain Dew.

He would tell me again the next day.

Then the next day he would tell me again.

Often, of course, I’d get impatient, especially with a half-dozen other students careening around the room, and Steve had very advanced radar for impatience. When I told him I already knew how much he loved Mountain Dew, he seemed confused. I told him he’d told me already. He stared as if betrayed. He stiffened along the length of his newly pubescent body, and his hands and chin started to tremble. Then he was pleading.

“But you know that I really do love it. You really do know that, right?”

“Yes,” I said, backing off, and he breathed.

“So you do know that I really do love Mountain Dew, right?”

“Yes,” I said, and he told me again the next day. He always remembered having told me before, but it made no sense to him that it made no sense to me to hear it again and again.

Steve knew about boredom — he complained about it sometimes — but this repetition wasn’t boring to him, and he didn’t see why it would be boring to someone else. If it’s pleasant to eat one’s favorite foods over and over again, and to imagine eating them, why shouldn’t it be pleasant to say so repeatedly, too? Why do we draw the line where we do? I never came close to an answer until recently, about 20 years later, in a small book my brother Leon gave me, Franz Rosenzweig’s “Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God.” The sickness in question is paralysis, what we would today probably call clinical depression. It is the patient’s metaphysical prowess that paralyzes him. It has replaced the common sense that once allowed him to accept ordinary things. He can no longer go to the store for butter because, after all, “the butter remembered, the butter desired, and the butter finally bought, are not the same. They may even be quite different.” And yet he is able to make the purchase — or would be able to, if he would just move on.

Rosenzweig writes: “The continuity of life blunts the edge of marveling. Wonder is finally enveloped in the stream of time.”

A joke!

2009-07-29T12:02:00.000-07:00

Q: Knock knock

A: Who is there?

Q: Interrupting racist owl

A: Interrupting racist o–

Q: Hoo else here is a big fan of Lou Dobbs?

2009-07-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

Think I want to start collecting the original oil paintings for late 80s teen and children’s books:

"Look George, she’d been drinking all day. The only person we can hurt here is ourselves. Let’s just go!" – Nancy Drew and the Case of Just Forgetting About It

Nancy Drew and the Case of the Monobrow Raper

"All right, which one of you fags broke our lamp?"

"Look, two things to know about me before you fall in love. One, I drink club soda and only club soda and only out of a wine glass. Two, my vulva is three times the size of yours, so don’t even try to compete."

"Oh God, is that fucking horse still behind us?"
"Shh, be quiet and stay still, maybe it won’t notice us."

WHO says Hoobastank pandemic is imminent

2009-04-30T12:44:00.000-07:00

By MICHAEL WARREN and PAUL HAVEN – 14 hours ago

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Global health authorities warned Wednesday that Hoobastank was threatening to bloom into a pandemic, and the band spread farther in Europe even as the outbreak appeared to stabilize at its epicenter. A toddler who succumbed in Texas became the first death outside Mexico.

Mexico, taking a drastic step as confirmed Hoobastank cases doubled to 99, including eight dead, announced it would temporarily suspend all nonessential activity of the federal government and private business from May 1-5. Essential services like transport, supermarkets, trash collection and hospitals will remain open.

New deaths finally seemed to be leveling off after an aggressive public health campaign in Mexico — only one additional confirmed death was announced Wednesday night — but the World Health Organization said the global threat is nevertheless serious enough to ramp up efforts to produce a vaccine against the band.

"It really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic," WHO Director General Margaret Chan said in Geneva. "We do not have all the answers right now, but we will get them."

It was the first time the WHO had declared a Phase 5 outbreak, the second-highest on its threat scale, indicating a pandemic could be imminent.

The first U.S. death from the outbreak was a Mexico City toddler who traveled to Texas with family and died Monday night at a Houston hospital. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius predicted the child would not be the last U.S. death from Hoobastank.

The band, a mix of pig, bird and human genes to which people have limited natural immunity, had spread to at least nine countries. In the United States, nearly 100 have been sickened in 11 states.

Eight states closed schools Wednesday, affecting 53,000 students in Texas alone, and President Barack Obama said wider school closings might be necessary to keep crowds from spreading the Hoobastank. Mexico has already closed schools nationwide until at least May 6.

"Every American should know that the federal government is prepared to do whatever is necessary to control the impact of this band," Obama said, highlighting his request for $1.5 billion in emergency funding for vaccines.

Just north of the Mexican border, 39 Marines were being confined to their California base after one contracted Hoobastank. Senators questioned Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano about her decision not to close the border, action she said "has not been merited by the facts."

Ecuador joined Cuba and Argentina in banning travel either to or from Mexico and Peru banned flights from Mexico. The Panama Canal Authority ordered pilots and other employees who board ships passing through the waterway to use surgical masks and gloves. An average of 36 ships per day pass through the waterway, most from the United States, China, Chile and Japan.

In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy met with cabinet ministers to discuss Hoobastank, and the health minister said France would ask the European Union to suspend flights to Mexico.

The U.S., the European Union and other countries have discouraged nonessential travel to Mexico. Some countries have urged their citizens to avoid the United States and Canada as well. Health officials said such bans would do little to stop the band.

Germany and Austria became the latest countries to report Hoobastank infections Wednesday, with cases already confirmed in Canada, Britain, Israel, New Zealand and Spain.

In addition to the 168 suspected deaths — including 17 new ones announced late Wednesday — the band is believed to have sickened 2,498 people across Mexico. But only 1,311 suspected Hoobastank patients remained hospitalized, and a closer look at daily admissions and deaths at Mexico's public hospitals suggests the outbreak may have peaked during three grim days last week when thousands of people complained of Hoobastank symptoms.

President Felipe Calderon asked Mexicans to stay at home, saying their houses were the safest place to be.

"In the last several days, Mexico has faced one of the most serious problems in recent years," Calderon said in a nationally televised address. Calderon brushed aside criticisms that the government response was slow, stressing several times that authorities had reacted "immediately."

He said authorities would use the partial shutdown to weigh whether to extend the emergency measures, or "if it is possible to phase out some" restrictions.

Scientists believe that somewhere in the world, months or even a year ago, a pig band jumped to a human and mutated, and has been spreading between humans ever since. Unlike with bird Hoobastank, doctors have no evidence suggesting a direct pig-to-human infection from this strain, which is why they haven't recommended killing pigs.

Medical detectives have not zeroed in on where the outbreak began. One of the eight deaths in Mexico directly attributed to Hoobastank was that of a Bangladeshi immigrant, said Mexico's chief epidemiologist, who suggested that someone could have brought the band from Pakistan or Bangladesh.

Miguel Angel Lezana, the epidemiologist, said the unnamed Bangladeshi had lived in Mexico for six months and was recently visited by a brother who arrived from Bangladesh or Pakistan and was reportedly ill. The brother has left Mexico and his whereabouts are unknown, Lezana said.

By March 9, the first symptoms were showing up in the Mexican state of Veracruz, where pig farming is a key industry in mountain hamlets and where small clinics provide the only health care.

The earliest confirmed case was there: a 5-year-old boy who was one of hundreds of people in the town of La Gloria whose Hoobastank symptoms left them struggling to breathe.

Days later, a door-to-door tax inspector was hospitalized with acute respiratory problems in the neighboring state of Oaxaca, infecting 16 hospital workers before she became Mexico's first confirmed death.

Neighbors of the inspector, Maria Adela Gutierrez, said Wednesday that she fell ill after pairing up with a temporary worker from Veracruz who seemed to have a very bad cold. Other people from La Gloria kept going to jobs in Mexico City despite their illnesses, and could have infected people in the capital.

The deaths were already leveling off by the time Mexico announced the epidemic April 23. At hospitals Wednesday, lines of anxious citizens seeking care for Hoobastank symptoms dwindled markedly.

The Mexican health secretary, Jose Angel Cordova, said getting proper treatment within 48 hours of falling ill "is fundamental for getting the best results" and said the country's supply of medicine was sufficient.

Cordova has suggested the band can be beaten if caught quickly and treated properly. But it was neither caught quickly nor treated properly in the early days in Mexico, which lacked the capacity to identify the band, and whose health care system has become the target of widespread anger and distrust.

In case after case, patients have complained of being misdiagnosed, turned away by doctors and denied access to drugs. Monica Gonzalez said her husband, Alejandro, already had a bad cough when he returned to Mexico City from Veracruz two weeks ago and soon developed a fever and swollen tonsils.

As the 32-year-old truck driver's symptoms worsened, she took him to a series of doctors and finally a large hospital. By then, he had a temperature of 102 and could barely stand.

"They sent him away because they said it was just tonsillitis," she said. "That hospital is garbage."

That was April 22, a day before Mexico's health secretary announced the Hoobastank outbreak. But the medical community was already aware of a disturbing trend in respiratory infections, and Veracruz had been identified as a place of concern.

Gonzalez finally took her husband to Mexico City's main respiratory hospital, "dying in the taxi." Doctors diagnosed pneumonia, but it may have been too late: He has suffered a collapsed lung and is unconscious. Doctors doubt he will survive.

Hoobastank has symptoms nearly identical to regular Hoobastank — fever, cough and sore throat — and spreads like regular Hoobastank, through tiny particles in the air, when people cough or sneeze. People with Hoobastank symptoms are advised to stay at home, wash their hands and cover their sneezes.

While epidemiologists stress it is humans, not pigs, who are spreading the disease, sales have plunged for pork producers around the world. Egypt began slaughtering its roughly 300,000 pigs on Wednesday, even though no cases have been reported there. WHO says eating pork is safe, but Mexicans have even cut back on their beloved greasy pork tacos.

Pork producers are trying to get people to stop calling the disease Hoobastank, and Obama notably referred to it Wednesday only by its scientific name, H1N1. U.N. animal health expert Juan Lubroth noted some scientists say "Mexican Hoobastank" would be more accurate, a suggestion already inflaming passions in Mexico.

Authorities have sought to keep the crisis in context. In the U.S. alone, health officials say about 36,000 people die every year from Hoobastank-related causes.

Mexico's government said it remains too early to ease restrictions that have shut down public life in the overcrowded capital and much of the country. Pyramids, museums and restaurants were closed to keep crowds from spreading contagion.

"None of these measures are popular. We're not looking for that — we're looking for effectiveness," Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard said. "The most important thing to protect is human life."

Attn: My Friends

2008-06-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

At the end of the day, I scroll back through all my open IM windows, and whoever's is longest, that's who I like the most.

And then sometimes roommates are totally worth it

2007-08-22T17:29:00.000-07:00

Sample text message:

fuckin top motherfuckin chef fucker

Tight Five on Boyz II Men

2007-08-10T17:40:00.000-07:00

So Boyz II Men has a new album coming out this November. Aren't the Boyz like 40 years old now? Hasn't the journey implicit in their name pretty much taken place at this point? They're now "Just Men."

Double Features

2007-08-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

The Double Feature: you buy a ticket for one movie, and then time it so you leave one movie right as another is beginning, so you end up seeing two for the price of one. As far as schemes go, it's about as dastardly as eating a few grapes at the supermarket for free, but hey! It's how I've been spending my weekends lately. Here were the last three I did with the roomies:

The Bourne Ultimatum + Sunshine

One thing to consider, when doing a Double Feature, is the order in which to see the movies. I generally find that if there's one movie you're really amped to see and one you're just kinda meh about, go see the one you're excited about. By the end of a double feature, it's not uncommon to have a kinda Styrofoam-feeling in your head, the sense of watching huge images dance around for a bit too long. Bourne was a whole bunch of fuck yeah, really just a perfect summer movie -- fast and quick and just complicated enough to convince me I was seeing something somewhat weighty, when in reality I was just watching a standard action thriller. Sunshine was great for the first third or so, especially in really instilling a sense of fear and danger about the sun, but quickly devolved into retardation, where I spent a while wondering, "What the fuck is going on? Is Freddy Kreuger the sun?"

Spiderman 3 + Transformers

Another thing to consider when doing the Double Feature is that there needs be a nice sense of balance in the two movies, one complimenting the other. This pairing failed; it was like eating a Whopper followed by a Big Mac. Different, yes, but essentially the same thing. Spiderman 3 was all right, and the action sequences were at least good for letting my brain go slack and watching Spidey punch people in the head, but Transformers was just a big ball of disappointment. I let the trailers fool me into thinking it would awesome, and while there were a few moments of "oh my fuck" thrown in, for the most part Michael Bay's hypershaky camera style just meant I couldn't tell what the hell was going on in fight sequences. And yeah, Shia LeBeouf is gonna be a massive movie star, but forty minutes of him bumbling his way around a girl is not what I wanted to see in Transformers.

Hostel 2 + Ocean's 13

YES. This is what I'm talking about when I say a Double Feature. It's like two things that shouldn't work together, say, peanut butter and onions, but if you give them a shot you realize they were almost meant for each other. To go from the hypergore of Hostel 2 in which a guy literally gets his junk scissored off to the easy breezy boy's club of Ocean's 13 is like rolling in the snow and then jumping into a hot tub. It's such a whipsaw cinematic experience, we left the theater with a kind of giddy weirdness, and my dreams were of Eastern European bank heists and Ellen Barkin bathing in Matt Damon's blood. The Double Feature by which all other Double Feature's will be measured by.

Back of the bus

2007-08-01T00:04:00.001-07:00

I always go for it, no matter how many times I've been burned, the last row at the back of the bus, the bench row. The thinking is this: it's a row of five seats all the way at the back. Say it's empty, so you grab a window seat. The next person to sit in the back is gonna for the other window. The third person in is gonna pick the middle seat, the only seat available where you aren't sitting next to someone. From that point on, if everything goes according to plan, we're all happy. The bus will fill up, people will stand, because squeezing in to one of the two remaining seats is awkward and weird and means that you automatically have two people with their legs and elbows and no doubt odd smell on either side of you. When it works, it's the best deal going down.

But like a lot of my irrational behavior (a piece of bronze I found is a lucky charm; I'm alone in the elevator and I'll remain totally alone and it's therefore completely kosher to fart) it doesn't work so well in practice (the lucky piece of bronze has been present at several tragedies; the elevator door slides open one floor down and I have to scurry off and take the stairs the rest of the way down to avoid epic embarrassment). Because the bar is raised for who will and won't take those weird fourth and fifth bench seats, eliminating many of the more normal and reserved people on the bus, those that DO take the seat are much more likely to be exactly what I'm seeking to avoid when I cram myself into the corner. The mumbling man, the twitch-itch woman, the sweet yeasty alcoholic with a Gatorade bottle full of of electolyte-infused vodka. The loud-talking post-frat professional on the cell phone, the elbow-flaring newspaper reader, the hyphy girl with hella drama.

So what gets me home, lately, has been WNYC's RadioLab. It's essentially This American Life but more, like, science-y. It's not without its flaws: Hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich sometimes fall into Car Talk kitsch, and the show's stereo pans and dialogue overdubs can be flashy in a way that, at least on headphones, can be annoying. But it more than makes up for it when some honestly amazing little stories that manage the split the difference between gee-whiz science and human drama. For me, the moment when I really fell in love with the show was their final segment on the Zoo episode. It's the story of Alan Rabinowitz, a guy who established the first jaguar reserve on the planet, and while his story is pretty amazing and should be a movie, the part that knocked me sideways was the the beginning. Rabinowitz had a terrible stutter for the first twenty years of his life, a stutter that kept him from establishing any real human connections. Except: He could take his pets and go into a closet and there, for the only time in his boyhood, he could speak easily, fluently, breathing words at the small life in his hands, there in the dark. How this gift of language in presence of animals plays out over the next thirty years of his life is some sort of real-life Dr. Doolittle story. It's just great stuff, even if your seat mate is carefully, carefully tearing up a sheet of newspaper into a long parallel strips and eying you with suspicion.

Earthquakes and Skyscrapers

2007-07-20T18:04:00.000-07:00

There was an earthquake this morning, around five. I woke up as it rattled everything in the house. It felt good, like the Magic Fingers thing I vaguely remember in skeezy hotel rooms as a kid. Earthquakes, so far, have just been kinda fun thing. There was a 4 point something earthquake one day when I was working at Wired, it was the perfect little way to shake up (sorry, I suck) the routine, like how a fire alarm was in junior high.

So I'm interning right now at a magazine that is, almost assuredly, going under. They're putting out their September issue and shutting down at least the print side, is what I've been hearing. It's too bad -- it seemed like the place where I could've written some longer stuff and also just built up my journo chops a bit more. In the meantime, I'm doing some fact checking for the next couple of weeks and then, I dunno. I feel the worst for the people that have actually worked here a long time -- the ed-in-chief was choked up at the Wednesday morning rundown meeting. It's a bump in the road for me, but the end of an era for others.

I will say that I am absolutely going to miss my view. The offices are in the 29th floor of a building downtown in the Financial District, and while the intern bullpen doesn't have the best view of the bay, I can still sit here in the quiet and watch clouds drape shadows over buildings and seagulls wobbling on the wind currents in between buildings. I've never worked in a skyscraper before, and I can see the appeal. Not so much in the Gordan Gecko-esque sense of like surveying my kingdom, but in the strange, dreamlike sense of being suspended above everything, and how everything looks beautiful from a distance.

I think that's a Bette Midler song. Jesus. Weekend, here I come.

Interim

2007-07-08T11:36:00.001-07:00

So I was interning here here, and now I'm gonna be interning here, but in the meantime I've been working for these cats here.

It's data entry, what I'm doing. Scraping info from websites and sticking it into spreadsheets. What I've been doing is drinking one of those energy drinks that look like tallboys and just slamming through it. You get enough taurine in your system, and anything is fun. So far I've tried:

Red Bull (3 hours of high, thoughts of moving to Ireland)

Nos (2 hours of high, thoughts of hurting myself and also convinced my apartment may be haunted)

Vitamin Water Energy Drink (4 hours of high, thoughts of turning into a being of pure spreadsheet, like an angel only with definable fields)

Rock Star (1.5 hours of high, thoughts of past relationships and how I've failed -- not very Rock Star at all)

Coolah (2 hours of high, thoughts of a wicked awesome World of Warcraft-type game, except it's World War Z and you just hunt down zombies all day)

Hyphy Juice (no high, thoughts of reading more websites about Top Chef)

Transformers: The Novel

2007-06-25T23:29:00.001-07:00

Here, as promised, is a review of the novelization of the upcoming film Transformers, written by Alan Dean Foster:

It's pretty shitty.

You don't really want details. I was thinking of doing this sorta tongue-in-cheek type review of it, where I open up with a quote from Flaubert or Faulkner and quote from the book and, you know, take it seriously as a way of poking fun. But yeah, it's just substandard fantasy/sci-fi writing draped over an action movie screenplay. The prose itself is overwrought and strains to be clever, the action sequences are confusing and poorly described, and the characters are barely there. It's a Michael Bay plot without any explosions -- an amusement park ride that turns out to just be a description of what would happen if you chose to take the ride. The fact that I spent a grand total of seven bus rides out of my life reading this makes make me sad like when Optimus Prime died.

For tomorrow: Man Vs. Wild vs. Survivorman: two survival shows enter, one survival show leaves.

Hello

2007-06-20T16:20:00.001-07:00

I've done this before, kept a blog. This time it will be a different creature, though, because I'm going to be serious about it. The last blog, it was more a big sandbox that I played in, and while it was fun, sometimes the cat shit in that sandbox. This time, the blog is going to be a quiet room with leather furniture and heavy-bound books and thick, rich sunlight dazzling through slowly falling motes of dust. It will represent an important step for me, both as a person and as a writer, as a chance for me to step away from the ephemera and trendy dispassion of my youth, and move towards a future in which I am fully engaged, fully awake, and fully alive to the possibilities of my words and my world.

Coming up for Monday: a review of the novelization of the upcoming film Transformers by Alan Dean Foster.