My favorite line in this article about yet another sad boy-man who couldn’t keep it in his pants:
Upset at Nixon winning again, John was totally out of his head on drugs, pills and drink.
(Via Kathy Shaidle. Title from the soppy, too-clichéd-for-Hallmark song “Woman” from Lennon’s post-binge realization that if he didn’t make up to Yoko he’d be out on the street. Too bad he didn’t get shot before the album was recorded got shot.)
You know those dried red pepper flakes that they put on the table in Italian restaurants? I’ve always thought they were kind of flavorless and not very hot. Anyway, for some reason or other I bought a jar and tonight I put about a teaspoon into the quickie sausage-tomato-mushroom pasta sauce I was making. Now my tongue is on fire.
My ear is also still stuffed up. I feel like I have concrete in my left ear. It’s making me insane! Insane-r. More insane. And now my nose is running because of the hot pepper. Argh.
More wine.
There are many interesting things going on in the world that I’m sure I could post about, but unfortunately I can’t think due to the fact that I only have half a head working. The other half has shut down due to my left ear being plugged up with wax. (Therefore that side of my brain can’t get enough oxygen. What do you mean that’s not how it works? Hey, I took science in high school — I think. It was a long time ago.)
Anyway, I am sitting here trying not to plunge sharp objects into my ear canal (where the hell are those knitting needles — oh wait, I don’t own any knitting needles; oh, but here’s an Exacto knife… darn it, too short), so I doubt I’ll be saying anything of substance on any subject whatsoever tonight.
Since I haven’t received my last check from work (it wasn’t in the mail box today, so I guess I’ll get it Monday) Update: the check came in — I thought I had seen the mailman turn down our street, but he seems to have a bizarre and circuitous route and must have come in later — but I’m still going to be staying close to home this weekend. (Or maybe not. We’ll see.) Oh well, that will give me a chance to clean this place up and make it homelike for the brief time I’ll be here. Right? Right… I did throw out some old art class junk that I’d been lugging around, and some other items that I knew I wouldn’t use and didn’t need. I’ve gone through some of my clothes — I want to get them down to what I can stuff in my suitcase, which by the way I bought in Woolworth’s in London in 1981 and I will not throw out until it crumbles in my hands. It’s one of my few souvenirs of England, a country it looks like I will probably not be able to visit ever again no matter how much I want to. It’s just too painful to see it go even further to the chavs and Muslim fanatics. Well, I’ll always have Doctor Who.
Speaking of Doctor Who, I watched the “classic” episode “The Invasion of Time” recently, thanks to Netflix. In fact, I haven’t returned it yet. (I also have Shaun of the Dead and four Firefly episodes still to watch — I just haven’t been in the mood.) It wasn’t bad for an old episode — there is a great scene near the end where the Doctor (in his Tom Baker incarnation) is carrying around a Big Fucking Gun, and he gets to use it too (and on a Sontaran, one of the more annoying of Doctor Who villains; really, I can’t stand those big toes in space suits, whoever came up with them as a tedious metaphor on militarism — ooh, they even have “stiff necks!” — needs to be slapped several times). After having endured David Tennant’s shell-shocked pacifist take on the Doctor this is unbelievably refreshing. (And in another Tom Baker episode, “Planet of Evil,” the Doctor gets to sock a guy in the jaw. Awesome.)
Anyway, the episode isn’t perfect, but it has its moments. It’s the companion Leela’s swan song from the series — the actress playing her got sick of being a piece of dumb eye candy — so I guess that’s why throughout the whole show she wears her tiniest outfit yet, a kind of tankini made of what looks like ivory silk (but is probably polyester). She’s definitely there “for the dads,” as the saying goes, and I’ll bet the dads loved this episode. There’s her entirely gratuitous scene where she’s swimming around in the swank pool in the Tardis, and then there’s this one scene where she’s bending over the Doctor, who’s been knocked out by some Time Lord thing, and you can see right down her cleavage all the way to France.
If I have one complaint about this episode it’s not the cheap special effects (that’s considered a feature, not a bug, for Doctor Who) but the fact that the Time Lords and Gallifrey just aren’t alien enough. I don’t suppose they could have come up with much on their budget of fifty pounds or whatever, though, but there could have been subtle things they could have done. See, for example, the Vulcans as portrayed in the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek series. That show may have had a slightly higher budget but what made the scenes there more “alien” was really the way the characters were portrayed. And there was nothing like that cheesy organ music, or whatever the hell that was that played when the Doctor was going through that ceremony to make him class president or whatever. It’s things like this that make you realize that Doctor Who is really just about an Englishman who travels through time and space and otherwise gets to do things that residents of staid, old Blighty aren’t allowed to do. But on the whole, watching it was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Speaking of aliens, I never reviewed Buckaroo Banzai. Well. I remember when I saw it in the theater thinking “that’s something I’ve never seen before.” It was unique in my scifi movie watching experience: a hip, ironic, comical, yet serious science fiction movie. Or so I thought at the time. Remember, most science-fiction in the sixties and seventies was either serious, didactic, cautionary stuff that picked up on the whole “the world’s gonna end” of something (whether nuclear armageddon, a life-crushing ice age — the notion of global warming back then would have brought mostly sighs of relief — or uncontrolled pollution) fears running through society, or else straight “action adventure” like Star Wars that was basically nostalgia with space ships. This was different: a movie showing eccentric people who, however, weren’t too different from some of our nuttier school pals or even us (at least in our dreams) dealing with aliens from some weird other world who also seemed to have personalities and a hint of background. Now after enduring over two decades of hip, ironic, meant-to-be-serio-comic nonsense coming out of the film factories, not to mention a more varied science fiction output, Buckaroo Banzai has lost much of its burnish. It was still fun, however, and if the dvd appears in the bargain racks somewhere I might pick it up. Peter Weller was kind of blank as the hero, Jeff Goldblum once again played himself (as he always does), and Ellen Barkin was more irritating now than she was when I initially saw her, but there isn’t much she could do with the part as written, which is a neurotic take on the standard damsel-in-distress. But there are all those bright 80s colors, John Lithgow, all those guys from Quincy, M.E. in bit parts, aliens giving each other the finger and sitting around bored watching tv when they are supposed to be fearsome and evil, the “nest,” etc. The plot was confusing so I won’t go over it here (something about aliens trying to take over the world and free themselves from another dimension, Peter Weller is some sort of singer-neurosurgeon-kung-fu-master… I dunno). A great party movie when you don’t really need to pay attention to dialogue and stuff.
More later. I watered my tomato plants, so of course rain clouds are advancing, and I need to go to the store for a couple of things I forgot. Be back later. Oh — and thanks to everyone who has contributed to my fund so far. You all deserve a personal email, but I downloaded the Paypal alerts with your emails in them to my laptop and then my laptop died. When (if) I get it fixed I’ll send you all a thank you note — for now this will have to do.
PS: I revamped my main gateway page with links to all my old websites — or as many as I could still link to. A couple of my early blogs are gone due to server crashes or incompetence on my part. But if you are at all curious about My Past on the ‘net (at least from 2001 to today), you can have a look.
Update: I forgot to mention one of the inadvertently funny moments in the Doctor Who episode I talk about above: the Doctor asks where one of his fellow Time Lords is — they had taken him into the Tardis to hide from the invaders — and Leela says “in the bathroom.” Now if you’re American and don’t know that “bathroom” to the Brits means a room where you take a bath — in other words, the room with the swimming pool I mentioned — you’ll have a vision of the character, meant to be a crusty old super-dignified sort, sitting on the commode.
Today was something of a bust. For starters, I have a stuffed up ear — I used to have this problem all the time, wax would build up in my ear canals until I felt like I had earplugs in all the time, and I’d have to pour that ear-wax softener into them, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Once it got so bad I had to go to a clinic and have the doctor on call there try to wash them out by shooting warm water and peroxide into my ears. That was fun. Anyway, I hadn’t been bothered by this for ages, not since I left Miami in fact. Now it’s back. I wonder if sleeping with the sliding glass door open (because the a/c was broken) night before last had something to do with it? And of course I went and poked around in my ear with q-tips dipped in witch hazel, and of course that only made it worse.
And today for some reason I was exhausted. The only thing I had done the day before was go to Ikea to return some boxes I had bought (they were too big). True that store is huge and they make you walk a rat’s maze to get to the exit, but I didn’t feel all that tired when I was done drooling at all the showroom stuff. (For some reason their “235 square foot apartment” display is my favorite. Except for the loft bed — I’m just too old to climb a ladder to get into bed, especially when my tiny bladder wakes me up 2 or 3 times a night — I would totally love an apartment set up like that.) Anyway, this morning I didn’t want to get out of bed — both cats kept walking on me and staring into my face and smelling me (to make sure I was still alive, I guess). I finally got up and did some things, and then around the middle of the day started getting the serious sleepies again. But I didn’t want to take a nap in the middle of the day, so I decided to go for a walk, as it was nice outside. Big mistake — I almost ended up falling asleep on my feet. So I staggered back home and crashed. And guess what — I’m still tired. Well sleeping in the middle of the day does that to me.
In other news… nothing much going on. I didn’t do much job searching this week — I’ve been thinking of rewriting my resume and penning up a better cover letter than the lackluster one I’ve been using. I’ve also been wondering if I should put a special web page up about me and my work experience. I wouldn’t tie it back here — vigilant employers are welcome to Google my name, and if some of my opinions are too salty or un-PC to get me hired by some people then those aren’t the ones I want to work for anyway. But I’m not going to lead them by the hand. I prefer to keep my work and “fun” lives as separate as possible anyway. But — I don’t really know why I didn’t think of this sooner: a website might get me a toe into some sort of content management position or at least something with more focus on what I like to do (back end support, writing, etc.) instead of stuff I’m always getting offered (mostly in sales — no srsly, I keep getting all these sales position offers even though there is nothing on my resume showing any sales experience — customer care, insurance quoting, things like that, yes, but no sales). Well I will have to think of where to put it — domain names are cheap these days, and show more professionalism than free blog sites or Geocities or what have you. I think I’ll be working on this off and on this weekend.
Actually I may be going to bed soon. I’m tired. My laptop, which was working fine a couple of days ago, has decided to start acting weird again, so I’m looking forward to that repair bill because I can’t afford to buy another one right now. So I guess I won’t be selling this desktop system any time soon. (What I really want to do is to sell it and buy a new laptop, but my budget won’t extend to such things right now.)
Anyway, Sarah Palin is debating Joe Biden in my future home, St. Louis. Apparently she is doing well — I’m not watching, because Biden gives me the pip, and also debates irritate me. Also I’m in a bad mood from my laptop not working. On a better note, the maintenance guy came and fixed my a/c (basically it was out of freon so it was using water to cool things down and the coils froze). So I’ve got that going for me.
I have an announcement: I will never own property. By that I mean, I will never buy real estate. I simply have no interest in doing so. There are a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that if I owned this apartment instead of merely renting it I’d have to pay someone to repair the air-conditioner instead of being able to call maintenance, as I did, and tell them “it’s broke, come fix it.” Another reason is the fact that once you own something, you are responsible for either looking after it or getting rid of it. Especially nowadays getting rid of unwanted real estate isn’t easy. Even foreclosure is a long, drawn-out process involving tedious things like paperwork and talking to legal departments. I am thankful that I have nothing more to worry about disposing when I move than some crappy, beat-up furniture and old books, and I plan to keep it that way.
It used to be that people like me were looked upon as somehow deficient, as having failed at life. After all, one of the bastions of the American Dream™ was owning your own house. But now that the fever dream of “a house in every pot, even if that pot could barely afford to scrape up rent every month and worked part time at McDonald’s” has ended and everyone who participated in the great Mortgage Grab is nursing the resultant hangover, I wonder who’s the failure now?
Anyway, everything that I could say about this fun crisis was said fourteen years ago, in 1994, by Florence King, who wrote about the attitude towards renters in this country and why she prefers to rent. The essay can be found in the collection Stet! Damnit! which I highly recommend to Florence completists. Anyway, her theory is that Americans are encouraged to tie themselves to home ownership because that way they’ll be so preoccupied with the constant maintenance the family homestead needs that they won’t have any time to give the government any trouble. Or as she puts it: “Being a home owner transforms him from a thinking reed into a tinkering, puttering, dull, distracted, small-minded bore, and that’s just the kind of citizenry the government wants.” Governments want power, and one of the easiest ways of getting it is to get the people you want power from in debt to you.
I think this could also explain the fits of condo-mania that have always perplexed me. When you sit down and think about it, what sort of home-ownership is buying a few rooms in a building, which is what apartments are? How deep through the drywall to the next apartment does your ownership go? How many inches of the pipes are you supposed to be responsible for as opposed to your downstairs neighbor? Sure, it’s supposed to build up your credit or something, but I never could get past the fact that people bought apartments as if they were houses. But when I read Miss King’s essay and come to the part where she describes how carefree she feels when she can simply call maintenance and have them fix whatever is broken, so she could go back to her writing in peace, it came to me: apartment renters weren’t being reined in enough. Sure, they had to sign a lease, but then when that lease was up they were free to move on. Can’t have that — get them to buy their hole-in-a-building! Tell them it will build them “equity” and they’ll be Real Home Owners at last, grownups just like that guy with the 5 BR 3 BTH McMansion. And of course, this drives rent prices up as actual apartments become scarce, and the meme gets passed around that renting is just “throwing money away every month.” As if you could take it with you, maybe line your coffin with it when you collapse of an early-onset stroke brought about by the stresses of owning a home.
I understand there’s a war on and also some sort of political campaign (mayor? dog catcher?), but this is important: my a/c is broken. Okay, okay, it will be fixed tomorrow. And also, the weather has finally cooled down (I have the sliding glass door open, which I can do thanks to the screened-in porch that has a locking screen door), so I am no longer sweltering like I was earlier.
And that was my exciting day.
Just to remind everyone, I am moving out of Florida. My chosen destination, for reasons mysterious even to myself (though bloggers I like do live there) is St. Louis. What can I say, I like the sound of the place — lots of beer, it’s on a big river, it’s in a state with real mountains, it has four seasons (I can have a Real Autumn at last! And I’ll finally experience snow!), has a big park and a botanical garden (I like things like that) and a lot of history, all things I love.
Right now I am trying to be good and have fixed my desired time of leaving at April 30th, which is when my lease ends. However, if I can’t find a job I will probably make an arrangement with my landlord to get out of my lease early and throw my cats in the car and head on up there sooner. Sure, I’m not used to a colder winter with possible ice and snow, but freezing temps are not unknown in the Orlando area — in fact, in my first year in my own apartment here over New Year’s temps went down into the twenties and my heater broke, and I survived. Florida’s bad weather is rather famous so that’s not a worry. I am sure the job market can’t be any worse than it is here — probably better, because it probably isn’t as hitched as Orlando’s is to the tourist industry.
Anyway, that’s just a repeat of my statement of my plans so far. I’m taking contributions towards the move, links on the left, etc. Every little bit helps.
Update: oh, and I just noticed, my air-conditioning has gone on the fritz. It’s already up to 83 degrees in here. Great, just great. (Yes, I have called maintenance.)
Update on the a/c situation: okay, the maintenance guy was here, and it’s not a problem he can fix tonight, it will have to wait until the morning. So I get to sleep with my sliding glass door open. Yays. At least I have the screened patio. And at least temps tonight are supposed to drop to the mid 60s. Right now, though, it’s about 87 outside. Do I really have to wait seven months to move up north? Ice and snow are looking quite attractive right now.
Insofar as I can understand it, pretty much what this guy says. On a side note, I take the opportunity to point out in the comments that I still can’t understand the whole Enron thing. (Please don’t try to explain it to me. I’ve read stuff about it, had other people try to explain it — it seems to be something to do with energy, but Enron didn’t actually have power companies or nuclear plants or anything, they just seemed to have some sort of “thing” with energy that for a while people were willing to give them lots of money for. Well, I own seven manual typewriters; everyone has a ridiculous hobby they want to throw money at, I guess.)
I can say a couple of things about the mortgage end and the housing end, though. I’ve already mentioned I worked for a mortgage company for fourteen years, and thus this sort of thing is no surprise to me. And I was just a flunky, not a loan officer or anything. You just learn stuff about a business you work for for a long time, unless you’re really stupid (or the subject is Enron). After that, I worked for four years for a homebuilding company, one of the big ones. Like all the rest of them they made all sorts of stupid decisions based on predictions even I, a keyboard puncher who had always rented, could tell were insanely over-optimistic. When the axe came down on most of us I was so not surprised.
What I don’t understand, and never will, is how the big ones in charge who actually make these decisions (lend money to everyone! build a zillion inventory homes despite the ascendant anti-cookie-cutter-home fashion that anyone with HGTV on their cable lineup knew about! Etc.) came to their decisions. It sounds more like some sort of lemming-like mass hysteria gripped the industry. How embarrassing if true.