Monday, June 29, 2009

I ate Glass?

"I ate glass"
---Alex "Bolo" Daboub


I haven't written in forever. I think I'm brain dead. All I think about is money and jobs and getting jobs and whether I have too much time to think about jobs.

Cooked some noodles. I bought this dubious paste from an Asian grocery store named "black bean chili." Andrew told me to. I cooked a recipe he gave me that involves noodles and shrimp and vegetables. So I cooked it, and it tasted really great, but I wasn't banking on biting into literal GLASS. There are pieces of ground up glass in it. No jokez. I blame the black bean chili paste because it's from China, and China is mostly glass. Fuck you China! Cheenore. First Tiananmen SQuare and now this. You're really blowing it.

F.T.W.

The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2: The Metal Years --- Obviously good. Why even ask? L.A. is sleazy. L.A. used to be more sleazy by a factor that is incalculable. This movie is about hair-metal dudes. It's the bottom of the barrel of culture. It's just like The Decline of Civiliztion Part 1 but no one ever says anything funny or smart. (except Lemmy from Motorhead)

Thursday, June 18, 2009

More About What Southern Blacks Eat

“Cannabis is the Divine Inheritance given to all people by Mother Earth so that we may unlock the mystery of the many and varied messages of the Pure One”
--- uhhhhhh,I don't know. John F. Kennedy??


I'm here to talk to you about polk salad, aka poke, pokebush, pokeberry, pokeroot, polk salat, polk sallet, pokeberry, or inkberry. Jesus, stop naming it already. Of course, this is another thing Andrew told me about. This should just be his blag and not my blagh. In any case, the pokweed is an herb which grows in the southern United States, ya heard me. It contains deadly poison. Back in the olden days black folks and southerens didn't have too much to eat. Somehow they figured out that if you boiled pokeweed like a million times it removed enough of the deathpoison that they could choke it down. They decided to call it polk salad and poke and about 500 other names. Isn't that bonkers? Some people decided that it had medicinal properties, and I totally agree. Also, the fucking United States Declaration of Independence was written in pokeweed-berry-juice-ink, so show some respect. Jesus. It's called wikipedia, deal with it.
Oh, and this too:




90210 --- Brandon, that fucking cad, of course tries to have ANOTHER romance with an inappropriate chick. This time it's a woman of undetermined middle-age who turns out to be dating a married sports promoter. Oh Brandon, when will you ever learn? As usual, if he would have listened to Dylan's cryptic advice about her, he could have saved himself a lot of gay-heartbreak. Just start listening to Dylan, idiot. He's like a surfing Confucius with a sports car. Dylan, in an occult death-pact with Allah, surfs too close to the sun and nearly bites it. He ends up with broken ribs, hanging out in his gay pajamas, and in Brenda's house because Mrs. Walsh feels sorry for him. I mean, he's practically a bastard-child. Most mystics are. What's happening to me?


Whatever Works --- Uh, I just heard that Larry David is the star of the new Woody Allen movie. This could be the defining cultural moment of my life or a total disaster. I'm sceeeered.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Some Things to Think About

"Haile Selassie I, the former, and final, Emporer of Ethiopia is the incarnation of God, called Jah or Jah Rastafari"
--- My Mom

Black folks often will say "Ya heard me?!" in New Orleans after a sentence. Like, "I want to eat some rice, ya heard me!?" It's the eQuivalent of white folks who say, " I want to eat some seaweed, ya know what I mean?!" Which brings me to another point: black folks eat rice. I heard southern blacks eat a lot of rice. For some reason this really surprises me. I just can't imagine it. So, are black people in the South the new Asians? Then what are Southern Asians eating? Do they eat carrots? Who eats carrots? What do carrots eat?

I live on the 2nd story of this house in Seattle. There's a lot of weirdos who pass under my windows all day. Most of them wear little skateboards as a hat and obscure their faces with peanut butter. Some of the bigger ones are making toast to pay off their student loans.


Dixie Dynamite
--- Warren Oates is this drunk guy who races motorcycles for money. His friend makes moonshine all day and has two sexpot southern daughters who run around in little shorts and pigtails. All pretty straightforward so far, right? So the man comes down on the father and kills him in a shootout involving the feds. Uh, then a bunch of other shit happens to the daughters until they get pushed OVER THE EDGE, son. At that point, they steal a couple of motorcycles and a bunch of dynamite, and they go on a Bonnie and Bonnie style crime spree across the South blowing shit up with the dynamite. Can you imagine a better plot for a movie than that? And then Oates is like, "Fuck The World."

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Head North West pt. 2



Redwoods. Northern California. Taken by a wood nymph.














There was a lot of this.











My only friend. Going 80 and taking a picture is hard.







Head North West

"There is no god but God, Mohammed is the one true prophet."
---Shahada

So I drove from L.A. to Seattle alone, and it was EPIC. There were times when I thought I had always been driving my whole life, and that that's all there ever was. I slept in my car somewhere in the Redwoods area of Northern California. I had to wait until it was getting light though, because it's so terrifying, secluded, and Quiet out there. I was sure bigfoot or a serial killer would immediately snatch me up if I stopped in the night. I stopped relatively often just to walk out into the woods or down onto some beach. I collected:
2 rocks from the beach in Southern California
1 pine cone from Big Sur
some mysterious good smelling plants from the side of the road
1 fern frond from the redwoods


If I would have kept driving, I'm pretty sure my car would have been filled with plants and rocks. By what magical mechanism did I take all of these shameless photos of myself?


Wednesday, June 10, 2009

I'm in L.A.

"If you stare too long into the abyss, eventually the abyss will begin to stare back"
--- (something like that, I'm paraphrasing) Fred Nietzsche


I'm half way to Seattle. Stopped off in L.A. for few days. Toby and I stopped in Joshua Tree:








Joshua Tree is a weird alien landscape like you're literally on Mars. It's bad-butt.













Now I'm in L.A. There's all these damn plants here. So much luxuriating plant life that it's hard to know how to handle it. There is this duality though where everything in L.A. seems overgrown with the sheer abundance of plant-life spilling over everywhere, but at the same time, it seems to all be dying away and unhealthy. I guess it's partly because nothing here grows naturally. It's supposed to be a big dead desert, but they artificially threw a crazy city here anyway. Like the city is overgrown with vibrant plants that are also all dying. I brought this up to my friend, and he told me that it is rumored that all palm trees in L.A. are supposed to be dying in the next few years. The story goes that all the palms were planted roughly 70 years ago, and that is also about the expected life-span of those trees. So they are all starting to die off. Could be a total lie.

So tomorrow I'm leaving for Seattle with possible stops in Big Sur and places like that. I wanted to go The La Brea Tar Pits and throw in a microwave or something. If you translated "The La Brea Tar Pits" into straight English, it would be: "the the tar tar pits." I've told this joke 100 times today.

Also there are more ads for more movies here than anywhere else I have ever seen in my life combined. Toby said it's like preaching to the choir. I certainly don't get it. I'm sure it's some sick incestuous Hollywood marketing thing where they have to prove to themselves that they are really trying. They have to justify their own exorbitant advertising budgets to the other suits, and that. I imagine some dudes driving around in convertibles deciding whether some other guys in convertibles are doing a good enough job with all the ad money for Transformers 2. If they subliminally see enough bill boards and bus ads then they feel pretty good about things, and they can comfortably go back to thinking about speed boats.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Ace of Spades

"You know I'm born to lose, and gambling's for fools,
But that's the way I like it baby,
I don't wanna live forever"
---Lemmy

I'm driving to Seattle tomorrow forever or a while, or something. Well in any case, I'm leaving Austin once again for an unknown amount of time, maybe forever. The last thing I have to deal with is moped. I need money really bad, and I don't know how I'd get it up there, but it's just so fun ride a 2-wheeled motor thing. It helps if you sing the lyrics to Ace of Spades in your head and be really reckless. How can I recreate that feeling if I sell? I'd have to drive my car with my head out the window, or something. I'm so confused.


Nashville --- So murky and brown and 70's that it's like a brown murky 70's pool of slop. I mean that in the best possible way. It's one of those Altman movies that are just of bunch of weird shit happening instead of like a plot broken up into scenes. Jeff Goldblum plays a silent weirdo who does magic tricks and drives this:









The movie is roughly about Nashville in the 70's, including the world of country music and all of that biz. Elliot Gould makes an appearance as the actor Elliot Gould. Meta-Gould.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Austin --> L.A. --> Seattle -->

"Either you dig me or you don't"
--- Keanu Reeves

I'm in Austin making final preparations to leave for Seattle. Does anyone want all of my belongings in the world? On Friday, Toby and I are heading West in my car, and I'm dropping him of in L.A. where he will become famous. I'm going to hang out in L.A. for a few days, try to locate everyone who was in The Decline of Western Civilization, and then drive onwards to Seattle. I want to stop at the following places:
White Sands, New Mexico
Joshua Tree
Big Sur
Yosemite
Some rich lady's house
Are there other places between here and Seattle that are worth visiting? I'm open to suggestion. Also, if someone wants to name an object that they need, maybe I have it, and I'll give it to you. I'm trying to be completely merciless and get rid of as much of my stuff as possible. I'm toying with the idea of selling my moped as well, even though the idea of losing it is like a dagger to my heart.


Communion --- So good that I've now seen it three times in about a month. It walks a fine line between absurdity and genius. Still can't do a good Walken impersonation. It's infuriating. One of the best parts is when Walken asks one of the aliens if he can smell him. "Can I smell you? Are you old?" So good.