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August 3rd, 2004
11:49 am - Wow. Cobwebs.
Haven't been here in a very long time. And that's sad. Makes it seem like there are only four people in the world more interesting than Cindy Crawford, and that's...well. Simply not true, is what that is.
Anyway, I sent the link to RobotDeathSquad, who does actually DO the blog-thing, so now I feel obliged to contribute simply because, well. I'm here.
And, given a minute's consideration, there IS someone worth noting. The Democratic National Convention was, for the most part, a waste of perfectly useful television viewing time. With one exception.
Barack Obama. Say it with me: <http://www.obamaforillinois.com/index.asp?>"Barack Obama"</a>. I wasn't a third of the way through the speech before I realized: HERE was a future president.
There's really something magical about watching a good speech, and it's not something that everyone can do. It isn't enough to have the right words to say...there's a gift you have to have, to turn those words into something tangible, something that binds your audience to you, something that turns the individual into the pack. Obama? He's got that gift. You could feel it through the television.
And, it's about time.
I'm TIRED of the republicans considering themselves the "moral majority". It makes me SICK that because Billy got a blowjob the Democrats are now considered on the same moral standard as the guy who invented Hustler. That, when the Republicans are free to run rampant, hypocracy spouted like locusts out of their mouths, beaning good ordinary folks on the head with a bible they've obviously never read for themselves, and all the while being considered the ones with VALUES?
Bleh.
And that was the best part of the Democratic convention. To be agaist killing -- anyone, no matter WHAT race or religion, that's moral. To be against screwing your employees so you can purchase that 60,000 dollar umbrella stand -- that's moral! To be AGAINST making old people decide whether they want to die from cancer or malnutrition -- that's MORAL! And by damned, keeping your nose out of other people's bedrooms, well. OF COURSE that's moral.
No, it's NOT terribly moral to be letting the interns give you head when you're supposed to be working. But it's a hellufalot LESS moral to be killing strangers because you've got a hard-on for a leader...THEY DIDN'T EVEN WANT! Gimme a break. Blowjob...dead people. YOU tell ME who shouldn't be casting the first stones.
Anyway. Obama. HOPE is on the way...and he's a skinny kid with a funny name...
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November 29th, 2003
02:24 am - Cindy Crawford has a Deformity.
Well, actually, it’s a mole. But it’s something to recognize her by.
Cherry has no fingers. Most of her toes are missing, as well, but that’s a detail that isn’t readily noticed. And, I probably wouldn’t have paid as much attention to her missing fingers if it weren’t for the fact that she always wore really tight jeans. And I couldn’t help but wonder how she managed to get them zipped, with the stubs she had instead of fingers. So, that’s why I started chatting with her. I wanted to know how she managed to get her jeans up.
She was born with all of her fingers. All of her toes, too. And really, she gets along perfectly well without them. But she lost something else, along with her fingers, and that, she’s not getting along so well without.
Cherry is a bit … adventurous. She’s an emergency-room nurse. Sailed around the Horn in something that looks rather like Mother Hubbard’s shoe. And, she mountain climbs. And that’s how she lost her fingers. And her husband, Chris. Chris was also a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and they conspired to climb K2 together. Unfortunately, it takes more than adrenaline to climb mountains. Although both were experienced climbers, Chris was also a heavy smoker. He fell ill on the mountain, and died. The sherpa declined to help carry the body back down, and Cherry lost her fingers and toes trying to get her husband’s body off the mountain.
Now, she spends her time raising money and building schools in her husband’s name. Chris’s body is still up on the mountain, but his name certainly lives on. And, some ten years ago, Cherry was still living on the boat they sailed around the Horn in.
It’s actually a fantastic story, though I think the book might be out of print by now. Still, if I can find it again, I’ll post the title and Cherry’s full name. It’s worth hunting it down at the used book store.
This woman’s story is truly remarkable. And infinitely more interesting than Cindy Crawford’s mole.
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November 21st, 2003
01:44 am - Cindy Crawford's a Star.
So's Preki. The real Preki. Well, he is if you're a footie fan.
Americans are pretty good at basketball, successful at hockey, fabulous at football. We have great runners, amazing skiiers, I think we've even got some quick Lugers. Or maybe we used to, before they launched themselves from Salt Lake City, made a slight miscalculation, and ended up in China. On a Yetti.
There are two great moments in American Footie, referred to by most people as "soccer". The first was the 1950 World Cup, where a handful of blue-collar workers gave England the what-for. And the second was the day Preki beat Brazil.
Brazil is the greatest football nation in the World. Fans will argue this until you're crosseyed and confused, but the fact is, they have the big gold balls. Italy is my favorite National team to watch. Aston Villa's my favorite premiereship team. Kansas City is my favorite MLS team (for obvious reasons). But Brazil is still the best team in the world.
BEATING Brazil is a major event. The equivalent would be if the Cubs actually WON the world series. Or maybe if George Bush Jr. said something intelligent. It just ain't gonna happen every day, or without divine intervention.
The divine intervention that day was Preki. Most people give the game to Kasey Keller, and you certainly can't take anything away from Keller: it was the performance of a lifetime. But if there had been no Preki, the score would've been 0-0, and we wouldn't have beaten Brazil. It would've been a tie, and that's significantly less remarkable. A tie with Brazil is like hearing that J.Lo got a divorce again, or that George Bush actually left a country without it getting up in arms. Slightly surprising, but there are always quantifiers: yeah, but it was one of those small countries where there aren't televisions and everyone's so impoverished they'd hug anyone for six grains of rice and a Coke. See?
Anyway. There were about 20 minutes left on the clock, and the score was still 0-0, and Preki'd had a couple of good runs at the goal already, and then, it happened. He faked left, faked right, faked left again ('cause he's left-footed) and there it was...Goal. It was one-nothing, and WE had the goal. I could barely breathe until the final whistle, and when it finally blew, the entire neighborhood (and probably all of the adjacent ones) knew that SOMETHING had happened. Luckily, nobody called the cops.
There's a good deal more to Preki than that one goal. He actually played indoor footie here in the Bay Area before the US hosted the World Cup in '94. He played in the US National Team Jersey in several nail-biting games, got kicked off the team by Steve Sampson (bad, bad idea), has a distinctive running style, is very kind to little old Serbian grandmothers who stand in line to speak of the home country with him. He's gracious to his fans, gracious to his opponents, and he doesn't play dirty. He has a nearly-unpronounceable name (hence the nickname).
And he beat Brazil for us. Preki is number 3 on my list, and he is more interesting than Cindy Crawford.
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November 20th, 2003
01:53 am - Cindy Crawford travels for work.
She probably doesn't take the trains, though.
It was about a year after the US had bombed Yugoslavia, and I was on the train from Novi Sad (because you couldn't get one out of Beograde; the tracks were still damaged) to Kiev. I have a love affair with Eastern Europe that goes back to my childhood, and if there's a fondness for the country, there's an absolute mad obsession with trains. It's probably from watching Dr. Zivago one too many times. Or maybe it's just the letters that Mayakovski sent to Lili while she was in France. They all went by train. Was one of them here? Hidden away in a crevace these 60-plus years? I touched the walls, stretched out on the bunks, popped up again to stare out the scraped-up window. Were those secret messages left by dissidents, there on the window, or just the result of one too many tourists banging their heavy cameras against the window?
So when a commotion started in the corridore, I went to go see. An older Serbian fellow was bellowing for soap. He was impish and leathery, a cousin to the leprichaun and just as slippery. The call for soap was at least a partial ruse; he was a Storyteller, and a Storyteller needs an audience. So he was calling out his audience, and we came, like charmed snakes.
The soap, we're told, is for his bunkmate. I glance at the door, and see a tall, slender figure battling a pair of socks. He stood well over six feet, the living flesh of Mayakovski’s poetry. Handsome, twentysomething. He had the standard Serb-issued dark hair, cheekbones like the Montenegrin mountains, and those haunting blue eyes. If the eyes are the keys to the soul, every Serbian bears the souls of every one of ancestors, and they peer at you from the depths of history. They are the paradigm of contradiction; so incredibly giving and friendly, and yet, even if you were to live forever and do nothing but have your questions answered, you will never come to know them completely. It’s calculated, this cloak of mystery. It ensures there’s always something fun to talk about tomorrow.
So the Storyteller's going on about the evils of foot odor, the quintessential artiste; his gestures are timed to enhance the facial expressions, the facial expressions add exclamation to the words, and the story, newly formed just a minute or two ago, has already become a legend to be sung at the fire at this old man's telling of it.
The boy's name is Rade, and he's come out to join the fun. The old man's got an audience already; from down the hall, two children have snapped their mothers' tethers. The mother hovers at the door, not willing to surrender her domain, but unable to resist the charms of the old man. And from the center car, a young couple: one Bosnian Serb, the other, Bosnian Muslim. Neither family wanted them, now, so they were looking to find a place to love each other in peace.
The old man has us, now. The train could careen over a cliff and we'd be using our last words to tell us the end of the tale. It's about the boy's adventures in the war. About how he wandered off to find some booze for his best friend, how Rade nearly got caught pilfuring the booze from one of the officers and had to hide in a storage locker, legs trembling with exhaustion, barely breathing, until the officers left and Rade could extract himself, and the contriband, back to his best friend. By this time, it'd gone dark, and the shelling had been unending.
And then he was shot. Right under the ribs. And then shot again, in nearly the same place. And a third time, in the opposite shoulder. But he carried on, half crawling, still madly clutching the bottle of booze, determined to find his friend, Marko. And as he stuttered forward, he slipped and slid through the fox hole. It got harder and harder to trudge forward, and finally, Rade sank into unconsciousness in the muddy pit.
When the sun rose, and rescue came, Rade realized it wasn't mud he'd been slipping in. It was the innards of his best friend.
One of the children asked to see Rade's scars. He flushed red, started to protest, but then he slowly lifted his black t-shirt. The puckers were half-way between his last rib and the top of his pelvic bone. They weren't neat, tidy holes, like I thought they'd be. Puckers, and scar tissue on scar tissue, as if a three year old had wrapped a package in a hurry. And the star-like puckers in the center of the mangled flesh.
The Storyteller got his soap, and handed it to Rade, who, slightly uncomfortable, excused himself to go deal with his foot-rot, a souvenir from the war.
I excused myself as well, but evesdropped on the conversation outside my door, in between daydreams and staring out the window. Eventually, I fell asleep.
I was wakend by a row in the next cabin. I thought at first it was the sad lovers, finding a little solace in the rythem of the train. But then I realized that the sounds weren't cries of love, they were cries of pain. And then I heard, "Marko! Marko!", and I knew. The boy was apparently plagued with nightmares. I listened, horrified that pain and ecstasy could sound so similar. I listened to the old man try to wake Rade, listened to the sobs eventually settle back into quiet. I didn't go back to sleep for a long, long while.
Rade's family was moved to Serbia proper after the war. Where once they were villagers, now, they were stored away in an apartment in the City, with no way to grow food and no jobs to be had. The Storyteller had told the boy that there was work to be had in Moscow. The boy's family had given him what they had left to get him there. There was no mistaking the pain in Rade's eyes. There was also no mistaking the hope.
Soon, they'd get to Moscow. The old man would weave his tales and proffer up what hopes he could muster through the long, cold winter, but in the end, there would probably be no work in Moscow. The old man would run out of tales and find someone else to leach from. The money wouldn't go far, and then what? A stranger in a strange land, haunted by nightmares, held hostage by Serbian pride, what would become of the beautiful boy? The odds weren't good. But then, the odds had never been good for these people. And yet, they trudge onward, telling their tales, drinking their drink, and laughing, always laughing to hide the sad, sad eyes.
I gave Rade $100 US and a pack of French cigarettes. It wouldn't solve his problems, but it might help him make it through the winter. I never saw him again, I have no idea how his story ends.
Rade and the Storyteller are more interesting than Cindy Crawford. But, I'll count them both as one, and that's 2 people more interesting than Cindy Crawford. 98 to go.
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November 17th, 2003
09:48 pm - Cindy Crawford has dirty laundry
Well, maybe not. I mean, maybe she just throws everything out once it's been worn for a couple of hours. But probably not. Probably, she has dirty laundry. And probably, someone else washes it for her.
Me, I have to do my own. And the Punk's, as well. And 2 year olds go through more clothes in a day than a supermodel.
We have laundry machines in the apartment building. One could use them, I suppose, but it'd take ten dollars in quarters and six weeks to dry one load of underpants. And that's provided you can actually GET to the dryer, since the apartment building is chock full of nutcases who are too busy lecturing God, trying to blow up the building, or practicing a peculiar brand of "meditation" that tends to bring the police on domestic violence complaints to collect their laundry from the laundry room.
So it's laundry day, and I'm at the laundry mat. Lumpy pillowcases screaming at the seams with drooled-upon Punkiewear. At the far end, there's a guy with no shoes. But directly behind the shoeless guy is a mountain bike. Not a cheap knockoff, but the real deal, all sparkley and blue, with a brand name blazing from the frame. So I figure he's a hippy, or perhaps he's a PETA member showing his support for cold cows everywhere, and I head for the washing machines.
There I am, doing the three-step shuffle, dancing back and forth between stuffing quarters in the slots, sliding back a couple of machines to dump in the soap, sliding foward again to cram the clothes in before the machines start grinding away, and all of a sudden, shoeless guy gets agitated. "Oh NO!" I hear. "MY RAT! The chinchilla! The chinchilla escaped!"
What? My feet are trying to leave the ground, both at the same time. My neck is snapping back and forth not unlike the washing machines in front of me. And I'm trying to puzzle it all out: first. Is it a rat? Or is it a chinchilla? Rat? They carry plague. Maybe Shoeless guy carries the plague? Chinchilla? Hey, now. There's a REASON they make coats out of those nasty little buggers.
I'm so busy peeking in corners and trying to levitate, I don't notice that shoeless guy has wandered to the front of the laundrymat. It takes a minute to register what happens next: I hear the lid of a washer open, and then I hear, "THERE you are! Don't ever leave me again, little chin-chin..."
I stop dancing, stop spinning my head, just stop, in complete astonishment. Then, I start looking for hidden cameras. Shoeless guy is heading back in my direction, coddling a chinchilla, whom he'd apparently been storing in a washing machine.
I thought I might go have a chat with him. Why not? What ELSE was I doing? But he stuffed the chinchilla in his backpack and put his headphones on; the universal sign for "piss off". He's cooing at the rohdent, waxing nostalgic about how life just wasn't the same without it, and how he's sorry he forgot about it. And then, he suddenly changes the subject. I'm not sure. He might've still been talking to the chinchilla. Maybe he was talking back to the headphones. Maybe, he just wanted to make sure I didn't wander over and ask to pet his critter.
Anyway, cherish and honor the rhodent soon gave way to something about a nuclear explosion that may have occurred at three mile island, but then again it might've been Mt. Diablo, either way (and it really didn't matter to him, since he doesn't actually live here) we Marinites were going to die a gruesome and horrid death, and won't it be funny that we'll all start melting and we'll have no idea it's because of chemical contaminants or was it radiation and so on...
I figured I'd take a little stroll, least he decide that death by disaster wasn't gruesome enough and tried to put his rhodent on me. That's when I realized why shoeless guy was, in fact, shoeless. There were two dryers running. And a tennis shoe in each one.
There's always a public noteboard in laundrymats. Captive audience, you know. There was the usual offerings. Soccer camp for kids, learn to write the Great American Novel in 48 hours from a one-hit wonder-writer, and being Marin, an absolute banquet of gurus and guides, self-proclaimed healers and magicians ready to offer up the latest snake-oil, lessons in how to ... live. Because, you know. Getting up in the morning and "doing" simply isn't good enough.
And, in amongst the crayola-happy construction-paper forest of screaming self-improvements, I see a little hand-written advert. It read:
Raul
Rat and Chinchilla grooming
So I wondered: do you use the "gentle" cycle on chinchilla? Or should you use "permanent press". And, is this a case where you would WANT animal-tested soap?
Raul the Rat Groomer is more interesting than Cindy Crawford.
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12:44 pm - Looking around, making sure the windows open.
So Nkuvu Tortoise gave me a key to the place. And what a timely key.
About four months ago, I was watching the Biography channel, and their chosen subject was Melanie Griffith. Personally, I didn't think her life so terribly interesting to warrant an hour-long program, unless you're a horror fan and like to watch self-inflicted metamorphasis from a person into a platypus in a human costume.
And I started to think about all the people I know or have been acquainted with that are more interesting than Melanie Griffith.
Then, last night, I was talking to my best friend about an idea of collecting little mini-bios of 100 people more interesting Melanie Griffith. But, she seems to think that Melanie Griffith has the redeemable quality of being married to Antonio Banderas, and that a better victim of my scorn would be Meg Ryan. We settled on Cindy Crawford.
The very next day, that is, this morning, Nkuvu the Wonder Tortoise, tired of seeing "anonymous" in his comments on his journal, offered me a key.
How completely wonderful, and a nice little birthday present, to top it all off. The heavens, and a tortoise, have conspired to provide me with yet one more venue for wasting time and not accomplishing the stuff I really should be doing...
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