| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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not that i care. i just thank them for their navels. i bought a ticket to the 1:50 showing of the royal tenenbaums. slipped it into my wallet and walked to bookshop santa cruz. bought two books, presents. one for a child who is a poet, one for an adult who is not. (or is.) i went to the pakistani owned irish pup. had a pint of boddingtons. asked the bartender for the time. stared off into space and drank my pint in five or six good pulls. headed down the stairs (a steep set of stairs to put before you can leave an "irish" pub.) i went to the theater. checked the clock at the box office. 1:30. i should really buy a watch. watches always stop working for me. rapidly. or work irratically. irrationally. i must have strong fields. i go into the theater and find a spot in the middle. this is where heather and i tend to sit. i miss her then, thinking movies are much funnier with her. i regret not going to see black hawk down or some other film where i wouldn't want to laugh aloud. i read the first three chapters of one of the books before they dim the lights on me. the book i bought for the adult, i'd already read the one i bought for the child. the movie was good. other people thought it was better. pop culture has been pumped full of this deliberate, formula wierdness that is getting tiresome. yes, that's wierd. i see. how odd. wierd in the same way everything else wierd has been wierd for the past five years. move on. it's like painting the mona lisa in shades of blue, after someone has already painted the mona lisa in shades of red. ha! just like the orignal only slightly blue! but it is not the first mona lisa, nor is it the first mona lisa painted in a different hue. interest fades. anyway, after the movie i lent my cellphone to james, the produce manager of the downtown new leaf market. his tire had gone flat and he couldn't wrestle the lugnuts off by himself. 'do you like organic produce?' he says. 'sure', i say. he goes on to list a bunch of produce they have at the moment. a recent promotion, to produce manager. moved from another store. he is very excited about his job. apparently he wants to give me some produce in exchange for the use of my cellphone. i tell him it's cool. everything goes around. i drive back to my town. i stop in at the local new leaf and have them make me a smoked turkey and provalone sandwhich on a sourdough roll. i buy a liter of grape juice. i go home, consume both. look at the mail. i read the rest of the book. take a shower. play bass. go to bed sober. if you don't count the people at the grocery store who i have ongoing three-four sentence serial conversations with, i didn't see a single person i know all day. i don't know how i feel about that. |
woke up feeling bad. got up and made coffee and moved around, this made me feel better. made scrambled eggs with diced bacon and onions and put it on flour tortillas with hot sauce. for some reason, i never eat anything i can't put on a tortilla of some sort anymore. and i had mango chunks marinated in hot sauce. so i guess not everything has to be on tortillas. but you know what i mean. put on npr. am listening to mildly addictive timekill "what what," learned that people in europe want to erect a statue of a pretzel in honor of bush's arch foe. some paper in england, apparently a respectable one, said in an editorial something like, "choking on a pretzel is the kind of thing homer simpson does every week. finally america has a leader who is in touch with the tastes and mindset of the people he leads." was cleaning out one of my closets. the hall closet. in the far right corner, behind boxes and old clothes and random junk, was a coffee can with $100 dollars in ¢50 pieces in it. that was nice. finished packing a box to send to an adult who is a poet. it then occured to me that tomorrow is mlk day and the post office will probably be closed. played some blues on a guitar without a high e string. loved nate. in my heart. got invited to dinner. people like to feed me. |
message for Mavis. Other than that, I sat in a laundromat and listened to Middle Eastern and Asian languages while reading a collection of quotes from people considered experts by their contemporaries, and who were all dead wrong about what they were talking about. It's a pretty thick book. There are a lot of good quotes from Reagan. I saw no one I knew today either. |
I can't remember any of their names. Well okay thats not quite true, but you know what I mean. I talked to them about what happened to me in Auckland and they were disgusted. I met the head honcho of the account who I have been brought in to fix. If they had of told me at the interview the client was on trial and I had three months to make them stay, I might not have taken the role. Tomorrow, I fly to Auckland again. I need to tidy my house and pack. Ferg will not stop meowing. I saw my mum. She cooked my dinner. |
I watched the evening news while I ate, and I learned that there was a murder at a gas station in College Park on Saturday, a gas station I often visited when I lived in Greenbelt. I then went to evening Mass, and a visiting gospel choir sang during the service. I like going to church there, at St. Michael's, even though it's not my parish, because the congregation is so ethnically diverse. My parish church, Our Lady of Lourdes in Bethesda, is full of old white people. St. Michael's has a lot of Latino and Carribean islander families. Mass lasted an hour and fifteen minutes, and I had a hard time enjoying myself, even with the choir, because of a headache behind and above my left eye. I still have that headache. |
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In the years during I've passed through that store it strikes me as interesting that I've seen no less than 2 individuals standing outside protesting the rudeness of the store managers and clerks. One woman was out there for days handing out fliers and explaining to anyone who would listen the details of some indignity she suffered at the whim of a Colisume clerk. "Excuse me, sir, would you like to hear about how I was insulted by the clerks in this store?" And she had a stack of print-outs with drawings showing what happened... I don't know what transpired, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that at a B&N or a Borders. Of course, as with virtually all things, just because I don't know about it doesn't prove anything. I knew there was no chance of finding a single decent book at Colisuem at this point, since the clearance sale has been going on for a few weeks. The place really was crammed with people and emptied out of books. I was thinking that I'd only find the shittiest remainder titles, and I laughed outloud when I found a stack of copies of "Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age," by Esther Dyson. At $2 it will make for a funny anecdote among people who, like me, never understood what made her such an authority on the future of humanity. I also got something called "Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001;" "Talking," by David Antin; and "The Stairway to Heaven," by Zecharia Sitchin. Buying that ludicrous Sitchin book brought a bit of closure for me, because the first book I ever bought in New York was also by Sitchin, and I bought it at Coliseum Books. In fact, the book I bought 11 years ago was Volume 1 in a 12-part series, and the book I bought today was Volume 2, so in 110 years I might have finally purchased all 12 volumes and read only the first 20 pages of each one. I predict that within a few months memebers of "The Earth Chronicles" crowd will find this page through some search engine and demand explanation of why anyone would describe Sitchin as ludicrous. Sitchin's theory was that the Nefilim (a superior race of extra-terrestrial beings) once ruled the earth and through cloning gave birth to the human race. This theory would seem to go a long way toward explaining the sudden acceleration of human evolution about 6,000 years ago and the seemingly spontaneous appearance of agriculture. Much of the concrete evidence supporting this, Sitchin says, was lost with the destruction of the library in Alexandria, Egypt. I have to say, even now I find the theory seductive. When I first heard about it I was in high school and listening to a short-lived radio network called The Sun Network, which I remember as an Art Bell predecessor in terms of talking about really crazy stuff. I think it was on a show called Tom Valentine's "Radio Free America." As far as I could tell Sitchin had some genuine credibility. But for me it was like reading "Satanic Verses" without knowing the subtleties of world religions. I am not a bible scholar of any manner, and I don't feel qualified reading and assessing the merit of the work ofsomeone like Sitchin -- who certainly appears to have read and absorbed a huge amount of history. But I realized later, perhaps in part through seeing self-declared authorites like Esther Dyson come and go like so many grandiloquent blowholes, that selectively stitching together information from vast amounts of incongruous bodies of research into seemingly coherent and fresh insights is not as hard as it sounds. But it sure can look impressive. Anyway... The Coliseum is closing, and I'm not going to miss it. Although it was conveniently located. Also recently closed was the Lechter's housewares across the street. I bought my Forman Grill there, as well as a cheese grater. |
Yesterday I went to church with my father and grandparents. I forgot to pack a razor when I left for the drive to Tennessee, so I was a tad disreputable looking at the service. Pastor Larry shook my hand anyway. I stayed at my grandparent's house, where they've lived since 1958. For most of Saturday my grandmother was worried about overstaying our welcome at "this place." She'd ask when we were going home, and if the "caretaker" would throw us out soon. Yesterday she'd forgotten all about that anxiety. I hope she always recognizes me. I selfishly enjoyed the big smile on her face when she saw me walk into the living room Saturday morning. A*** was in Las Vegas this weekend, so I wasn't able to talk to her while I was gone. I found my thoughts drifting to her all weekend, just gently resting on the idea of her. Last night I was going to write in my journal, but watched the Sci Fi channel instead. I'm totally wired now after driving for 12 hours, though, so I'm sure a few pages will come out. The subject: "She likes the way I smell..." |
Ive walked along the river there and flown in a Cessna 170 taking off and landing in a cow pasture in Oakridge. I had one of the worst weekends in my life this past weekend. Im so volatile right now. |
uh i went to a party. go drunk. pretended to take that hit of MDMA, saving it for later because I would have been in hot doo doo had I taken it. lots of hot girls at the party. even had this one girl speak and introduce herself to me. I forget names moments after introductions, so I couldnt tell you her name now. Im not sure what that means, her introduction, if anything, but you can bet Im wondering if she thought i was attractive. despite my internal mood, i felt very good externally. I was wearing clothes that make me feel good, that make me feel potentially attractive. i was wearing my navy levis, the polyester kind that look and fit like cords, but are polyester. I was wearing a black, good-fitting tee shirt in addition to my low cut shit kickers that sound so impressive when Im walking on anything but carpet. best of all was my pea coat, despite its missing buttons. I stood tall. I felt tall, but I also kept my hands in my pockets. draw your psychology conclusions if you may, it seems to fit. i went out side to smoke and this cute blonde girl said "hi" and asked if i "worked on the show" (it was a party for the camera crew of thats series, Scrubs). I told her no and that i was there with a friend who is a key grip. I went on to remark about the view, as it was a tremendous one, over looking Hollywood, seeing sunset blvd go on and on in a plethora of lights and sparkles. I asked her if she lived in the neighborhood. She didnt. I happen to live in the hood and went on to remark about the one noticeable hill in Silverlake viewable from the porch we were on. I remarked how Ive seen it from so many different angles, at parties and various friends houses and how this angle was a new one for me. Its a very distinct hill with rows of palms at the top. She *seemed* to find this interesting but probably not as interesting as I found it. Nico interrupted us for one reason or another, I excused myself. A bit later, I was walking by her and she was fumbling with a cigarette. As I passed I whipped out my Zippo and lit her. My one and only suave move of the evening. Later in the weekend we went to M's birthday party. M turned 1 years old. I got him a shiny, loud music makin machine with big sparkly lights. Just so H wouldn't get jealous and possesive of his brother's birthday I got H an Xmen Wolverine spinning blow pop device. Yesterday i was in the darkroom for a bit, then I went home, made dinner, got shitfaced and watched hockey. |
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The owners shipped their money off shore. Leaving everybody, especially their employees holding the bag. I liked their stores a lot. I just wished they managed their business better. |
but what happened to them is/has happened to smaller independent bookstores all over. aggressive marketing tactics by the like of B&N and Borders who are now paying the price for such tactics. It used to be, like Starbucks, they were content to loose an assload of money on certains stores just to get market share, while other stores made up the difference. Unprecedented expansion. |
They should have closed those stores. And, they could have made it. The suburban stores had plenty of business. Just not enough to support the city stores. |