The Funniest Thing of the Week

My reluctance to ask directions isn't a reluctance to admit my ignorance. I do that freely. My experience has been that most people of whom I ask directions have absolutely no idea

• what the hell I'm talking about, or
• what they're talking about.

So they make shit up, afraid to say that they don't know. So if I ask these folks something, they babble on, then take their directions until I leave their sight, and continue to wander. My objective then becomes twofold: to get where I'm going, and to avoid the directions-giver.

Two contenders for funniest thing of the week, from yesterday evening:

1) "We're fighting a war of attrition. It's like the Western Front in 1917." -Kevin's comment on the high body count of vermin recently laid waste by traps in his kitchen

2) "With this you could feed a village. A village, perhaps, that had already eaten." -Greg's comment on my rice and beans

I used to say that the most difficult thing about flying was staying in one place--that cramped seat--for that long. It's difficult.

But getting to and from the airport can be as challenging. I don't think I made a single wrong turn on the way there and it still must've taken an hour. And that doesn't count finding the ticket counter.

But the way back! Man. First I have to take this shuttle to the main terminal, find the right bus to the parking lot, get off at the right time, then take the correct exit from the freeway. And all that while a pretty interesting thing was on public radio. I expect a bit too much from myself.

The closest thing I have for a contender for funniest thing of the week is this:

Asked friend Dave why he wasn't running on Saturday. He said that he was hurt. A very small bit of prodding revealed that he'd injured himself while bar hopping. He took bar hopping a step further by hopping down some wall and hurting his leg. "I can't really blame being drunk," he said, "because I probably would have done the same thing if I were sober."

Good times.

Oh, and I caught my sister's garter at he wedding this weekend. Damn near hit me in the eye. Good thing I ignore fate as a rule. My life would be much more prosperous and harmonious if I didn't. That's how you know I make a habit of ignoring the universe when it's trying to tell me something.

Tried to toss the garter off on my nephew, but he knew the score, and threw it back to me. Clever, that kid.

Further potential candidate for ftotw is the dream I had last night, that I got hornswaggled into enrolling in a international relations graduate degree. Of course I skipped most of the classes and never really realized that I was actually a student, and before I knew it I owed something like $129,000 in tuition and fees. Man, was I ever pissed. I think I crashed someone's Ferrari into a house across the street, too. All in a day's work.

Had to understand a sentence in an email that wasn't long, but must have been 30% acronyms. This is like reading French. Sure, the basic words I understand, things like l'etat c'est moi and maison and bonjour. But then most of the significant words are those whose meaning is not revealed by guessing.

Once I tried reading a German newspaper and found most articles to be utterly preposterous. For example, upon reading something in the business section, I was all like "The giraffe did what in the evil exchange?"

Le chat c'est moi.

Finally got a DC library card last night. It was a hell of a lot more satisfying than I'd expected. The whole thing just puts a spring in my step.

The building that smells like a school, the home-made displays, the beaten up shelves, the books that should have been tossed long ago mixed in with an entire set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Disheveled and very friendly workers, the pissy-looking children's librarian, the woman at the reference desk who would really rather be in an office, working. The familiarity of these places affirms my soul. It's like the watermark of urban American society. I go to these places and I feel like Yes, this is the real deal, and I'm in love with it.

I've been going into bookstores lately to look for reading stuff, 'cause I ain't got none to take on the bus with me, all of my subscriptions now on the four to six month forward schedule. So I've been going into Olsson's (is that what it's called?) or Borders or another place and looking for good car magazines--they never have the one I like best, "Thoroughbred and Classic Cars"--or something with reasonably good articles that aren't overwritten and harpy, or something with good fiction.

But these magazines are pricey, and often times I'll read through a whole issue and not find anything I want to read. And books--without a Dewey Decimal System or a Library of Congress system to go by, I got no idea where my nonfiction is, and their fiction is always ridiculously expensive (fifteen bucks for a trade paperback?) and they don't have what I want on the shelf, namely rockin' noir-y spy novels, something funny and obtuse, like Pynchon, or a young adult biography of Churchill. I like reading the young adult biographies, the poorly-written ones that are usually like 90 pages. These are quick reads, they give you the good anecdotes, they get most of the big facts right, they don't try to make impossible and over-reaching arguments about the subject's sexuality or possible history of drug abuse or whatever. And they aren't stupidly dry, and they aren't muffled by every last piece of information the biographer found in his research that he can't bear to leave out of the book.

But the public library! Dirty, underused, underfunded, idealistic institution! These things are better than Henry Rollins' "well-stocked garage"! I go there and suddenly I'm floating in space.

And I especially like urban ones. Anyone can go there and waste as much time as they want, as long as they don't stink too bad or make a big mess or make lots of noise or bathe in the bathroom.

So I checked out four or five books, one or two of which I'll probably read. And now I can plug into their databases and shit, and renew books online, and request stuff online, and check out as much of their crap as I want.

Just that this thing is there makes me feel great.

I used to think concerts were the ne plus ultra of the ne plus ultra life I was somehow missing.

And a few were more than fantastic, experiences that were most certainly this-one-goes-to-eleven kinds of experiences.

A few that were like this:
-Trip Shakespeare
-Green Day when they opened for Bad Religion, even though the friends I went with, they thought it was lame; excellent ride home, very late
-Fugazi, particularly the ride home
-Some weird show, Lollop For Losers, held on the West Bank in the summer of 1993

Maybe that was it. I went to more that had less significance. Come to think of it, I think all these shows were in 1993, except maybe for the Fugazi show, which may have been in early 94.

I liked the drive home, the whole experience of getting there from my relatively littler town with friends who'd been driving less than a year. I liked being in the city at night, downtown. And I liked being with my friends, who had a glow about them that we carried together as we wandered around, very tired, looking for the car. I liked that everything we did was an adventure and more fun and more independent than anything else. I liked that everything was the making for an excellent story. It was really as close to being a rock star as I ever care to get.

I saw Sigur Ros in May or April of this year and found it to be a completely different experience. Okay, that's not what I thought about at the time. At the time I was just really sick and I enjoyed it. But it wasn't like I was looking at my life through a magnifying glass. Which is for the best. I've got more shit to do these days, and I'm not so consumed with an intended rebellion.

Then again, I'm sure that the interior decorating of my brain hasn't changed. I'm probably consumed in the same way with very similar things, like girls and other such activities in which i feel the need to be affirmed, and stressed out to the very same degree with different things. Having a job instead of getting into college, the general repair of my living situation rather than how pissed I am at my family.

Music and going to concerts, however, is an area of my life that has seemed to dry up and lose significance without having been replaced with some other driving and angry plaintive passion.

Hm. Maybe this is a symptom of treated depression. I become a floating point operation machine instead of a serial processor, or whatever it's called. Instead of focusing intensely on one thing and then moving onto the next, or instead of being consumed with the completion of one thing and not being able to let it go before finding another, I can sort of do multiple things at one time. None is super important--okay, they become important only when they're neglected--but it's maintenance, not creation.