Wednesday, January 21, 2009

V-B Day

Our grandparents had V-E Day and V-J day. We'll never have V-I day or V-A day. NEVER!
But we do have a V-B day. Victory over Bush. We survived his rule. HE said his main concern was over protecting Americans (from Muslims with box cutters) but more kids died from handgun wounds in Los Angeles than at the Pentagon on 9-11. So his excuses don't fly with me. If terrorists had destroyed New Orleans then are we to assume he would have actually rebuilt the levees? He's a liar and a thief and while some people did not survive his presidency, we can declare V-B Day here and gone.

Listening to the inauguration I heard someone say that America is the best this and that and look, a black guy became president near a coffee shop where he couldn't eat in 1960. "It's never happened anywhere else." they said.
I thought, never? Like a Jew has never visited the pyramids? Or Berlin? Mandela didn't become president of South Africa? Then I thought, yeah, those things have happened, and they were big deals...when the first Jew visited the pyramids and wasn't there to push rock. That was big deal. And remember when Mandela became president of South Africa? That was a huge deal. And think about how long it took for Mandela to go from possible slave to president. The Dutch were stealing people in the 13th century. Who knows how long after the pyramids were built was a Jewish person allowed to visit them. I mean, a thousand years? Two thousand years? But America is brand new comparatively. Right? And slavery was just abolished in 1865. Like 150 years ago, not even 100 years after the Revolution. Two generations ago. So the swing in public opinion has been substantially the same as Egypt enslaving Jews to build pyramids and then taking their tourist dollars to visit those same pyramids, or Mandela becoming an leader of South Africa after the Dutch basically treated blacks like exportable cattle for 600 years...but the difference is that it only took The united states (It was a colony before 1776) 230 years to reach some kind of political, ideological, philosophic equality...even if the practical situation isn't much different than 1692. Now a black person can gain access to the elite, ruling class. And it didn't take as long as Egypt. And really, those pyramids still keep the tombs of the slave masters. If the analogy was accurate, a Jewish person would be buried in one of those pyramids. Or maybe a bunch of Egyptians would build a new pyramid for a Jewish person. That would be equality...because Obama isn't just visiting the White House. No. He's living there and he's calling the shots and white people have to obey or they get the whip. Now that's some crazy swing...and maybe they're right...it hasn't happened anywhere else.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

laptop

this old IBM laptop computer has finally played its last porn clip. So the man in the van will soon be signing off this blog. I wanted to unplug this year anyway. No more wires and digital communication and batteries. It's gotten completely crazy. So if I find another laptop then I'll post some more but I won't be looking. What more could I say anyway? Oh look at the ocean. look at the Mexican people. boring.
I don't foresee myself riding a moped to an internet cafe so I can post about riding a moped to an internet cafe. that makes no sense. there is no internet connectivity on remote beaches in Baja. and no power.
better to just live day to day and no more virtual history that only gets mocked to begin with.
and no one should be wasting their time looking at these rants either. I mean really. You have to be ashamed of yourself to watch these inane rants. Or you have to be like Eddie and have a job that pays you to be unproductive...in which case you should still be ashamed of yourself. look at the state of America. we're a third world nation...we're slaves to so many different Ponzi schemes, the biggest one is called social security...but who cares as long as the fake pay checks still cash out? California is flat broke but proudly still feeds prisoners with food that even the richest governor can't actually afford...because his money doesn't exist. Instead of wasting your time looking at the internet go read Atlas Shrugged. What is money really worth? What does it actually represent? Go find out something useful that will do your kids some good in 2050. Go learn a skill like farming. Don't believe anyone with a rolex on. Believe a man with dirt under his nails. Or learn to believe in yourself. Be self reliant.

top things I lost

Part One: The Coat









Part Two: The Backpack



one thing I neglect to mention is where I got the backpack. This is supposed to tell the tale from the beginning to the end and you don't get an idea of where I bought it to begin with. The short story is that I was training to ride across the country by bicycling to Concord from portsmouth. Like 45 miles there and 45 miles back. in one day. and on one of those trips I kept passing an army surplus store on the concord turnpike. Finally I stopped and looked around and found this backpack. I think I bought it the first time I saw it because I knew I would have to be able to roll the back up and put it on my bike rack. It worked very good and went from Portsmouth, into Canada, across canada, back into the U.P. of Michgan and into the mid west and actually went into the black hills of South Dakota with me, off the bike and on a foot hike up the highest peak in South Dakota somewhere near Mt. Rushmore. Then back down and across Wyoming and to Jackson Hole and then on my back to Fairbanks. the rest is as I describe.






The steamer







Sunday, January 11, 2009

sex on fire

resolutions




The two things I let off the list are
no more internet porn. Come on. This is the year!
and to play guitar like Jim Hall. he's #1

deep creek hot springs

in my ongoing attempt to get video on this blog I had to post this video to my photobucket account and then embed it here. Why? I don't know why blogspot is preventing video upload. Makes no difference. Fuck them. Fuck blogspot! long live deep creek hot springs. these are at around 4500 ft in the san bernardino mtns. long drive. then a long hike and then crossing a river that is fed from snow higher up. the water couldn't have been colder and remained fluid. In the summer the river is no big deal, swim in it, relax. in the winter it was so cold that Luis and I worked hard to find another route back across and finally did some leap frogging across boulders and then some rock climbing to find the trail. I would have perished rather than get in that water again.


Thursday, January 8, 2009

Constance Collier

Standing in line at the Pantages theater waiting for tickets to see Wicked I was in between the hollywood blvd stars of Constance Collier, Karl Malden and Jackie Gleason.
Malden, I had to call my buddy George who reminded me that he was opposite Mike douglas in Streets of San Francisco. He also played The Gentleman Caller in A streetcar named desire. Right? The guy who said, "I knew you were old, but I didn't know you were this old." after he pushes Blanche under the torn paper mache light shade. Wait, the gentleman caller was in another Tennessee Williams play, the glass menagerie. It's all too confusing!
Gleason, of course, is everyman, Ralph Kramden, in the Honeymoners *(which was actually started as a sketch in the Jackie Gleason show and then later expanded to its own series.) and also a great pool player in The Hustler.. But Constance Collier

is a different story. we'd never heard of her. which is no surprise considering she mainly acted on the stage, during the silent film era. So you either heard her in person or you didn't hear her at all.

There were no tickets available to Wicked so the trip to the Wood was only a trip into Nostalgia zone. A bit of trivia though, Hollywood got its name when the a couple of pioneers in 1890, owners of a ranch located at the foot of the mountains, split the ranch in half. there were two dirt roads on the ranch. The one going east west they called Hollywood Blvd. The one going north south they called Vine. That's where the Pantages is. and that's where Constance Collier's star sits.

The picture above was taken just weeks before the crack cocaine epidemic of 1888. If you look closely you can see the hookers and pimps and tattoo shops hiding in the trees, waiting for their chance to turn hollywood into this:

Saturday, January 3, 2009

QO-1922449-aa

That's the Ford part number for a hood latch on an Explorer.
I learned that today as part of my ongoing project to chase my dream. Yes, the very day I quit my job assembling bikes my temp agency, the temp agency I haven't heard from in 3 months, calls and asks me if I want to work today.
I figure this is just Karma telling me that I was born to be pharaoh's slave and I should just adjust.
The best thing about Temp agency jobs is that as soon as I walk out the door at the end of the day I mutter to myself "I quit this shit eating job. I wouldn't come back here for a million dollars."
No one can hear me, and in fact my assignment has already ended (and deeply regretted by all parties) but still it is satisfying.
The pharaoh's slave didn't have that option. to quit. to say fuck this to the Pharaoh. But the man in the van does have this option and he will exercise it often. Get another monkey to count your door handles and gaskets and 75W150 gear oil containers. No me. Not this man.

Of course I didn't know that was where I was going when I accepted the job. I just took it on spec because that's the kind of guy I am. Maybe I'll count beans and maybe I'll move boxes. A beggar can't choose, but he can quit.
So it turned out to be Carma...not Karma that brought me back to work for one day at the Santa Monica Ford Dealership.
NOW I'm ready to start chasing the dream.* This time I'm serious.

The video upload function has had some issues and I've got a good video review of The day The Earth Stood Still in my archives. I'm not sure it will ever make it live. Maybe I've reached the limit of videos or maybe this internet connection is so tainted by porn that it is useless. Who knows? Don't see that movie unless you like pandering over budget bullshit with "lessons" stuck in the middle of a perfectly average movie. awful!

*The dream looks something like this

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.