Category: Thoughts

Privacy: It didn’t really exist prior to the industrial revolution in any meaningful way. Nor does it exist now that we have so much electronic monitoring. It seems to have been something that happened roughly for 100-and-some years starting shortly after 1900.

Paying $15,000 – $30,000 for a motorcycle does not guarantee a well-programmed fuel injection system or reliable sprockets: Ducati has issued a recall for its top-of-the-line 1098 motorcycles.

Oh my god, shingles can cause you to scratch a hole all the way through your skull and damage your brain: “Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.”

Short list of things I have seen on Cambridge Street while walking to and from work this month:

• A man wheeling a 25-pound sack of MSG into a restaurant.
• A woman who looked like she’d just been released from MGH, sitting in a doorway, picking listlessly at the bandages around her wrists.
• A man in scrubs who looked like he’d just gotten off work, ducking into a Beacon Hill doorway to drink from a tall-boy in a paper bag.
• A brown late-80s Chevy station wagon in the early stages of being converted to donk awesomeness: The body was ugly but rust-free, the vinyl interior was badly cracked, and the owner had installed enormous speakers and even more enormous chrome wheels (22 inches at least).
• A Ducati 1098 S piloted by a man wearing khakis and sneakers, who took both hands off the handlebars while moving to adjust his gloves. Contrary to all rules of schadenfreude and justice, he didn’t drop it.

Despite the looks my co-workers gave me when I told them my Friday night plans last week, there are plenty of valid reasons to want to go out to a shooting range. I feel that I can’t really have a solid opinion about gun control without at least knowing how to work one, without appreciating the people who use them for sport and competition. Plus, it hardly seems fair to let the political right in the US be the only people who know how to work firearms. I don’t want to be the only liberal in the shelter when the zombie apocalypse happens, right?

Anyway, it seemed like a good idea. Megan and I determined that we should go out to a shooting range and spend an evening firing some weapons with a couple of her co-workers. Google suggested the misleadingly-named Boston Gun Range in Worcester (pardon me, I’d been spelling it with an H, as Worchester, which is a terrible slight) where Fridays are “Jack And Jill” nights, involving free gun time for the ladies.

Or rather, Fridays were Jack and Jill nights.

It turns out that they got shut down months and months ago after an alarming string of suicides. Of course, while fighting the police-ordered injunction, the Gun Range hasn’t updated its web page. Or its phone message.

We didn’t find any of this out until we got to Worcester on Friday night and found the range locked and shuttered, without even a “CLOSED” sign out front. So, then what? Obviously, the four of us drove around past the nudie bars and automotive spring repair shops on the outskirts of town until we hit Worcester Center. We briefly got lost in the Abandoned Warehouse district, and then stumbled upon the Gentrified Abandoned Warehouse district, featuring loft condos (natch), a discount meat store (“We Towed You So” emblazoned cheerfully across the parking lot), and a tapas bar called Bocado.

Inside, we found mediocre tapas, moderately priced wine, girls with low-cut dresses and boys with over-gelled hair and french-cuff shirts. It had the promise of a decent evening, despite the presence of mango salsa on the menu. Authenticity in food is certainly overrated, but mango salsa on tapas, especially in a place that prides itself on a Spain-only wine list, indicates an unfortunate confusion of Spain and Latin America.

Still, I was more or less satisfied with my meal until a band set up and started playing Buena Vista Social Club-ified covers of American pop standards. That pretty much topped it. I will say no more of the evening or of the fair city of Worcester, which I am sure has some lovely people in it somewhere.

I’m on the 17th floor, directly above the parade route. That’s almost eye level with the blimps circling downtown. We don’t normally hear much noise from the street but this was loud: 17 stories up, through sealed double-thick glass, and across an office filled with sound-damping cubicles, I could make out the cheering and the guitar riffs.

And then it was past. Now it’s just a bunch of green and white confetti.

Who pays for parades, anyway?

I was kind of hoping his shirt would say “I (heart) NY… But Not In That Way.” But the one they used in this video works well, too.

At work, there’s a big stack of letters labeled “California Wildfire.” It contains demo copies (all addressed to John Sample of Anytown, USA) of letters we sent out to borrowers who might have been victims of last summer’s fires, reassuring them that if they hadn’t paid their student loans because their checkbooks and houses and banks had burned, we wouldn’t be angry.

Today I found video of those fires (or of one like them) and stared, entranced.

Firestorm from powrslave on Vimeo.

I think my work probably sent out letters along the same lines after Hurricane Katrina, although those letters would have been put away in archives or just recycled by now, so they’re not sitting in a convenient pile near my desk.

Fires make me think of Katrina because I also saw today that FEMA finally surplused all the supplies it bought and failed to distribute to Katrina victims. While they’ll probably be put to good use, it’s just yet another reminder that they let New Orleans down. Even three years on, there are plenty of flood victims who could use those supplies, and won’t because FEMA is disorganized and lacks initiative. But hey, that was a couple news cycles ago, and Bush has moved on. So has the rest of Louisiana, which now features a man whose support for Intelligent Design belies either idiocy or cynical pandering or both. Hey, maybe abandoning the poor in their flooded homes is part of that grand intelligent design.

Sometimes people wonder why I’m so angry at the world. I usually wonder why they aren’t.

Yesterday afternoon Megan and I went to a party in celebration of Gay Pride day, hosted by my married friends Ron and David. My major concern for the party, of course, was what to wear; I went with a shirt that was about two sizes too small. A guy’s gotta look hot for Pride, right? We got a bottle of pink wine to bring, and on arrival we were handed Jell-O shots that had rainbow layers in perfect ROY-G-BIV order.

There was some dancing, and some chips and dip, and grilling, and beer and cookies. But on the way home, it got serious. I’d been thinking of it as an excuse for grilling and drinking and wearing silly clothes and flirting. But afterwards, Megan and I talked about how we’d kind of misunderstood it. Yeah, sure, it’s a party. But we’d also met Ron’s parents and David’s sister, and talked with people who had been at the parade when it was a march for justice, too. And it’s not just a day for grilling – not any more than Memorial Day, which I also take for granted as a party excuse rather than as a day to honor people who died for things I hold dear.

So, yeah, it’s a victory that Doritos and N*Star were at the parade. And it’s a victory that a guy like me can wear a tight shirt and eat rainbow-colored alcoholic desserts without fear of backlash when co-workers and family hear about it. And while it’s sad that the Gays For Patsy country dancing group has fewer members than it used to, that’s also a victory in its own way, because it’s a sign that gay people can now join any old dance group and it’s not a big deal. But it’s not really fair to think you’re celebrating gay pride if you just send a corporate truck down a parade route and hand out snack chips. And you can’t, or shouldn’t, just borrow being gay for an afternoon as an excuse to get drunk.

The real story there, the real victory, is that Ron’s parents are there at his cookout, chatting about lawn care and paint chips with their son-in-law in a way that you’d never ever have imagined fifty years ago.

I just finished reading The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle. It’s a book I resisted for quite awhile, at least partly because Bookdwarf was so enthusiastic about it, and I just didn’t want to admit that she’s always right about these sorts of things.

Another factor that scared me off was that the book contains dogs. That immediately makes me think it’s one of those dog books – you know, of interest only to dog fanciers. It’s not. I’m pretty sure that people who like anything with dogs in it will like this book. After all, it contains dogs. But it’s not the sort of thing that appeals only to them. It will also appeal to novel-lovers. It’s a tale of family and secrets and betrayal, a northern Wisconsin sort of Hamlet mixed with Lear, a story of almosts, of near-breakthroughs in communication and understanding and perfection.

“The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle” uses the relationships – sometimes beautifully tender and joyful – between people and dogs to reflect more clearly the relationship between humans. Just as even imperfect communication between humans and dogs requires years of training and practice, the mute Edgar is stymied by his own imperfect understanding of the world and by other people’s inability to grasp what he’s saying. And of course, more generally, everyone fails to communicate or hides what should most be unearthed and shared.

No, there’s no happy ending there. Nice dogs, though.

You know most of those best-of lists that show up in locally-oriented newspapers and such are pretty much made up, mostly compiled of things the reporters and their friends like personally, and places that advertise with the paper.

But I’m sure it’s totally different for Boston Biz Journal’s Best Places To Work list. At least, I’m pretty sure my employer didn’t put any big ads in BBJ just to get on the list. Maybe the editor’s cousin just works here or something.

Or maybe I just have the best job ever.

My brother sent me the Obama video to beat all Obama videos- not merely a Bollywood remix, but a completely psychedelic Bollywood remix. The caption: “east meets west meets acid.” My reaction: Oh my god there are people dancing in his mouth!