Welcome Back

I did it. I moved. Most of my stuff has not made it here yet, and I'm sleeping at my mother's house until the truck comes with the boxes, but I'm here. Back in Texas, safe and sound.
    Honestly, I'm conflicted. I do have plans, and if things work out - as they will - my brother-in-law and I will create a business to sustain our families. And that's the reason I came back, family. That, and there was just nothing happening for me in SoCal.
    And yet...
    I left people behind, and that's what's making me sad. I spent 20% of my life in Pasadena, and the place and the people occupy a big chunk of my heart. I do not at all miss sitting in my truck for 45 minutes to go 13 miles to a job that I didn't particularly want to do anyway. And I don't miss the astronomical prices or the state income tax or the asswipes who thought they were particularly privileged and thus should go first. But I miss individuals, and as I sit here typing away I find I miss them terribly. They were my family in Pasadena, not blood related but family nonetheless, and I shed a tear when I think that I won't see them in person for a long time, if ever again.
    It was a good run, my friends, and I'll do everything I can to stay in touch. Here's to you: Sweden, Tracy, Derick, Staci, Dick, June, Hal, Steve, Nicole, Mark, Ted, Joe, Sandy, Val, Anne, Eric, all the guys at the Comics Factory, Tim, Tina, Sam, Ed, Ryan, Alex, Andrea, Brad, Eve, Charlie, Joseph, Lana, Loretta, Victor, Bill, Susan, Tanalee, Stephanie, Rich, Marissa, Jane, George, Heidi, Pam, Heather, Gennady, and Denise. My heart breaks when I realize that when I drove out of town on Friday I left you all behind. It hurts.
    But it's time to start a new adventure, time to make the most of what I have here, in San Antonio. Onward and upward.
    Just don't forget me, my friends, I know I won't forget you.

Good-bye, Farewell, and Amen

The packers are coming this morning. Not long after them the guy is coming to put my car on the truck to ship it back home. I pick up my brother-in-law tonight at the airport. The movers come tomorrow to put the boxed contents of my life onto the truck and take me back to San Antonio. Friday I turn over the keys to my place and my brother-in-law and I get in the truck and start driving.
   I am not all right with all this.
   Only now, right now, is the magnitude of this disruption becoming clear to me. I'll be sleeping on the floor tonight and tomorrow night, probably in a motel on Friday night. Then I'll arrive at my newly-rented house and move in what few of my things I put in the truck for the drive cross-country. Then I wait for my car and all my stuff to catch up with me.
   I'm leaving you, SoCal, with mixed feelings.
   There's a new adventure waiting for me back home, I'll try big things and - fingers crossed - succeed at them. But I've spent 20% of my life in Pasadena, far, far longer than I ever intended, and the place has grown on me. I got comfortable here, probably too comfortable. Definitely too comfortable.
   It's sad, and moving sucks no matter how you cut it. But I will be back in my home town, with all my friends and family around me. Which will be great.
   Still, I'm gonna miss you, SoCal, with your astonishingly incompetent and corrupt local politicians, with your 10% sales tax and state income tax, with your overpriced produce, with your crazy drivers and your terrible roads. It's been a good ride, but it's time to switch horses.
   See you in the funny papers.

Another Last

You know what really sucks about moving? It's not the packing, or the changing addresses on everything, or dealing with the phone company and power company. It's not even dealing with the moving company, which has been relatively pain-free so far.
   The closer you get to moving day, the more every activity becomes 'the last time' you're going to do that thing.
   I recently trained for the last time with my long-time trainer. And I shared a meal for the last time with some guys I've known since my very first day here in SoCal. And soon I'll have had the very last fencing lesson with my friend and coach. Not long after that I'll have the very last fencing class and I'll say good-bye to people who have become almost a surrogate family.
   I'll soon have the last visit to Trader Joe's, and the last Wednesday at my comic book store, and the last time I'll buy lotto tickets and gasoline at the same place where I buy cigarrettes for a homeless guy.
   I know change is inevitable, and I know that ultimately moving will be good for me. But that doesn't make this any easier. Soon I'll lock my apartment door for the last time, and I'll drive down Lake Avenue for the last time, and I'll get on the 210 for the last time, and then I'll be out of Pasadena, out of Los Angeles, out of California.
   Wow. I don't know how to feel.

Why Does Mickey Wear Shoes?

I was in the bookstore today, in the cartoon section, naturally, and I heard a little kid ask this question:
   'Why does Mickey wear shoes?'
   Seems straightforward enough, and it's an honest question. You could respond with 'why does he wear shorts?' or 'why isn't Minnie wearing a top?' or 'why isn't Donald wearing pants?' It's just the way it is, would be my answer. Cartoon mice wear shoes, cartoon ducks don't. Union rules. Whatever.
   But this kid's mother didn't take the easy, rhetorical way out. She came up with an answer that impressed me. 'Because mice have to match their shoes with their gloves.'
   And there you have it. Mickey wears shoes because he's wearing gloves. And why is he wearing gloves? Because he's wearing shoes, of course. Nicely circular, and eliminates all the pesky follow-ups.
   I'm guessing this wasn't her first child.

Animal Smarts

Remember Planet of the Apes? I sure do, I love that movie. Hell, I even love the fourth sequel and nobody ever loves fourth sequels. It was a madhouse of a world, where apes walked on their hind legs and ruled over herds of mute humans. It was a cautionary tale, a lesson in man's brutality to his fellow man.
   My favorite were the monkeys.
   There was a definite division of labor. The orangoutans were the bureaucrats, the chimpanzees were the scientists, and the gorillas were the soldiers. Makes sense, kind of, if you ignore the fact that gorillas are really peaceful and shy in the wild. But in the wild they don't speak either, so I guess it's all a wash.
   But I got to wondering, if all animals were like the Planet of the Apes, what jobs would each species have? I came up with a few answers.

   Elephants - teamsters. Like you're going to tell an elephant what to do and when to do it.
   Crocodiles - finance. Crooked finance, the kind that got the world into trouble two years ago.
   Cats - mad scientists. Think about it, if they could talk, they'd want to know the most painful ways to torture you.
   Pigs - short order cooks. Not really gourmets, pigs would be the hairy guy behind the grill, stub of a cigarette in his lips, slinging hash.
   Hawks - traffic cops. They're always circling, circling, looking for the opportunity to strike.
   Rabbits - day care workers. They're quiet, vegetarian, and breed easily.
   Buffalo - mall security guards. Big and burly, they'd rather not move much.
   Pelicans - mail men. Naturally.
   Cows - Dairy Queen workers. Duh.
   Coyotes - private detectives. A slightly-not-legit job for a slightly-not-legit animal.
   Mice - office workers. They live in a maze and actually believe there's a point in going for the cheese.
   Dogs - wing man. Think about it. Who's got your back, no matter what? Who's gonna look out for you even if you're a total jerk? Yup, your dog.

Tough One

As I may have explained before, I'm turning into an old man decades before I should. If I had a lawn I'd yell at kids to keep off it. If I owned suspenders I'd wear them and a belt, just for insurance against my pants falling down. If I had dentures I'd pop them out of my mouth for comic effect. You get the idea.
   Today I saw something that immediately got the old man in me riled up, but at the same time got the caring, understanding liberal in me going. It was an odd conflict, sitting there at the stoplight by PCC. Good thing I had the red, otherwise I might have been paralyzed into inaction.
   I saw a wheelchair athlete practicing. He was obviously training for some event, he had an escort on a bicycle beside him - hard to see a wheelchair that's below the level of most car doors - and he was sprinting down Del Mar at a pretty good clip.
   The old man in me immediately railed against this, he was holding up traffic, and it wasn't the safest exercise in the world, even with a bicycle escort. It's the same reaction I have when I see a phalanx of bicyclists hogging a lane of traffic. Get the f*ck out of my way...
   But then, the considerate, liberal side of me spoke up. Why shouldn't this guy be on the city streets? Like I said, bicyclists do it all the time, why can't he? It's a worst a momentary inconvenience to the people behind him, and he's got as much right to hold up traffic as those bastards in stretch bike shorts do. Besides, where else would he possibly have to train? A quarter-mile track at a high school? Live and let live.
   You can see my dilemma. On the one hand I want to shake my fist and mutter under my breath, but on the other hand I would want someone to cut me some slack if that were me in a wheelchair. I feel like I might explode...

Things That Worry Me Which Probably Shouldn't

I'm concerned that solipsism is real, and that everything I see is just a figment of my imagination.
   Because if that's the case, then, man am I f*cked up.
   Think about it. If anyone reading this actually exists, that is. What if everything I see and experience is actually just a figment of my imagination? All my friends, all my family, everyone I've ever met or talked to is just some aspect of my unconscious mind. I've met some pretty weird people in my time. I mean seriously whacked-out individuals who should have been institutionalized, or probably had been. What if I made them up? What if they were nothing but me with idle time to spend coming up with something insane? Scary.
   Or what about every situation in the world? How completely screwed up am I if the mortgage crisis, the end of the space shuttle and the Japanese tsunami are all stuff I just made up. What kind of person thinks up those kinds of things?
   Here's a brain twister. Serial killers. If no one but me exists, that means I made up the concept of serial killers. How deviant is that? And, to put the icing on the cake, if no one else exists, then the serial killers are really parts of me looking to do away with other parts of me. Me stalking myself, as it were. A grand ouroborous of disordered thinking.
   For my money, I hope all you other people are real. Even those of you who smoke. Because the alternative is that I'm just one great big, hyper-imaginative mess.

The Small Man

It was just somewhere to be for a year. Maybe two.
   That's what Stan told himself when he took the job. He didn't know what he wanted to do or where he wanted to go or what he intended his life eventually to become. But he knew this job wasn't it. Two years, max. Hell, six months if he could find something else that paid a little better.
   At the one year mark he told himself he had six months to find another job or else quit. He told himself the same at the two year mark. Then at the three year mark he stopped giving himself six months to quit.
   Stan got married in the summer of his eighth year on the job. His first son was born in the winter of his tenth year. He and his wife bought a house six months later.
   By the time he'd reached fifteen years at the same job Stan was going gray at the temples, and he wondered where the time had gone. Fourteen years longer on the job than he'd intended, and still no end in sight. There was college to plan for, and weddings for his three kids, and then retirement. His one year on the job looked like it was going to stretch into thirty.
   Then the economy tanked and Stan got laid off while some overpaid bastard took home millions in undeserved income. Stan foundered on unemployment - he'd never learned a skill marketable outside his company - and let himself feel emasculated while his wife shouldered the burden of being the family breadwinner.
   But one day Stan realized something. He wasn't shackled any longer. He was a free man. He could do anything. Literally. Follow his bliss. Find his passion. Indulge in the way he never had before. He found a new career.
   Stan never made millions, but he provided for his family and he held his head up and answered proudly when people asked him what he did for a living. And that was something he never could do before.

Oddly Comforting

I'm moving out of LA.
   Sorry if this is how some of my friends in SoCal learn this news, but the time has come and there's no sense in me fighting it any longer. I've made preparations, gotten a place back home in San Antonio, and it's a done deal.
   That doesn't mean I'm not conflicted about the move, I have very mixed feelings about moving back, but LA just isn't doing it for me any more so I can't stay here. Yet... going home feels like giving up, like a surrender. And I ain't French.
   So today, just half an hour ago or so, I went to the grocery store. 'Cause I gotta eat. And there was a guy just inside the door, one of those people trying to sell subscriptions to the LA Times. Nice enough guy, but I told him I was moving in two weeks and couldn't take advantage of his offer. He wished me well and I went about my business.
   I got my veggies and fruit, and headed for the other side of the store. When I passed the subscription guy he stopped me again. I reminded him that he'd already spoken to me, but he didn't want to talk about newspapers.
   He started to tell me about how he'd been homeless, an abject alcoholic convinced that he was going to die either with a bottle in his hand or looking for one. He then told me how he asked God to help him get sober and stay sober and improve his life. Which evidently happened. I don't mind talking to people about this kind of thing, you can't deny the evidence of a changed life, and anything that happens to bring one man out of the gutter and into a productive life is something I can appreciate hearing about.
   He then quizzed me a little about San Antonio and who was there, whether I was married or not, that sort of thing. Then he told me 'God has something planned for you, that's why he's calling you home.'
   I found this reassurance oddly comforting. I say oddly because my usual habit would be to nod politely and roll my eyes inside, where I wouldn't offend the other person. But I didn't feel that coming on. Not one bit. I'm not a particularly religious person - more blasphemous than anything else, actually - but I could feel my restless spirit ease slightly with this unsolicited proclamation from a complete stranger. I don't know if it's true, I'm pretty sure God has bigger things to worry about than me*, but just the thought that I'm not firing blindly and hoping for the best makes the move easier to do.

* say... nuclear armageddon in Japan, where in the past few days the chance of creating a for-real Godzilla has dramatically increased

Runnin' Rum

You what this country needs? You don't? Well, I'll tell you.
   We some good old-fashioned civil disobedience.
   There's a grand tradition of American defiance of authority, hell, it's how our founding fathers started the whole mess in the first place. You got your tax rebellions, your revolutionary wars, your fights against slavery, for women's suffrage, for civil rights, against the Vietnam war, etc. etc. etc. The list just goes on.
   Lately, though, we seem to have become a nation of whiny bitches.
   Yes, I mean you. And me, too. And your neighbor, and the guy across the street. And for sure the corrupt politicians and evil corporate overlords. Nobody wants to take a stand about anything, and it's kind of pissing me off. Where are the suffragettes? Where are the civil rights workers? Where are the rum runners?
   Yup, I count those guys in the list. Running rum - which gave us NASCAR - started during Prohibition, that well-meaning but ultimately misguided attempt at legislating morality. People weren't going to stop drinking alcohol, especially since they'd been doing it for millennia, but they couldn't buy liquor any longer.
   That's when modern invention met ancient beverage. Enterprising young men who had automobiles, which had only recently been mass-produced, put homemade liquor in the trunk and let supply meet demand. Sure, it was mostly a mercantile transaction, but it was defiance of authority in the grand American tradition.
   I think the problem nowadays is that too many people are comfortable. We got it pretty good, all things considered, and any dissatisfaction we feel with our lives isn't so bad that we're compelled to think about the reasons why or to do anything to change our situation. We guard what little we have instead of thinking of the larger picture of inequity and institutionalized greed that we could help eliminate. So the filthy rich get filthier, our air and water become more polluted, and people who would have starved to death had they been born in a third world country find themselves elected to be our government representatives. And you and I sit on our couches watching TV and getting fatter.
   Makes me want to load some bathtub gin into my truck and drive into the hills to avoid the revenuers.

Talk To Me

You ever get a text from someone and you wonder why they don't just call? If you have you're probably someone born in the last century. The 20th.
   I'm a man 'of a certain age' which means that I don't have a whole lot of friends who use text messages. It's not that they don't know how, they're all smart guys, it's that they would really rather not. There's a bland impersonality to a text message that puts off people like me. Time was not everyone in the world was connected with a cell phone. We even had to carry change for a pay phone, believe it or not, in case of emergencies.
   I remember when I was growing up, everyone in my family just sort of stopped answering the phone. At least when my sister was in the house, because chances were very good any incoming call would be for her, and if she was indoors she would certainly be the first to get to the phone. Which you couldn't carry with you back then, and was usually hung on the wall in the kitchen in most homes. Our one family phone was practically glued to my sister's head for years as she carried on with her friends.
   But engaging in all that talking built relationships. My sister is still best friends with her best friend from middle school and high school, and I think those insanely long phone conversations had a whole lot to do with that.
   I was sitting on the couch next to one of my nieces the other day, and she was carrying on a text 'conversation' with one or several of her friends on her phone. This is not the same thing as talking on the phone, you can't hear the other person, the sighs of exasperation, the nervous giggle, the angry tones. Typing is not conversing. And, while she's halfway engaged with her friends via text, she's halfway engaged with the other people in the same room with her. Arguably worse than a sullen teen who just disappears into her room
   I read an article the other day that stated kids these days* prefer the safety and relative anonymity of a text message over the immediacy and intimacy of a phone conversation. They feel actually talking to someone reveals too much of themselves. This is the same generation who thinks nothing of posting drunk frat-party photos online for all the world to see and enjoy for decades to come. A nip-slip or dropped trou in living color is okay to share, but a phone call is too intimate. I can't figure that one out.
   I wonder if people said the same thing about the phone when it started going into homes? 'You know, if you want to talk to me, you can just come over.'

* I love saying that, it makes me seem like my grandfather

And That's The Truth

Ping pong balls are filled with nerve toxin.
   Santa Claus can't go back into Liechtenstein. He won't say why.
They actually make photocopiers strong enough to sit on because they know you're going to scan your own ass.
   Trees are telepathic, they're just not mobile. So they know you're going to chop them down but they can't run away. It's a cruel evolutionary adaptation, but nobody said nature was kind, only efficient.
Most of what you text is complete nonsense. Same with Twitter.
   Fire bad. No, wait, fire good.
Cameras do steal your soul, but only if it's a film camera. Digital cameras steal the photographer's soul.
   Most UFOs are shaped like weather balloons. Helps them blend in.
Termites are not blind, they're faking it for the sympathy.
   Every prison cell has a secret exit, you just have to be smart enough to find it.
In 200 years fashion designers are going to look back at 1980's leg warmers as the height of style.
   When you stub your toe that's the Universe's way of telling you to pay more attention to where you're walking. And maybe to put on some shoes.
Everyone you've ever known and everyone you're ever going to meet will die. Except for Keith Richards.
   Corporations are run by people who are less competent than you are, and who don't care enough about their jobs to do them well. But they're going to die like everyone else, so that's some consolation.
Winos rarely drink wine. At least not very good wine. Which is kind of the point, now that I think about it.

Tales From My Past - The Iranian Kid

When I was in eighth grade a new kid showed up. Being in a military town we got new kids all the time, but this one was different. He was thick and dark and was already working on a pretty decent mustache, and he looked at us with wide, suspicious eyes, like he was waiting for the worst but hoping for the best. He liked to play basketball - 'hoop' as he called it - even though he was a worse player than I was, which was saying something. He looked vaguely Mexican, at least in coloration, but his features were wrong for it. When we asked him, he said he was Persian.
   He was from Iran. It was August 1979.
   His name was Sayeed, and he understood math better than the math teacher. He spoke English with barely an accent, which was way more Farsi than I knew, and he wrote Arabic as kind of a parlor trick, because it went backwards on the page. He didn't care for football and its pads and solid hits, but he really wanted to try out for the basketball team, and maybe baseball if he learned how to play. He slowly stopped being the new kid and stopped being the zoo exhibit because of his foreign-ness and started just being one of us.
   Fast forward to November. Revolution in Iran. Students storm the US Embassy and take over fifty people hostage. It's the only thing on the news, video of young men who look remarkably like Sayeed chanting 'death to America.'
   In an instant Sayeed went from just another kid to representative for his entire country and spokesperson for the revolution. He endured abuse like I could never imagine, but he also enjoyed more sympathy and defense than thought twelve-year-olds capable of. I could imagine him bracing for a day at school, for the names, for the demands for an explanation, for the humiliating yet necessary teacher interventions, for the agonizing yet well-meant friendly gestures. No matter how bad I had it, I knew I didn't have it anything like Sayeed did.
   He finished out the school year and then his family moved back to Iran. I remember talking to him about it, and he was politicized to an extent that was foreign to me. He loved his country, and he and his family wanted to help make it better. So they went. That would have been May 1980.
   The Iran-Iraq War started in September 1980.
   I remember watching TV and seeing bodies, men killed in some nameless part of the desert between the two countries. They looked like Sayeed. Just as young, with the beginnings of proud Persian mustaches that were never going to get bushy. The news said both sides, Iran and Iraq, conscripted boys as young as twelve. If you were big enough to hold a rifle, you got one.
   And it hit me. The kid who just wanted to 'shoot hoop,' and who could out-Algebra the Algebra teacher, might be dead. He was my age, fourteen, and he could be a corpse at that very moment. Or he could be sitting behind a stack of sand bags waiting for the enemy to come over the wall. And here I was worried about having the proper brand of shoes and whether I should buy a mum for one of the girls I liked. We were the same, he and I, and yet his path took him into a true life-or-death situation, while mine let me worry about zits and trying to get to first base.
   That was the first time I realized that life isn't fair. The truth hit me in the gut when I saw the lifeless eyes of boys my age, killed in some conflict they certainly didn't understand. The injustice of it made me cry, and the shame I felt made me turn off the TV.
   I don't know what happened to Sayeed. I hope he's alive and well and teaching his kids how to shoot hoop. But he was exactly the wrong age, and in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time for his survival to be anything but a lingering question.
   Ma salama, Sayeed.

A Zombie Walks Into A Bar...

Hey there, pal, how's it going?
   Unnhh...
Yeah, tell me about it. You're looking a little rough around the edges.    Unnhh...
Well sit down, take a load off. What can I get you?
   Br...
Beer? Bottle or tap?
   N-no... need bra...
Brass monkey? Haven't had anyone ask for that in a loooong time. Don't know if I have the stuff. Gimme a second, I'll check.
   Brains! Need brains!
Well, we all have those kind of days. I'm Harvey, by the way.
   Unnhh... I hunger...
We got peanuts and pretzels. If you're really famished I can order from the pizza place next door.
   P-pizza... with brains?
You're really fixated on that, huh? Something go down at the office?
   W-walking dead... invade...
Jeez? Again? Don't tell me you're... of course you are. Should have seen it when you shambled in. I thought the red stuff around your mouth was strawberry jam.
   Unnhh... how about a b-b-bourbon?
Sorry, I'm cutting you off. We don't serve unholy armies of undead.
   B-but... just me...
Yeah, now. But if I serve you then before too long you'll bite one of my other customers, and he'll bite someone else, suddenly everyone in here's a zombie. And you know what? Zombies don't tip for shit.
   P-profiling... illegal... call the cops...
I've danced this dance before. You know what this is?
   Sh-shotgun...
And you know what happens to zombies when there's a shotgun around?
   G-get the message... leaving...
I thought so. And tell your cheap bastard friends they're not welcome either. Man, I hate zombies.

Buy My Crap

What is it about garage sales that brings out the drooling idiot in people?
   This weekend is the Come-One, Come-All Yard Sale Extravaganza* in my mother's neighborhood. No permit needed, just toss your junk out on the lawn, sit beside it in a lawn chair, and wait for the quarters to roll in. And the morons.
   A street is only so wide and only so long, right? Which means there are a finite number of cars that can fit in front of any single house at any single time. Yet my mother's neighborhood is packed to the rafters with people who want to ignore the laws of physics and cram just one more automobile into a space already full of them.
   What about car doors? They're not going to close by themselves, you know. And if there are already too many cars on the street, if people on both sides open their doors all the way then nobody gets through.
   And let's talk about the merchandise. Things. Stuff. Garbage. It's the same from yard to yard to yard. Baby clothes and other dirty laundry, dusty books, battered coffee tables, and old tube TVs. Maybe a full-length mirror or two thrown in for good measure. Seriously, if you've been to one driveway you really have been to all of them, the only thing that changes is the nature of the musty smell, which varies from old-man to cat-lady to chain-smoker.
   Some houses were doing a brisk business even this morning, and I wonder where all the junk they're selling actually goes. Time was I suspected it all ended up on eBay, but eBay is now just an equally-crooked version of Craig's List where everything is retail-priced, no room for the little guy. Maybe flea markets? A hoarder's front bedroom? A lean-to in the back woods? Maybe it's all packed up and shipped over to China so they can learn the value of Western over-buying and clutter?
   I know some people haunt garage sales in search of that one elusive find, the Thing Of Value the seller doesn't know he has in-hand. Like a mint condition Action Comics #1 or a Tiffany Lamp that the buyer could get for a song and sell for a fortune. Which means that most people rummaging through someone else's junk this weekend are secretly burglars who want to take advantage of the unsuspecting. Think about it. All these nosey people should be wearing masks and horizontally-striped shirts like the Hamburglar.
   Now that would be funny...


* I made up that name, it's not what the city calls it. But they should, don't you think?

Ill At Ease

I went to a technology conference/expo/trade show/whatever today. I've been to these things before, you go to a convention center, you walk down aisles of prefab booths, you talk to people for five minutes about their business, you move on. It's something I don't think my grandfather would have been familiar with - especially not the technology aspect* - but it's common now. And, in all honesty, I don't know that the investment companies put forward to attend these things matches any return they might get. Seems like an awful lot of chatting and not a lot of doing.
   After a few mintues wandering the aisles and smiling at vendors I was never going to talk to, I noticed two things that bothered me about the environment. I've noticed this before, but now I could finally put a name to what I felt after all these years.
   First, there was a lot of schoolyard-style sizing up, like Jets and Sharks facing off across an alley. Vendors eyed badges for names and titles, attendees scanned the booths for candy and free stuff, and the mood felt moments away from a fist fight breaking out. I was uncomfortable and aside from the tension I couldn't say why. Then it hit me: everybody was assessing everyone else in terms of what one person might be able to do for another. They weren't interested in talking to people to find out more about them individually, we were all avatars of ourselves, attendees and vendors, reprentatives of our demographic bands instead of human beings. Very off-putting, because I could feel the curiosity follow me as I walked the aisles, which then turned to curt dismissal when the vendors saw I wasn't interested. Like making eye contact with all the girls at the middle school dance but not asking any of them onto the floor, I wasn't making myself popular.
   Second, and as a corollary to the first observation, I realized after about ten mintues of people watching that, like me, almost no one in the room actually wanted to be there. Maybe it was a reaction to the dull mood, but I got the distinct impression that we were moments away from a stampede for the exits. It felt like the time I was caught in a pool hall when a fight broke out, all eyes on the door and every man for himself. Kind of poisonous.
   I'm curious to know if that mood is a result of something the organizers did, or if it generated spontaneously from the people in attendence. Probably it was a synthesis of both, but if you could figure out why that happened, you could start a business to prevent it from happening. Put a little math to it, a little rigor, and you could charge a pretty penny to make sure conferences succeed, instead of go down like the one I was just at.



* he had the biggest Rolodex I've ever seen, yellowed index cards packed with names and numbers in faded pencil and blue pen that had bled out over time. If you don't know what a Rolodex is you're a true child of the digital age.

Sneezy Was Also A Dwarf

Thai food makes me sneeze, evidently.
   So does the dusty inside of a disreputable muffler shop.
   And being in a ship on the ocean. But being in the ocean itself does not make me sneeze.
   Trying not to think about sneezing makes me sneeze. So does looking at a lit flourescent tube. Really.
   Picking my nose while driving my truck past the intersection of Third and Highland in Los Angeles made me sneeze more often than not. I have no idea why, but I did test it out and the results are better than chance.

I'm not an allergic person, no pet dander, no pollen, no milk products, no peanuts, no shellfish. As far as I know I'm not allergic to anything, never have been. I'm pretty sure it's because of all the dirt my parents let me eat when I was a kid. And yet, for some reason, those things I outlined above will make me sneeze. Every time.
   Why?
   Would someone tell me why I can walk into a Thai restaurant and sneeze immediately even though I haven't sneezed in days? Doesn't happen for a Japanese restaurant, or Korean, or Italian, or German, or even a McDonald's. But the moment I walk into a place where the waitresses wear brocaded full-length skirts, the sneeze is on.
   Is it psychosomatic? What trauma in my past life led me to associate sneezing with Mee Krob? Better yet, how the hell do I stop?
   This kind of makes me wonder, what other things do I do unconsciously, things that don't draw attention to themselves quite like a sneeze does. Maybe I stare into the refrigerator? Maybe I twitch when I walk past a fudge shop? I don't know! It makes me crazy. Or maybe I was that way to begin with.