I have returned from LA and I can get Tom Waits’ “I don’t wanna grow up” out of my head. Why, you ask? Well, I spent then weekend in Palm Desert, a sleepy retirement community outside of Palm Springs. My cousins now live there and my parents were visiting. So there was a large BBQ while we were there. Fifteen or so fifty, sixty, seventy-something year old couples descended in their golf carts on my cousin’s place. Conversations ranged from golf to golf to what their sex life used to be like to golf to golf. “How do you move in a world of fog That’s always changing things Makes me wish that I could be a dog When I see the price that you pay I don’t wanna grow up… Open up the medicine chest And I don’t wanna grow up” When my cousin mentions that he, at age 60, is the youngest guy in his poker game by ten years. That his bowling league starts place a 3pm and is done by 5. That his poker game starts at 6pm and ends by 10. That the flag is almost always flying at half mast over some of these developments due to dying residents. “When I see the 5 o’clock news I don’t wanna grow up Comb their hair and shine their shoes I don’t wanna grow up Stay around in my old hometown I don’t wanna put no money down I don’t wanna get me a big old loan” My dad though at the outset of the weekend that he would love to live in a place like that. My mother was skeptical. After that barbeque, Dad was disgusted by the whole place, golfing aside, and swore he would never live in a place like that. Go Dad!

My tour of the finer malls of America continues. I am at King of Prussia… again. I am staying at a different hotel. For $179 a night, I’d expect a lot more. No chocolates. No minibar. Nothing really fun at all. (Though I did just have a great Chicken Pot Pie.) For those of you interested in real estate, I have sold my house… took about three days to get the offers and three more days to make it vaguely legal. So it looks like this will all work out after all. I’ll be moving into the Poo Poo Palace sometime in June. Orgo joko? What? You’ve never seen a orgo joko festival? Well, trust me, don’t try searching the web for it… the best I could find is some random Polish web pages. And what is orgo joko? It is an old Basque wagon-lifting contest. These are the mysterious people who did in fact invent jai lai. (BTW, they also have a sport called aharitalka, which roughly translates into… wait for it… sheep fighting.) It is nearly Passover. This came as quite a shock to me… I have lost all sense of time and especially those days related to Jewish holidays. Before cracking the Kedem with Elijah, you could have a drink with a different kind of visitor… Josh Nanberg. He’s back. Yes, he’s back and staying at my house. Still moving out, yes, but here for a visit. Hopefully, I’ll be back in DC tomorrow night in time for Tuesday Night at Toledo Lounge, but I know that Josh will be there.

Yup, that’s good advice from Mr. Waits. Warning, I’m in an odd mood, which does not bode well for you Reader. I want to talk about the Cut Up technique. William S. Burroughs gave it a name. Hugh MacDairmid used it extensively. DJ Spooky uses it… another disciple of Burroughs. In a nutshell, the Cut Up Technique is taking one piece of work, slicing it up, rearranging it, and creating a wholly new work. Burroughs did this by folding papers and using scissors. MacDairmid was said to simply slice off lines of his never ending poem and give them out like Tic-Tacs. Spooky takes fragments of songs and pieces them together. Offices are perfect places to practice and witness the Cut Up Technique. Take, for example, my office. Next door we have two 23-ish year olds from Maryland. They work with yet another recent grad of Maryland. They provide Ken and I endless amusement, listening to their conversations. Recently, I walked into my office to see Ken, quite pale. When I inquired, Ken swore he just heard one of them say, “I was like, Oh My God!” Thin walls and loud neighbors equals endless fun. The following is a rough Cut Up from the offices on the Friday after Valentines Day:

So last week, I had a headache. Seems minor enough. Just a headache. But it grew more intense and moved a bit around my head. By the end of the day this mobile command center of pain had centered itself over my right eye. I got home, swallowed a couple asprin, and tried to ignore the searing pain. The next morning the mobile command center of pain has shurnk a bit, was less intense. I thought I had beaten it… oh no, the headache was just sleeping. By the time it woke up, it was around lunch. And this is when I realized why I was in such pain… I hadn’t had any caffeine in a few days. It seems that may usual coffe intake had slowly crept upwards. I think I had level out at around three cups (large ones) per day. This isn’t a huge amount of coffeee, I admit, but it was more than I usually drank. And now my body did not have any and was grumpy. So I was left with a decision: try and push through this and remind my body what it was like without caffeine or just have a Coke and a smile. I like pushing my body around a bit. So I decided to grin and bear it. Which, writing this now, was a good decision, but during the process was an extremely painful one. If kicking caffeine is that hard, I am not planning on developing any new tough habits.

Sunday was a great day if you were a bookie or a Patriots fan. It was a great Superbowl. It was a refreshing non-blowout of a game. It was actually a game you had to watch all of to see what was going to happen. At times I found myself yelling at the Fox coverage for saying things like, “No team has ever come back from a deficit so large in Superbowl history.” When it comes to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Boston sports teams have a knack for it. Thankfully, our bargain basement backup QB did the job like a pro - that is the way to end a football game. (Now, if the LSFL could only play games so well.) I want to state now for the entire Tuesday Night crowd… I have no ties, neither political, nor financial, to Enron. I was, at no time, a political consultant for them. I have always thought that digital marketplaces were a sham. I think it will be interesting to see where the ropes lead when the government starts pulling on the whole Enron tangled knot. If the GAO and Sen. Waxman have their ways, this spring and summer could be filled with Enrongate, and that is guaranteed good political fun on both sides of the aisle. Meanwhile, Philips is fighting you and I. Yes, that Dutch company that everybody loves is threatening to sue the record labels over their use of copy-protection in their CDs. The beauty is that these new copy-protected CDs that Universal and others are churning out don’t work with computers and some normal cd players as well… but guess what they aren’t really CDs. Philips is going to sue because what Universal is producing isn’t technically a CD; these copy-protected CDs do not meet the standards to be a CD. That standard is owned by Philips and Sony. Philips would force the record labels to print a label on their protected CDs warning the consumer that the CDs won’t work and aren’t really CDs after all. Even better, Philips has stated that they will begin producing CD burners and players that can overcome the copy protection. Eat that RIAA! Well, I am headed to King of Prussia, PA. Yup, it’s time again to play with an unnamed customer near Philadelphia. I have been trying to quickly research what are the largest malls in America. I know that they Mall of America is the largest. But after that, I have no idea. I do know what the KoP mall is very very very big. Here’s their directory. I did get to rent a big FUV for the drive up there. I didn’t realize it until I got into this Explorer that each SUV is sold with a “drive like an asshole” licenses… I’ll put it to good use, I’m sure.

Well it appears that my Mac is back. The Cube suffered a massive drive failure which knocked me back a bit. Thankfully, a) I had a few backup cds laying around and b) I could order parts and pieces 24 hours a day. I had to replace my hard drive. Not a big deal, just kinda annoying. What is a bit shocking is how incredible cheap storage is. I got a 100gig drive for $230… that is 5000x times bigger than the first hard drive I ever had and cost half as much. I remember thinking that drives were cheap when they were $1 per meg. They are slowly approaching $1 per gig! The other aspect of this little affair that has got my attention is how unearthly quite this new drive is. First off, the Cube doesn’t have a fan. It is designed as a cute little chimney and all the heat rises and cools the processor with need of a fan. It is rigged for silent running. However, my old hard drive did produce some noise. Not much. Just enough to know it was doing something. I could tell the difference between the read and the write head being engaged. I was comfortable with the little clicking it made. Not any more. My new drive makes no sound. None. It has stopped breathing and I can’t if it has amazing lung capacity or is, in fact, dead. This is a bit unnerving. More than anything else, I can tell what a machine is doing by its sound. This seems a bit wrong from a computer… a car, okay, but a computer… seems a bit strange.

Now I know what Veruca Salt feels like. Yes, I’ve turned into a bloated blueberry-like bowling ball. For the last three weeks, I have done nothing but eat, sleep, and drink. I have eaten: goose liver, rabbit, lamb, grouse, cookies, cheese (cheddar, sex, brie), cheesecake, cow, and much much much much more. I have drank: red wine, beer, malt liquor, vodka (oh, so much vodka), tequila, sake, champagne, and much much much more. As for sleeping, I have been hibernating. In fact, I knew that I was going to be sleeping so much, I put in curtains in my bedroom to keep it darker. I started to get concerned about my recent behavior when I woke up with my face in a 50 pound sack of U.N. AID rice and a bottle of Old English 800 in my hand. Well, we have made it into 2002. The world is still in one piece, more or less. Hope all your New Year’s Eve plans were fun and exciting. In other news, I have won the My Team game. It is over. I won when I was in Miami. I saw a big (6’ 1", 225 lbs) black transvestite. It was wearing an appropriately large red unitard and carrying a tall walking stick whilst dragging its belongings in some roller luggage. The hair. Did I mention the hair? Bleach blond fro that put mine to shame.

Happy Post-Thanksgiving, Pre-Christmas! I’m sorry, but I simply can’t get into the festive mood when it is 70 degrees out and there has even been rain, let alone snow, in a long time. I mean, we just cooked lobster… outside… that is not winter behavior, not at all. I remember when I was younger and the news would report from this or that mall, talking about the holiday crowds. Seems kinda silly now… sure the economy is of great concern, but really, we have bigger things to worry about than mall crowds. George Harrison is dead. This is truly a sad thing. It think it is touching that Apple has for the last few days had his picture on their main page. It amazes me that he was a little older than my dad. It can’t imagine my dad hanging out with Ravi Shankar, taking acid, or writing Something… So, apparently, the last thing I wrote to inflict upon you was a flop. Yeah, I agree it started well but ended poorly… ah well, they can’t all be Pulitzer Prize material.

So, Tuesday morning I learned to bow. I thought I knew before, but I was wrong. I found myself kneeling in front of a vaguely lit pyre, hastily constructed in a warehouse on the south side of the river. The smell of leaky petrol tanks, muddy cement, and illegally imported products permeated the air. “Sorry man, I know he was like a father to you,” said a Joe next to me. People say they have people who were like a father to them. My question is, isn’t your own real father better than someone who is like a father? What does that mean, like a father? I would never call the guy laying on the sawhorse pyre someone who was like a father to me. If I did, he’d’ve boxed me in the ears. Bow three times. That’s what you are taught. Three times, deep and slow. The first bow. When my forehead touched the cement, I let go of all the sense-memories I had with him in it. I let go of his smile. I let go of the smell of his awful aftershave that was mingled with whiskey. I let go of the feel of the cracked leather in the passenger seat of his dark saloon car. I let go of the taste of his omelets. As I rose up I noticed that the sun had started to glint through a cracked window high above the pyre. The Slims and Joes were starting to leave. The second bow. When my forehead touched the cement, I let go of all of his teachings. I let go of his lesson on how to dodge bullets. (It starts with making sure no one is pointing at gun at you.) I let go of his explicit instructions on making an omelet. (Sorry, this is too important to share with just anyone, especially You.) I let go of his endless droning on about how to fight hand to hand. (It starts with a strong mind and a fast waist.) As I righted myself of the second time, I realized that all of his teachings were now mine to reteach. The third bow. The third bow was slower. It was harder to reach the cement. And when my forehead just kissed the cold cement, my whole body when limp and I lay, chest heaving. On the third bow, I let go of my teacher. I listened to my last sob bounce drunkenly around the warehouse and land dead, cold, in a dank corner. I righted myself. Stood. Pressed the button on the remote in my left hand. The back of the warehouse exploded pulling air out of my lungs. I turned and headed out to a waiting rickshaw. So Tuesday I learned to bow. Wednesday I may learn grovel.

2:59 am Sunday, November 18, 2001 Look up. Look southeast. Look up. Wake up! I’ve been on the road for almost a month. I have come to learn that I have about three weeks of boxers. I have come to learn that flying on Airbuses is scary. I have learned that this is all unimportant. Look up! When I was younger, much younger, I went sea-kayaking. I paddled out to an island between Isle au Haut and Mount Desert called Hell’s Half Acre. This gives you a good idea of the area. At any rate, the island gets its name because it is a half acre big and there really isn’t a reason to be there. But I was. I ended up sleeping on a boulder the size of a small house. The rock happened to get separated from that main part of the island as the tide came in. That night was the darkest night I have ever experienced. It was so dark and clear that we could easily make out the various satellites as they passed. I am connoisseur of this astronomical. I have seen, in no particular order, the moons of Jupiter, a lunar eclipse, a solar eclipse, the Milky Way, a variety of planets, more shooting stars than you can shake a stick at, and a bunch of general strange things in space. I remember a few years ago the Perseid meteor shower was in coming on strong. A few friends and I sat in the midst of a soccer field, chowing down on Ben and Jerry’s, watching what was one of the most incredible meteor showers of our lifetime. And tonight, just an hour away, the Leonid threatens to be an even bigger show. Look up! I have seen two shooting starts already and it is a) early and b) way too light out. I get excited when things like a big meteor shower or a good thunder storm show up. It proves that there are far more important and bigger things in this universe than us. Look up! Well, Thanksgiving Day is fast approaching. I guess it is time to be thankful for some very basic things: life, loved ones, and the freedom to enjoy the previous items.