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June 20, 2006
southern discomfort
Here is a reprint of an article I wrote in May of 2002.
THEY'RE GOOD KIDS. They'll get it sorted out. That's what the parents of those of us in hab-rehab are saying now. It's touching that they continue to believe in us, even as the group sessions fail to provide the level of intervention we really need. There is a downward slide here, and nobody wants to talk about it.
Take last night for instance. Good company, good weather, some darned good gualsa* and, inevitably, that little baggie of dried habañeros which nobody seems to know anything about. It was high-grade stuff, and no one objected to the "help yourself" atmosphere which comfortingly tucked us into easygoing conversations about things we never otherwise discuss. Like the social addicts we are, however, we never strayed very far from the topic of these butt-ugly wrinkled brown treasures we were passing around.
Maybe I'm still in denial about my level of involvement, but I still don't own a lot of the paraphernalia. So someone improvised a pestle using a saucer and a ball jar. As the peppers were broken down into something between chunks and powder, any remaining ice between the conversationalists gathered there in my apartment was broken down into congenial chunks of good natured deference. Everybody took a hit, even those who hadn't experimented with habañeros before.
We were all adults there, and yet I felt a poignant fatherly impulse toward my guests which was wrenched into true remorse when I saw the face of one friend of mine after she took a serious hit of the stuff. She was weeping, eyes nearly swollen shut, and her face was a twisted mask of exhilaration and just-been-stung-by-40-bees pain.
Then my own endorphin rush came in a fiery chariot and gathered me up into a stolen athletic bliss, but it was too late. The angry white seed of doubt had lodged between between my teeth, and it was burning a hole in my proverbial lip. Were we out of control?
Of course, there is nothing controlled about the morning after. The last remnant of my hot-sauce bravado evaporated amid the smoke and thunder of my first bout with the White-Hot Squirts. I have never seriously considered getting a bidet, but if one could be equipped to dispense super-cooled novacaine, while simultaneously administering a morphine injection, I would go into hock to buy one right now.
Scatalogical evidence notwithstanding, I now realize that my body has failed to metabolize or even chemically alter the hellspawned oil of the habañero. The worst part is that I know it is far from over. Now there is a distinct preference for standing over sitting. Later there will be cursing, oaths, and finally, promises made. Now is the time for a caring loved one to extract a covenant from me to never, never, never do this again. Now, should a persuasive friend argue down my stubborn resistances and help me on to the conclusion which my anatomy is already screaming from the housetops: friends don't let friends do habañeros.
*A cocktail of salsa and guacamole.
See also "Grok My Heed: Weapons-grade Peppers.
Posted by joel at 01:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 19, 2006
what's this "we" stuff
Radiohead's Thom Yorke, king of angst rock, is suitably conflicted about the environment and his own role in destroying it. It turns out you can't be a superstar without a most triumphant concert tour. And any most triumphant concert tour burns tons of fossil fuels. And the fans generate gobs and gobs of unrecycleable waste (for instance most concerts are a waste of time; and you'll never be able to recycle that time).
Here's what Thom said:
"The whole apparatus of big festivals is not cool."
Ok, now here's a slogan we can use: "It's the Apparatus, Stupid!" I'm with you, Thom, if by "apparatus" you mean smelly, greasy-haired commiejugend standing around wreathed in second-hand cannibis smoke, drawing up a new constitution in the air with the embers clinging stubbornly to their roach clips. I am so sick of that apparatus.
"If we could go to them and say, you can only use paper cups, you can't use generators, you have to use solar panels."
Dude! Solar panels! So awesome...until the sun goes down. Which is usually long before the main act wonders onstage as if they are lost and took a wrong turn. Anyway, MTV tried that, it's called "unplugged" and it was huge back in Kurt Cobain's day. All these bands would record music without using electricity. Except for the recording equipment and the broadcasting equipment and the coffee maker and such. But they didn't do the whole open field thing. Dang! I see what you mean, man!
"You technically can't make it happen."
Not until the hemp-powered cold-fusion ipod comes out.
"That stresses me out, because I am a hypocrite."
Preach it brother.
"As we all are."
Whoa, wait. We who? We all-in-the-band, or all-all, as in everybody? 'Cuz I ain't, cuz.
If I had a rock band our festivals would take place only in recently levelled old-growth hardwood forest (you can sit on the stumps!). My stage show would involve two monstrous genetically engineered cow intestines belching methane into the air, which we of course would burn for a whopping 2.54 billion BTU's an hour. The immediate environmental impact would mess with low pressure systems as far as 250 miles away, spawning tornadoes, hurricanes, or sometimes both.
As if the light and heat from the methane were not enough, we'd also run massive generators powered by makeshift brick and mud nuclear reactors which barely remain stable for the duration of the show. After the show everybody has to clear out and you can't clean the littered field up for another 40 years due to the fallout.
Our stage would be constructed entirely out of 297 brand-new SUV's, all of which would have their engines revving the whole time. We would pay minimum wage minus "expenses" to illiterate drivers to drive each SUV so that the stage could periodically roll forward into the crowd. It doesn't pay to get too spaced out at one of my concerts. And you've never seen a mosh pit like this.
Instead of pot we'd have hand out cans of freon to huff. And the noise level would be such that children of concertgoers born many years later would sustain inner ear damage because their deafened parents always yelled. What a night to remember.
The point is that I'd make all of this clear right from the outset. My fans would never wonder for a moment if I was conflicted about the impact of my concerts on the environment. We are not all hypocrites.
Posted by joel at 10:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 06, 2006
don't be evil...ish
It appears Google may be rethinking its decision to kowtow to China's demands that they censor their search results on www.google.cn. Sergey Brin described China's censorship demands as "a set of rules that we weren't comfortable with." But they did it anyway. Brin said they knew they were compromising their principles, but thought they could "provide ultimately more information for the Chinese and be a more effective service and perhaps make more of a difference." Ahem, not to belabor the point, but also make a ton more money, don't forget that one, yeah.
I hope they're coming back into the light. Sergey's statement seems promising, but isn't really ringing with confidence:
"It's perfectly reasonable to do something different, to say, 'Look, we're going to stand by the principle against censorship and we won't actually operate there.' That's an alternate path. It's not where we chose to go right now, but I can sort of see how people came to different conclusions about doing the right thing."
Sergey, if you can sort of see, then kinda get a spine, and maybe drop the deal you made with the devil and get back to your stated core principles.
Posted by joel at 08:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
iced tea
My plans for the perfect glass of iced tea began this morning. On Sunday my sister-in-law gave me her old sun tea jar, and this morning I filled it up with filtered water and dropped in six bags of tea; two of Earl Grey and four of English Breakfast Tea. The jar went onto the balcony in the sunshine for about five hours. Around 2:30pm I suddenly realized I had no ice. I also remembered that the two empty ice cube trays in my freezer were empty because I had inherited them with this apartment, and there was an odd white crust around the bottom of most of the cube-compartments --"odd" being defined as 1) I don't know what it is, and 2) doesn't wash out easily. I nipped a bit of un-iced tea from the fridge, and it was good, but it wasn't what I'd envisioned this morning.
I went to Target in search of ice cube trays; I wanted something colorful, rubbery, en vogue that made oddly shaped ice cubes (it's been that kind of day). Target had no such ice-cube trays. It's rectangular cubes for $1.50/per tray, or pleasingly oval-shaped cubes for $0.99 per two trays. Such synchronicity makes my usually indecisive shopping easy and quick.
Three more hours pass until one of the trays looks like the cubes are mostly frozen. I knock them out and sure enough, several exquisitly oval-shaped cubes rattle into my glass. (I later learned that a few of them harboured a watery reservoir which setup a fine iced-tea fractal: bubbles floating in inside the ice-cubes, as ice-cubes floating in a glass of iced tea, as iced tea floated around in my mind for most of the day.
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Lots of wonderful things come my way every day. But it's rare to want something so simple all day and then to finally have it. I just had to tell you about it.
Posted by joel at 07:52 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 01, 2006
newark is getting old
First my flight was peremptorily postponed to the unusual moment of 9:29pm. The the lightning began, and briefly knocked out the floodlights on the tarmac, covering the drenched ground crew in darkness. Soon we were told 10:45pm. Shortly after that, we learned the crew of our flight was still on the ground in Jacksonville Florida. Near as anybody could tell, we were postponed til after midnight.
I've been taking advantage of the time; the Mark Helprin book I harried for over a year in fits and starts of enraptured attention deficit reading has had my undivided attention the whole evening. I'm carring off chapter after chapter like a bandit in an empty, shuttered beachhouse in February. I'm reading Winter's Tale. I'm not even going to tell you how awesome this book is. You should read it, but you won't get it. I don't get it. I think my dad gets it. It's his book. If the rain keeps up I'll be returning it to him soon.
Another side note: I didn't realize that pretty women could still make me stutter. She wanted to know what was up with our flight to Cleveland. I felt like a fullback with his cleats tied together, and a pumpkin under his arm. Is it too much to ask that when you pull me straight out of a Helprin book I'd be too tongue tied to talk anything as cleverly as one of his inimitable characters? Drat.
Posted by joel at 11:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack