personal history 3 (count the flip flop story etc and i think we are up to three)

5/15/2009

hey there,

so, i figure it is time for another more personal post. you can either tune out now and click on to something else or read forward if you would like, really, no offense taken :) it might be of interest of you lived in or near Pittman new jersey in the year 1993. or if you take a particularly keen interest in my personal history. otherwise.... naaaa...

this one time, in 1993-ish maybe (?) i moved to pitman, nj. i lived in a house on west ave, next to one of my sister's first houses she rented. pitman is a terribly inbred place (not that we inbred - come on! but that everyone knows everyone and houses are sometimes recycled from family member to family member, and not by handing down, but just by re-renting from the one landlord family that own(ed)s them all. hi robin!

so i moved there. and i brought my friend Dennis from California - poor thing. California culture to nj culture might be more of a shock than cali to euro depending on the country. none the less, he trekked on over.

but before he arrived i had already moved in. one day i came home from work and there was a girl on my front porch. i hesitated to say girl since she was legally an adult. but i suspect that even she would say that compared to the woman she is now she was a girl at the time? it was J. i walked up to the porch and said something along the lines of "hi, this is my house, can i help you?" and she said something along the lines of "yes actually, i am K's girlfriend, we met following the grateful dead - i was the 'kind veggie burrito girl' and he said i might be able to stay here?" I said, oh, ok. K was my friend from high school and we had been on many adventures (including but not limited to seeing BOTH a squirrel get run over by a car and lay twitching for minutes in the street AND running into my dad at the supermarket on the same day WHILE i was having a rather uncomfortable acid trip.....) So being 20 something and ready for more adventures i said "SURE!"

I think me and D lived in the bedroom and poor J had to stay in the "baby room" which was about 8 ft long and 3 ft wide.

So we settled in.

What is the point of this story? Is there a point? Does there need to be one? Why have I suddenly started thinking about capitalization?

ok. trying to follow the holy sinner Kerouac i will just forge ahead, stream of consciousness so...

there are three stories i want to tell:

1 the car door
2 R freaking at the sink on who knows what
3 the night i bolted upright and scared D
4 and the day i found the pot plant growing in the back yard

these are not in chronological order.

1: the car door. we had a tiny back yard where J - the only one with a car, would park after she was done her shift at any of 15 jobs she had that summer. if there was a way to be a professional application submitter/interview taker she is it! there was not a day7 that she was unemployed. whoever she talked to hired her immediately whether they needed her or not. that's J's magic! so she came home one night and tried to squeeze into the tiny tiny tiny back yard parking space we had and crashed in to the fence. i think - i think - that the basic summary of the story is that she could then no longer open the driver's side door and had to crawl across her Volkswagen rabbit to exit. she entered the house rather distraught but as we learn, these early crisis turn out to be rather mundane once you hit 30's/early 40s

2: this is classic R, and there are two R's in my little world, this is not the R who rests in the grand canyon. This is the R that does anything but rest in Philly. so - there were various substances floating around among those who came to that house. oddly, and this is not just a legal defence, i was over almost all mind altering substances by this time except alch. so he does what he does on a particular night when we had invited everyone over that we could possibly think of. We noticed things had gone awry when he started talking to the sink. the jist of the conversation (with the sink and with whoever interjected) was that R was going to cut himself into tiny little pieces and stuff himself down the sink because no one cared. Ok, this, in more ways than one is like deciding to nail yourself to a cross. What do you do after the first hand is nailed? How, after, cutting oneself up into millions of pieces would one be able to stuff oneself down the sink. He did disappear shortly after the first person raised just that question. Surprisingly for Pitman he wandered around tripping his ass off and returned safe and snug as a bug.

3: One night i was sound asleep = don't even remember dreaming, which i always remember. And suddenly in the middle of the night i bolted upright and said something (i think i might have said "what"...?) and there sitting wide awake looking at me as if he were awaiting a response was D. There is a theory about this night that the other R(the grand canyon one) had dosed someone with something. But I bolted upright and D and I began a conversation as if nothing had happened, as if it were expected.

4: One day I was bored and went into the "baby room" where J lived and was looking out the window wistfully and I spotted an almost fully grown pot plant growing along our fence. Weeds would not surprise me. We did very little to fit into the lower/middle class neighborhood. I threw our compost out the window directly above the kitchen sink - hey - what's the difference i thought, it's all compost... we didn't do much about the yard if anything i planted a tree or two and let nature take it's course. not surprisingly our neighbors did not like us. the objected to the laundry we hung over the front porch rails. most interestingly our landlord walked by our house one day - at the moment i had an obsession with Ethiopian liturgical music (obscure) and still do to a tiny degree. it fascinate(d)s me because it sound like a perfect mix of pentecostal speaking in tongues and Islamic chant. so i was apparently playing this one day when our landlord R walked by. I can imagine him walking actually, why wasn't he driving, but that's beside the point. He walked by and he heard this music thought he open windows. apparently he was alarmed because he mentioned to my brothers that i was listening to some kind of "Islamic music" and he was concerned. anyhow - he became much more concerned when he let himself into the house and found 1/2 of us moved out and 1/2 still living there, it looked like a bomb went off, all of us sorting our paperwork and artistic treatise etc etc and discarding anything we deemed unnecessarily into the middle of the living room floor, where R found it all, piled a mile high. Well, at any rate it was all cleaned up and fine and repainted and scrubbed and such and such as any guilt ridden son of an Irish mother would do.

and that's it for the moment. mostly i would love to hear any comments from others who witnessed this time. I know it was when we met LK and others, so please, there is certainly much that i left out.

and that is the story of west ave in pitman in 1993(ish?)

There's More... Expand Full Post

if you likedborat 2x funny, if you hated borat 2x bad

cohen is at it again, he who created the borat character (and ali g) is soon to release his newest incarnation "bruno', gay fashionista from austria. I think he has a real talent for impersonation and great insights into the darker recesses of our current world's more irrational concerns. I think he MIGHT be able to do one more movie afte rthis but then that's it, then it will just be a schtick anybody could reproduce with enough effort. but for now, i still find him refreshingly awefully horribly un-pc.

There's More... Expand Full Post

50 Horrifically Awesome Senior Photos

50 Horrifically Awesome Senior Photos

There's More... Expand Full Post

(fictional) Wes Anderson film festival

For a film-school project, Alex Cornell and Phil Mills made this promo for a (fictional) Wes Anderson film festival in the style of The Royal Tenenbaums. I think they totally nailed it, from the quirky, upbeat tone of the voiceover right down to the multiple quick pans and the distinctive title font. (Via Kottke.)

Wes Anderson Trailer from Alex Cornell on Vimeo.

There's More... Expand Full Post

Andy Samberg is nominated for Best Female Performance in this touching drama co-starring Anne Hathaway.

this would rack up the ratings on LIFETIME!

There's More... Expand Full Post

cute overload 1 - monkey-giraffe hybrid?

There's More... Expand Full Post

The Internet as envisioned circa 1969, and 1988, and 1994

Tech Buzz Back then, the internet was envisioned as easy, convenient, and inherently sexist. Good thing that didn't come true!




why the cheesy semi porno sounding music?

"electronic correspondence machine" :)

i would love to be able to see the rest of this...

...also we have these:

Internet 1994

awesome web page design! plus....
"a global electronic mall is under construction!"

and again from a different year:
Birth of the Internet 1988

"now it's coming true because of internet." i wonder when they added the "the" to "the internet"...

There's More... Expand Full Post

If you want to get rid of your christians just call the US

5/14/2009

Palestine:
1920 - Number of Christians 250,000 20%
1948 - UK creates Israel with full US financial\military support
1948 - Jerusalem was about one-fifth Christian, 28,000. Today it is 2 percent.
2009 - Number of Christians - 180,000 2%

Iraq:
1980 - Number of Christians 1,400,000 6%
2003 - US Invades Iraq
2009 - Number of Christians 500,000 less than 1%

Iran:
1950 - Number of Christians 540,000 1.5%
1941-60s - US and UK support overthrow of Democracy and installation of the Shah
1970 - 1.5%
2009 - Number of Christians 79,000 0.2%

Lebanon:
1920 - Number of Christians 50-80% of the population
1980 - Israel Invades Lebanon. US troops stationed there.
2009 - Number of Christians 1,350,000 30% of its population

Syria:
1940 - Number of Christians 1,200,000 15%
1948 - Creation of modern Israeli State next door
2009 - Number of Christians 970,000 9%

Egypt:
1950 - Number of Christians ?
1970 - US supports dictatorship of Sadat financially and militarily
2009 - Number of Christians 10 percent

There's More... Expand Full Post

one plus and one minus from me for obama this week

plus:

White House calls for end to "War on Drugs"

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.

In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation's drug issues.

"Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We're not at war with people in this country."

The administration also said federal authorities would no longer raid medical-marijuana dispensaries in the 13 states where voters have made medical marijuana legal. Agents had previously done so under federal law, which doesn't provide for any exceptions to its marijuana prohibition.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124225891527617397.html

minus:

backtracking on the release of documents and photos related to the torture investigations going on as well as hemming and hawwing on fixing the legal status of the detainees in gitmo who have still not been charged after seven years imprisonment - I was hoping for a little more constitutionality from the former president of the Harvard Law Review. :(

Obama Considers Detaining Terror Suspects Indefinitely

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without trial -- as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124223286506515765.html

There's More... Expand Full Post

Jesse Ventura, former navy SEAL on waterboarding and cheney

5/13/2009

Jesse Ventura: I would prosecute every person who was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it, I would prosecute the people that ordered it, because torture is against the law."

Larry King: You were a Navy S.E.A.L.

Jesse Ventura: Yes, and I was waterboarded [in training] so I know... It is torture...I'll put it to you this way: You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoqmH49VBC0

There's More... Expand Full Post

whitewashed sepulchres? "outrage", political outing documentary

5/12/2009

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Matthew 23:27


a very controversial subject - should public figures have their sex lives exposed? is there a different standard for public figures who speak out openly against gay issues who live homosexual lives themselves? is it then a matter of public record since they themselves have taken up the issue? at the end of the trailer we see new jersey former governor mcgreevey who lived a married heterosexual life and only came out when forced to by one of his former lovers going on about "what are the true values? the true value should be honesty." - how did he feel about honesty while he was still in a position of power? now that his situation was revealed against his will he is suddenly very pro-honesty... is this a genuine "conversion" of thought or just useful for him so he can now take on a new career as a speaker suddenly in favor of gay rights (at a hefty fee per speech, mind you.) Allot of questions. wonder what the documentary below will reveal:



In the documentary, Dick lambastes the mainstream media for not better investigating the politicians' "hypocrisy" and double lives. He told New York magazine that the film explores "the issues surrounding closeted politicians and their hypocrisy in voting anti-gay -- and how these people have harmed millions of Americans for many years. Outrage" premieres May 8 in five cities, including Washington, D.C.

There's More... Expand Full Post