We had a great day yesterday. “We” being Beck and I. She’s been doing our taxes herself since I shut down my business, but this year we decided to have them done. The YaYa’s highly recommened the guy they’d been using for years, so we called him up and made an appointment. We were warned that he had a few eccentricities. Picture this office. A ten by ten room surrounded in shelves, with a desk in the middle.The desk and shelves are piled to the ceiling with folders and papers and pamphlets and what have you. That’s not mentioning the shelf built on top of the computer monitor that’s also piled to the ceiling. One swivel chair behind the desk, two comfortable 80’s vintage office chairs facing the desk from the other side. In the swivel chair sits our guy. Three hundred some pounds of him. Headset on and ready to rock and roll. The man works confidently and quickly, concisely explaining every move as he goes. And when he’s not explaining, he’s talking to himself. I’ve never been quite so entertained in a meeting that involved finances. Things went well too. I’d forgotten about some overpaid taxes that occurred in the middle of the year. REFUND! That is if I can get my insurance company to tell the IRS that I really did not get 11 grand in taxable funds from them last year, like the 1099 they sent out says I did.
After the tax meeting we decided to go looking for a market that one of the YaYa’s had mentioned, and where they’d picked up a jar of Ginger Garlic paste for me. We only had vague and incorrect information on where it was. So we were cruising around in an unfamiliar part of town looking on the wrong street for a market who’s name we didn’t know. In the course of our search we stumbled on “Brand Name Deals” where we bought snacks for tomorrow night’s Oscar party and two shirts for me. The shirts were originally marked at $65. Our total bill was under 15. Then we found the “South Asian Market and Indian Deli” What a find! The aroma when you walk through the door jolts your appetite to attention. Ten kinds of Basmati Rice. Shelves full of curries and chutneys and mystery. I’m thrown back into the chapter in Rushdi’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet in which Rai is rhapsodizing about the food in Bombay. We are the only Europeans in the place. And it’s crowded and alive with conversation. I drift back to the Delhi Deli to scope out the menu. These words jump out of the blur of conversation in a thick Indian accent, “KG has matured now and he’s stepped up as the leader of the team.” I was still grinning from that when a herd of belt high children spun me around as they dashed down the isle. We bought a couple of bags of Basmati for the price of one. We didn’t buy the brand that “Makes You Think of Home.” I went for the sturdy zippered bag. We now have a year’s supply. I bought some pistachios and a brick of chashews cemented together by sweetness. We found a bag of Hot Mix, which is mentioned in The Interpeter of Maladies and Beck asked the man behind the counter, an imposing guy about thirty, tall and handsome and very friendly, “Is this really hot?”
“No, well…You don’t like hot?”
“Well hot’s ok, but I don’t like things too spicy.”
He’s thinking, “God, these Norwegians!”
“Buy it, if it’s too hot, I’ll give you your money back and I’ll eat it myself.”
It’s not very hot.
Next stop a pawnshop to browse. Pawn shop didn’t smell as good as the Market. I was looking for a bass for Q, but there were none. I came to the conclusion that bass players always have gigs so they don’t have to hock their axes. There was nothing at the pawnshop that we couldn’t live without so we headed home.
Simple pleasures. The money for the taxman was well spent!
Tonight is the Oscar party. It’s a girl thing. It’s been suggested that I get out of the house.

Ah, Youth

There’s been a lot of talk around here about how our culture is goiing to hell in a handbasket, and there’s probably some truth to it. But there’s some evidence that the next generation isn’t completely hosed. Here are links to a couple of amazingly talented young denisons of Xangaland.

kiwiichigo A poet who will take you for a metaphorical roller coaster ride and dazzle with her insight. This girl is still in High School.

NDM A photographer in LA with an incredible eye and a deep understanding of light. If you start reading the F bomb post, remember, it’s a quote from 25th Hour before your liberal sensibilities get too jangled.

As long as I’m promoting here’s another one of my favs. Qwindin just turned thirty, which is certainly young to me, but disqualifies him from being evidence for my original point (there’s a point? you say.) (I really love parentheticals)(can you have quotes inside parens?) Anyway, his keen observations of life are priceless. One of my favorites is the barbershop story from February 22. Same day I didn’t get my ear hairs trimmed.

I figure someone will make the point that even the culturally hosed generations produce great artists, often in reaction to the desolation of the environment. I subscribe to the theory that any given moment in time looks like the first minute of the apocalypse.

Last night I dreamed that my flower garden was coming up. It was great, like one of those time lapse films when the flowers pop out and bloom in a few seconds. Crocuses mostly, I’m eager for them to come up because I planted some right in my lawn. But also some plants that came right out of my subconcious, really wierd ones that looked like artichokes. I must be ready for spring. Or I was getting a nocturnal woody.

Don’t Fuck With The Constitution!

Just when I thought the White House had reached the limits of cynical, dishonest and mean spirited self promotion and stupidity, they announce that they are backing a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage. I don’t care if you are the most virulent homophobe in the fifty states, this should make you cringe. It’s a bad idea! “Those who can’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.” Anyone remember prohibition? (No jokes about me being alive then) That was a constitutional amendment. Worked great didn’t it.
Not that I think it has a chance of actually happening. It’s a cynical attempt to polarize the coming election. “So, Mr. Kerry, you’re against the marriage amendment? You don’t believe in marriage? You’re in favor of homosexuality?” Let’s just split this country apart a little more. God, I hope this thing backfires. I hope that even the social conservatives see it for what it is. I hope that it mobilizes the political margins (more likely). I think the bushmiester is vulnerable right now. I’m also convinced that they have some stunt up their sleeves that will shoot their ratings over the top as we get nearer to November. Wanna bet that Osama turns up dead around, say October 20th? They probably have him in a cave somewhere, just waiting for the most politically advantageous time to drill him and say he was killed in a raid to capture him.
Mark my words, dreamfish.

The Inbetweener
I said I’d tell you about my career as an inbetweener, but I’m going to have to make it brief. It’s 4:30 in the morning and I can’t sleep because I’ve got nasty work things piling up. I’m going to try to get in early and catch up a bit.
I was trained as a fine artist. “Commercial art” (no one calls it that anymore) was looked down on by the arteests. My plan when I got out of college was to work seasonal jobs and devote my off time to my art. Instead I devoted my off time to working on my jump shot. Either way my chances of making into the MOMA or the NBA were about equal. One of my first jobs in the applied arts was in an animation studio. Ever since I was a kid who never stopped drawing, I’d wanted to do animation, I wanted to work for Disney. We did short spots for advertising. Those of you from the midwest who are old enough might remember the Old Dutch Potato Chip commercials that were film parodies. I got the job by taking a test. They told me they had never seen anyone do as well on the test. They hired about six or eight aspiring young animators. I was 28, all the rest were in their early 20’s.
When I’m at parties telling stories, I say that I was an animator. It sounds so much more impressive and people know what I’m talking about. I never was an animator. I was an inbetweener. The animator would lay out the drawings for, say, frames 1-5-8-10-13-19 and so on and our job was to do the drawings inbetween. There are some artists that can do whatever they want, they can draw in any style they choose and mimic the style of anyone they care to. And there are others who are have their own unique style and can’t really switch gears very well. I am more of a stylist. Needless to say, doing inbetweens it’s neccessary to draw just like the guy who did the extremes. I sucked at it. For example one of the animators, who happened to be one of the owners of the company, had a style that required quick whips of the pencil to mimic his line quality. I found it impossible to move the pencil fast enough to get the line right and still be accurate. I was bored. I became depressed. I became the office ping-pong champ. I drank.
After about a year of hell, one morning I called my wife, sobbing that I had to get out of the job, I couldn’t take it anymore. Are you starting to see a pattern here? That afternoon I was called into the bosses’ office and told that they were sorry, but business was down and they were going to have to let me go. I went into the men’s room to rejoice, to find one of my compatriots weeping in the stall. This was no union environment, so the layoffs were not by seniority. You knew you were considered a weak link. But just to show you what they knew about talent, they also canned the guy sitting next to me. He went on to gain some fame in the very competitive world of super hero comic books and is now employed at Disney. That was the beginning of my freelance career that lasted 12 years.
So much for brevity.

I’ve been experimenting with colors for link text. I’m trying to find something that stands out enough for people to recognize it as a link, but doesn’t completely clash with the pukey pea soup background color that I’m too lazy to change. And I’m supposed to care about this stuff.

First, the power window on my car is broken. It won’t go up unless I give it a manual assist. Difficult in traffic, particularly since it’s a manual transmission. I knew it must be time for auto repairs, I was just starting to think I was going to get my credit card paid off. Dang.

I got a haircut on Saturday. The woman who cuts my hair is tiny, pierced and tattooed. She’s a very young single mom with two kids a little younger than mine. We talk about parenting. We pretty much see things eye to eye. She’s great. But she forgot to trim my ear hairs. One of the things age does to you is destroy your close up eyesight about the same time it starts producing hairs in places where they never really grew that much before. I’m sure you’ve all seen the look. So there I am walking around with pretty much white sidewalls and long curly hairs, the only dark ones on my head, are sticking out from the tops of my massive pink ears. I think your ears continue to grow as you get older as well. Think about Lyndon Johnson. I put my reading glasses on and looked in the mirror and realized the hairs in my nostrils needed a good trim as well. So I says to myself, I wonder what google has to say about nose hair. I found toys and art. As well as a dizzying array of devices devoted keeping your nostrils clean cut. Remember the scene in L. A. Confidential when the chief or whoever was trimming his nose hairs just before they hung him out of the window? That really impressed me. Rich guys almost never have those hairs. Do their barbers remember to trim them? Do they wax? Are they rich because they’re compulsively well groomed or is it the other way around?
The nose hair movie reminds that I stated earlier that I was going to explain my career as an in-betweener. I’ll get to that tomorrow.
Later, youngsters.

I have submitted the dreaded FAFSA form. It’s the one you fill out for financial aid for college. I didn’t realize that it gave you an instant estimate of how much you’ll have to pony up for the year. My estimate came to all of it. L has already gotten some scholarship money from Iowa State, her school of choice, but there’s no longer any reciprocity between Minnesota and Iowa, so out-state tuition is a bitch. I’ve tried to make her aware that we don’t have much to contribute, and what she can’t come up with she’ll have to borrow, but she’s determined. She could go to a smaller school in Wisconsin for less than half the dough, but ISU is her dream school. The only way I can justify it is that she wants to be a graphic designer (I slapped her hands everytime I saw her doing artwork but it didn’t work) and they have a great program there.
I never realize Iowa State was so close, just a little over three hours straight down I35. Nor did I realize what a beautiful campus it is. It’s very compact with an excellent layout of roads and beautiful landscaping. Right there in the middle of the cornfields. Although it specializes in left brained pursuits like engineering and has a great ag school, it also is very strong in design and the visual arts. And I understand the smell of pig shit isn’t completely overpowering. Minnesotan’s have a huge chip on their shoulders about Iowa, we think we’re so much more cultured and sophisticated, but we’re not.

Where Do You Fall on the Political Compass?

Click here to take the test.

My brother sent me this. He’s a guy with very interesting politics. He’s a retired Army Lt. Colonol and is a pretty hard core liberal. I think that’s a rare breed. Here’s my score. More liberal and less authoritarian than I would have thought.

Here’s a reference from the site, I guess these are hypothetical, since Hitler and Stalin obviously didn’t actually take the test. Well maybe Hitler did in his villa in Argentina, where he’s living with Elvis.

You may refer to me as Gandhi.

On another note, it’s been a very long time since L has asked me for help with her math. I wasn’t bad at math in High School, but this is so far beyond me that it could be inscribed on an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.

My depiction of the corporate chain of command. I’m not the littlest dog, but I’m the littlest dog that’s not in a union. Shit rolls downhill and has a helluva lot of momentum built up by the time it hits me. I was recently in a meeting with the guy three rungs up the latter from me, so a big wheel, and he was trying to do the frank and honest discussion thing about how the biz can be improved. I brought up one of my many pet peeves, something that we do wrong in the most basic no-brainer way. He heard a couple of buzz words and came back with an answer that was so vaguely related to what I was talking about, I might as well have been speaking Urdu. I tried to explain myself but I’m sure I sounded like a crazed techno babbler to him. Over the years there have been so many times that they’ve rolled shit out and I’ve predicted that it wouldn’t work and that it was a vast waste of money, if I’d just gotten on the phone with the CEO I could have saved the company millions. Or I would have gotten fired for not being a positive team player! My motto is. “keep your head down and be quick on your feet to dodge the turd slides.”