Sell Phone.

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE
This is my cell phone legacy. 14 phones in 10 years. They got steadily smaller over the first seven or eight models. Then I started a trend of big/small/big/small. As you can see, I'm ready for "small" again. And so, as is customary, I'm selling my phone. And, as is also customary, I have my eye on a Sony Ericsson phone. The perfect Treo antidote!

Après l'école.

In 1984, I lived in San Ramon, California. My parents were about to get divorced, my sister had run away from home at 15, and I was in the fourth grade. My best friends were a group of three brothers from a strict Christian household: Joe, James and John. Their parents were named Joseph and Mary.

Joseph had an enormous beard and worked for Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas' company. He had art boards propped up around the house that would be used in Return of the Jedi-- big boards with intricate paintings of the interior of the Death Star.

I would go to the brothers' house to play Atari, hang out in their backyard fort, climb trees and do other Christian-friendly stuff. For seamier times, I'd hang out with my other friend, Brad. Brad was a latchkey kid like me. He'd steal money from his mom's purse and buy us candy and sodas. Then we'd leaf through his dad's porn collection.

But Brad and the brothers were weekend friends. The interminable weekday afternoons-- between getting out of school and my mother coming home from work-- I spent alone. I would while away the hours after school by dumpster diving for Amway samples or shoplifting from the Safeway by the video arcade. And I figured out that if I worked a metal nail file in and out of the quarter slot of the newspaper machines that the quarters would spill out, Vegas-style. Then, it was off to play Ms. Pac-Man.

What I mostly shoplifted was candy bars-- five or six at a time, all different kinds. When I got home I'd unwrap them all and arrange them on a plate. I also had figured out that a certain combination of button presses on the cable box would tune in the pay channels. And so, each day after school, with my plate of candy bars, I would kick my feet up in front of Escapade, the precursor to The Playboy Channel. All by myself on Interlochen Drive.

Two Dads and a Motherboard.

I have an odd job, I really do. I work part time for a national tech-support dispatch service and jobs get routed to the pool of nearby technicians via email and text messages. When the text or email shows up on my phone, I scramble to get to a computer and log into my account and accept the job before anyone else does. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't.

The job can be either commercial or residential. If it's residential, I usually go to someone's weird house in god-knows-what suburb. In any case, I am required to represent whatever company is sourcing me that day (e.g. CompUSA, Acer, Dell). It's hard to remember who I'm representing on any given visit, so it becomes "Hello, my name is Nick and I'm with (slowly scan work order in hand) "International Laser." Smile.

Today I drove to Lebanon, Maine, near the New Hampshire border. Maine has all kinds of cities named after foreign places. A quick look at the map reveals names like: China, Lebanon, Vienna, Lisbon, Peru, Wales, Mexico, Sidney, Palermo, Paris, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Naples, Madrid, Belfast, etc.

Anyway, today I drove to Lebanon and met with an old queen named Ron who had a dead computer which he professed to having bought at "Walmart's." Ron had the patina of a serious lifetime smoker. He had 'smoker's hair', 'smoker's face', and a shredded voice. He wore black jeans, a tucked-in mock-turtleneck and a studded black belt. Ron lived with his partner Steven (another tense, white-bread Mainer) and an adopted Pakistani teenager, a boy named Rahesh.

Rahesh had only a Maine accent and was called on to figure out the basement lighting. That's where the computer was. His two dads snapped at one another upstairs while I got to work dismantling the PC. "I said 'can you pour me a soda?'!"

"You just had a soda!"

They were preparing something in the kitchen for their Christmas dinner and the entire house including the basement smelled like bagel dogs. My job was to replace Ron's motherboard, which I did, and as I waited for the computer to start back up, I looked around and really drank in the scene for the first time. Shelves and shelves of antique bibles, several dozen VHS tapes including a 2-tape set of My Fair Lady, several books on sexuality and a few really old sets of philosophy books, spanning dozens of volumes, on unfinished plywood shelves.

The basement was done up in wainscoting and brown shag, severely torn in places. Several dusty museum-ready stereo components were lined up on a low, lacquered entertainment center: an audio cassette deck, an early CD player, a turntable, a receiver. I began the final steps of reassembling the PC so I could get out of there.

Then the dads started in again: "Did you turn my oven down!?"

"Yes! Do you want the outside to burn before the inside's even cooked?"

I felt sorry for Rahesh, then felt guilty for feeling sorry for him. He's just a teenager with parents like anyone else. As long as the three of them love each other, it doesn't matter how weird Ron's skin is or if they are having burned or raw bagel dogs for Christmas. Then I felt a little bit happy for them.

I got Ron's elaborate signature on a few forms and wished them all a happy holiday. As I left the house, they were all filing down to the basement, as a family, to check out the fixed computer. I wondered what they'd do, gathered around the computer. I imagined them browsing to a sports website or maybe the dads would check a joint email account. I have to admit, I felt useful. Which is rare.

Do YOU Support Our Troops?

If I was less ADD, I would read a Noam Chomsky or Marshall McLuhan book all the way through. Well, among lots of other books. And blogs. I did make it through Chomsky's 9/11 treatise but that was more of a pamphlet really. The thing I love about him is that he's so level-headed. And because his political analysis is not aligned with religious values or commercial or political interests, he delivers interpretations of events and policies that are in stark opposition to popular media interpretations, and does so in an emotionless and matter-of-fact way. He's not a scaremonger or a shouter or even a conspiracy theorist. In fact his delivery is kind of dry. You'd almost expect him to be Canadian.

And because he's also a linguist, Chomsky is exactly the kind of guy you turn to when all of the magnetic yellow ribbons on Volvos and pickup trucks alike have you scratching your head. Here's an excerpt from a paper entitled "The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda" delivered in Kentfield, CA on March 17, 1991 (during the Gulf War).

"Support our troops." Who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be against that? ... In fact, what does it mean if somebody asks you, Do you support the people in Iowa? Can you say, Yes, I support them, or No, I don't support them? It's not even a question. It doesn't mean anything. That's the point. The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy? But you don't want people to think about the issue. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for, because nobody knows what it means because it doesn't mean anything, but its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about."

Snipers.

I absolutely love these three panels from Dan Clowes' Ice Haven. The line "An anonymous note speaks for everyone!" is brilliant; it must be what deluded, passive-aggressive neighbors actually tell themselves when they, say, leave a note on my car criticizing where I park.

Then, a few days later, an anonymous call to the police speaks for everyone when I'm rousted from bed on a Saturday morning by a cop pounding on my door telling me to move my car from its legal but apparently not-kosher-with-an-unnamed-neighbor spot. A spot which I pay to use.

And so, tail between legs, I go downstairs to move the car with the weight of at least one set of eyes on me as I begin to chip the ice from my windshield. Eyes, no doubt, on a pinched, chuckling, perhaps bearded face. Eyes most likely behind round wire-rimmed glasses. Glasses maybe a bit foggy from a steaming cup of coffee or tea clenched by the bitter fingers which had gripped the red pen to scrawl the note that spoke for everyone.

In Minneapolis, They All Look Like Me.

CLICK TO LISTEN
Here's a song I'm working on, feel free to offer ideas on arrangement and instrumentation.

The Todd.

Journal Entry: Wednesday, December 6, 2000

The Todd River wound through town like a dusty serpent fossil; once or twice each year it would attract enough rainwater to begin to flow, sometimes to swell, and sometimes to carry away garbage, animals, even people. On a particular summer night in 1992 it was as dry as ever, and as I approached its sandy banks I brought my bicycle to a halt and jumped off. I was returning from Alice Springs to our little home, a shy, lopsided wallflower on the outskirts of town. The warm air carried suggestions of drunkenness and discord among the tribes people whom resided among the wispy, brittle bush that dotted our Central Australian landscape: deep bellowing and shrieking from the torn numbed throats of a beaten, weathered people. It is tempting to trace the spaghetti schematic of my late 20's neuroses to my 17-year-old interpretations of the dangers lurking in the night along the banks of the Todd River. The idea of snakes haunted me terribly and with money I saved from stocking grocery store shelves I bought a small lamp to attach to my bicycle, anticipating better odds of survival lest I come across a king brown snake taking in the warmth of the Stuart Highway or one of many scabby three-legged dogs that were affixed to the "blackfella camps."


I could see our little porch light scratching through the tar of the moonless desert night: a comforting signifier that my cries for help might have the ability, if uttered during some grizzly scenario, to be carried by a hot breeze through an open window and into the ears of my sleeping parents. Our small tilted house lay at the end of a dirt track. The dirt track split from the Stuart Highway and ran about a half mile, corrugated and dusty, curvy and unforgiving and was cut in half by the Todd. My family owned a rusty Volkswagen bus that required a full-throttled preamble to a Todd River traverse. even then becoming mired, almost terminally, in the deep sandy basin but generally breaking free, as if from quicksand, to begin an overheated meander into town. Crossing by bicycle was impossible. I waded through the prehistoric sand, dragging my little machine behind, light flickering between white and yellow in a vain attempt to warn of miscellaneous evils via its dim composite of my immediate future.


At first I was confused by the hissing. To recall the prickling of skin and the welling of tears is effortless. The raw instinct of fear split through me like an axe and I froze waiting for teeth to pierce skin, for my spine to become poisoned, for venom to begin its journey to critical organs. I wondered about the breeze. Which direction was it blowing? Toward the house? Away from the house? Would the Aborigines hear me? Could I even bellow for help? I stared at the ground as I did once when confronted by a large dog while throwing newspapers on a dark winter morning. I hoped the serpent would sense my benevolence in the way the dog had as its snarls turned to growls and then throaty warnings until eventually he released me from his locked attention. I wondered if my jeans would help, or my boots. Where would it strike? Would it hurt? I then realized, with no lesser of a fear, that there was no snake.


____________

Watching the flickering oval of sand at my feet I realized the ground was becoming increasingly visible. illuminated with a green hue and the hissing was becoming louder. It's hard to describe how easily one can be frightened in the Central Australian desert at night. There are things there that kill people. There are spiders that can destroy a person's nervous system. There are dogs and snakes and scorpions. There are people, invisible and omnipresent: people half-understood. People kill people in the desert (the murder rate in Alice Springs is the highest per capita in the world). Loud hissing noises only serve to rattle a traveler's nerves. Bright green light on a dirt track miles from any appliance capable of producing bright green light only serves to cause a traveler to hastily review the details of his life and to try to revise his half-hearted religious pessimism.


I looked up. Falling from the sky was a green ball of flame, its descent clumsy and vital and mortal. An enormous rock was screaming through the sky over my head. It was on fire. It came from space. Never had I felt my eyes forced open so wide nor such a sustained chill throughout my body. My benevolence shifted skyward in its focus and I felt okay. No snake was biting me, no three-legged dog was tearing out my innards, nothing was infecting my spine with venom. I was watching a meteorite descend from the heavens. My body cut a sharp and shifting shadow on the ground as the rock rumbled through the sky just a few hundred feet above sizzling loudly and crisply. I started to cry.


The whole affair couldn't have lasted more than 45 seconds and ended with an almost subsonic impact several hundred feet to the north. It was the lowest of low sounds-- the kind you feel rather than hear. I felt as I did after sex with a stranger-- an odd post-coital awkwardness checked only by the validation of the sexual experience and the satisfaction obtained thereby. I stood spent and confused in the darkness that again swallowed my bicycle and me and I realized that my light was no longer flickering but shining steadfast. I started to laugh.


I covered the remaining distance to the house in record time, exhilarated and happy and humbled. I switched on the radio scanner in the living room and listened for any mention of the meteorite by air traffic controllers or policemen or truckers. Nothing. I stepped out onto the wide wooden porch and listened for sirens. I listened for shouting and I wondered if more celestial debris would assume broad sizzling arcs above the dark little house. But the desert was quiet. Even the specter that met the earth just minutes before had fallen deathly still and silent but I knew it was there on our neighbor's land. Melting the sand and rock it touched, pulsing, steaming, cooling and expanding, half buried. I climbed into bed wondering if the rock was still glowing, wondering where it came from. I wondered if I had not been out on the track, would it have gone unnoticed? Was I the only one on the planet who saw this shooting star touch the Earth? I slept beautifully and dreamlessly.

The 8th Destruction of Portland, Maine.

I was looking over the flap copy of this 1950's folding map of Portland, Maine recently (pictured and click-able above) and I learned that in the past 50 years or so, the population of Portland proper has dwindled from 81,000 to 63,000. Considering the hardship the city weathered prior to the 20th century (it was destroyed four times by fire and three times by war-- hence the Phoenix on the state seal), I am left to wonder what silent power is destroying the city now and whether this Phoenix has a ninth life?

Here's what the map people said back in the 50's (thank goodness for OCR):

PORTLAND INFORMATION

Portland, Maine's largest city, with a population of over 81,000, is the hub of a metropolitan area known as Greater Portland. This area includes South Portland, Cape Elizabeth, Scarboro, Westbrook and Falmouth, with a combined population of more than 155,000.

Portland was settled by two Englishmen, George Cleeves and Richard Tucker, in 1632 and was known by the Indians as Machigonne. It was known as Casco Neck until 1658, when the name was changed to Falmouth. On July 4, 1786, Portland was incorporated as a town; the city charter was adopted March 26, 1852. Portland became the capital of Maine and continued as the capital until 1831, when the state offices were removed to Augusta.

Greater Portland has more than 250 diversified industries. Several, such as pulp, lumber, furniture, paper, boxes, wood turning and cabinet work, and the processing and canning of farm and fishery products, are based on the natural resources of the region. Other products manufactured here are printing and publishing items, foundry products, stoves, wearing apparel, boots and shoes, elevators, industrial machinery. refrigeration equipment, marine hardware, clothespins, candy, card tables, bakery products, metal and paper containers, and metal culverts.

The city proper is located on a peninsula, almost entirely surrounded by water. Portland harbor is recognized as one of the deepest and safest on the Atlantic seaboard. Its piers are closer to the ocean than any other port. Many shipping lines make Portland a regular port of call. Principal cargoes include woodpulp, oil products, coal, grain, china, clay, bauxite, and lumber.

Portland is also the center of transportation and a distribution point for northern New England. It is the present terminus of the 107-mile-long Maine Turnpike which links Portsmouth, New Hampshire with Maine's capital city.

Today, Greater Portland continues as a major recreational area. In summer, public beaches accommodate hundreds daily. Only 15 miles to the south is famed Old Orchard Beach. There are many parks, playgrounds and athletic fields, an 18-hole municipal golf course, nine other courses, tennis courts, yacht clubs, indoor swimming pools, and many other healthful and recreational facilities.

Numerous sites, within easy walking distance, are of historic and scenic interest to visitors in Portland. On Fore Street are the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow birthplace and the sites of the first meeting house, erected in 1680, and the first settler's house. Portland Head Light, built in 1791, under President George Washington, First Parish Church, Fort Allen Park, Fort Gorges, Portland Observatory, and various other scenes and structures merit the attention of visitors.

Minstrels and Charlatans.

I've mentioned Martin Seligman's book, Learned Optimism here before.
Seligman says that the pessimistic mind, governed by permanent, pervasive and personal explanatory style is also keenly realistic. He says (Page 109) "There is considerable evidence that depressed people, though sadder, are wiser."

I've been feeling sad and wise lately. Say, for the past 8 years or so. This wisdom keeps me from enjoying the dumbed-down blissful ignorance that is my right as an American and it pisses me off. TV, of course, is the lowest common denominator and I expect anything I switch on to be offensive and insulting. Only lately have I realized that this includes public TV too.

Apparently some people have no trouble believing the crap that comes out of the mouths of the Wayne Dyers of the world. But me, I watch "doctor" Wayne Dyer on public TV purely for comic relief. In fact when he came to my town (Seattle), I got some friends together and went and saw him in person. Try as we might, we couldn't keep from laughing out loud during his overly earnest presentation. Why can't everyone just get that any jackass who has written 18 books (not to mention all this other bullshit) is a complete charlatan.

Another thing I see on public TV a lot are these weird doo-wop concerts featuring all-star lineups of old-school doo-wop acts like The Penguins and The Drifters. First of all, these people are minstrels and their acts should be treated the way Sambo dolls are treated these days: preserved for reference of an early, ignorant time in our culture. Not trotted out in front of fat, bearded, Cosby-sweater-wearing crackers.

Secondly, if you've ever seen one of these concerts on PBS, the editing is truly unsettling. Swells of cheers and applause come from seemingly nowhere, at illogical times during the performances and the audience is never shown along with the stage performer, i.e. the audience was most likely shot by itself reacting to prompts rather than having shared time and place with the act they're supposedly watching. You know, the way the America's Funniest Home Videos audience is filmed.

Why do I have to be on guard constantly? Because someone's always trying to trick me. Every day. At least I'm not completely alone.

Miss Neighborhood, 1987.

Journal Entry: Sunday, December 10, 2000

It was the late 1980's. Our neighborhood was typical of the stale hot part of California east of the San Francisco Bay. In our section of Concord, we had an Elvis impersonator, we had a retired HAM radio operator, even a recycler. We had schoolteachers. We had psycho sex offenders and soccer moms and soccer kids and kids who beat up soccer kids and men who beat up their soccer mom wives. We had a Naval weapons facility; it lay at the fingertips of an arm of water that stretched eastward from the Bay, double-jointed and impossible, made possible by blasting and dredging and money. Ships and trains arrived daily trafficking nuclear weapons to and from earth-covered bunkers, scattered with antelope and invisible from the air.


The yards of the houses in the town were dotted with all types of fruits and vegetables now seemingly exotic and even incredible to me as an assimilated Midwesterner: walnuts, peaches, plums, guavas, figs, pomegranates, kumquats, loquats, oranges, apples, grapefruit, Swiss chard, persimmons. It seldom rained. It was seldom windy. Lawns were watered daily, garbage picked up weekly, and every other Thursday at dusk, dozens of pounding, black helicopters descended to dump Malithion onto our homes to exterminate our fruit flies. The government recommended we remain indoors.


I lived with my mother, her fourth husband, Jeffrey, and a truckload of insecurities in an Army green rambler on Margo Drive. My parents drove matching Dodge Darts and worked at the same middle school in Walnut Creek. Apart from that they had nothing really in common, save for an interest in Louis L'Amour novels and Gewürztraminer. On Sundays we'd have waffles for breakfast and then cruise the flea market at the Solano drive-in. They'd look for Louis L'Amour novels and I would covet old hi-fl gear and Beatles LPs. Apart from that, we weren't a family.


The only one-on-one interactions I had with my stepfather were boots to my bed when I slept through my paper route alarm and stern warnings about door-slamming. He knew a guy over in Solano who invented a little rubber device to make trees grow straight and so after his janitorial shift at the middle school, Jeffrey would go work at Grow-Strait until quite late. Doing god-knows-what. The weekends saw him shut in the garage turning wood on an industrial lathe or manipulating band saws, drill presses and the like to produce bizarre dishes and implements.


Each morning for five years I sat on the tiled floor of the front entry and folded newspapers. The smell of newsprint and recycled rubber bands collided with the exhaust from my stepfather's bright yellow Dart as it drifted through the screen door as he left it running endlessly in the driveway. He was very particular about his car. Once out of the house, I enjoyed the still, dark neighborhood and stumbled around throwing my papers and inspecting the yards and cars to see what had changed from the day before. I studied the front page of the paper: the extended weather forecast, the headlines, the pictures. The ink built up on my hands and I wet them with the dewy grass, wiping them clean on my canvas bag.

______
There was a girl who lived on my route named Shelly Doorak. She went to Concord High and dated a boy who drove a white Camaro. She was kind of a bad girl and never looked at me when our paths crossed. At sixteen, she was the cutest girl in the neighborhood and had never said a word to anybody I knew. At the end of the month I went around to each house to collect the $7 subscription fee and! actually prayed, to some god, that Shelly would answer the Doorak's avocado green door. She never did, but one morning in late summer there was a bra lying on the welcome mat where the paper needed to go and I picked it up, a little white piece of cotton, and wondered about it. I became nervous and didn't know what to do with it... leave it on the mat? Throw it in the bushes? Wrap it up in their newspaper? I decided the best thing was to stick it in my bag and take it home. I hid it inside of a toy helicopter and every now and then I took it out and looked at it but usually I was afraid to, until one day it was gone and I was paralyzed with fear and guilt. Who had taken it? My mom? Was I in trouble? How did she think a little bra ended up in my helicopter? What was she doing looking in my helicopter?


I was fourteen and my sexual slate was clean. Squeaky-cleaa In fact it had not yet been unpacked from the box. Rumors were all around school about Shelly and her sexual exploits with various high school bad boys. Standing in the Doorack's dark front yard. forty papers in my shoulder beg and breathing on my cold fingers, I watched her pull on sweaters and make her bed and put on lip-gloss. Huey Lewis played on my headphones and I watched her talk on the phone, flip over cassettes in her boom box and fight with her mom. I watched her brush, curl, crimp, tease and blow-dry her hair. I saw where she hid her cigarettes and where she kept her socks. I was looking in on Shelly Doorak's life and knew things about her that even the white Camaro guy didn't know. When I'd see her smoking behind the grocery store on the way home from school I knew how many shirts she tried on that morning and the color of her underwear.


In the summertime the sun came up early and I lost my window to Shelly's life. I knew it would be months before I would know her again. The sun pinned our town down like a tanned wrestler. The hills turned to gold in the distance, the antelope danced around on the nuclear missiles and my parents consumed more Louis L'Amour and Gewürztraminer. I saw Shelly smoking by the dumpsters behind the store and wondered how many shirts she had tried on beibre school. The yellow Dart choked me, the alarm was ignored and the bed was kicked for three more months. The helicopters dumped cancer and we remained indoors, windows closed, air conditioners on. I wondered about my older sister who ran away from home and whether she had a boom box in which to flip tapes or a hair dryer wherever she was living. I waited and waited until the cold weather and daylight savings would again change my world.

Teens in the 50's are a Thing of the Past.

Remember those filthy old computers I hauled out of the Jenny Craig? Well they're still in my car. Except one which I brought up into my apartment after scooping out the dander and human fur from inside. And what a diamond in the rough! Squirreled away in a safe place deep within the bowels of Windows 98 (first edition) was a folder chock full of personal MS Works documents.

Below is my favorite, in its entirety: a fascinating and meticulously-credited research paper entitled "Research Paper" that pulls no punches as it lays bare the differences between parents and teens of today and those of the mid-century.

In the 1950’s music consisted of mostly jazz, blues, and rock and roll. We still listen to those styles of music in 2005, but along with new music we have expanded our choices of style and have also expanded to new ways of listening to it. Being a teenager of 2005 is superior to being a teenager in the 1950’s because of the premium technology of CD players and IPods which have replaced the record player. The availability of these machines, where you can listen to the music, and what you can listen to has greatly improved since the 1950’s.

Records were 10-12 inches and easily breakable.(Gale, “45 RPM”) They sold for 4 to 5 dollars per record. CD’s are roughly 15 to 20 dollars each, but contain larger amounts of music and are a better quality. These CDs are much more compact than records are. The phonograph was a large piece of equipment as well. Because CD players can be quite small, it isn’t abnormal to seem them being stocked in local stores whereas a phonograph takes up a sizeable amount of room and was sold in very few stores. The internet has also helped the availability of CD players. In the 1950’s the internet was a thing of the future so phonographs couldn’t be advertised like CD players are now.

In the 1950’s listening to music was a family affair. The phonograph was usually like a piece of furniture. It was kept in the drawer of a cabinet in the living room inbetween the t.v. and a coffee table.(Pelham) The parents had control of when you were able to listen to music. Teenagers rarely had their own phonograph. The parents owned it and decided when you could or couldn’t play it. Their children wouldn’t be able to listen to music in their own bedrooms like teenagers today do. It is common for teens to own a stereo, walkman or even an ipod of their very own. This would allow teens to listen to music wherever they felt like, but teens of the 50’s were confined to listening to their parents music in their own living room.

Parents are more lenient with what they allow their children to listen to now than in the 50’s. As long as the parents of today don’t have to listen to what their children are listening to they don’t mind it. In the 50’s, since the phonograph was generally in the living room, parents had control over what their children listened to. If they didn’t like what they were listening to they just had to turn it off. If teens wanted to listen to something deemed inappropriate by their parents they wouldn’t be able to listen to it in the 50’s. The teens of 2005 have a better chance of listening to what they want to listen to with the technology provided. With headphones in their walkmans and ipods their parents would never know what they are listening to.

With the advantages of technology on the side of 2005’s teens it would be much better to be a teen now than one in the 50’s. CD players and CDs are much more available to teens now than in the 50’s. Today teens also have a larger variety of musical styles that they can listen to and with the invention of walkman they can listen to it wherever they’d like. Teens in the 50’s are a thing of the past.

*Results Not Typical.

I've been working sometimes for this weird tech support dispatch service. Calls come in via text messages and email and us registered techs sign into our "online office" and either accept or reject the jobs. There are a lot of techs and not a lot of jobs, so it's a scramble to get to the computer as fast as possible to claim the available work.

Recently I scored a gravy job (you might say) carting some old dander-riddled PCs from the sinister-looking meeting room of a Jenny Craig franchise in a nearby strip mall. If you haven't been to one, these "weight loss centers" are in a formal sense like gyms for sedentary optimists. Here, plump, shawl-clad "weight-loss consultants" tailor an eating regimen to allow clients to achieve their fantasy girth. All the trappings of a gym are present: duplicitous salespeople, unclear terms of service, memberships, managers, proprietary equipment, etc. Though I guess gyms don't have posters of Kirstie Alley everywhere.

Anyway, check out this photo I scored while there. These 'food portraits' are about 3 feet square in real life! Jenny's "product", that is, what the "consultants" are selling, is this weird food that is stored and sold on the premises. In fact, when I walked into the place I flashed back to the first time I walked into an Arby's (it was during a Minneapolis winter. I was a freshman in college and had just sold plasma next door and Arby's cashed the plasma checks but I digress). Wet cat food. That's the smell.

What'll It Be?

It's my third week of bar-tending. My 8th shift. I work in a hotel bar on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights-- a hotel for business travelers-- and there are very few "guests" on the weekends. And the hotel is by the Mall, directly across the street from Michaels Crafts (no apostrophe) so there are no walk-ins, only hotel guests.

The only stuff around here is mall-area stuff: some loco border restaurants, a stereo store called Tweeter, a Zales, another diamond store just like Zales, a few other hotels that look exactly like mine, a Best Buy, a Chili's, a giant pet store called Pet Quarters. Most of these get the possessive treatment by the locals: Tweeter's, Best Buy's, etc.

Some nights I have no customers, some nights I have a few. Last night I had the most ever. My first customers were a newly-wed couple married only hours earlier at City Hall. They were about 50 years old and the woman asked if I had Champagne. I was happy to report that we did have "sparkling wine"-- personal-sized bottles of Freixenet-- and would they like a couple of bottles. She asked if the bottles had corks that made a popping noise. They did.

The groom was in the ink game, and wove fascinating yarns like the one about the latest Bacardi label that has invisible, bootleg-proofing ink detectable only under a black light. Then there was his racountement concerning his company's production of money-printing ink for the federal government. "We got Brinks trucks comin' and guys with shotguns picking up green ink." After the Freixenet, he ordered a Mudslide. I Googled it.

Last week I had a woman, whose birthday it was, treating herself to a glass of wine before taking herself to dinner at the Old Country Buffet adjacent to Best Buy's. When she returned she seemed really depressed and finished another Robert Mondavi Chardonnay rather quickly before adjourning to her room.

On the Thanksgiving weekend, "Mainers" flocked to the hotel from all over the state to take advantage of the early morning Black Friday deals. Even into the night, groups of three and four would return to the hotel just long enough to unload their cars, the luggage trolley dripping with sacs de joie.

I had a single mother at the bar the other night whose daughter was upstairs sleeping after a swim in the pool. As the woman slipped into drunkenness, I learned about her visits to the Methodone clinic and life in general in Milo, Maine.

Later that night, a guy slunk up to the empty bar and sheepishly ordered a "Mar-ga-rita." He just turned 21 and I was his first bartender. "Let me ask you something" he said. How much liquor is in a Mar-ga-rita?" I showed him the conical metal shot glass and he twisted his lips around and asked if maybe I could use less. He spent the next 45 minutes talking about Christ.

I finally got a chance to make a Martini last night: dirty, up with olives.

Found on Craigslist.

family pet

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Reply to: sale-501735212@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-12-07, 11:53PM EST


Loving family looking for a family pet for son. Must be good with kids. Either cheap or free.