Real letters from real geeks

Dear purveyors of electronic music,

I've had just about enough of your squeaks and squeals, your grinding bass, your thumping and testicle shattering bass, all of it. Give it a goddamn rest. I know, I know, you're really clever with that laptop of yours and you look badass in a pair of headphones, but I don't give a rusty fuck. I'm trying to get some reading done here.

There is a time and place for that kind of "music"; namely cavernous warehouses or hangars on the outskirts of town. So baffling is the experience of this artform, drug use is basically mandatory. Who could listen to dubstep sober? Why would you?

But now I endure this cacophony even as I sit down to the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle (I do that shit with pen, fuckers) in the comfort of my own home. It so happens that my neighbours are people with devastatingly, heart-achingly, terrible taste in music. I shall carbon copy them on this note, and remit a third carbon copy to God (In the remote hope that he empathizes and makes all your heads explode in a messy fell swoop. He might recall that he owes me).

Signed an old fogey,


Harvey

Verby day

I am writing this missive on the evening of 28 October 2012. A passable Sunday. Here's what I did in order:

1. ate scrambled eggs and bacon
2. sat on the bus for exactly one hour and 
3. read The Atlantic
4. bought groceries at the supermarket
5. placed clothes in a washing machine
6. cooked up a storm
7. nibbled on a medicinal marijuana chocolate bar
8. removed clothes from a washing machine
9. listened a supremely moving podcast
10. ironed shirts
11. saw Giants fans celebrating
12. washed dishes
13. lay in bed
14. typed out words

In order words, I'm pretty high right now. Thanks for reading. 

The memory of a scent

I am walking down Valencia and my nostrils have filled with a strong sense of nostalgia.

As I pace, my brain and my senses struggle to source the meaning of this smell. I find myself on the first day of university, carrying luggage into my new student residence. Inhaling once more, I am on the grass by the banks of the Thames river. I can feel the thousand or so footsteps to class, the drunken destructive sprints home from the bars, and a calendar that was more spiral than schedule. I remember the taste of dollar beers and make-out bandits and the associated angst and indifference, and I can still hear the clunk of empty bottles of Jack Daniels accumulating on the windowsill.

I'm transported to the dark forest behind our residence where among the tall trees we would — oh, wait. It's weed. The smell is weed. Someone is definitely getting high around here.

Religion reform #17

The Book of the Toucan describes well the Toucan's message of everlasting hope and peace.  And while it is sufficiently detailed, it's also kind of (totally) messed up.  Take for example, this passage:

For when the Toucan, blessed be his beak of many colours, created the Heavens and the Earth he showered the world in the warm dew of his everlasting breath.  Believers commune and share in the glory of all creation!  Engage ye in the ritual known as the Shower of Gold: 

Enter your bathing facility and disrobe completely.  Securely close off the entrance and seal off the edges with clay or mud or duct tape.  Let no light disturb this chamber.  You must create a shell of complete darkness, like the formless void of the unblessed universe.  Turn off all lanterns, and let no light enter the bath. 

Then, steady a flow of hot water and let your bath fill with hot steam.

Then, spark a medium-sized joint.   

Having inhaled no less than three sturdy puffs of the Toucan's smoke, enter the shower chamber.  The water shall be as hot as a body can muster.  Be seated under the deluge and in the thick darkness see with open eyes the formless void; listen with both ears to the awesome crash of the Toucan's breath. 

Sit for no less than one half hour in the cascade.  To the pious and noble in spirit will be revealed the sound and sight of the true beginning. You must concentrate.  Banish from mind all voices, all memory, all thoughts completely.  Experience nothing but the heat and the line of holy water tumbling from the sky on to your body. 

Recite: "Hallowed Bird, blessed be your beak of many colours, may you with glory dispread your breath into our breasts and blanket us with your Shower of Gold!"

That's where I quit reading.  The golden shower part was a little off-putting.

But for the record, I have tried this. (Less the chanting.)  And it's fucking awesome.

Religion reform #16

Surely religious services would be more enjoyable (that is, tolerable) if the participants were permitted to get baked beforehand. Proposal: a smoking section in every mosque, church, temple, damp basement or wherever the hell it is people go to abandon their sense of logic and mull over fairy tales.

This smoking section would consist of a sealed-off partition with its own ventilation. At the front there would be a small stove upon which would be placed a hefty brick of delicious herb. The people sitting in their pews -- nay, couches -- would then reach for the conveniently-placed tube originating from under their seats and inhale the sweet, sweet cheeba. Holy smoke, man. Whoa, that was completely accidental. Hahahaha! But it would be wicked, right?  Another idea: could we hand out Doritos instead of the Eucharist? What? Too crunchy? I hear you brah. Is cool.

Over the course of the sermon, the partition would fill with smoke until it resembled a giant and gently undulating white box. It would be warm to the touch and sound like coughing and muted utterances of "dude."  God willing, it would contain a foosball table.  It would be pretty glorious.  And there is little doubt in my mind that that the message of any religion would be amplified both in efficacy and in "awesomeness" through the hazy lens of this pot-filled vestibule.

In a way, this smoky white box is the perfect metaphor for religion; it's opaque, filled with passive dunderheads, and easily dispelled with a few purposeful swipes of an arm.  Zing!

(And I didn't even mention the hot air or carcinogens.)

From the archives

13 October 2007

I'm high and out of breath.  I just raced into the bowels of St. Patrick station and it feels like the hardest thing I've ever done.  Buying tokens used all the mental capacity I left the house with this evening.  I was staring at the transfer machine for about four minutes when I heard the rumbling of the train below me.  I sprinted down the escalator with both hands on the rails, in time to see the doors of the southbound close in my face.  I tried to shrug it off like I wasn't really interested in that train anyway, but everyone knew better.

So here I am on the platform trying to catch my breath and waiting for another train.  I figure I might as well document this trip since I have nothing better to do.  Tonight should be a good night.  And by "good" I mean stressful, trying, and awkward.

But I want to mention something quickly. Before I started writing these words, I leafed through this notebook and a rather disturbing realization hit me.  This is a God damn diary.  I feel like a girl admitting this.  And worse, I've whipped it out in public.  An expression of awesome

*    *    *

FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!  I am now standing on the Northbound platform having missed my train a second time.  Well, it's the first time missing my train, but the second train I missed tonight.  If that makes any sense.  In my state of being completely baked I attempted to catch, and missed, and subsequently waited for a train I didn't even want to take.

Only after a few minutes of notebook faggotry did I catch the sound of the approaching Northbound train and my synapses snapped to life.  I barely had time to jam my notebook into my pocket and run to the other side before missing the train.  Again.

God, I am so fucking high right now.  I hate first dates.

Ceci, n'est pas un tee-shirt

We were sitting on the grass last summer, high as balls, people-watching, vodka-out-of-water-bottle-drinking, self-loathing, and chilling. My pal Kessler was there too, similarly fucked, but self-tanning instead of self-loathing. While sitting and watching the Dumb Summer Hordes pass by, we got to thinking. And as always happens when people think: we developed those things called ideas. In particular, stupid ideas. For tee-shirt slogans. For example:

• I'm without stupid
• My other shirt is a pair of pants
• I'm not that gay
  
• I went to Darfur and all I got was this humanitarian catastrophe
• Pink is the new asshole
• Irony on tee-shirts is gay
  
• Irony on tee-shirts is not that gay
• Michaelangelo > Raphael > Leonardo > Donatello
• Ask me about this tee-shirt
• Emotionally retarded (and single!)
• Do you know the way to San Jose?
• Ceci, n'est pas un tee-shirt

And so forth. The ideas were truly of the low quality expected after an afternoon of beer and sun exposure, but after much discussion (and a detailed flowchart, a summary paper and expert testimony), we realised that it wasn't our fault. Simply put: the medium has circumscribed our ability to fulfill our remarkable potential. Because, let's face it, the tee-shirt is a shitty medium.

It is just a cotton canvas scarcely held aloft by a slacker's slumping shoulders. It's not a forum for deep thought. Textiles generally lack the gravitas to convey meaningful ideas. Especially those made of low-quality cotton or worse, some kind of synthetic blend.

The sun went down and our water bottles were empty. Switching to hastily-rolled joints, Kessler and I decided -- nay, decreed -- that really, we should keep all forms of self-expression off tee-shirts. Instead (and this is where things got kind of fucked up), we sought to unite in protest of tee-shirt aphorisms. We rejected the notion that an item of clothing, a scant fibre ledger, can adequately express any portion of the complex content that is the human condition.

I mean, what is a tee-shirt slogan anyway? Usually a meaningless meme. An attempt at individuality that reveals only a desire for conformity. A throwaway tattoo; it's like a vacuous Twitter, or a Facebook status update, or an ICQ away message (for the ancients among us), or simply: an unheard shout among a million similarly unheard shouts from a million "unique individuals".

And this cry for help on this store-bought rag is an emblem of how pathetic we are. So desperate we are, that we don't define ourselves by the clothing we wear. We let the clothing define us. We are the accessory to the brands we wear, and not the other way around. As far as individuality goes, it's a failure. Collectively, we stand defeated waving an American Apparel brand flag of surrender.

So our (drug- 'n' booze-addled) protest took the form of a uniform shirt. A single design to be worn by those who feel contempt for the notion of catch-phrase fashions, and for sound-bite styles. An anti-tee-shirt. Proclaiming nothing for life is nothingness. And, I remember thinking, after a good four minutes of coughing, this is a shirt that we truly wear, it does not wear us, man. Our shirt was simple, and pure, and honest. It's merely a white shirt, with black block letters (Helvetica, of course), that reads:



Well, that's the tough part. I completely forgot. I've tried to remember and recreate it but I keep drawing a blank. I thought maybe it said "White Power" but that doesn't make any sense. Something about white though. Or power? I don't know. It might have been "Fuck You". It was pretty awesome at any rate.

But Kessler hated it I recall, and we argued about it for forty-five minutes before we got really hungry and went to a pub for wings. We told the idea to a couple of guys we met that night, but one of them was wearing a "Don't Vote for Pedro" tee; it didn't really go over that well.

New angle for Novartis

Stacey watches with some fascination at Harvey neatly slices open the package of Neo Citran and pours a small pile of white granules on her glass coffee table. He gingerly picks up a piece of the packet he had snipped off and rolls it into a tube.

STACEY

(puzzled)

Um, aren't you going to boil some hot water for that?

HARVEY

(nonchalantly)

Why bother?

He bends over and snorts a good portion of the powdered cold and flu relief. 

HARVEY (CONT'D)

Ah. That's better.

CUT TO:

Harvey is stacking crates in a warehouse on a forklift looking healthy and mostly alert. 

CUT TO:

Title card and logo.

ANNOUNCER (V.O.)

Neocitran: it'll fuckin' get ya.