Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   first time I'd left
Thursday, March 22 2001
A bunch of my colleagues were at work all night like all the king's horse and all the king's men, trying in vain to make this new architecture to work on the live servers. I came in all rested after a full night of sleep and they were all standing around looking defeated. Fucking Microsoft and their half-cooked architectural schemes!


At the very last minute last night my housemate John had bought himself a plane ticket back to the East Coast for today. By 2pm he was already gone and my house was vacant and deserted. Lucky for me John had arranged to have his sister Maria drive me to the airport for my own East Coast adventure which would be beginning today. It was awfully generous of Maria to agree to take me to LAX, but truth be known she's often plagued by a severe manifestation of the West LA Blahs, a boredom so existential it even drives some Angelenos into volunteer work (if you can possibly imagine such a thing).
It was my first trip-packing-job since my breakup with Bathtubgirl and my first ever solo airplane ride. Without the burdens of a Schnauzer or good sense I packed extremely lightly, with four or five shirts, a few pairs of socks, my one good pair of pants, and a pair of shorts. I didn't check the weather map but I naturally assumed it would be warm in some place at some point in the East.
On the ride to the airport Maria and I talked about the depressing misery of working for our respective dotcoms. The story is always the same: the endless rounds of layoffs, the desire to leave if only we could find something better, yet the ranks of the unemployed are full of people less lucky than ourselves.
Then the subject changed to the story of the whole Gretchen thing, how we'd known each other back in college, had had an argument and not talked again for twelve years only to rediscover each other once again with the assistance of the internet. "And part of my attraction to her now is related to the fact that she's such an excellent poet," I said later. "Wouldn't it have sucked had her poems really sucked?" Maria asked.
As we neared the airport Maria said she was delighted to find herself taking part in such a moving love story.
After I passed through the metal detector, for some reason I was singled out for one more round of inspection by a woman wielding a wand tipped with some sort of reactive paper, but of course I came up clean. I was very happy that the six hits of ecstasy I was carrying were hidden on my person.
The nonstop TWA flight to New York was on a massive jumbo jet with two aisles. I'd never been in such a big plane before. Unfortunately my seat was in the middle section away from the windows and there was nothing much to do except suffer from the discomfort of a shred of Burger King Whopper lodged between my teeth. I searched my person for a toothpick but it was utterly in vain; I had no objects suitable for use as a toothpicking.
My toothpick raw materials eventually arrived in the form of a can of bloody mary mix, but not, I must hasten to add, in the most readily apparent form. At first I tried to manufacture a shank from the clear plastic airline cup, but its plastic refused to break or tear. Then I tried tearing the aluminum can, but it didn't yield either. Finally I pulled off the aluminum tab depressor, broke the ring of its handle, and used its pointy end to pick at my teeth. It was perfect.
The movie was Basket, a touching folksy American love story about the origins of basketball, but since I didn't rent the headphones I had to make sense of it without the aid of dialogue. Somewhere over the Great American West I fell asleep.
This was the first time I'd left Los Angeles County in nearly a year.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?010322

feedback
previous | next