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live in my idea of Utopia
Thursday, May 3 2001
On my way to my workplace early this morning the alley gods smiled on me and bestowed upon me a late-model microwave oven. I took it to work and tested it on a paper cup of water, and behold, it did work.
During my workday things were going well so I took a little walk down to the park by the freeway. While I was there I thought of a brief phrase, a song title perhaps, that sums up the central masculine view of women: fun until I fuck you. Last night, you see, my housemate John and I were talking about how much fun a beautiful woman can be and we realized it was all irrelevant after an orgasm. At that point she's only as much fun as she can possibly be asexually, and that has nothing to do with the way she looks.
On a completely unrelated note, yesterday John's sister Maria said, "I have real weakness for scenes depicting a crowd of people walking in slow motion."
Julian's VW Bug, which he "inherited" from erstwhile co-colleague Chris Johnson (now in Mexico), is in the "buggy shop" with valve trouble. Since now Julian doesn't have a job and doesn't need a car, he views the bug as a big hole in his pocket. So today he called me and asked if I wanted to have it. I'd been considering the idea since Linda mentioned it yesterday, so I said sure. My only expense will be getting the valve work done, which could cost as much as $500. I think I'm going to paint some sort of animal hide pattern on it.
It was such a fabulously beautiful day I left work at five, intent on getting out and walking around. While fiddling with my new computer, I found that the damn CPU fan wasn't working and the Athlon was actually as hot as the boiling point of water. The strangest thing about this revelation was that it must have been running this hot for a long time - days I suppose - but still it never failed in any way. I didn't know electronics could function at all at those temperatures, let alone for days. I wonder what is wrong with the motherboard that it would suddenly stop providing power to the CPU fan? That's just not cool.
I was eating a chicken burrito outside the Tacos Plus on the corner of Bundy and Ohio when a cop pulled up and couldn't find a spot in the crowded little corner lot. So he just parked in one of the traffic lanes of Bundy, simply because there was no one around to tell him he couldn't. As he busted an illegal U-turn in Bundy and eased into a lane behind a random motorist at the Ohio stoplight, I wondered if cops ever feel guilty about the cases of nerves they give to citizens behind which they are forced to drive on a nearly continuous basis. Very few of these citizens are ever pulled over, but every one of them probably experiences an accelerated heart rate. I know I do, no matter how legal my driving situation, no matter how devoid my wallet might be of ecstasy tablets. But then I realized something about the sort of person who enjoys life as a cop. They're always sadistic to some extent. They derive pleasure from making people nervous with their authority. For them it doesn't suck at all that most people are a little more miserable whenever they materialize in the rearview.
A little before sundown I went for a long walk down Wilshire to somewhere around Barrington and then up to San Vicente and then back south down Bundy. It felt like bona-fide springtime, with the faint aroma of clean laundry and mowed grass. As I walked through the mostly pedestrianless neighborhoods of Brentwood I was thinking of various governmental policies that could help to encourage pedestrianship as a means to facilitate community. One idea was to somehow give people tax credits for logging into various "pedestrian stations" at a rate that would only be convenient to reach by walking. The unspeaking mind is full of such ridiculous ideas, and of course this one was unworkably complicated. So I began to think about ways to just keep cars out of a community. Perhaps planned communities could be designed in such a way as to keep all the cars parked in vast parking lots on the edge of town. I suppose New York City and Venice (Italy) are a little like this and I'm living in the wrong city. Nobody in Los Angeles would want to live in my idea of Utopia.
Survivor just seems to drag tonight. What's up with these long video montages? And how about that new Britney Spears commercial? (Was it for Coke or was it for Pepsi? Her throaty "bah bah bah bah bahs" sound like "Dr. Pepper" to me.) Getting Britney to hawk your sugar water might be brilliant advertising but it doesn't work on me; I find it about as repulsive as somebody peeling a boiled egg. Especially after all the failed dotcom advertising campaigns I've worked on, sometimes I find myself wondering, is there any real science to advertising? Nearly all the ads and promotions I see are only a slight cut above email spam. They always have a feel of frat-boy-brainstorm desperation about them, even this new Britney soda pop ad.
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