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").



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   hoop and stick
Sunday, May 13 2001
John and Pinkis were down in El Cajon (near San Diego) all today visiting Pinkis' relatives who, unlike most people in El Cajon, are not of Mexican ancestry. Tonight when John came home he demanded to know how the fuck I could have lived in San Diego for as long as I did. "It's all shopping malls and freeways!"

This afternoon was, as usual, sunny and warm, so I went back to work on the Punch Buggy Rust. When I installed the junk yard engine lid, I was alarmed to find it wouldn't close adequately. It seems that the rear bumper had been kicked in from some previous accident in the car's long and illustrious (but mostly unknown) past. I figured I could get the bumper back to where it needs to be if only I could find a lever big enough to use as a pry bar, and that of course meant a visit to a construction site. Happily, even in Bush Recession II, there are plenty of construction sites. There's even a multi-story media center under construction beside that temple to the dotcom age past, the Etoys.com office building on Olympic.
I already had it in my mind to videotape my layoff if it should happen on Monday, so I walked up to the SaveOn on Wilshire and bought a couple new micro DV tapes for my camera. I proceeded eastward to an apartment construction site just south of Wilshire near the intersection with Westgate. The pieces of rebar littering the grounds were too long and flimsy, but then I found a nice stout piece of threaded steel, the kind used to bolt houses to foundations in earthquake country. I figured this was exactly what I needed. On the walk home I had the rod propped on my shoulder and I kept imagining how wonderful it would feel to haul off and smash the window of an expensive late model German car or to hear the tinny crunch of a Japanese car's roof caving in.
It took only a few well-placed pries to set the rear bumper of my Punch Buggy back to the place it had once been, allowing my new engine hatch to close correctly. Unfortunately, the hatch's spring is just a little too weak to hold up the heavier engine hatch of an older-model Bug.
Later I noticed that one of the cylinders wasn't firing when my Bug was idling. This kind of bummed me out, because among the things that would have had to have been done during its recent valve job would have been a tuneup. The fuckers at the Buggy Shop probably tuned it up with a hot engine, an Idiot's Guide no-no of the highest order. So, hours later, I did adjusted the valves myself and managed to get all the cylinders to contribute to the task of rotating the drive shaft.

I was watching the latest all-new episode of the Simpsons tonight, the one where Homer injures his knee and, after an unsuccessful experiment with breeding the cat to the dog, starts up a daycare center so as to pass his convalescence. Immediately after he gets out of the hospital, Homer is sitting in front of the big picture window enviously watching all his friends and co-workers enjoying the outdoors. Among the co-workers was that guy Carl, joyously pushing a hoop with a stick. It was the use of a classic 19th Century children's toy to implicitly make fun of the sorts of entertainment people enjoyed back before the advent of teevee, the mimeograph machine, videogames and the internet. But the thing that's so wacky about this is that a little over a week before, Gretchen had spontaneously come up with an entire Simpsons episode based around the sight gag of the hoop and the stick. It's no wonder we find the Simpsons so hilarious; their humor resonates so well with our own that we come up with the same jokes completely independently!
Later on tonight, Gretchen and I had a phone conversation. She'd just flown back from her brother's engagement party, and while waiting for a cab at La Guardia, decided to accelerate the process by asking if anyone else was going to Park Slope. There was someone going, it turns out, and this person was none other than one of Gretchen's childhood girlfriends she hasn't seen for 19 years. They recognized each other all the same, across all those years of adolescence and adulthood. You know, it's been quite a year for reunions in Gretchen's life. Meanwhile Gretchen's parents couldn't be happier: both of their kids are engaged to reasonably good people (if I do say so myself).


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