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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Like my brownhouse:
   no piss on the palms
Sunday, November 8 1998
A light but steady rain fell from cold grey skies for most of the daylight hours today in San Diego. It was the closest thing to genuine precipitation I've seen since I arrived in California back in early September. There wasn't much use in going anywhere, so Kim and I stayed in bed and read books. It reminded me of a rainy weekend in my childhood when I sat outside on the front porch under a blanket with a box of old Ranger Rick magazines and read my favourite regular features systematically>
Today I was mostly reading about cold fusion, the flawed idea that chemical processes can be used to induce nuclear fusion at room temperature. I was so fascinated by the underlying stupidity driving the 1989 cold fusion furor that I found myself on the web checking out the University of Utah's website. I was looking for vestiges of the 5 million dollar Institute of Cold Fusion that was there back when the University of Utah was ground zero for what was hoped would become a multi-billion dollar "Fusion Valley." Sadly, not a trace of the Institute could be found anywhere on the web, and I was cheated out of a great deal of therapeutic laughter.
After the rain stopped in the evening, I took Sophie for a walk. The streets, telephone poles and palm trees were all suddenly washed clean after the long dry summer and Sophie had difficulty smelling anything for which a urinary response was appropriate. She's been spoiled by the dry conditions here and now only responds to things that strongly reek of multiple layers of dog urine.
Kim and I wanted to see a movie, so we went down into Mission Valley and found our way to the theatre in one of the malls near my workplace. I could tell the economy down there was booming just from the difficulty we had finding parking in the large mall parking lot. Inside, the place was bustling as all malls do, but with more people than I usually see in malls outside the holiday season.
The mall was mostly open-air, but almost invisibly so except in today's rain. The walkways were painted with big colourful abstract shapes and many of the store fronts incorporated futuristic designs (or 50s versions of futuristic designs). Kim was delighted with the place, though I think she was imagining how she would have reacted had she been a lot younger. She figured if she'd ever been here as a kid, memories of the place would have haunted her ever after.
The movie theatre was mostly sold out, so we decided to go home and watch the Simpsons instead. I finally got Rita's pirated teevee cable operational using my computer and video capture card and the old amplifier I bought yesterday.
My old Oberlin chum Jason Meyers (infamous for his sexual frustration, witty recollections, and guitar talents) moved out to San Diego several years ago and pretty much vanished from my world. I knew he was studying to become a lawyer and that, during his many San Diego adventures, he once did guest vocals for the Mentors, one of his erstwhile favourite bands. The other day he was doing a web search for The Mentors and he noticed, in one of the link descriptions, his own name; it was me telling the above story in substantially more detail. So he sent me an email, I told him my phone number, and today he called me. It was a good conversation and I learned that now Jason is an unemployed Entertainment Attorney in Los Angeles. But he keeps his life reasonably interesting; for example, he told me about an episode during which he hung out with a group of people that included Slash of Guns 'n' Roses fame. Using the probably unnecessary lure of Kim's female massage school colleagues, I invited Jason down to my Ocean Beach house warming party (tentatively slated for early December) and he promised to be there.
Speaking of house warming parties, my mother's oldest sister Dotty, who is a piano instructor up in Orange County, is having a house warming party on November 22nd and tonight she called me to invite me and Kim to attend. I'd never talked to her in my entire life and was amused to hear she still has a distinctly New England accent even though she's been living in Southern California longer than the Beach Boys.

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