My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

I always liked Yosemite Sam. He’s a pirate cowboy. Here he goes again, telling Bugs what’s up. Apparently this is a line from some Kurt Russell movie. Also a record label. Now a cartoon.

Here is the gist of my donut movie. I read this narrative over footage from late night donut shops. My pal Fisher, who is editing it, says the last part about city planners is kinda weak and that maybe the Dunkin’ Donuts part could be cut. So here is your chance to chime in friends, about donuts. What could be better before we record?

*******

Most Americans can remember a Sunday morning trip to the donut shop to pick up a warm dozen with Mom or Dad. With the pretty pink frosting, the rainbow sprinkles, the glistening honey dipped, it seemed like the happiest place in the world, that little donut shop. But come 12 hours later and a kid’ll see a whole different world. At night a donut shop is a warm place for a homeless women to wait out the dark hours. It’s a place for a guy on a bad trip to sit and come back down. Old guys with nothing left in life shuffle in just to be near humans. The working poor come here when they get off the second shift because they can’t afford much beyond an old fashioned and a coffee for a buck and a half.
San Francisco’s a rich city. You’ve got the biotech industry and Silicon Valley money here. One of the highest property values in the country. Part of a healthy capitalist economy is plenty of cheap labor. In other words, poor people. A city needs poor people to mop floors, take out the garbage, and do the laundry. And make the donuts. But no one ever stops to think about what service these simple little places provide.

Just about every donut story in San Francisco is another chapter in the American dream. The vast majority of them are owned and operated by Cambodian immigrants. People from one of the poorest nations in the world, fresh out of occupation and genocide.

Whole families are put to work, and who isn’t working is home sleeping. Then they switch. It only takes flour, sugar and hot grease to make one. People point at the donut they want, so you don’t have to know English to work the counter. All’s it takes is the ability to make change in a new currency. To not get ripped off.

I’ve hung around a lot of late night donut shops here in S.F. Seen people selling prescription pills, stolen sunglasses, and make big talk about other hustles. I’ve seen guys passed out in the corner for hours. No other business model allows for patrons to spend eighty cents and hang around as long as they want. Back in New England your only choice is Dunkin’ Donuts. A huge franchise. There’s no room for a mom and pop place. Dunk’s has it locked down. There’s a dunkin donuts inside the dunkin’ donuts. That’s the American nightmare – corporatization.

Out here in the west it’s still up for grabs – but for how long? The owners are immigrants and haven’t caught on to the American ideal of quick turnover. Of standardization. Of throwing the weird guy out. Maybe these small time business owners have some compassion for the down and outs, since they themselves are scraping their way along the bottom as well. You gotta drop a lotta donuts in grease before you get rich.

But donut shops aren’t on the mind of urban developers. City planners don’t make space for the poor. City leaders don’t give awards out to the folks who work 19 hour shifts to make a low class pastry. The rich eat cakes and go to bakeries. City planners are concerned about tax revenue. City leaders court voters, not transients, illegals, zoned out druggies. There’s a dark side to donuts, kids. There in the city. Maybe someday when you get old enough you’ll understand how important it is for some dark places to remain.

pulled these old wooden gutters out of a dumpster in San Jose today. They are quite beautiful.

Rusty Sunshine picked up this homemade tractor. It has an old Chevy drivetrain, a hand welded I beam frame and a single cylinder engine. The seat is missing. Someone stole it.

Why? This is the 2 am club. The bar Huey Lewis is standing in, sports coat slung over his shoulder as he thinks, “I want a new drug.”

That’s why.

I promised myself I would never collect cardboard and sell it back at the recycler. It just seemed so low. But curiosity got to me, and today I had a bunch in the back of the truck so I called around to find out where and how to turn it in. It probably helps that I have a limp (bad ankle from the fight last weekend) and long hair and an army jacket on today. It really got me into the deranged-vet-hardscrabbling-the-city-for-some-beer (heroin?)-money mentality.

I found a place at Pier 96, down in the industrial end of town naturally, that was buying back with a minimum of 150 pounds. I wasn’t sure how much I had so I headed to a warehouse I’d made a few deliveries to in my time. Like a pot of gold a big ol’ stack of boxes was waiting, and they were already broken down! I had just thrown a stack in the bed and was back in the dumpster on the loading dock when this large angry man started throwing my boxes out of my truck and screaming,”You’re stealing my cardboard! Unload this shit now!”

I started fast talking an apology and he said, “You know how much the garbage company charges me if I don’t leave them the recycling?”

“No sir, no, I wouldn’t have any idea.”

“20,000 a month!” Spittle came out of his mouth with the dollar amount. His face was red. Is this why more people aren’t recycling cardboard?

“I sure am sorry, I didn’t realize it was stealing.”

He got into a pick up and drove away, and guys on another loading dock gave me the meanest look. Like I was junkie caught stealing a laptop. I’d have to hope I had my 150 pounds already. On to Pier 96. It’s a long drive down a really rough road and there are cranes for loading ships looming in the distance. The city police have a driving course marked out with fluorescent yellow and red cones on a huge swath of pavement behind chain link fence. It’s where they come to learn how to drive 120 mph down Lombard.

The other side of the street is a windowless processing center. Just before I hit the bay there is a weigh master – she is nearly five feet tall and Asian. She gives me a plastic card that reads “13″ and tells me if I have less than 150 pounds “no money.”

Machines are baling up plastic like it is hay and fork lifts are loading it into trucks. Same goes for paper and aluminum. Gotta feed the machines. The Tide detergent bottles stand out in the compressed mash. I remember that.

I pull the truck into a huge open warehouse, just drove in through a twenty foot high roll up door. A man in a day-glo safety vest gave me a piece of paper and told me to throw the cardboard on the floor “over by that yellow pole.”

It was easy enough. I drove back out and got on the outbound scale. I’d lost 180 pounds. The weigh master gave me 11 dollars and 73 cents. Not bad. Cardboard’s selling for 130 bucks a ton these days. If everything else goes wrong I can do this.

notice the C’s are all slightly bigger than the rest of the letters…

You ever play PhotoHunt at the bar? For a buck you get two nearly identical pictures of a woman in a state of semi-undress, quite often soaked in baby oil. (For extra fun, play two player and choose Babes for one and Hunks for the other. It freaks out the guys around you when some stud in white Bikini briefs lounging amongst gaily colored balloons flashes on the screen.)

The game involves finding five areas that have been slightly photo-shopped and touching that area on the touch sensitive screen in a given time limit. In the beginning the backgrounds are simple white walls, the errors easy to spot.

“Her heel has two straps on the left!”
“Her hair!”

Usually they make her hair a little longer. A lot of inconsistencies are often in the background, so don’t spend a lot of time staring at her boobs if you want to win. There is a bigger life lesson there.
As you and your friends gather round winning game after game and you are up in the 250,000 point range, suddenly the backgrounds get dark, out of focus, and very cluttered. Fabrics suddenly involve paisleys and panties are not sweet plain white, but involve layers of intricate black lace with strings and ribbons.

You’re drunkest friend will reach over your shoulder and start pressing randomly on the screen shouting “somethings weird with her navel!” This only takes time off your timer so grab his fingers and bend them backwards. It’s not the best way to spend a Sunday afternoon. At one point Doug was using his tongue to highlight errors on a foxy brunette taking a bubble bath. I had to turn my Tequila shot over to him to prevent any infection from setting in.

“Have a good day!” the bartender said as we got up to leave. The bright sun punished our eyes and Doug said, “I don’t think its a good sign we’re leaving a bar drunk and it’s hardly past lunch time.”
He was right, but I’ll have to tell the rest of the story another time.

This came from Linger somewhere in Boston. What accent is that?

I fought a guy at work today. We ended up on the ground and I was biting his shoulder as he dug his chin into my chest while I had him in a headlock. Somehow right about then I sprained my ankle. I’ve always had pretty weak ankles – part of the reason I’m six foot five and don’t play basketball – but this was ridiculous. I wasn’t even on my feet! Sometimes I hate my body.

But whatever. I didn’t mention it after the fight which kind of ended in a draw. I have a great reach and fight dirty – at one point I grabbed the guys nose and tried to pull it off – but this guy had endurance. What really embarassed me was that he’s a smoker. How can a smoker be healthier than me? But there it is. You turn 35 and you can’t go like you used to. It’s all ice packs and band aids.

So I thought I’d share this taqueria wall painting of some other San Francisco has beens: the 49ers. They suck too. But to be fair, I never was a world champ. Loss comes easy to me.

Judging by our toilet paper we are number two.

Tagging? It’s the worst manifestation of the American Dream. It’s all about signing your name on something in order to claim ownership – but having no real right to do so. It’s like claiming a country other people already live in. Of course our government at least had some muscle to back up their illegitimate claim. Taggers are weak. They go to the poor, the downtrodden, (wait a minute – that’s usually what our country does too…) and write all over the poor and the downtrodden’s shit. You never see them tagging up power centers like police stations, police cars, fire departments, the mayor’s office, insanely wealthy communities, or even upper middle class areas. They are afraid. So they try to take from those who can’t fight back.

It takes more than writing your name or painting your ugly malformed line-drawing on something to really own it. Ownership involves working. Taggers like to think they are outside the system. They don’t want to work the 9 – 5. Of course, the people they target work much more than 9 – 5. Usually it is the vehicles of dirt poor cardboard and bottle recyclers they spray paint. People working hard to get out of the neighborhood the young white middle class taggers come blow up. Taggers pretend to be above the system, but they want to be President. They want power. They are evil Republicans in gutterpunk hoodies.

They have no message. It’s “Me! Me! Me!” It’s “I was here!” It’s “Look where I went!” It’s “Look what I did!” They are at a fourth grade level at best. Very few are actually making something interesting to look at. There are a few rare examples of great street artists who have inspired lazy name scrawlers across the country to spray noxious chemicals and toy-ass doodles on everything they can. Artists have a message, taggers just want to put their names on things that don’t belong to them so they won’t feel insignificant. Look at that piece of shit throw up some douche bag put on my truck and ask yourself, “Is that the next generation of art?” If it is, art sucks.

a little known part of Oakland – jingletown

After seeing George Bush lose the popular vote and still become president, and then watch him get re-elected after proving himself an idiot and a lackey, I lost faith in America and the process of democracy we call voting. With an electoral college, my vote truly did not count. It simply was a gentle breeze that could possibly sway an electoral voter.

When I read here and there about George Bush asking phone companies to turn over records and content of phone messages without a warrant, I kinda figured, “Well, they were fighting terrorism.” It was illegal for the government to ask, and illegal for the companies to comply. It went against the very Constitution of The United States which guarantees us protection against warrantless spying. Turns out the president’s office was involved in illegal monitoring before 9/11. It’s also coming to a vote TOMORROW in the Senate to grant the phone companies immunity from breaking the law and our trust as citizens. More importantly the Senate will vote whether or not we should continue to allow the Executive Office to continue to eavesdrop on all electronic communication without a warrant.

THAT IS INSANE! I didn’t think much how that would affect me when it was mentioned. What it means is one branch of the government has the right to spy without any checks or balances from the other branches of government. That’s consolidation of power, like creating a Fuhrer. As it was explained to me in this video, any member of congress who is embarrassed about any activity, illegal or completely legal, can now be quickly brought in line with the President’s wishes by blackmail. How easy would it be to find some embarrassing fact about you if I had complete access to all your credit card purchases, the content of all your emails, locations of all your phone conversations and a recording of what you said during them? For a politician who has so many different faces for different audiences, it would take about half an hour to find something to use against them. Remember, it is the House of Representatives and the Senate that make up our Congress, the body that is supposed to be a check on the power of our President.

So often I hear news about how the government works and I lose hope I didn’t realize I had. I feel very insignificant. There is really nothing we can do to stop this right? Well, there is one small hope. CALL YOUR SENATORS! YOU HAVE TWO OF THEM! TELL THEM NOT TO PASS THE “FISA BILL”! Go to eff.org and click on the top left area that says “Don’t Shred The Constitution”. There are fireworks. You can’t miss it. Then you type in your zip code and it tells you the phone number of your congresspersons. There is a script that you can read into the phone. It will take you approximately one minute to preserve some last shred of freedom. Of Democracy. This is truly important and you have today to do. They vote tomorrow. PLEASE MAKE ONE SMALL EFFORT TO BE A CITIZEN OF A DEMOCRACY!

I moved from New Hampshire where the politics go against what I believe in to a state that often (but not always) reflected my own philosophies. Both my senators (Feinstein and Boxer) are pledging to challenge this, but most Senators are going along with it. I’m going to call my senators now and thank them for having some soul. Call yours and tell them what you want. There’s no guarantee they’ll listen, but if this bill passes, so will any opportunity for you to have any influence at all with them, ever again.