Not to say I made any money today, but I was busy. Saw a showdown between Ford and Chevy, loaded the truck with dumpster finds, helped my friends style a photoshoot, moved an electric organ up a long flight of stairs and jeezus, can I lay down and make love to my girlfriend now?
Have you been hanging around non-whites lately? They love to call you racist, if they are anything like the non-whites I know. Maybe it’s because you say racist things. Or maybe it’s because they know it freaks you out.
Anyone can be racist, but calling a white person racist means something altogether different than calling a Vietnamese person racist. How? I’m not exactly sure. Any white people out there know what I’m saying? Let me take a stab at this. People call me racist for making a joke, which isn’t racist, but might involve someone of a race other than mine. They do it to be funny, because they know a non racist white person will be very sensitive to the charge. We get that deer-in-the-headlights look and start tripping over ourselves trying to apologize. That cracks other ethnicities up.
It has also become a term synonymous with “dumb-ass” or even “shit-head”, as in “That racist threw out my lunch.” Not because throwing out your lunch was racially motivated, just because it was ignorant to not realize you weren’t done with strange bone thing you were eating. (Ha!)
But they – (those who aren’t white, like, really white. Like the cliffs of Dover.) – they will use it abusively any chance they get. Maybe you ask a guy from India if he knows anything about Indian food. You get labeled racist. I can’t ask a dumb question about a culture I don’t know about without it becoming racist.
Excuse me? Do you know what racist means? Do you know what you are implying? Racist is someone who thinks their race is superior. In this case it calls up thoughts of Germans exterminating Jews, because that’s what white racists are racistly accused of. I’m confused too. I think I mean, maybe White supremists aren’t out to exterminate everyone but Aryans. Maybe they just think they are better. Like some people think Fords are better than Chevys. No one is getting killed over that are they? So give a White Supremacist the benefit of the doubt next time. He might not be a Nazi. You’re jumping to conclusions.
Then again, racism isn’t always about thinking your race is superior. It’s also those of us who make sweeping generalizations about other races. Like, “White people are all…salad eaters.” Or “white men can’t jump.” That kind of stuff. Maybe it’s your uncle who says, “Don’t let Italians work on your car.”
That might be the difference I was looking for. When an African American man on the bus calls me a racist, I know he isn’t talking about my advice not to trust Italian mechanics. He is talking about me being the virulent vicious kind of racist. He’s talking about white racists. The really evil racists.
I guess that’s all I was trying to pin down. Why, to me, calling a white person racist seems more powerful than using the same word on a non-white. I guess it’s because the dumb shit white people pulled in the past. The sins of a generation are passed down. If not biblically or genetically, certainly in the epithets chucked at the children.
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would you expect anything less at the bead store?
There’s a bead shop down in the scuzzy part of town where rent is cheap and landlords are absent. Two floors of beads and sequins. It was such a strange place – horror movie posters on the wall alongside bead displays, and four vintage pinball machines in the center of one room. The woman behind the counter gave me four quarters to play for free. It was like a psychedelic Mardi gras float with Ike and Tina battle of the banding Navajo drummers. There were a lot of beads.
Future Spa? That was the vehicle for a pinball machine? In the future we will do curls with bands of electricity? Jog with giant clocks on our wrists? How long must I wait?
I let the guy who sells tires in the newspaper play dress up. I gave him a little something from the grocery store circular to help him cope.
The following is a response to medical marijuana brownies
Swaan: I thought they were fucking insane. It felt like something was inside trying to push itself out. I was scared a lot.
Dave: It felt much further away than how short it was.
Ravi: They should be illegal. They were so potent. Come on… there was no medical benefit to what happened yesterday.
Me: Don’t you think there’s social value? A spiritual value?
Ravi: I only feel the spiritual value when I come off it and I’m thankful I’m still alive.
Kathleen: They’re probably for people who are unemployed because i don’t think you could do any work. They were really the delicious biggest gooiest dessert ever so it was really hard not to eat a lot. When it hit it hit really hard, but in a good way. I wasn’t scared, I could walk around…laughing my head off, it slowed time down. We kept walking away from a gate but it never got farther away.
Mattie: They should have tested them on laboratory animals before they sold them to us.
photo posted from my iPhone
Went to Mugu state park today, saw crazy limbed sycamore trees shading a twisting river and talked with three guys living in a mid ’70′s Winnebago boiling chicken in a pot and heating beans in a can over the state park campfire.
What ten years ago would have been two ships passing in the night now needs no end. I have their myspace address. Ashes to Light. They’ve been traveling for six months in a rickety old camper. They’d spent six weeks at an animal shelter. Not as animals, but helping out abandoned pets from both Katrina and Ike. These were some decent dudes. Maybe they’ll pull through SF and we’ll meet again. Who knows?
photo posted from my iPhone
That’s a bag of medical marijuana brownies and I’m in LA. It feels good.
I wish I could play dress up more. Its the only reason I joined a band. A lot of guys think the stage is for showcasing musical talent. Its not. You’ll spend your life standing beside a bookshelf in a coffee shop Open Mic nite if you don’t figure that out.
When you get on a stage you’ve entered the realm of fantasy. An elaborate display is expected. Not just of clothes and music either. You’ll need some rock moves, as Pink brought to our attention. An online presence is crucial if you’re gonna tour. There’s a lot of details I could go into. But let’s get back to dress up.
The important thing to remember is, it’s a “show” People are “looking”. That’s what “show” means. Watching someone play music in a club is boring because what’s to see? You’re strumming and picking is not so fascinating it brought these people out to the tune of $8 to $15 bucks each. They came to look at you. “Look”. Not “listen”. At your hair, your face, the hair on your face, your shoes, your shirt, your socks when you lean down to adjust the knobs on your amp. You’re being devoured by the audience, but not with their ears. It’s about eyes. Dress up.
When you’re unloading your gear from the Aerostar onto the sidewalk in front of the venue, people better not drive by and think you are a roadie. They better drive by and think, “that dude’s a musician”. You better have a hat and some scarves around the hat and some leather on somewhere, even if it is your socks, in which case suede is okay.
People become revolutionary for what they wear. That’s amazing to me. Because most of us, by what we wear, put ourselves in a box. We join the machine. We say, “I’m a truck driver” when we wear a plaid shirt and a vest and jeans and trucker hat. We say, “I’m a business man” when we tie our tie in a four in hand and pull out a Blackberry. We join the army of the everyday. That’s the machine.
It’s the person who goes onto the stage and has something on that belongs to no regiment who is the revolutionary. “What outfit is he from,” the captain of the vice squad asks as they roll past the seedy bar with numerous noise complaints against it as you carry your bass drum inside, a devil’s tail sewn into the backside of your Dickens era top coat. When he says outfit, he reveals how the synonymous our clothing becomes with our politics. “He’s a rocker,” the Captain’s partner says dismissively. But no one knows until that rocker goes on stage how powerful he may be. Only those who make it to a stage have the chance to overthrow something. Don’t take it lightly. Dress up.
Over here in my band the Flagpoles, I’m the worst musician of the bunch. So I’m having a hard time having my fashion concerns heard. It is true, we should at least be able to get through the songs without stopping before we have the debate about matching outfits or not. I want loose cuffs because I’m also pushing for synchronized kicks. Maybe we’ll wear dresses. For the revolution.
Sean came by Friday night and helped me change the brake pads on the big white truck. We had Doug, Jenny and Nick out there lifting on the front end while Sean and I got the wheels off. That worked fine so we went inside and drew some pictures. Sean drew the lock. Nick drew the rainbow below.
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