rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

can Mahmoud get a hell yeah?

yes.
yes he can.

when I read the Fox News replies I blacked out.
I blacked out, and when I came to, I was down at this playground on Octotillo boulevard. that’s like, two miles from here.
I was lying on the blacktop. my head hurt, and there was a crowd standing over me. I started to get up, but I realized I was tangled in a basketball net, and a metal rim was seared into my hand. the metal backboard loomed over me, twisted into an unintellgible shape.
one of the many onlookers, stood there, mouth agape. “man, you just tomahawk jammed behind your back, and then ripped the hoop down with your free hand! holy fuck!”
that’s right. I read some reader-reply comments from dipshit Fox News constituents, and I blacked out, went into a superhuman sprint, somehow acquired a basketball, and dunked, hard, on some poor busters.
what a glorious afternoon.

thanks, Wonkette.

fuck YES

It’s 2:45 in the morning. I’m at work.
my flight for DC leaves San Diego at 1 pm. which means, I have to leave here by 10 am. and the paper (just like any other asshole corporation) won’t let you take a half day off. if I leave after four hours, they count that as a full vacation day.
so fuck them. I’m picking up the hours on the early end.
I’m sitting at the paper right now. I just built the week’s Health section, which is actually just a two-page spread the local hospitals pay for. their HR departments write up these obnoxious, masturbatory briefs about honoring employees for hard work, and others covering tips on “eating healthy and getting enough sleep.” but by all means, please come in and spend a couple thousand dollars on healthcare if you ever get sick. remember how nice we looked in the paper.
seriously. they write up stories, which aren’t actually stories at all, and then it’s my job to lay it out on a page to make it look like it’s legit news. which makes me feel whorish. if I wanted to work in advertising, I’d have worked in advertising.
that aside. I’m also listening to “Brothers in Arms,” which is making this whole sitting-alone-in-an-empty-newsroom-in-the-early-morning thing all the more eerie.
oh well. in 15 hours, I’ll be on the other side of the continent. imagine that. one of my favorite holidays is here. mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, man.

and, of course: happy Thanksgiving.

I’m signing up for car insurance as I type.
this shit sucks.
but they’re giving me a good rate, so there.

I just talked to mom and Mar.
Mar is going to Budapest next semester. that’s what you get if you study. you go to Budapest. Mar rules.
whenever mom calls out here, and that’s a lot, I tend to unleash some torrent of complaints about my current standing. kind of like I do here, only with more whining (which is impressive). she tells me if I really want to get out of here, I need to plan; hence the last post. so far, I’ve been dragging ass. all I’ve got as of yesterday is maybe another song or two to add to the list, and that’s not much progress at all.
mom is telling me I should go out and visit Mar in Budapest at the end of her term in the summer. line up another job and quit this one around then, go fuck about in Hungary for a week or two with my sister as my tourguide, and then come back.
I felt a little bit of elation, a little bit of giddiness. how rad would that be? not only would I get a concrete date in my mind as to when I’m going to leave here (school was easier; you graduate at such-and-such time, so you knew what to look forward to) but I’d also get to see some of Europe.
so mom put Mar back on, and I told her what mom had just suggested to me, and she said something to the effect of “well, she’s worried about you.”
that’s the long and short of it. she didn’t say that exactly, and I can’t remember what exactly she said, but that’s the gist.
and I felt just a twang of guilt, and I told her to tell mom I’m fine. I complain a lot, but it’s not that bad. I’m not going to jump off a bridge or anything.
and Mar said, “well, I can tell her that, dude, but you know how she is. and the way you talk out there…” etc.

and that’s when the guilt bus hit me.
I spend an awful lot of time feeling sorry for myself. wishing someone would make it all better, would write this book for me. I wish this, I wish that, I bitch about being out here, I complain about how I don’t like my job, I miss people, I miss my friends, I miss Josh’s horrible songwriting skills, I miss my brother and sister, I miss Alisha, I miss changes in the god damned seasons, and I want someone to map it all out for me so that it’ll be like it once was. truth is, though, it’s never going back to that. Bloomington and the unique assortment of people it brought around me are gone. I’ll never get that same combination again. and even when I had it, I bitched about it most of the time. but… if it’s those things I want, those people I want to be near, then I need to make that change myself. until then, I’m in southeastern fucking California (as a local once put it, “the armpit of the state”). no one keeps me here but me.

I know this, right now. in a week, I’ll be back to posturing, waxing poetic, making vague allusions to better times and framing imaginative ways of saying that I still think about a girl who never really felt the same way that I feel about her.
but for this one moment – 6:39 pm, pacific time, Saturday the 18th – I knew that no one keeps me here but me. and I’m still here. so I’m obviously staying for something.

I saw Fu Manchu last night in Orange County. met up with Pat. some of his friends.
fuck, did I need that.
they’re very good live, and I didn’t actually expect that. some bands really fall off in front of a crowd, ala Smashing Pumpkins. but no, not the Fu.
a band called Totimoshi opened for them, and they were pretty rad too.

I’m on my lunch break, but because I got here so late today, I’m just sitting here for a half an hour and screwing around. can’t afford to go anywhere for food if I want to get out of here by 12:30. I won’t.
it was announced the other day that one of the copy editors will be leaving in March. she’s by far the most valuable of the three of us; I’m too much of a, uh, greenhorn, and the other guy (whom I like; Rudy, who listens to Dio) is a career fuckup. he’s in his fifties, and he’s doing the same shit I’m doing, which says something.
I don’t know what that means, but that does mean that I’m leaving here by midsummer sohelpmejesuschrist. I may have to announce it early (fuck, I hope not four months early) but I’m leaving. so I guess I should be looking for places to go, things to do right now. hey, at least it gives me something to look forward to.

right now, I’ve got no idea where start besides the obvious places. but beyond that, the only thing I’ve begun to flesh out is the tracklist I’ll blare when I leave this shithole burg:

you only live once – the Strokes
what’s the frequency, Kenneth? – REM
street fighting man – Stones
solid gold – Eagles of Death Metal
sledgehammer – Peter Gabriel
“fuck you” – something I’ll be chanting as I dump garbage from the driver’s side door when I pull on the freeway on the way out of town

honestly, these are all just albums I have in the truck at the moment. I tend to daydream.

I think if the past two months have taught me anything, it’s that I’m as fleeting and emotionally unstable as a teenage girl: I don’t know what I want or how to get it. I do know, however, that I’m not necessarily excited about doing this, what I’m doing now. look, this is a job I can handle, but it was never my dream to integrate myself into some small town on the ass-end of a continent, and that’s the most I can look forward to in the Imperial Valley. so even though I just got here, I’m ready to either get bigger, or try something else.

but let’s be honest: I bet most of you who read this are wondering how many more posts I can fill just complaining about this fucking place.

well, it’s a lot. I can fill up a lot.

alright, bullfight.
the mystery roommate wrote a story about it. apparently, we were supposed to meet up with this dude Carlos. at the event. Carlos is a reporter for Adelante – the spanish version of the Imperial Valley Press – and was to take pictures with a slick looking camera with a big lens, but he didn’t materialize. so we rolled alone.
you get to the border. you go through the border. you find a cab driver. you haggle with him. he takes you to basically anywhere in the city for $4. you pay him when you arrive, you get out. you pay about $7.50 for a ticket. $5 for a 24 oz. beer. and another $4 to get back to the crossing.
so that’s what, $20, $21 for the whole afternoon?

the whole place wasn’t half full. I would imagine the ring holds about four or five thousand people, and half of it was empty. I get the feeling that bullfighting is like hockey in the States: a Mexican niche sport. it is definitely very hispanic, very old world. I mean, fuck, in a dog or cock fight, there’s at least half a chance that nothing will die. not so here. that bull is fucked from the start.

to be honest, it’s not really a fight. I mean, there’s always the possibility that the matador or one of his multiple assistants could get seriously hurt, but a bullfight isn’t an actual contest of wills between the bull and the matador. this is certain from the beginning: the bull will die. where the actual sport of it comes from is how artfully or technically the matador is able to kill it.
I didn’t realize this until the very end. I mean, I assumed I wasn’t going to see anyone killed on sunday by a pissed off, rampaging animal, but I guess I thought of it more as some cultural happening. but that’s not the case; the matadors (there were three of them) were actually competing. someone was scoring them. someone was keeping track of what was going on, not just appreciating or taking in the spectacle of it all.
score, from what I’ve been told, goes something like this:
-confirmation (yeah, you killed it. the bull’s dead)
-ovation (people clap for you)
-one ear
-two ears
-two ears and a tail.
they cut those off and give them to the matador if he kicks ass. this is also accompanied by bouquets of flowers, wavings of handkerchiefs, cheering, etc.whoever gets the highest scores through two bulls wins. so, that’s six bulls. they kind of lose their majesty after the first or second one.

a lot goes into a bullfight before the matador actually comes out and does anything. most of the time is spent tiring the bull out, bleeding it a little bit, so it’s feasible that a matador get in the ring with it.I guess you could call that respect. I’m not sure.then, the show begins. getting the animal to charge at a red cape. hearing the crowd yell “ole!” listening to the 8-yr-old behind you clamor for the kill: “oh, yeah, here comes the sword!!!”

the bit Pierce Brosnan says in “the Matador” about how the bulls die an honorable death, I’m not sure if I buy that. I mean, it quickly became apparent to me that it was more about the matador than about the bull. the bull is a big, angry, hulking beast that can move pretty fucking fast when it wants to. for the most part, they’re all like this. people are much more interested in the matador’s courage than the bull’s strength and tenacity.

none of this is to say that it wasn’t incredibly interesting to watch, and that I wouldn’t go back. I mean, fuck. how many of you have eaten a fast-food hamburger in the last month? this point is too easy to make, but at least the meat in the bullfight (they butcher all of the slain bulls for market) gets a chance to fuck something up on its way out. that’s a chance many don’t ever get.

what else is news, pray tell:
it’s funny to read back over this thing in watch my many mood changes. to be honest, I’m not much smarter than I was two years ago when I started typing on this fucking thing, but nonetheless, it is fun to sit and watch the rollercoaster.
like, for instance: right now, I can’t wait to get out of here. can’t wait. seriously, can’t wait. but I can look back, only a day or two, and realize that I’m in a better state of mind about it than I was over the weekend.
one year from today, I will not be working at this newspaper. I won’t be living in this town. I say this with all the certainty I could possibly have (that means this is far from concrete), but fuck, it’s only a couple of months. I’ve got years and years and years to spend elsewhere. at the least, six or seven months isn’t going to kill me, it’s just going to improve my resume. so as much as I dislike this job sometimes, dislike this town, I will get over this. I’ll move forward, and I’ll be out of here some day. and some day is soon.
right?

until then, I’ve got a temporary respite over Thanksgiving. Spencer, be in town. come on, man.

Mexicali is an interesting place.
I took a bunch of these, and will post more later.

I’m on my lunch break.
I knew this would happen. seriously, I knew it. I knew it.
I didn’t know it.
I don’t know what I was exactly thinking. but this job sucks. I’m at about 80% independence level when it comes to the work, and I’m ready to move on. I can’t move on, not feasibly, for a couple of months at least. but I’m ready to go.
tomorrow, I’m going to a bullfight. that’s going to be boss – can’t see one of those in the States, so this weekend isn’t going to be a wash. I’m really looking forward to it. maybe it’s just cause I’m burned out and miss my friends and family, but I feel like I’m on some sort of emotional roller coaster.
maybe I’m menstruating.

at least I can still laugh at Rick Santorum’s weeping children.

I’m not missing anything important at home. and if I was there, it’s not like I would be doing anything greater with my time anyhow. but this out here: job with meager pay, small, dusty town? life’s too short for this. so I’m not going to kid myself for any longer than I have to.

I’d rather be around people I love. fuck this exile.

now let’s see how different I feel tomorrow.