Overheard in the Fry's Parking Lot (Plus: A New Devil!)

So, the beck and I went hiking this morning and stopped by Fry's on the way there to grab some bottles of agua. That whole encounter / activity was normal.

Decidedly un-normal - on our way out of the parking lot, at 8:05 am, a nice enough looking stocky white guy with a cellphone earpiece on turns vaguely in our direction (actually in the direction of the people behind us, we quickly figured out) and shouts:

"Remember the Alamo! Kill all the Mexicans!"

Aroo?!!!?!?!?!!

The people behind us were hispanic, maybe native american, but as far as we could tell hadn't done anything to him. He was also exiting a Fry's empty-handed, so maybe a Hispanic person had just beaten him to the last on-sale set of patio furniture, and he was pissed. Regardless, I now have a new entry in my top ten all-time list of Sunday morning racially charged bellows.

And just to round out a weird post, this was overheard in the car on the ride home from said hike (note - picture-post of hike will be posted later):

(On the radio, Black Sabbath's War Pigs is playing, featuring the legendary aggro vocals of one Ozzy Osbourne).

Nyet: Beck, I'll give you a hundred points if you can name this artist.
Beck: ACDC? (this is her stock answer).
Nyet: No.
Beck: Hmmmmm... I don't recognize the singer.
Nyet: Hint - there's a music festival named after him.
Beck: Is it Woodstock?

Ladies and gentlemen: Your Prince of Darkness!!!

Scripts!

So one of my jobby jobs at the Tutoring Industries Inc. is to get a handle on and hopefully better organize their SAT program. So I've been doing some extra work reading through the corporate manuals on how to train teachers, recruit clients, talk to parents and the like.

Everything - everything - is scripted.

Down to the letter. In an initial parent conference, for example, there is a highly specified order of talking points, what you are to say when, what their possible objections will be, what you should say in response, and on and on and on. Including verbatim snippets of how you should praise little Timmy.

It's salesmanship = science. And I can't help but read the thing as a boldly dishonest affair, some kind of attempt to turn the experience into a predetermined capsule of outcome (which is obviously, from the salesman's POV, the whole idea; you want that sale to be guaranteed). But regardless of how pure your intentions of improving a student's scores and their chances for college and the cushy capitalist life afterwards, the whole thing is inauthentic, your office is a stage, and you're a player. The parents/kid, of course, are kept as duped as possible so they don't realize your procrustean treatment of their "special, individual" situation. Natch, this is how a franchise operates; everything controlled to maintain a consistent corporate image. But how does anyone spit this stuff out without feeling like a robotic automaton?

It reminds me of med school - I can't even count the times that the sentiment of "be nice to your patients, because if you are nice they won't sue you." The scientific method applied to human interaction finds that decency is not decency but rather efficacy. The non-suits are not a side benefit; they were routinely called as a primary aim! Why be nice to your fellow humans? For your financial security, por supuesto! Doesn't this assume that we are deep down self-interested a-holes who require practical reasons for amiable behavior to transplant any kind of inborn "treat patients nice because they're people!" sentiments? Hmmmm, sitting in a classroomful of future physicians in that particular environment and contemplating their apparent characters, maybe the teachers had it right - teach to the bottom line.

So I'm in a bit of an authenticity whirlpool over this, and trying to give the company the full benefit of the doubt. And I start thinking about scripts, remembering their general application in anthropological type environments. I use pre-planned statements all the time; what is my specific objection here? When I go into a restaurant, I'd better invoke the "get me some pancakes" script, or I'm exiting stackless. A picture to break philo-rant monotony:

(That was, btw, a thinly veiled attempt at interrupting the "Nyet rant script" with something hilariously impromptu. Unless, of course, this script contains the particular stage direction, "something impromptu now.")

So back on topic: a huge range of our daily discourse is at best seemingly original, at worst hopelessly derivative. Even if intentionally try to create a sentence that's never been said before - "The pink giraffe has an awfully tough time determining the proper focus length for the lens of his monocle" - even this is constrained by untold numbers of rules and reasons for word and idea placement. For example, almost all of my original sentences contain the word "pink." And an animal.

So I think, perhaps, that the distaste I have for this behavior is not in the scriptedness in and of itself, as that is something that to a degree permeates all of our existence (not to mention our favorite sit coms). I think the problem is the dishonesty of it - this idea that I'm conversing with you human to human, but really I've got this whole model device that I'm going to try to manipulate the frame of conversation with. Now, anyone entering a sales interaction has to expect this to a degree - in social contract type speech, they know they're entering a sales exchange - but I would put forth that your most distasteful sales experience result from that samesaid dishonesty and the extent to which the salesperson is painting you into a role in a script. I'm thinking unctuous car salesman types here.

All of this gets back to one of my primo favorite themes, that of authenticity. And its possible impossibility - the dire question that seems to recur in my case is "authentic to what?" An arbitrary upbringing, a culturally defined set of values and thoughts? A destiny? I don't know; that whole game has vanished across the horizon in the light of the multitude of world outlooks, a lot of which are equally viable compared to any one you happen to be enacting at this particular moment.

Be yourself. Think for Yourself. Whatever; independence is a mythical ideal. But there are spectra, and this whole cooking recipe for taking people's cash, regardless of how good the intentions are, rings ont eh bad side for me. Business in general, I suppose, seems to be a victimful crime. I can't wrap my head around this well. This is why I fail. But when I look at a script with explicit instructions down to the word and tone of voice for what I say, I think:

Printer 17, Nyet 1

I just spent some wee hours wrestling with a printer/scanner that I have finally conquered. And now to bed. But YOU are the beneficiary of the fru-its of my labor - the scanner is connected, so I dug through a dress drawer of photos and came up with this, the rarest of rare sightings, the Speckle-bellied Jullietta, circa 1997 or so at what I believe was a post-Women's Football Championship Party:

It's a Nyetverse classic!!!

(Oh, and if you're interested, tonight's Ultimate game won, 15-4. Sense of accomplishment = nil).

(Oh, and something that I just can't let go - you may have seen the OSU coach's wacky post-game "speech" on ESPN. I'm not going to link to it; just too dumb. The newspaper article he was so upset about? That is worth linking, because it is just too dumb. If you have a moment, read that article and answer the simple question, "is this good writing?" Whether sports columnists should be permitted to write articles that amount to calling out "your mom" to college players is up for debate, kinda - it's clearly low level and mean, but being mean seems to be a journalistic trend these days. But writing that poorly is not up for debate - it's a newspaper article, not a middle school cafeteria conversation. Please leave your "word is" and other mal-constructions at home. Barf).

Post for the Sake of Bump

Or, to get a scantily clad (and deviously unlicensed) nurse off the top of my blog.

I just took a break from intense reading to take the dogs for a walk and post here. I'll be back on American Pastoral in a sec; it really is great, so far especially in the case of narrative structure / framing. A very slick trick he (Roth) pulls off in the first part; I'll let you read it fo' yo'self.

I'm also pondering today's Ultimate game and trying to combat my usual MO, which is to get really hyped up about any athletic contest, no matter how goofy-leagued it may be, and get all wrapped up into it only to suffer the inevitable letdown of Ultimate's less life-affirming qualities. This is probably just symptom A1A of a general tendency to overthink things and otherwise put more import into the everyday than warranted; I am still the same person who has both truly agonized over the number of minutes it was taking me to get home from work in Austin and who once stood in the street outside of a Boston pizza shop debating the merits of the joy a slice of pizza would bring me vis a vis the calories it would imbue my belly with. I am a little stupid in these matters. Okay, a lot.

But I like to instill a lot of effort / thought / import into these games, to the point where I drive down there early, almost unfailingly well before anyone else shows up. To warm up, yes, but more importantly to breathe in the empty field, to view it alone before it becomes trampled upon by a hundred goofballs in cleats. What can I say; I enjoy the solitude, and the silly pre-game banter, and the build-up of anticipation that turns an otherwise forgettable Tuesday night league game into some kind of personal monumental event.

Unfortunately, the games must inevitably start, and as started, must end. (I actually get a tinge of this same sadness when DVD players read 47:03, and the episode, be it Buffy and/or Bullock et al, is coming to a close). And given that these contests are usually NOT the stuff of myth - usually more the war of attrition of unqualified contenders - there's a big fat letdown at the end, a steady sense of "I got all riled up - for that?" You would think I could digest this repeated experience and, as a result, not get into the stupid on-field arguments I have a penchant for. You might also think that the head-banging experience - and I speak of Frank's style of headbanging , not, for example, my own seventh grade one (Pantera rules) - would cause me to drop the ritual altogether, just show up to play and have fun like the rest. Or you might think, what with the holy experience of two destroyed knees and the corresponding plunge in athletic ability, I might have dropped this activity along with my youth some time ago. Why invest so much in something doomed to disappoint, on every level?

It becomes a stupid and generic question, because its model could be brought upon anything in moments of existential despair: why code, why build, why write or do much of anything if the falling short of expectations is to be the only reward noticed. But it gets back to why Ultimate in particular, why anyone's particulars?

I worry a lot, to a stupid degree, that Ultimate serves as this entrenched self-validating mechanism for me. I am, objectively, experienced; I am still reasonably athletic enough to utilize my experience in a way to better opponents. Until, of course, I run into somebody equally experienced and more athletic, in which case it's a crap shoot. I have to fully admit that I revel more in those moments of masturbatory domination over lessers than any kind of relishing the challenge. By every sports cliche, by every moral standard of "the good" in sports, I should be more fixated on meeting my equals and appreciating their bringing out the best in me (and vice versa), but if I'm to be honest, I really just like doing cool stuff with the disc and catching goals over people.

I'm a chump, an insecure, ostentatious dork; I'm the guy who plays the sports video games on the low setting to repeatedly bash-in a stupid computer opponent, all for the glory of the lever-push win-thrill. Wanting respect, craving only that, and continually trying to hide these effects with a happy-g-lucky (when not aggro-competitive) demeanor with teammates. I, in short, play at sport for all the wrong reasons, finding losing unbearable but seeking out the easy-win instead of the challenge.

This is a whole lot of self-criticism and value-laden analysis for the silly act of playing Ultimate in a Tuesday night league; don't allow me to pretend that I'm the only one with this motivation set, or that others out there are not more cowardly than me. If anything, though, this is an honest account, and a good old-fashioned purgatory aim informs this post. I am, I think, too run down and old and too surgeried to pursue the nobler aims of self betterment and victory in competition. I am left with the trickles of past accomplishment and the current days of fun. I suppose in essence I aim to free my sports-playing of the external, judgmental narrative, and wish that I could just do it for "love of the game," whatever inherent joy I feel within it (as though that itself were not an external narrative as well). I wish that I could just do something for the happiness of it - even if that happiness is rather holistically selfishly derived. I am probably exercising my childhood MO, tha tof being my own worst enemy, and truth be told therer are other less centralized aspects of the game that I do if not enjoy: teaching a newbie to throw, complimenting a teammates effort. So, all is not evil in the Ultimate Nyetverse. Still, hopefully this public pondering will get me in a less self-centered mindset for tonight's game. Maybe not. Regardless, it's 2:30, so I'd better head down for my pre-pre-pre game warmup. Not really.

Skates & Snakes (& Skanky Shakes) (Sub-T Homesick Aches) Pt. 2

We slept in on Sunday (by "we" I mean Beck) until 10 and barely roused ourselves enough to head down to DC's for pre-Dbacks game lunch. Where to go, where to go? Dan innocently suggested The Heart Attack Grill, and I, thinking we were in for merely some scrumptious burgers, eagerly agreed. Little did I know that... well, the whole pace is a big farce on the health food craze, and they furthermore play up the hospital angle. So the owner of the joint is dressed up like a doctor, the waitresses are skanked out nurses, and they offer burgers called the single through quadruple bypass, PBR beer, no diet sodas and, if you want, you can buy cigarettes with your meal. If you manage to finish a quadruple bypass, they will wheel you out to your car in a wheelchair. Just like a hospital! Only funnier and sluttier. Just for visual reference, our waitress was Sami, and she was dutifully playing the role of "fantasy nurse:"

Beck made several comments about Miss Sami's stunningly good service, always being out in front of her customers' expectations, and her well-placed stethoscope that day (missing from the picture, but you probably guessed that she had it aseptically stored in her pocket). Dan and I dutifully averted our eyes, being the good protestant boys that we are. The whole thing was a little too surreal for a post-Karaoke Sunday morning, and only got slightly stranger when a 65 year old woman showed up to dine alone. Moxie! Between this and the Ice Pack or whatever the hell the Coyotes Dance team is called from the previous night, I had had enough pseudo-sexy ridiculousness for two days. On to the D-Backs game, where nary a dolled up hussy is employed trying to trade t-shirts for credit card signups. Oh, wait. Anyhoo, we finished our burgers and chips (which were, unsurprisingly, AWESOME), Christina vowed to dedicate her life to protesting the parodying of nurses, sexy or otherwise, and we headed down to the DBacks game. Xtina was primed, rattler in hand:

So she could either cheer on the DBacks or scare the crap out of people in dark desert alleys. Xtina I agreed, too, that the DBacks mascot - some kind of ridiculous aged mountain lion-type thing - would be much better if it were a giant snake that would give kids perma-nightmares. We were ranting on about such thing sbecause despite the fact that it was the last home game of the regular season, despite the fact that the DBacks are in1st and in the middle of a tight pennant race, the place was as dead as can be. The place was packed (40K or so):

But the DBacks got trounced, and you could pretty much hear the songs coming out of the iPods of the bored teenagers sitting next to you. It was 5-1 at one point and Dan was telling Xtina that we should give up, and she asked why, can't the DBacks come back? And we told her no, the Dbacks were really not that good at "playing the baseball." Seriously - this team is wacky - in first place despite being far outscored on the season. They are fantastic at 3-1 games, but Dan is absolutely right, they're going to be hard-pressed to ever come back from more than 2 down. Which makes the possible upcoming showdown with the Cubs at

all the more exciting. So the game was a bit of a letdown, though we did get to hear about a whole bunch of prizes being given away and had the privilege of paying significant amounts of money to be bombarded with mankind's entire creative gamut of flashing advertisements. Man, I suddenly have this urge to gamble... anyways, fun time as always with the DC, and we wrapped up the weekend with some more Deadwood and laundry. Wahoo! Always!

One dig to end the post:

These people are wicked unoriginal.

Skates & Snakes (& Skanky Shakes) (Sub-T Homesick Aches)

Good weekend here in the land where purple and orange is a natural skyscape, and not just an NBA fashion statement. Beck and I (and the DC Train) made it an all sports affair, with smatterings of Deadwood, karaoke and a well-placed stethoscope.

Friday was the usual biz - Tutorbin5000 was closed, so I spent the day going for a quick 5 mile run and finishing Rabbit, Run, a nice little thoroughly depressing anti-heroic account of America in the 1950s. And dashed dreams, has-been-ness, and the death of communication. Pretty heady, pretty good - real review pending - and I've since marched on into American Pastoral by Philip Roth, another cynical take on the American Dream involving a star high school athlete. THEME! And it's impressive, only 50 pages in. Good times.

Beck got home in the evening, and we watched the 9th and 10th episodes of season 2 of Deadwood - hmmmmmmmrumblenumblesumblbutt. Definitely still entertaining, but the constant politicking over the annexation of the camp is reminiscent of all of the politico-talk in eps 1-3 of the Star Wars series: pretty dry, and distracting from the more thrilling cursing and murdering to be done. Al remains a great character, even if his kidney stones deprive him of a couple episodes of dialog. Bullock, though, seems painted into a corner w/r/t his wife / Miss Garret issues. In other words, the second season is a bit of a slide - now that the shimmer of the shocking dialog and general histori-stylized dynamic has worn off, our focus has turned more toward the plot, and the season gets so wrapped up in the statehood narrative that some other aspects feel rendered peripheral. All that said, still a good watch, and it's always fun to experience the ridiculous pomp of formal 1870s social interaction against the backdrop of constant whiskey and whorehouses. (Speaking of whiskey - shudder vehemently at the prospect of an Al Swearengen drinking game. Either his drinks are watered down, or that guy has a Livertron 2000 installed).

Saturday, beck and I both worked - my center director showed up late due to a mysterious closing of the 101, so I spent the first 30 minutes of the working day discussing Rob Zombie's Halloween with a 13 year old.

Him: Rob Zombie's Halloween is the best movie ever!
Me: Really? I heard it was just gory and disgusting and debase.
Him: Naw, it's the best!
Me: Why is it the best? What makes it so good?
Him: It's awesome!
Me: Yeah, but what's awesome about it?
Him: It's the best movie ever!

I'm fairly sure that's an iPMM-approved instance of begging the question. Spent the rest of the working day increasing kids' vocabularies beyond "awesome" and "the best" and even spent a little time on "how to construct an argument." One day at a time, ya know. I got home just in time to see the Brewers lose to ATL in extra innings - wahoo! Cubs are up 3 as of today (Tuesday), so we are set for the every-five-years-or-so vomit-inducement that is the Cubs in the playoffs (see 1998, 2003).

Saturday night we drove across town to watch an AWESOME preseason hockey game b/w the Coyotes and the Dallas Stars (who were kind enough to not play Mike Modano - thanks, dudes). One of The Senior Partners in Beck's vet group had sweet tickets - four rows behind the penalty box - that he sold to us at discount, and it was fantastic to watch the psychotic speed of the NHL from up close. It's almost too fast - the rink is much smaller than it looks on television, and things generally look much more chaotic when viewed from the side than when given that nice bird's eye angle. There were a ton of goals - the Coyotes won 6-5 - a ridiculous number of penalties, and the highlight of highlights, an A+ hockey fight that occurred about 10 feet from our faces. The Beck mightily approved of the silly violence. But really, it was a good preseason game with plenty of fast-paced action - so much that we forgot to look across the ice at the coach's bench to spot a glimpse of the Great One. Oops.

But why talk about the game when you can cite the pageantry of idiocy SURROUNDING the game? Dan made the following comment about Sunday's DBacks game, but it applies easily here: "I'd be more entertained if they weren't trying so hard to entertain me." Every stoppage in play required two bozo DJ-types to address the crowd over the jumbotron, giving away prizes and playing idiotic games and making the white folks dance. The Coyotes also, thank something, have a dance team, whose members saunter down the aisle and dance asynchronously to miscellaneous beats after coyote goals. It's bizarre - 25 different interpretations of "do a cheer." And fear not, none of the dancers were bleached blond or otherwise took up accoutrements to look like strippers on an off night. (Though honestly, no high quality stripper would pass up a Saturday night's tips to perform at a hockey game, so we can be assured that these were ladies authentically living their dreams). The dance team also performs during the second intermission, though not on skates - weak. The remainder of the time of the game is spent chasing free t-shirts and then taking off said t-shirts and gyrating for a coveted appearance on the aforementioned jumbotron. And the guy in front of us taunted the players in the penalty box with the full spectrum of his wit, ranging from "you suck" to "you stink." In short, it was remarkably like a minor league hockey game, only the players were better. Sigh.

Oh, and it also turns out that the stadium is cold - that's why they call it "ice" hockey - and Beck chose to improve this condition by eating ice cream dots. Unflappable!

Having started our evening watching the height of athleticism in the lowest of athleticism-watching-brow settings, we continued on to a miscellaneous Glendale Mexican Restaurant Bar to meet up with some of the techs from beck's office for some solid Karaoke-ing. Or weird karaoke-ing - no stage, just a pair of mics that got passed table to table. Or stayed at the same table, as it were, since ours was pretty much the only occupied one in the run down joint. Some of Beck's colleagues can SANG, some cannot, and I broke up the country pop marathon with a painfully bad rendition of Bobby Z's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." The backing music was odd - the rhythm was off, it was seriously chincy in the guitars department, and on top of that the screen was flashing up incorrect lyrics. I think my brain was infected by all the drawls, so I ended up twangifying my Dylan impersonation. Tragic. We deserted the deserted desert scene to head home to our happy dogs, and fell asleep after a good Saturday.

(Cont'd).

Usut Tuntas!!!!

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