Graffiti

There ain't no tellin how long i've been driving around with graffiti hand-written into the layer of winter dirt of my automobile.

The front bumper says "FUCK USA".

Poignant!

The driver's side says the same thing, while the passenger's side says "USA SUCKS!", which is the one i prefer for driving around in public because it is more child-ready.

And on the top of my hood it says "USA IS THE ENEMY".

True dat. But watch your tone.

I have deduced that the other cars that i park near are not having this problem, because there is a difference, which i guess is being considered important, and the difference is that the other cars have Ontario license plates, and my car is having one Florida license plate. So i am allowed to blame Florida, again, for more miserable things happening to me.

Apparently, the author was feeling that my car or its driver has some share of responsibility for The Foreign Policy of the United States of America. It is true that i could have done more to avert our bombs and invasions. But i have been so busy being capitalistic, collecting money, paying off school debts, not recycling, not giving money to panhandlers, and also sleeping. I did help to get Jim Webb into the Senate, though. Which may have been quasi-illegal. Which should make me a true hero of the American left, as well as hero of Western-world whitebread who are doomed to carry the burden of the Islamic plight around with them, always; but it has not.

After i noticed the graffitis, i decided to not rub them off, because then i would get dirty. I also figured that i could parade my vehicle of persecution around the lands of Canada, very similar to Jesus Christ walking to the drugstore while carrying his heavy and bloody cross, and Canada's citizens would sympathize, and throw down their ancestral roots and join my cause, which will have something to do with chopping down the CN tower with a very large axe, and then celebrating with chocolate-vanilla swirl custard ice cream cones, which are fucking delicious.

Then i was driving past small children whose eyes were popping at all the slander, especially considering that all children around the world are born with the instinct to love and appreciate the USA. Their entire psyches were crashing down as i drove by. I had to wash my car.

Goddamn, i have to wash my car. What a pain.

Author, why not write your thoughts on a nearby building? Why not write them to your completely ineffectual MP? Why not write them to my Congressman, who i don't know who it is?

Better yet, why not wait patiently beside my car, until i return from whatever it was that i was doing, and opine on my government's actions over the past five years or five decades, and then i could counterpoint with my usual speech, which i have never uttered, about how i don't know any country, ever, that could be considered a beacon of justice and righteousness, and that all of our homelands and cultures will be remembered as small-minded shit stains, and some shit stains are just smaller than others. And i can also opine how there are no significant differences between the American and Canadian cultures, and that the author shares blame for meekly enabling the USA to become the eleventh and most dominant province. That last part may not contain much truth, but it would stun you long enough for me to kick you in the testicals and push you into a snowbank and escape the scene in my thoroughly unmolested car.

Humidity

DSC_1192
Originally uploaded by amnesoid.

Yesterday, i came home. I do that almost every night. When i get home, i need to pet Linus thirty-thousand times, or else he will pester me mercilessly.

As i petted Linus yesterday, we gave each other ninety-six uncomfortable static shocks.

Then i got all scientific. I put two huge pots of water on the stove and boiled them. I wasn't even cooking anything. I was just boiling water, cos. That's short for 'cousin', probably.

The static shocks went away. It was brilliant, and i don't pay the electricity bill either. They call the electric bill the 'hydro bill' here. Whatever!

I have decided to leave the pots of water on for the remainder of the winter, and leave them boiling 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

Soon, though, i discovered that there was a sludge film that remained after most of the water had evaporated. Apparently, my publicly supplied water is very disgusting and teeming with filth. I began to think that if i were not present, and the pots of water boiled all of the water out and there was no water left, then the filth would become encrusted onto the insides of my valueable pots, which i use for things other than humidity, like linguini, and elaborate sauces.

That would be a terrible circumstance.

Anyway, that's all i gots.

Juno Beach

DSC_1129
Originally uploaded by amnesoid.

Here is a blurry photograph of the Juno Beach shoreline.

Sirius, i think

DSC_1140
Originally uploaded by amnesoid.

Here is a long exposure of Sirius, maybe. I have no hard evidence that this is Sirius, but it was the brightest piece of light in the sky other than moveable aeroplanes. This was yesterday evening on Juno Beach.

The twisty shape is due to the long exposure and lofting the camera with a feeble human body. You should try it sometime. Terrible technique can be alright, sometimes.

Palm Beach

Hello readers of blogs.

I am currently sitting and typing adjacent to a second-floor balcony with slightly-ajar sliding door, because i am located in Palm Beach, Florida, and it is much warmer than minus twenty-five degrees Ridiculous, which is the same thing as Fahrenheit, except that it applies to digits less than zero.

Why i am here has to do with my job, which is not exciting. What is more exciting is the sidereal dramas involved in arriving here, starting at 5 pm yesterday, at which time i was sitting at gate 10 at BUF, silently agape at the combined height of the UB Bulls basketball team, who were apparently getting ready to share my airplane to DC. I was swayed by the physical presences, and became convinced that they must be an undefeatable basketball team, but maybe they are not. It is a UB sports team, after all.

The UB Bulls are playing Ball State tonight, i think.

They will probably win, because they were graced by a goodest good luck charm yesterday, whose shortened head hair and not-quite-sickeningly-proceeding facial hair combine to form a fresh look, allowing a level of self-esteem which in turn allows for fleeting minutes of determined assertion, in certain situations. I know of whom i speak.

Anyway, my United flight sat on the tarmac for an extra hour, being sad, so i promptly missed my connection to Palm Beach and assumed i was screwed. But United hooked me up with an alternate route via Charlotte. So i flew to Charlotte, adjacent to the jet's furnace, i guess, which kept me at a beyond-comfortable temperature of 105 degrees Insane, which is the same thing as Fahrenheit, for digits more than one hundred. For the temperature gradient i had exposed myself to yesterday, i will surely contract four flus, one on top of the other.

I just checked the score. UB is only down by two points at the moment.

Anyway, my flight to Charlotte also decided to sit on its tarmac for an hour, and as a result, i was coerced into some unintended exercise:

Determined not to miss a second connection in two hours, i exit jetway at A15, and begin sprinting across the Charlotte airport, fastly past all of the moving walkways with slow slow folks, past the comfortable looking rows of rocking chairs which i have admired so many times and never sat within, down the Terminal C corridor, all the way to the end, handing my boarding pass to the ticketing agent who was in the process of announcing the last call for passengers, as i dove into the jetway, tasting blood all up and down my trachea, which cannot be so super.

We sat on the tarmac in Charlotte for an hour.

I sat next to a batshit insane old lady on this third and last flight. At first i thought she was talking to me, but it turned out she was talking to herself, wondering out loud "We're flying so low i've never seen a plane fly this low before i wonder if they know how low they are flying." I took a peek out the window. We were very obviously at twenty-thousand feet or more. When she failed to be assertive enough to show her plastic cup and garbage as the flight attendant passed with a trash bag on three occasions, she assumed, out loud, that she was being snubbed, and dumped the ice, the cup, and maybe a shot's worth of vodka into her seat pocket, justifying with "That's what you get..." When we landed, she removed her buckle and began to climb over me to leave the plane, only to find that no one had begun to move yet. Also, she smelled like piss. She had said something very loudly to herself every minute or two for the entire flight, i wish i could remember some of her other comments, but i was concentrating more on how awkward it seemed to ignore everything she said so utterly and completely.

Anyway, when i got to Palm Beach at midnight, it was warm. And immediately i felt my moistureless arcticidic skin begin to heal its deep cracks and jagged craters with the merciful humid air, and i was content.

Tonight i walked to the beach, and had it all to myself. Apparently, no one goes to the beach in Palm Beach. Maybe the entire population of the city is in their pajamas watching Wheel of Fortune while i am claiming the beach. This was my theory. I took blurry pictures of the ocean and stars and city lights. They were all blurry because the exposures were long because the light was so dim because it is a winter evening. Maybe i will show some pictures after i get back home tomorrow. Maybe i willn't.

Twilight, bare feet, sand, short sleeves, wave sounds and lack of human presences were things i was able to check off of my list for 2/7.

Ball State is up by ten with seven minutes left. How ruinous those heathens are.

Los fotografias, partida uno

Hello. I have gotten through my first 187 photographs from South America. I have published 39. You can see them at my Flickr account. Apparently i have a Flickr account.



The first set of photographs is of Buenos Aires. They were all taken while i was on Panda Tours' most successful, enjoyable and disastrous city bicycle excursion ever. The guide was a reincarnation of Che Guevara, except that this reincarnation is of Japanese descent, and smokes 44 cigarettes per day, all while bicycling, and this reincarnation of Che Guevara works for the touristry industry, which isn't very socialist, unfortunately. But it did mean that we were able to bicycle through the ramshackle and dangerous barrios of the downtrodden, who are probably constantly seeming to notice just how glaringly white and fortunate i am. Also, my bicycle seat was unintentionally destroyed in the wake of unintentional gravitational prowess lent by my ass, though i did not take it to mean that i am too fat, but just that Argentinian bicycles are lousy and shabby. Anyways, also on the bicycle tour were two annoying Americans and a Venezuelan whose sister can only continue to fabricate extremely sturdy backpacks if she is able to escape from beneath the oppressive canopy of Hugo Chavez, a canopy which is becoming more oppressive everyday. Also, we saw Maradona's old house. Maradona is the only man ever ordained by God to be able to play soccer with his hands.


The second set of photographs is from my first two days in the rugged wildernesses of Southern Patagonia. After Argentinian-style tribulations at the Buenos Aires domestic airport, i was certain that i would be crushed in the onslaught of a widespread cultural temper-tantrum, but, hallelujah, i was saved simply by remaining meek and standing still. I arrived in El Calafate, had an impromptu lunch with a girl from Oregon, met my tour group, and boarded a bus for El Chaltén the next morning. My group consisted of all Brazilians and Europeans. And then one from Montreal, and then me. I was the young man of the group, i am always out of place somehow. We spent two hours in El Chaltén before donning our gear and backpacks and rainsuits and beginning our hike to the first mountain camp, where we celebrated our New Years' Eve with surprised bottles of wine and sidre (cider) which had been smuggled in between changes of clothes. Someone was responsible for a toast at the top of each hour, depending on who was having New Years'. First the germans, then the spaniards, then maybe the brazilians, and then i gave a toast to the Inuit of Greenland (may their igloo closets be stuffed with eternal seal blubbers), and then Patagonia had its New Year, and then we went to bed and let Dick Clark handle the rest, if he is still functional, that poor bastard. On New Years' Day was maybe the most demanding hike of the tour. This is the reason it could be called a trek. We would walk and climb 20 kilometers to De Los Tres Lagoon, into the laps of the Mountains Chaltén (a.k.a. Mount Fitzroy) and Poincenot. My left knee formalized a lengthy set of objections on the way back down, which ultimately would not be entirely mediated until after my return to North America and a lifestyle of almost complete immobility.

This is all i will write with quills and parchment, for now.