PriorBlog

Just a quick note to be difficult here, and to run the risk of getting arrested.  It seems to me that there is a fair amount of opposition to the president’s plans to increase troop levels in Iraq.  Does it seem that way to you?  And there seems to me to be a burgeoning class of the angry, of vehement antipathy for the commander in chief.

There is a vast gulf between the level of fury in words and actions though.  For example, you don’t have to go far to hear or read the claims that Bush and the neo-cons have ruined the country (or the world).  The correlative actions taken are the wearing of a Che Guevara t-shirt or a recitation of the familiar sounding bumper sticker  mantra, “somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot.”

In Brookline I once saw t-shirts for sale in a trendy shop with the word “Dissident” on them.  I bought one for my friend Jose Padilla in SuperMax.

For all the communal bluster, not one person has ever taken me aside, and suggested that something needs to be done.  Content that Nancy Pelosi means we are once again a peaceful nation, despite troop surges and emerging proxy wars, you will never hear around here suggestions that it is time to overthrow the government.

Maybe the reason for this is simple fear and cowardice, or maybe it is because our “right to bear arms” is no longer anywhere near commensurate with the government’s.  This needs to be changed so that the government can once again be accountable.  Your average citizen, with his out of date out of date semi-automatic AK-47, is no match for an F-18.

I’m just saying…

This morning I missed my bus, and was late for work. Because of this, I did something I have never done before, although I was aware of its possibly thanks to google maps. There is a shorter route from the bus stop to work, but it involves walking along some train tracks for about a quarter of a mile, and then sliding down a 25-foot embankment. Today, being late and all, I took the path less traveled, the railway path.

I think I have mentioned before that I work in an office park, and that the majority of the population of the office park work for a large collection agency. I have some issues with the agency, mostly regarding their decision to heavily market themselves. When they moved into the office park a few months ago, they added two giant flagpoles to the soil beside their parking lot. One for their flag, and one for Old Glory. Prior to the mass immigration of the collection agency workers, I was the only person in the office park who used public transportation to get there. Because of this I walked across that parking lot many times, four times a day in fact, because I also walk that way to lunch. This being the case, I was very familiar with the goings on as the collection agency’s then future home was being refurbished, and the flagpoles were planted.

The day the poles were placed in the ground there were a number of surveyors and hardhat types milling around the parking lot. I feel it is important to tell you this because of what I perceive to be a slight difference in height between the two poles, and since there is a difference, and there were so many pole technicians in the lot the day they were planted, one can only deduce that the difference is intentional. The collection agency’s flag appears to fly just a few inches above the US flag, which, from what I remember my third grade teacher telling me, is strictly illegal.

Although I am bothered by this, the reason I won’t divulge the name of the collection agency relates to my fears that Bush might bomb the fuck out of them for it, and despite my misgivings, I know that many of the people under that flag, are completely innocent of the company’s transgression. I was thinking about this the other night as I walked by the windows of their building, about how otherwise decent and honorable people, through no fault of their own, wind up through circumstances completely beyond their control in miserable jobs in which all they do is sit there and have people talk shit to them all day.

I have had little to talk about with these people other than asking them how long they had been waiting for the return flight of the 34e at the bus stop and so forth, but today, as I waited for the train to pass so that I might walk along the tracks without a conductor accusing me of trespassing I noticed that beside me stood a gentleman from the collection agency, who intended to travel along the tracks as I did. We waited then for the train to fill with her commuters, and as it rolled slowly into motion, it was impossible to betray the excitement welling within myself as I came to the realization that I was soon to trespass along the lair of a hundred ton giant, and that her iron path would soon be laid out exclusively for my use. Well, exclusively for my use and the man from the collection agency. It probably goes without saying, the most exhilarating part was when we crossed Route One.

At the end of the trip along the tracks, the man from the collection agency, who had made the journey many times previously, showed me the safest way down the embankment. I felt like I had fallen from the sky.

I think I will always go this way in the future for several reasons:

1. The feeling of camaraderie with the hitherto [O]ther eclipses my own feelings of alienation.
2. The trespassing aspect brings back memories of stealing apples from the Academy of the New Church’s secret orchard. Note to Pitcairns, I live in Montreal now.
3. It’s three tenths of a mile shorter than my old route.
4. Makes me feel rugged and tough.
You may suspect that this is something of a parable intended to shed light on the current wars, but I am afraid that if you are thinking that, you are wrong. I am not into parables or little stories, because they are condescending, and I am well aware that all three of my readers are brighter than I am.

Plus, if I were to write something like that it would most likely involve a family of rabbits who worked in a foundry. For some reason the idea of rabbits working in a foundry has always sparked a vague political sentiment in me, that at times I’ve thought could change the world, but I just couldn’t find the words to express that sentiment purposefully enough to garner populist support.

Sometimes when I am bored while looking at crap I could care less about on the internet, I instinctively click on to my own little website here to see if anything has been updated. I wish that somebody could put posts up here for me, so that I could see what exactly it is that I am thinking about. I wonder if WordPress has thought of that yet. Blog writing software for people who really want to have a big blog, but don’t have the time or the inclination to write everyday. It writes entries for you based on your interests and so forth. It might even jazz up your life a bit.

I have also been tempted to start lying here. I mean big lies, like to the point of inventing whole new people.

Don’t know if you know this or not, but Bambi and I just took on a boarder. His name is Alfonse.

There now, that wasn’t so hard, and I am already intrigued myself.

Alfonse asked me if it would be alright for him to cook a stew from his native country in the kitchen tonight. He is originally from… Laos. The dish he was going to prepare was something very close to what people in Massachusetts call steak tips.

See. This is great.

If you couldn’t guess, not much going on here tonight. Bambi is off at some knitting jamboree and Hazel is asleep. I am sick of patching up some logo in Illustrator, so I decided to come here.

I did notice that the US started bombing parts of Somalia yesterday with the blessing of the brand new government. When I was a kid C-130’s used to fly over my house all the time. They were super loud, ugly looking snub nosed things. I sometimes think about that when I hear about missions using the AC-130’s, which are basically the same planes but with a bunch of giant guns hanging out the side to blow people up with.

Ok, time for steak tips.

My brother-in-law came over last night to watch the Eagles playoff game.  The game watching was accompanied by a bunch of beers, the last of which, a Sierra Nevada Winter Warmer from the year 2000 given to me by beer connoisseur Clark Johnsen, really brought the party to life.  Unfortunately, this happened just as Akers kicked the game winning field goal, and Matt was out the door to do bigger and better things, like going to sleep. 

Bummer for him, because on channel 35, Rocky IV was on.  I wonder if they were playing it in honor of James Brown, who appears just before the Apollo Creed v Ivan Drago fight?  Could make sense considering we are still in a month of “national grievance” over his death. 

Speaking of death, Apollo sure met his when he faced Drago.  How could anybody forget the tautological menace that was Ivan Drago.  “If he dies, he dies.”  As the celebrated philosopher A.J. Ayer once said “can’t argue with that!”  IV is by far the most Hegelian of the Rockies, and was made with an eye towards a decisive turn in world affairs.  It’s worth noting, that the Berlin Wall came down in ‘89, just about the same time that this movie hit the black market in Moscow.  Mikhail Gorbechev reportedly wept openly when he first saw Rocky IV, as did Mikhail Barishnakov, and a couple of other famous ballerinas.

If you think my watching Rocky and football wasn’t manly enough, I also saw a few Ford commercials which caused me to suffer from an overabundance of testosterone, resulting in headaches, nausea, and zits.  My favorite Ford Truck commercial is the one with the guys in the barn at night, each one with square jawbones, whose job it is to place an unidentifiable giant heavy thing into the back of the FORD TRUCK.  The looks these men give one another convey respect and trust, they seem to say, I wouldn’t trust just anybody to place this unidentifiable giant heavy thing into the back of my FORD TRUCK, but I can trust you because of your jaw, your rugged suede jacket, your sturdy barn, and the fact that even though it isn’t showcased in this here commercial, you undoubtably own a FORD TRUCK yourself. 

At the end of the commercial the FORD TRUCK drives away carrying the heavy thing, and the remaining square jawed man looks seriously into his barn.  The hard day’s work is done seems to be the feeling, although the ad takes place at night.  Perhaps they were working on a science project together, although they seem too old. More likely the thing was a thresher or some other type of bygone piece of machinery unrecognizable to the effete, just a hulking mass of iron and grease to them.  What is it, this giant thing?  And why, so strong, so terrible in weight must this thing struggle for life against a sea of nano-gadgets, like the undeniably sissy iPod, much like these brave FORD TRUCK driving men are themselves an increasingly diminished race, finding themselves on the cusp of mythology, their, let’s face it, Neanderthal-ish jaws buried squarely in the past? 

I did a quick search on Youtube to find the commercial in question just for you, my three readers.  It was very revealing.  For we all know the truth that these commercials rarely convey.  Your average Ford Truck driver is in fact quite different than the men in the commercial.  For starters, he enjoys spending his nights sitting naked behind his computer and speaking softly (you’ll definitely have to turn up the volume on this one) instead of placing unidentifiable giant heavy things in the back of his trucks.  He also puts videos of himself on the internet… 

One more thing, an update on BearingPoint.  I asked my dad about it and he said that the golfer Phil Mickelson wears a BearingPoint hat during golf tournaments.  As if it wasn’t easy enough to hate golf for being such an elitist “sport,” now pro-golfers are walking around with war profiteer hats on.  

Alhough I pretty much gave up on my New Year’s resolutions in December, I have gone running 3 days so far in 2007. Today being a Saturday, I got to go for a run in the Blue Hills at the crack of dawn. The Blue Hills are great because even though they are super close to Boston, you can still be in them and feel like you are Rod Dixon in a Runner’s World shoot from circa 1982. I don’t know if you are familiar with the issue, I can’t remember the month and year myself, but it was an article about Dixon, the last of the great New Zealand runners, and one of the shots has him cruising through a giant open field. This had a profound effect on the young David Prior, who always thought it essential to know the distance of a training run for it to have any value. Seeing Dixon cruising through that field made me realize that there were more important things to precisely grading and evauating personal performance. This inspiration meant a lot to me, and is pretty much responsible for the downward spiral my life has been since. But, back to the open field, I did find, in the Blue Hills a small pasture that allowed for only about a quarter mile’s run before ending at a “Private Property” sign, however, the distance was just enough to make me feel like Dixon (sans mustache). The downhill slope didn’t hurt either, as running back up I felt like my old self again.

Another running picture that I have in my head when I go running sometimes is from a book my dad had called Kiwis Can Fly.  It’s a picture of Murray Halberg going out for a run.  He isn’t even off the steps in front of his house, but already his body is swinging into running motion.  I love that picture for that reason, his eagerness.  You know, it’s interesting the way memory works, because I was thinking of that photo today and had it in my mind that Halberg’s name was George Grant.  But looking for the Dixon picture online, I realized (seeing Halberg photos as well) that it was most likely Halberg.  Then I realized that George Grant, I think, ran at BC before I got there.  I never met him, but I remember the great Mike Atwood, who was a big fan of making runner murals, at one time or another placed a photo of Grant, a very good runner by all accounts (1984 Massachesetts State Champ), among pictures of the John Ngugi and Khalid Skahs of the world.  It may have been that Grant looked like Halberg.  Yes, I think that’s it.

“How do you determine which laws and regulations should be followed?”

This is a line from BearingPoint’s website, which I am unfairly singling out from a page I found in the BearingPoint Institute for Executive Insight, although you have to admit, it is kind of funny in its grammatical ambiguity. I had never even heard of Bearing Point until the other day when there was an article in the Globe about some formerly top-secret committee in Washington called the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group. Since I don’t have enough concentration to finish an entire article in a newspaper without seeing a name like “BearingPoint” and going off on a google search, I can only offer you a hazy summary of the article, something like, the ISOG is making sure that all of Iran’s neighbors will be able to bomb it back into the stone age during the next war du jour.*

That’s all well and good, but who is this Bearing Point company, and why do they get to be part of the ISOG getting cool top secret information, making weapons deals, and wearing (most probably) secret decoding rings and stuff, while I have to sit in this dull cubicle all day? My thirst for information was moving beyond its bearing point, so I did a google search.

What a company! Is there anything they can’t do? And with so many giant projects taken on, it’s a wonder you don’t see them in the grocery store and stuff. There must be hundreds of thousands of employees. Reading their website, you begin to think that anytime the government runs into a stumbling block, Bearing Point gets hired.

Gov’t: How can we track of all our bombs?
BP: RFID’s.

Gov’t: How should we rebuild Iraq’s economy?
BP: Let us do it.

The reach of the company is astounding. I got lost reading about all of their “projects” and so forth, very sophisticated stuff. It’s not as cool as Black Water’s website, but it’s more impressive in an ‘I-can’t-believe-the-amount-of-complexity-it-takes-to-control-millions-of-people-and-products-and-this-company-claims-they-can-do-it’ kind of way.

I knew there had to be a dark side to Bearing Point, but wondered if I would be able to find since they have done some projects for Google, and that, of course, is my only link to the world outside my cubicle. Turns out there’s no hiding it. They wrote the new Iraq’s economic policy (contracted by the US gov’t to do so for like $240 million, A-rod money), which called for opening the country up for easy access to foreign investmentors. Foreign investors like themselves. They were number two on the 2004 Top Ten Worst War Profiteers list put out by corpratepolicy.org. Again, why do they get to profit from the next war while I have to sit here in this cube? They got to profit in the last war. It’s not fair. There should be a random draft of who gets to profit from these wars, because it seems like the same people always get dibs.

I was thinking about BearingPoint during a complaint session I was having with a fellow bus rider while we waited for the bus this morning. I was telling him how yesterday the bus driver saw me, pulled over to get me, but way overshot me because she hasn’t yet figured out how to use her brakes, and then, when I didn’t magically appear immediately at the bus door situated a full twenty-five to thirty feet beyond the bus stop, not wanting to miss the light, she drove away. I’ll spare you his complaints because mine are more important and I have a tangent I want to move along, as quickly as possible and, while this fellow passenger is not a fictional character, I just don’t have time for him right now. After the bus pulled away, I spent a few seconds getting angry, and then decided to run for it and try to catch it at the next stop (.277 miles away according to gmaps pedometer). I would not advise most non-athletes to attempt such a feat. Being a highly accomplished runner (once won the fourth heat of the mile [it’s funny if you know track, so lay off]), I was able to catch the bus, but was too winded to come up with anything nasty to say to the driver, something that is still eating me up inside.

I would like to say this was the culmination of a series of gripes and frustrations I currently have with the MBTA, but there are a whole bunch of other little things they continue to do to ruin my life that I won’t bore you with right now. There is definite room for improvement, but I think help needs to come from the outside. That’s where BearingPoint comes in. If they took over running the MBTA, the buses would stop when they were supposed to and the trains would run on time.

Note

*I will say this about the proliferation of nuclear weapons- and I think we can all agree to this being a promising development for mankind- the new version of MAD is much more democratic in that everybody gets to participate. Of course, I am not referring to Mothers Against Drunks here, but Mutually Assured Destruction. Thanks to MAMAD (Mothers Aggrandizing Mutually Assured Destruction) for pointing out that this might strike some as confusing.

This morning on the bus, some of my fellow riders were discussing their jobs as customer service reps for a giant collection agency.  I don’t normally listen in on other people’s conversations on the bus, but at one point one of the women began raising her voice as she inveighed against an absent co-worker.  The highlight of her idiotic and at various times self-conflicting tirade was this quote: 

“This is the easiest job I ever had.  All I do is sit there all day and have people talk shit to me on the phone.  How can you complain about a job that easy?”

Another co-worker, this one present in the seat next to her, wearing a jacket with the words “Apple Bottoms” emblazoned on the back, concurred with this evaluation of the job’s difficulty.

It would be unfair of me to suggest that all of the conversations on the bus are on par with this one.  In fact, a lot of the dumber things I hear do not enter my ears on the bus, but rather at work, where, for instance, yesterday I learned that postal workers had the day off because it was a “national day of grievance.”

Quick aside: I realize I am coming off as snobby, so please allow me a quick self-deprecating anecdote to even things out.  The other day I stuck my sugar covered finger in my mouth after eating Christmas cookies.  I had forgotten that about five minutes before I had shoved that same finger in my ear to wiggle out some earwax.  The taste was beyond nasty and I almost threw up.

To resume where I left off, I realize that not all of the people on the bus are morons, but you do hear a lot of idiotic things said on it.  A big reason for this is that the smarter people tend to keep to themselves, whereas the people with obvious mental disabilities tend to speak out. 

Examples?  Why not, it’s always fun to make fun of crazy people.  There’s Rueben.  This guy is a doughy Stop and Shop worker with a large head and a larger voice.  His MO is to spot the best looking woman on the bus, sit next to her, and then let her know about what movies he’s seen in the past week.  My guess is that he must watch ten to twenty thousand movies a day.  Interspersed between these reviews he throws in little tidbits of information such as, “I’m a really nice guy, a friendly guy.”  Amazingly, most of the women are very kind to him, probably because his manner of speaking, which lacks a certain basic understanding of, shall we say, normal people elocution, reveals him to be an insane madman, and I guess they are enamored with his passion. 

Then there’s the little guy with the pouty lips and the Bird-era Celtics jacket.  This guy likes to talk to everybody but me.  If nobody wants to talk to him, he yawns loudly and repeatedly the entire ride.  The reason he doesn’t like me has to do with a snowstorm we had about two or three years ago.  He came up to me at the bus stop and said something like, this is a lot of snow and it’s cold, to which I responded with a half-ironic, ‘ah, it’s not so bad.’  This set him off, and unfortunately for me, it did so right about the same time the bus was pulling up.  Once inside, brimming with that type of agitation only a crazy person could have, he let the bus driver know that “There’s three feet of snow on the ground and this guy over here tells me ‘it’s not so bad!’”  And then to the people in the handicapped seats:  “That guy over there thinks this storm’s not so bad!”  And then to himself, for another ten to fifteen stops, I could hear him muttering over and over “not so bad.”

Although there are other far less entertaining conversations on the bus that I don’t listen to or catalog due to a lack of interest, it’s the truly wacked out conversations I use to define my experience with the 34E.  Part of it has to do with the brusqueness, with the eruptive spasms of a loud mouth that not only force you to listen, but in many cases remember.  Yesterday, was the first day of the new fare increases, and as such there were a fair (no pun intended) share of eruptive spasms from the bus riders.  The best of which came from this guy who got on at Beech Street.  A bunch of his buddies were unaware of the fare increases and were having difficulty coming up with finding the extra sixty cents necessary for getting on.  Of course, they were all loudly complaining and cussing (i.e. using words like fuck and shit), and that’s when, our guy, who previously seemed like simply a conductor of the others’ complaints, began his own riff, railing against the T and their budget problems with pinpoint precision with all of the confidence, all of the assumed accuracy of an economic expert.  At the same time, he threw in just the right amount of “motherfuckers” to keep a very strong populist verve alive among his cohorts and the other passengers.  In short, he was delightfully charismatic.  Had he gotten on at DeSoto instead of Beech the bus driver might have ended up swinging like Saddam on a Friday night.   

I have a new favorite website. Here are some of the profiles:

“When I asked him why his marriage failed he said it was because his wife could not handle the supposed agreement they had. This agreement was that he could find sex other places. What woman would agree to their man cheating on them!? I believe there was no agreement and that he is just a pig with a lot
of excuses!”

“He owes his last girlfriend money for bills he just decided not to pay. She’s a single mom and worked her ass off to support him, his kids, and her own, so much so that she ended up in the hospital. He has let his Ex wife Krissy take all his money and run his life. Did I mention, he’s a one hit wonder, don’t bother getting warmed up ladies, it’ll be over before you even get to first base, he lasts for 45 secs tops.”

“His friends and I know that HE FATHERED THE CHILD OF ANOTHER WEALTHY WOMAN. SHE IS WORTH MILLIONS AND PUT HIM IN HER WILL. THEY HAVE A SON.”

“what you told yesterday! you finally admitted that you have sex with her now! “

Bambi is watching some show on teevee called SuperNanny. I can hear it from here. It’s about how this British nanny comes and saves the day for some troubled American family. Why is it that there are so many Brits on reality shows judging Americans?

Another thing that gets me. How come so many hours on NPR are used to broadcast the BBC world servisssse?

Almost without fail when an English accent is declaring something on teevee or radio (even when they’re asking, they don’t sound like they’re asking to me), the position the American viewer is supposed to assume is that of subservient half-wit, happily willing to accept the wisdom of the far more sophisticated Brit. SuperNannies. Like Louise Woodward.

This afternoon Hazel had me read a book to her called Hey, Al.

Here is a brief summary of the book. This janitor Al lives with a Jack Russell Terrier named Eddie in a small studio in New York City. The dog, who can talk by the way, is always on Al’s case about moving to a better place. One day, as Al is shaving, a giant bird sticks his head in Al’s bathroom window and tells him about a special place that he can take Al and Eddie too. Instead of enlisting the help of a psychaitrist, at Eddie’s insistence, Al decides to hop on to the giant bird’s back the next day. The bird takes them to a magical wonderland in the clouds, populated almost exclusively by birds. Al and Eddie are living the high-life, when one day, they realize that they are becoming birds. In an absolutely horrific sequence of events, both charachters suffer mental break downs and end up falling thousands of feet through the air into the “open sea.” Somehow, Al makes it home alive. Amazingly, maybe a little too amazingly, the talking dog shows up the next day, the two of them deciding, that in lieu of living in the clouds they will paint Al’s dingy apartment yellow. I guess this completely anticlimatic ending is somehow supposed to relieve kids, let them know that even though there are people mutating into birds up in the clouds, it’s okay, because you can always paint your room yellow.