PriorBlog

I was just sitting here reading about McKenna’s wife giving birth, when all of the sudden I look up and in the window opposite me, a pigeon is trying to get in my house.  It was trapped in mid-flight against the window screen for a good three to four seconds.  Needless to say the dogs, who were sleeping under this window, went apeshit, which is always nice when the baby is asleep.  This happened like 5 minutes ago, but they are still on a state of red alert, barking at every small sound in the neighborhood.

A few quick hits from around the major leagues:

Was walking to work along a semi-major thoroughfare the other morning. There were two guys wearing bright yellow vests working on cleaning that section of grass—I think it’s called the median—and as they were doing so, I noticed that they were passing a joint back and forth. I thought this was kind of brazen of them, what with the traffic flow, hundreds of people could see what they were up to. At the same time, because of their location, it’s not like anybody could really do anything about it, cops included.

The next day, I saw another group of yellow vests on the way to work. This time they weren’t cleaning up the median, but instead were inspecting the bus station. Among this yellow vested group was a woman who was, with the exception if her yellow vest, dressed in fancy business attire. The others in the group, who all seemed to swimming in her wake, floating on a wave of obsequious deference, included one of the two guys spotted from the day before. The look on his face was an expression of I will do whatever it takes to do my job well, your majesty.

I guess you had to be there. Oh well.

The Phillies have FINALLY crept above .500 and best of all they did so by beating the Braves. Don’t know if I’ve cried you a river about this before, but I don’t watch baseball on teevee because I don’t have cable. Instead, I have the mlb.com internet package. This means I can watch all of the games except the Red Sox and nationally televised games. All but maybe six Red Sox games are on Cable. This has something (a lot) to do with why, despite their respective records, I like the Phillies better than the Sox this year. Yesterday, though I couldn’t watch the Phillies on the internet because the freakin’ Braves have to be nationally televised. I guess that’s one of the benefits of rooting for a team that is part of a corporate behemoth. Anyhow, it’s late in the final game of the series right now, and the Phils are up by ten, so it looks like a sweep in Atlanta. They swept us to start the season, so this is extra nice.

Since the Phillies were thrashing the Braves so hard, I decided to check out some other games. One that caught my attention was the Yankees Angels game. As much as I hate the Yankees, I have to admit that they are so far back now, that were they to get back into the pennant race, it would make for a great story. Before you all start jumping down my throat hear me out on this one, okay. As I type this, the Yankees are about to get swept by the Angels barring a K-Rod meltdown. That means if the Sox win against the Rangers the Yanks will be 12.5 back. Today the fans were booing Joe Torre. That’s how low things are in the Bronx. It is about as low as you can get in baseball. This isn’t some small market team with a bunch of hot prospects that the Sporting News picked to snag the wildcard, this is the freakin’ Yankees. Things aren’t just going wrong, things are going HORRIBLY wrong. It’s as if GOD is against the Yankees. Which is why I think it would make for a remarkably compelling pennant race if the Yanks were to fight their way back into it. How could you not be amazed at that happening? But you know what, it’s not going to happen because the Yankees really do suck this year.

Actually, they are threatening right now. Two runners on no outs in the bottom of the ninth down by two.

Under the Senate bill, he said, those who have been in the country two to five years would enter a temporary-worker program, while those inside longer would be eligible for legal status or citizenship after an 11-year probationary period. They would first have to meet other criteria, including learning English, and paying a penalty and back taxes. –CNN Your trusted source for news.

I’m sorry, but who on earth would go for that deal? If you’ve been here for five years, it’s already your home. No matter what. After five years in a place, when you walk out the door to go to work in the morning, you don’t consider any other address yours. So why on earth would you decide to go to some office and wait in some super long line just to get a few numbers on a card?  For five years salary in back taxes and penalties?  The idea that by levying an insanely heavy tax on the insanely poor is almost so evil as to be funny. I mean, let’s face it, that would be hilarious in a Mel Brooks or a Monty Python comedy, like people lining up to be shat on.

First in-line

Guy born here: Hello. Seem to have lost my Social Security card. The number is 555-46-9028.

Cashier: We’ll have a new card to you in three days.

Guy born here: Cool thanks.

Second in-line

Guy born in Ciudad Laredo, not Laredo and lived in the USA for the past sixteen years: Hello, I would like to get a social security card.

Cashier: Ok, please fill out these 80 pages of forms and hand over $30,000.

Guy born in Ciudad Laredo, not Laredo (Spot-on George M. Cohan impression): God Bless America! Land of the free…

Enforcing a language. Compulsory lessons three nights a week at the local Y after all day floundering around in some giant foreign city, it’s all just like a study abroad program really, right down to the price! That’s what’s going to make for some great “citizens,” if not people who have good keggers, the rudimentary I for yo. Followed by all sorts of conjugations and declinsions, of course, what great fun. Lord knows I love the cultures attached to all of the foreign languages I’ve learned (Ha ha. Get it? I’m American, I don’t know more than seven words in any other language.)

You can almost see why there would be more appeal with the alternative way of getting that number in lieu of going back in time and choosing to be born here.

In other patriotic news (Latin being an Ancient not a “Foreign” Language [didja’ ever notice? italics the voice of truth, quotes lies), I got to see my son for the second time on Monday during my wife Ali Larijani’s appointment. My parents were both in the room, the kid in the womb of Iranian diplomat Larijani laying back and giving the ol’ uterus slide show.

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me.
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

I used to live with a guy whose last name was Ratkevich, and he had a fluffy grey cat that I called Catkevich. Ratkevich didn’t really like the name, but I thought it was hilarious. I am leaving the Ratkevich’s first name out of this because I have a sense that the last thing in the world he wants is to have somebody locate him via google in this here blog. Back to Catkevich, though. He was one of those my way or the highway type of cats. I don’t remember exactly how Ratkevich found him, but it was probably in a dumpster or something. Catkevich was pretty tough and did whatever he damned well pleased. One notable trait of Catkevich’s was his tail, which ended crookedly. When you were lucky enough to be allowed a full pet, from the top of the head to the end of the tail, the smooth sailing of your hand would come to an abrupt halt at that crook. Who knows what happened to that tail. If anything it was a testament to his toughness. Since cats can’t really have tattoos, they generally display toughness through ripped ears, lost eyes, mange, and crooked tails.

Ratkevich and I went our separate ways after I met and moved in with my future wife, Iranian Nuclear Negotiator Ali Larijani. I can’t remember if my moving out of Ratkevich’s place marked the last time I ever saw Catkevich. A few years later, I bumped into Ratkevich and he told me that Catkevich had run away. I guess he got stuck outside during a terrific rainstorm and never came back. Ratkevich mentioned that he thought he may have seen Catkevich with some old lady, but he couldn’t be sure, because it was the woman’s cat and he didn’t feel it would be right to ask to inspect Catkevich’s tail.

On Sunday, as I went to pick out a case of beer at a package store I cannot name for reasons that will quickly become apparent, I noticed a large grey cat perched on top of a stack of about eight cases of Budweisers.

Catkevich?

It’s worth mentioning, that Ratkevich lives right down the street from this package store. Was it Catkevich though, that’s what I wanted to find out. When none of the employees were looking my way, I headed over to the cat in order to check out the tail. The only problem was that the stack of Buds the cat was sleeping on was about four or five rows deep. If I wanted to get to Catkevich I would have to surmount about a hundred cases of beer, and that would definitely bring attention to myself. Instead of doing this, I tried to get a good angle on the cat’s tail, but it seemed to be tucked under that cat’s paw. After all, I don’t want to send Ratkevich to the liquor store to steal their cat unless I am sure it’s Catkevich. As I as shuffling around the boxes, trying to get a better look at the cat, it opened its eyes and gave me a look as if to say, “you’re a moron.”

I am pretty sure it was Catkevich. Now it’s up to Ratkevich. Does he want Catkevich? I know he has two “new” cats now, but this is Catkevich. You see things like this in the movies all of the time. I forget what the movies are called, but they always involve somebody who was lost, who comes back unexpectantly, and how this changes everything.

Spoiler alert: I am going to give away the ending.

In the end of Germinal, the guy whose pet rabbit was killed and eaten gets revenge by imploding the mine.  I was just thinking that I am a lot like that guy, and the rabbit is a lot like my bike.  A few weeks ago I would have considered blowing up my company, but now I am in a mode where I am just excited to get out.  I wonder what would have happened had I gone out with a big explosion.  Sometimes I wish I could view alternate endings to things, not so much as a product of regret, but as an offshoot of curiosity.

I was reading on the Reuters website about the Israeli air strike in Gaza the other day and found this amazing photo of a guy being pulled from the rubble of the building in which Hamas had formerly kept their “Executive Force.”

Obviously the shafts of light make it a great picture, and maybe I shouldn’t be so impressed with such a familiar trope, but there are also a bunch of other things that I think make this picture shout rather than speak: the hands covering the eyes, the partially obscured figured in the background, the way the leg in the pair of khaki cargo pants is seemingly bending in towards the camera, as if to push it out of the way, and most interesting to me is the disembodied hand reaching down from the top border of the picture.  It is almost too over the top to be considered sublime, but since it is not art, you can’t really question its intentions, you are forced to bask in the horrible reality of it all.
 
Or, maybe you do think it’s art and it is over the top.  Maybe you think that there is always a fair amount of staging of besieged areas by the groups victimized, artfully exaggerated dioramas of oppression set up for the world to see.  Let us show you where the rockets hit, this is where the family was blown up, etc, etc.   Or, maybe no it’s not that, but that in place of singular intention the photographer (as well as the web “master” I suppose) has at her disposal a cache of photographs to sift through, picking out the best one for publication, which might not necessarily be the truest to what the scene really looked like.  But then again, what does anything look like?  Everybody in the photo has a unique perspective just by virtue of their individual physical placement on the scene, to say nothing of the differences in traumatic experience (e.g. the ferociousness of the attack has been impressed upon the man with the bloody forehead more so than the guy with the cargo pants). 

The L.A. Times reported that the prosecution in the Jose Padilla trial used the word(s) “Al Qaeda” 91 times in the first hour of the trial.  I am going to try and emulate this technique at work this morning.  That’s using the word 1.5167 times per minute for a whole hour.  How long before they send me home for being mentally unwell?

“The water in the water color seems lukewarm, you don’t think Al Qaeda is responsible do you?  Al Qaeda would do something like that, even though some would suggest that Al Qaeda wouldn’t be involved with an office park, an officially sanctioned “Al Qaeda free” office park I might ad, nevertheless, Al Qaeda is a threat we should all be very aware of…”

 Let the games begin!

I have an aggressive dog.  He is a Jack Russell Terrier.  In his life he has been run over by bigger dogs enough times that he now preemptively attacks them.  He used to be friendly, now he’s friendly with other dogs about 45% of the time, the rest of the time things get ugly.  That’s why, when I take him to the Arnold Arboretum, I like to bring him off the beaten path (road is more like it) and have him play where there aren’t any other dogs.  Except my trusty beagle, that is, loyal friend and bane of my wife’s existence. 

The mutts and I were off on one of our little hikes yesterday when I came across a bag of human remains.  Yes, a plastic bag full of ashes, semi ripped open and clumped together by a recent rainfall.  I felt bad for the remains, but at the same time I didn’t want to touch them.  I gave the bag a brief kick in order to free some of the ashes through the hole.  A lackluster puff, nothing more.  I gingerly rolled the bag beneath my shoe, hoping to disengage the matter from itself.  There was some spillage, but not a lot.  I grappled with the temptation to grab the bag and rip it apart, send the ashes all abut Peter’s Hill, and if I knew the person contained within, I just might have, but since I didn’t know them I thought the better of it, concluding that touching the bag would be gross.

So I just left him or her there.  It probably wasn’t a bag of human ashes anyways.  Maybe it was from a barbeque or something.  Who knows?  Further up, I discovered a laptop computer shoved haphazardly beneath some leaves.  It partially turned on when I pressed the power button, and what’s more, a further investigation of the area revealed a carrying case.  No real identification on it, except the name “Jackie G.” in silver marker on the outside.  I considered that it might belong to the Red Sox’ old shortstop Jackie Gutierrez, and that my finding and returning it to him would allow me to count Jackie among my closest friends.  That would be cool.  But instead, having no idea where in the world Jackie Gutierrez is these days, I brought it to a nearby police station.

I entered the police station with two kids.  They must have been about 18 years old.  They came in right behind me.  Since I was first, the guy behind the counter asked me what I wanted.  I lifted up the laptop and said I found this.  The cop shook his head dismissively and said it would have to wait.  Then he asked the kids what they were there for.  They were looking for the girl’s brother who had been brought to the station the other night.  The cop told them that he wasn’t there anymore, that he was at a juvenile detention facility somewhere.  Where, the sister asked.  Are you his guardian?  No.  I can’t tell you if you’re not his guardian.  Well what did he do?  Again, I can’t tell you that if you aren’t his guardian.  Then the cop told them that the kid would be at court the next day and bail was $25,000. Then the boy, I don’t know if he was a brother or a boyfriend of the girl, goes, what’s a fifteen year old kid gotta do to have a bail that high? 

Who knows?  They were obviously both distraught, and as I sat there on the bench waiting and waiting for the cop to find the time to check out the computer, I didn’t feel so bad because of seeing it.

The cop was bent out of shape because a lot of people were being mistakenly sent to his station with lost and found items that weren’t even from his precinct.  “I’m not mad at you,” he said, but he was mad.  At a certain point, I was tempted to just leave the computer there and skedaddle, but I stayed because they were the cops, capable of arrests and so forth and so on.

I have to confess that the experience wasn’t all that unpleasant once I got talking to the guy.  Even though he was angry, there was a certain character to his frustration.  Sounds awful to say this, but I enjoyed watching him shove his binder against a wall.  He was intermittently listening to music at the time.  A fellow cop came up and chided him for it. 

“This is the New Jack City soundtrack, isn’t it?”

Maybe he fantasized himself as being played by Ice-T.  It occurred to me as I walked back to the car, that it would have been great if instead of the laptop I took the bag of “human remains” into the police station as lost and found.  He would undoubtedly have gone absolutely ballistic, but I can’t imagine that he would do anything like shoot me.  My sense is it would have been one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever witnessed in a police station.

I hate to sound like an old fogy, but my review of the Arcade Fire show last night will be nothing more than a litany of my aches and pains and discomfort, as well as my wife’s.  For starters it was hot.  Once in the Orpheum I headed for a beer.  Did I say to the “bartender,” “One lukewarm beer for eight dollars please?”  No, I did not.  I expected a crisp refreshing (what a cliché way to describe a beverage, but alas, as we shall see, I did not get my cliché of choice) beer.  Instead I got a warm Harpoon… in the gut.  $9 beer in hand (you have to tip, of course, otherwise you become the jerk, and once that happens all of your complaints are negated) my pregnant wife and I (how’s that for an announcement?  I try to keep my family out of this, as anybody who really knows who Ali Larijani is already knows.  Due October 21, in case you are wondering.  Expect a long rambling post on the man at Valvoline on that day.) begin to ascend a series of lengthy carpeted (threadbare) switchbacks to arrive at our nose bleed seats, perfect for a view of the puckering and in need of immediate restoration murals (i.e. please discard the mold is tough on the allergies this time of year)  who call just below the magnificent (magnificent circa 1881 that is) ceiling home.  Heat rises.  The heat of a few thousand hipsters rose to the top of this decrepit old stove.  Two rotisserie chickens turned on slow rolling spits to my left as the opening band took their turn on the stage.  Right before going off, after announcing that they were local, somebody in the audience shouted out a request for the singer to tell the audience the name of the band.  The tickets certainly didn’t let you know who they were.  Ticket fee is only a meager $9, barely enough to get the date on there, much less the opening band or the price of beer.  The singer guy, even from the vast distance, appeared beyond pleased that somebody would ask.  It was really very sweet, to be truthful, because you knew, or at least, you suspected, that this local band, Wild something (I forget really) was on the biggest stage they’d ever been on, and this request, for recognition, not from them, but of them, aw shucks.  For all I know somebody might stumble upon this little outpost of spleen and rebuke me for not knowing the history of this immeasurably successful band.  If so, fine, but that means no tender feelings from me ever again, so take your pick.  But back to being miserable in row 389, did I mention that I wasn’t allowed to drink beer there?  No?  Oh right.  You can buy overpriced beer, but you can’t drink it, or you can drink it, but only while standing outside of the theater, in the wings, majestic fluted columns left and right, marble maybe I forget, it was all so lost of original intentions, like a sophomore’s essay on the Kantian sublime (written as an all-nighter in the Boston College dorm room Walsh 216 on February 18th in the year of Our Lord 1993.  Got a B+ for what it’s worth, or worth inflated at least.) gulping down the stuff quicker than a late to the party frat boy.  Meanwhile, my wife, or your wife if we are to continue on in this peculiar second person thing I sometimes drift into for reasons unknown but not interesting anyways, stares indignantly, hands drifting across her swollen mid-section as Magic Johnson’s might one of his collection of golden basketballs, that judgment, the proclamation of a subtle (subtle hell!) guilt derived from an unsavory and/or unsatisfactory (take your pick, I am all about choices today) encounter so many moons ago.  Why I suffer so.  One final swig and then back to the chicken coop, husbanded as we all were by the friendly but ingratiating seat finder boy (how many times last night did I have him ask me “Do you know your way?”  Answer, every time I returned from taking a leak.).  Finally the music, cast in a bath of sweat.  I was determined to hear song number four from the new album first, I almost put money on it, but my wife lost interest in whatever I could say before I could spit out the period of my sentence.  It was the perfect starter to a concert, I thought, you know the one, the one that starts with the organ music.  And no, they did not pick that one, they chose instead another, saving song four for the first number of the encore, which occurred simultaneously as we were on the way out the door.  Oh well.      

I gave my two weeks at work today.  My sense is that they wanted me gone because I pushed the issue of them being responsible for my smashed up bike beyond their comfort level, i.e. I wasn’t going to be told that it was my fault.  Definitely a bad scene between me and ownership at this point.  Contemplated simply quitting outright, but thought the better of it.  Although I have to say, a few more days of the invisible employee treatment and maybe I’ll just say screw this.  I also got my police report today.  So, maybe this thing can get resolved quickly and I can get on with my life.  Chance of that happening: 7%.  Got home at 6:22 pm.  With bike I would have made it at 5:35 pm.

All of this contentiousness and animosity has clouded up my vision of what life will be like when I start the “new job.”  I keep thinking about how Proust is always getting mad at habit, and how important it is to break with it.  Part of my mixed feelings I think comes from moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar and all of the re-orienting that will take.  O well.  Since I’ll be on public transportation a lot again, maybe I can get back to finishing ISOLT again.