Year: 2001

A woman in Albuquerque collapsed while testifying in the murder trial of her son’s alleged killer, she died shortly after. It turns out that one of the men who was recently charged with committing fraud in the McDonald’s Monopoly contests had donated a game piece worth one million dollars to a children’s hospital. The U.S. bombed Iraq. The U.S. postal service plans to raise the cost of stamps again next year. A typhoon hit Tokyo, killing five people. An Australian court ordered immigration officials to allow a shipload of Indonesian refugees into the country. Amazon.com and Target announced a strategic alliance. The bankrupt company that manufactures Schwinn bicycles was auctioned to one of its competitors. The third Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire album is really something.

After the last post I remembered this from an old version of this site. I don’t remember what triggered it.

It requires just as much energy to maintain my composure as it does to stop functioning. I assume this applies to other people & that that’s the reason we don’t crumble everytime the ground shifts. It’s almost impossible to hit rock bottom, and that’s just too bad. I’d like to be completely down for the count once every couple of years or so – and I’d like to be able to have minor lapses once or twice a month.

Everytime there’s a change, I hesitate & listen for the world to spin off its axis.

In my world, when someone leaves their job, production will shut down for a few hours while everyone says: “What now?” When world events become unbearable, everyone will wander out into the streets and blink their eyes at the blinding light of the sun (the smokers will take advantage of the situation by bumming cigarettes off of each other; staring at their shoes.)

It’s so easy to swap out the rulers we’re using to measure our returns that it’s difficult to get a score that results in something as low as a draw. You & me, we’re both undefeated. We have bottomless souls. (4/22/00)

It took awhile for the news of the hijackings and attacks to sink in. I got up late and I listened to NPR – not hearing the words. I dialed-up, checked my email, and launched a browser. I had a message from Fiona in the UK, “All i can say is that we are completley devastated over here, so I can hardly begin to imagine how you and your country are feeling at this moment.” Along the bottom of the usually bare Google front page, my browser’s default page, there was a list of news sources whose servers weren’t overwhelmed. I started listening intently to the radio and clicked through to Yahoo’s newspage.

All I wanted to do after absorbing the general shape of the events of this morning was just stop and shut down. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to answer email or get into something on instant messenger.

I sat and stared at the radio. Then I realized that I could numb myself with the TV news coverage. I watched Peter Jennings – he seemed to be giddy about covering another huge event. He compared it to the Challenger explosion. A bit more prepared, I took a couple of peeks at blog reactions and fueled myself with a couple of cups of tea. Then I decided to face the world, opened my door and jumped, startled, as a neighbor walked by.

I walked timidly through my neighborhood, looked at familiar faces and tried to figure out if they were thinking about these things too. I went downtown. Half of the stores were closed and traffic was light. Pablo stood alone on his corner with his “Seattle police are communist. Jesus loves you.” sign. He was conserving his voice, only yelling when a car went by. I wondered if he knew what had happened.

I had a sandwich at Three Girls, sitting among the tourists. Basically I wandered around for another hour and avoided looking anyone in the eye. I ended up back here at Vivace where I finally shook the trance I’d been in. What in the world am I doing?

I came home and poked around on the web some more. There was an email from Chris, light and jaded: “What’s the news from yer end…RE: massive disaster today”. Doesn’t she know that the world is coming to an end? Then there she was on instant messenger, I could ask her myself. I was put off a bit by our conversation, something left me cold (though when I mentioned a group of people “preying” in a park – she did point out my Freudian slip). Maybe it was just a misunderstanding. She signed-off shortly after.

A bit later Fiona came online. It would have been after midnight her time. She couldn’t sleep. We seemed to be in a similar frame of mind, we sat there repeating how stunned we were – how horrible. We agreed that somehow things are different from now on. I don’t think I can go on with some of my more adolescent attitudes, my undercurrent of negativity.

Funny how this is all about me – how will I react to the world now. But that’s really what it will have to boil down to for any of us.

A few notes about the tactile experience of reading my copy of A Sort of Life by Graham Greene:

Greene described particularly adventurous events as “Buchan-like”.

In the upper right hand corner of my copy a previous owner has written his name, “Ross Jones”. On the same page, placed carefully between the Los Angeles Times and Time review excerpts, there’s a pink and white file folder label. Typewritten on the file folder label is, “February 21, 1973 Bellevue, Washington”.

Used as a bookmark inside was a bank receipt for a deposit of $515.13 on May 1 1973 into a checking account at the Bellevue branch of Seattle-First National Bank.

There were a few more typos in the book than one would expect from a book published pre-spellcheck. Among them was “kidnaper”. I notice the same misspelling on the same day in one of the Gasoline Alley strips that appear in the new Drawn & Quarterly.

The man who sold me my digital camera had the posture of the Jack Lemmon character in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Another customer was paying for his top of the line unit at the same time that we went over to the cash register to finish up my transaction, my salesman maneuvered awkwardly around the other man’s salesman. The second salesman confidently shook his customers hand, passed him his double-bagged box, gave him his card (“I’m the manager.”) and invited him to drop his camera in a sink – they’ll replace it with no questions.

The customer headed out. As the manager (Kevin Spacey in Glengarry Glen Ross) walked away and I signed the credit card slip, my salesman turned toward the manager and said, “Thanks for doing that.”

The salesman saw me notice and confided that, “I was working on that guy and thought I was losing him. But my manager stepped in and closed it for me.”

I nodded my head and said, “Coffee is for closers.” He looked at me quizzically. Handing me my bag, he remembered himself, “Keep the packaging. You can bring it back anytime in the next 30 days and return it for an upgrade.”

My friend Jessica is doing what I merely dare myself to do. She quit her job, is selling all but a couple of boxes of her belongings, flying down to San Francisco, and taking the Green Tortoise to New York where she’s moving in with cousins.

Justin writes about vending machines here and here. My thoughts on the subject:

When you put money in those spiral-powered vending machines you’re not buying candy, so much as you are gambling for the chance of getting candy. Sometimes it pays out, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it pays out particularly well. The odds are good anyway, compared to slot-machines.

At the Amazon warehouse I was particularly good at shaking loose refreshments that were barely being held by the mighty spirals. Usually I only attempted this when the machine hadn’t paid out on my coins, though there were others who would periodically shake it down just to see what they could get. It was my opinion that the spirals should have been rotated an extra 45 degrees to increase the machine’s reliability.

Years ago, at another job, there was one Coke machine that would often offer up 2 cans if you hit the button twice quickly. I was pretty good at getting the second can and would always give it to whoever else was in the break room.

Once while waiting for someone in the lobby of a hostel in Amsterdam. I put a guilder into a machine, and selected my candy, the spiral rotated, and the package didn’t drop. I restrained myself, thinking it would be fairly ugly-American to beat up on a Dutch vending machine. I went back to my seat and waited for my friend, sulking.

I finished up Huntingtower this morning and then headed off for lunch at the Green Cat. The place was packed and it took awhile to get my salad. When it finally arrived I scarfed most of it down and rushed off to Bumbershoot. I headed across Seattle Center and got in line for the Sarah Vowell and Dave Eggers reading. The long line folded in on itself several times. I didn’t get in but stood in line for a bit, hoping enough people would leave early and I’d be let in. It wasn’t looking good, so I split.

There were a couple of bands I wanted to see, the shows were still a couple of hours away. I didn’t have the patience to deal with the crowds, so I thought I’d browse at Titlewave Books a bit – I’d like to pick up some more John Buchan and Graham Greene, and have a cup of tea somewhere. Titlewave was closed. Tower Books was out of business. And I couldn’t think of any other bookstores in the neighborhood.

I sat outside Uptown Espresso with a chai and the miscellaneus bits of different newspapers that I’d scraped together. I considered the generic concert-in-a-box nature of Bumbershoot shows and the fact that both of the bands that I wanted to see were local – meaning they probably play a show here at least once a month – and decided to forget about Bumbershoot.

I walked up to Pike Place Market to check for some Buchan and Graham at the bookstores there, but had no luck.

On a whim I wandered into a little thrift store that looked like it specialized in dust. I chatted with the little old lady. (What kind of stuff do you collect? Do you want to look at baseball cards?” “Don’t go back there.”) I ruffled through a little stack of comics. It was an interesting little collection of odd ’50s and ’60s non-superhero fare. I skimmed through a no-name Mad imitation, remembering that I’d read recently that Jack Davis had worked on a couple of those things, but this wasn’t one of them. The next few were Road Runner books or something. Then there was a Dell published Mad rip-off, Yak Yak. And, speak of the devil, it had a Jack Davis cover. I flipped through the book and every page was by Davis! And at the bottom of the stack, what do you think I found? An issue of Kurtzman’s own Humbug!

The day is looking up, I’ll read the comics later. And I’ll go over to Twice Sold Tales, where I know they have some more Buchan and the Graham Greene autobiography.

After seeing The Crimson Rivers and listening to the Orson Welles production of The Thirty-Nine Steps, I felt compelled to seek out a book in the thriller/adventure genre. Specifically I went looking for a Penguin collection of the John Buchan‘s Richard Hannay novels (of which The Thirty-Nine Steps is one) that I’ve seen before.

I didn’t find it, so I picked up Buchan’s Huntingtower. I’m only a few chapters into it, but I’m already bowled over by it (despite the stuffy & somehow dismissive introduction and the latter-day editor’s intrusive footnotes* that pollute this Oxford U. Press edition).

I cringe to a degree when the main character’s attitudes match some of my own tics. It’s really funny. Regarding his book collection: “He had a liking for small volumes – things he could stuff into his pocket in that sudden journey which he loved to contemplate. . . . Only he had never taken it.” Then a couple of days into his retirement, he decides to finally take that holiday. Only after carefully selecting a book to take with him does he think to contemplate what his destination should be. To make an allusion to a book I’ve set aside once again, he’s a bit Quixotic.

McCunn, the main character, gets into a conversation at one point with a jaded young writer wannabe who is filled with half-baked half-formed ideas. I smile as these characters, both of whom seem to mirror conflicting aspects of my own personality, talk. One, slowly building a case against the older. The other, good naturedly feeling his way through the discussion before arriving at his conclusions about the man sitting across from him.

*intrusive footnotes – I know what a “safety razor” is, thank you very much.