Stuck.

I'm in Little Rock again. It's all overcast skies and chilly weather here, genuinely deciduous flora (as opposed to New Orleans), and an amazing buffet of old friends and good conversations. I have a bad cold that's preventing me from doing much this morning besides sit inside my friend Jared's house, pal around with a cute dog, and try to write.

Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time doing that either (the writing), and I'm unclear why. I don't know about the rest of you, but lately I feel there's this strangling vine of narcissism that's grown wild over the facade of my mind and largely obscured the outside world from my view. The vine has always been present to varying degrees, but it's grown more and more voluminous over time. Nowadays, its mirrored fronds block virtually all of the light outside. It's a good thing to be aware of the room you live in, but the main focus has to be on the view from the window or else you'll start to go crazy. I'm trying to write, and the only thing I can talk about is me, me, me. Like right now. Bad news.

Home for the Holidays

So I come back to the old blogstead in the hopes of reclaiming something else in life that isn't my job, and I try to think of something to throw out there. Anything. Maybe I could talk about a funny craigslist ad. Maybe I could do the thing where I dwell on an insignificant piece of personal minutia or passing faux pas and pretend like I think it's really important. Maybe I could concoct a zany scenario in which Kim Jong-il's heart failure happened while we were having sex or something, hell, everybody, I don't KNOW. Anything.

Any topic I try to write about makes me feel like a washed up prop comic whipping out oversized rolls of toilet paper and various jolly hats to a stoney-faced crowd fresh off the casino buffet, my rigor mortis grin pleading for forced laughs with the unhinged desperation of a famine victim

It's hard to start writing on a blog again after a long absence. Well, it's hard to write anything after not doing so for awhile, but a blog is especially susceptible to inertia. I think that's because the only unique redeeming quality inherent to the medium lies in its property of developing a relationship through slow, real-time accrual. Whatever premeditation there may be at the outset of the project is soon subsumed into the subtle patterns that develop post-by-post. Taken over time, it's maybe an opportunity for a more unfiltered type of self-expression than any other writing. The posts themselves may be carefully edited for this or that purpose, but (like in conversation) you can't keep your actual self from showing up in the interstices. With each post and each comment, the rhythm of something organic develops, and it's this organic quality that gives the form any hope of being interesting.

But a blog is always less a fully differentiated, wriggling eukaryote than it is a haphazardly sprawled colony of vaguely interdependent cells. The resulting shape is lumpy, awkward, and grossly asymmetrical, and if not continually shoved along by one post and then another and another it tends to get lodged in the divots and crannies of the work week. Look out along the road and see them stretching on for miles, the dead hulks of blogs perfectly preserved, placid, and mired to the ground as intractably as glacial boulders.

What would you like to know? Give me a topic and I'll go with it.

Nostalgia for July

I wrote this almost four months ago, but then everything in my life ground to a fairly immediate halt except for working and feeling sorry for myself. The references no longer make sense even to me and this blog has gone all cobwebby anyway, but I'm going to post it still. It's for the sake of the record, because this is how I spent my July:


July was a mixed month all the way around.


Thirty one days packed with drama and action.


We moved houses -- only about five miles away, but it seems like a different city. There was no Penske Party. I guess you could call it a UHauliday, but let's show some restraint.


We gained a pair of exceptionally high-quality roommates and lost them within the month (a preplanned move, but a damn shame nonetheless).


There was a wedding. At the reception, the bride and groom requested the guests each draw cute pictures to mark the occasion. Staggering around, weighted by gluttony and vice, bloated to the gills with miniature quiches and free drinks, I defaced the heartfelt drawing done by my friend's wife with a crayon picture of a troll.


I hung out with Arkansas royalty. It was my immense privilege, in fact, to be stuck in interstate traffic with Arkansas Royalty while she banged out songs on a miniature guitar and a kazoo.


I visited Ravendon, which is a tiny town home to an old high school friend of mine. I had always pictured Ravendon as a steep-walled chasm of dense, poisonous vapors, strewn with charred human skulls and the blasted remains of long-dead trees. It turned out to be a beautiful place filled with forests, hills, and fat little dogs. Nonetheless, I got covered in seed ticks.


There was a death.


I rode a train with a horde of goddamned Christian teenagers on their way to a goddamned "mission trip" to New Orleans.


I discovered an old friend switched sexual orientations several years ago (it's a semi-secret, so I'll let your respective imaginations run wild with this one).


In the towering shadow of high tension power lines, I picked swelling heaps of sweet grain from a patch of experimental corn at the hushed invitation of a rogue agronomist.


I introduced my mother to YouTube videos, to her endless delight.


At a wonderful BBQ put on by people who care about my feelings, I was savaged by ants out to ruin my friendships.


I got a real job again at a school.


The US Government decided to set itself on fire in protest of its policies.


The space shuttle program ended.


Arkansas still feels like home. I miss it.

McSweeney's

Sometimes I really like the nonsense words given to me by Blogger's human verification (just now "woozess") and it suddenly occurred to me to keep a running list of the ones I liked the most. But then I realized that I'll bet McSweeney's has probably done this at some point -- I mean, it's a virtual certainty, right? -- and now not only do I not want to make my list but I'm deeply annoyed that the idea occurred to me at all. It's been a pretty rough last four minutes, guys.

Home

I'm coming back to Arkansas this weekend for yet another wedding. It's now been two full years since I've lived there and we have no plans to move back soon, so returning to the Original Bear State feels a little more like a visit and a little less like a homecoming each time. I don't like that at all.

But, I will hopefully be seeing some of you soon!

Why is this the top Google result for "home"?

Pancake Day

The move is over and done with and my car has now been towed to a local garage after I finally admitted to myself that a week’s worth of DIY attempts to diagnose and fix its problems were about as effective and well-informed as me trying to treat a tuberculosis patient by pouring Pepto Bismal on his feet. My part time summer work has shrank to about 2.5 hours per day, at least for the moment. Consequently, I have time to spend again and that's a good thing because I have oh so many important things to discuss here on Adult Concerns: death, sex, God, law, war, love, breakfast, power, despair, community, liberty, technology, beauty, etc. I'll use a random number generator to decide which of the above topics to discuss. And it looks like it's going to be...breakfast.

For many years, I had this preferred breakfast that was defined very rigidly. No matter how many times I made it for myself, it never failed to be a delicious treat that I enjoyed to the utmost. I didn’t eat it every day or even most days, and there was still plenty of room in my life for other breakfasts, but this was definitely my breakfast. Though I never named it, I grew to think of it as a small part of my identity. I believe the habit started sometime around 2005 and continued until well into 2009, after which I abruptly started to find it uninteresting.

I was reminded of my breakfast recently when I read AZ's post about "Egg Horn Muffins". My breakfast was very similar, though much less classy. I'll call it English Muffins South Sudan in honor of the world's newest nation as of last weekend:

English Muffins South Sudan

• 2 large eggs
• One split English muffin
• 1 T Butter (or olive oil)
• Sharp cheddar cheese
• Ketchup, vinegar based hot sauce (like Tabasco), coarse ground black pepper, salt

Top the muffin halves with a medium slice of cheddar cheese and toast in a toaster oven until the muffin is just beginning to brown and the cheese is thoroughly melted but not seared. Meanwhile, fry the eggs over medium (in the oil). This is the crucial part -- they need to be truly over medium, meaning the white is entirely cooked through and is beginning to crisp slightly around the edges while the yolk is just beginning to solidify but is not broken. The key is having the pan at the right medium-hot temperature and keeping it there throughout the cooking process, and it takes some practice.

Slide one egg on top of each muffin half and drizzle with disgusting tendrils of gloppy ketchup (preferably from a ¾ empty plastic bottle with lots of crusty crimson residue around the spout), pallid spurts of cheap hot sauce, and a pinch of hypertension-inducing salt. Coarsely grind plenty of black pepper over the whole thing and there you are.

Eggs, cheese, English muffins, and the kind of debased, blunt-edged seasonings that bars use to stimulate the cigarette-seared palates of drunks. It’s barely even a recipe, but oh I loved it. In texture and taste, it was perfect -- the egg and cheese and muffin rich and creamy yet toothsome, the ketchup and hot sauce and pepper spiking it through with just enough tang and heat…delicious. I made it for myself wherever I went, and then one day it became boring to me.


Where did I get English Muffins South Sudan? No particular place. It evolved out of endless breakfast experiments, but once it achieved its ideal form it remained static for years. Like the cockroach, it simply had no need to evolve further past a certain point. Oh, mutations did occur -- I'd add onions and herbs, experiment with the cheeses and sauces, but nothing did the trick like the precise formula above. So why did it captivate me for such a long time and then suddenly lose its appeal? This I don’t know. Why do you sometimes listen to an album forty times in the space of a few months, after which it falls by the wayside? I think it's interesting to think about the idea of taste and preference using the language of memes. The word "meme" has in recent years been popularized to mean something like what this very sad website says -- "ideas that people can’t help sharing with their friends" -- but it's worth remembering the pre-cat-macro conceptualization of what a meme is, because it's much broader and more interesting. Memes are defined (by Wikipedia (of course)) as ideas, behaviors, and styles that spread from person to person. We can think of such intangibles as analogous to organisms, because like organisms they are subject to Darwinian pressures that will cause them to either change or go extinct based on their ability to adapt to their environment (meaning society). A meme can be as large as "democracy" or "Christianity" or as small as "track lighting" or "flat cap".

But what about how an idea, opinion, or taste evolves within the internal mental environment of your own head? If we conceptualize the individual mind (rather than society) as an ecosystem, we can imagine how there would also be evolutionary forces at work between different mental and emotional objects within the diverse biomes of our consciousness and subconscious. Everything from “human beings are inherently vested with certain rights because they are human” to "I want Rick Santorum to be the President of the United States”, from "I realize my husband is cheating on me with the mail lady" to "delicious English Muffins topped with melted cheese and fried eggs!", could be seen as such. Of course, some of these organisms play a more visible role in their ecosystems than others but maybe their endlessly diverse forms and functions abide by universal rules. After all, it’s the discovery and description of such rules that allows us to conceptualize elephants and mushrooms and extremophiles as part of the same vast system of life. (Note: When I was first writing this, I thought it was an original idea, but Wikipedia makes mention of some researchers classifying memes as "i-memes" and "e-memes", meaning internal and external, though it doesn't explain further.)

In the biological world, evolutionary pressures are largely driven by shifts in dependencies between species. For example, an evolved resistance to an intestinal parasite might give a species of beetle an edge over its competitors, thus expanding the size of its population and killing a larger number of the plants on which it feeds while also providing increased nutrition for certain species of birds well suited to feed on the insects, and so on. Over enough time, countless numbers of small shifts transform entire ecosystems into an unrecognizably altered world with a wholly different set of pressures. No matter how well-adapted, no species is capable of surviving in an unchanged form forever, and revolutionary collapses frequently take place on all scales of the biological world. The stock of the trilobites or the dinosaurs soars high for millions and millions of years, and then one day crashes. Sometimes it’s a Permian or K-T style catastrophe, but sometimes it’s just…obsolescence.

I believe this is what happened with my breakfast. Whatever combination of qualities precipitated its rise within the mysterious internal swamps of personal taste and sensory preference – whatever gave it its evolutionary edge – the environment it lived within shifted in a way that eventually rendered it less well adapted. I don’t know if there’s more than can be said on the explicability of taste than just that – that change happens from enigmatic quarters. There is a mechanism in there somewhere, but can it be examined? I do know that around the same time I lost interest in English Muffins South Sudan, I picked up an entirely different breakfast habit – a bowl of plain rolled oats microwaved with a pinch of salt and a generous handful of raisins. Quick, easy, and pennies to make, its straight-faced blandness always makes me feel like I’m going to try to get something accomplished today, no matter how many countless times I’ve proven myself wrong in the hours that follow. This is my default breakfast today. Meaning? I don’t know, but I think I’m out of steam with this idea.

* * *

This morning, I am trying a new breakfast cereal that is tailor made for an adult such as myself. I found it at Hong Kong Market yesterday and felt immediately drawn to it. Instant Cereal for Adults contains the following ingredients: barley, oats, whole wheat, black sesame, buckwheat, wheat germ, black bean, green bean, black rice, wheat flake, cowpea, lotus seed, green pea, fox nut, pine nut, yam, red bean, lily bulb, almond, pupkin seed, fructus lycii, carrot, colza seed, creamer, shugar, gingko nuts, black dates, and oligofructose (inulin). Cereal don't get any more Adult than that, folks. I'm going to make some right now.

* * *

Ok, I made some and ate it! It wasn't bad at all and was remarkably filling. It comes in these little self-contained sachets, so if you'd like some let me know and I'll send you one. The back says that, "it is the best nutritious supplement for adult or vegetarian."

* * *

Perhaps from the subject line of this post you might have thought that I was going to talk about pancakes. Well, you were wrong (but that's ok -- we all are sometimes). In the course of my research, I discovered that Fat Tuesday -- Mardi Gras -- is also sometimes called Pancake Day! You can read about it here. All I have to say is, while I share Alex's enthusiasm for Newfoundland, nobody better put a nail in my damn pancake if and when I visit.

* * *

Now then. What do YOU like for breakfast?

Troubles

Little to no blog activity for the next seven days. Time travelers from the future have called me away to an unnamed village in a certain African country where a pair of girl twins has just been born upon whom the future of the human species -- and indeed all life in this galaxy -- depends. Also, my car isn't running, I've got a part time job, and we're moving houses this weekend. So, see you soon!

Your Basic Hat

It is summer and so I need a hat. But what kind of hat?

The ballcap is the default hat. I like wearing a ballcap nowadays, but I used to feel very self-conscious in one. The reason was that when I was younger I felt that they made me look like a teenage Japanese baseball enthusiast -- not that there's anything wrong with being a teenage Japanese baseball enthusiast, but growing up timid and insecure in rural Arkansas I tended to avoid anything that drew attention to me being not quite white. When I went to college, I learned that being not quite white is sometimes cool and, when executed in a non-threatening way, can often serve as a free supplement to your public persona in the neverending struggle to differentiate your personal brand in the depleted soil of the overcrowded cultural marketplace, BUT I still thought I looked stupid in a ballcap. At some point this changed, either due to my tastes or my face...but it's still hard to find the right one.

I would sometimes wear one of those flat caps in college, much as Brad Pitt is doing in this image. But I eventually had to stop because I wasn't sure what message they send to people other than "I'm trying to say something about myself but I'm not sure what it is." That, and I looked like a fucking tool when I wore one. Tell me: does or does not wearing one of those caps make you look like a tool [if you are under age 55]? The odd thing is that to me they don't evoke any particular kind of tool -- on the contrary, I have seen a bafflingly wide range of tools wearing such caps, from a yuppie frolicking in a park to a wannabe intellectual with scruffy facial hair reading in a coffee shop to a bobbling-headed overweight middle-aged guy playing bass in a bar band and wearing sunglasses at 11 PM. But the hat binds them together, does it not? What is up with this? Is this indicative of some sort of meta-type that exists beyond the scope of our everyday understanding of types? Might other types of this kind exist all around us and point to the true nature of our social/cultural reality? Much like the Michelson-Morley experiment, could this seemingly trivial flat cap question lead to a revolution in the way we categorize people and partition pop cultural phenomenon?

I really want to get some feedback about what is up with flat cap guys, so please respond.

By the way, did you know that a flat cap may also be called Bunnet, Sixpence, Scally Cap, Ivy Cap, Golf Cap, Derby Cap, Irish Cap, Tweed Cap, Salmon Hat, UNION Cap, Dai Cap, Jeff Cap, Windsor Cap, Touring Cap, Driving Cap, Skid Cap, or Smack Hat? I didn't, but Wikipedia did. (The best part about that page is that there is a section called "Current Situation".) Also, the general Wikipedia Hat page is really one of the best Wikipedia offerings I've came across in a long time. There's so many hats there whose names I didn't know, as well as hat names whose appearance I had never linked with the word. I learned a lot! Maybe my knowledge of this is unusually poor, though. Time for a quiz. Let's see if you can match the person with the hat:

People:	Hats:
Russian citizen Chef Contemporary cutesy-ironic burlesque dancer Zapatista Santa Claus Sherlock Holmes Military general circa 1800 Military general circa 2011	Deerstalker Balaclava Bicorne Ushanka Peaked cap Fascinator Toque Santa Hat

Click here to check your answers and win a prize!! Win the prize by posting your score in the comments below, and BE HONEST. Your prize will likely be a hat.

Well, this wasn't where I intended to take this post at all. The point was that this is the ballcap I bought and I feel ok about it. It is nothing to write home about.

A Medical Mystery: The Final Chapter

Upon examining my MRI, Dr. Harold Stokes said my hand now looked normal and that he saw no problems. He said he doesn't know why I lost bone density to begin with, nor did he seem to particularly care. "Looks like you fixed the problem!" he said.

But I have not. The problem remains: I have a chronic pain in my hand that's been steadily growing worse for the past two years. Out of habitual passivity, I guess, I accepted his undiagnosis with little more than dazed stares and a whimper of "but...but it's been hurting for years...hurts a lot..." I asked him a string of passive and desperate questions, trying to get some hint of what to do next about this problem but all he would say was, "call me if it gets worse" in a friendly, grandfatherly voice that made it clear he wanted me to leave and made me yearn to smack him in the face and call for a Centurion to drag him away. The three attractive residents that were accompanying him today began to wander out of the examination room, bored. Case closed, considering my insurance is going to lapse again in another month. This is why I've never liked medical dramas.

What do you do if a doctor tells you you're well and you're not?

Oh man math

Everybody, there is some exciting stuff happening right now at I Want Blog Too. I am going to learn some abstract algebra from a bona fide math PhD candidate, and you can too! I don't understand what "abstract algebra" even means (Alex's definition said something about "structures" and "operations" which I guess means we'll be assembling a lot of toothpick and gumdrop bridges and playing dumb party games with tweezers) but I am very excited. Right now we're just on sets, which are as fun and digestible as a candy bar. Come on over.

The idea behind this is to experiment with making math more like a creative, energizing game of puzzle-solving (which it is inherently) and less like an absurdly pointless chore. I have some strong feelings about this personally, because I'm sort of a latecomer to the idea that math is beautiful and exciting. I was a decent student in my high school math classes, but just due to memorization and drill. I found it tedious and intimidating. It wasn't until I started tutoring teenage kids while in college and later that I had to really get involved with math problems on a creative level. Unexpectedly, once I developed some agency over math, I started to love it...enough so that I chose to make it my subject as a teacher.

I encourage you to read Alex's post about this project and then join in. You can always stop if you get too busy or if you get bored or irritated, though I hope you will persevere like I might possibly.

A medical mystery, part 2

The MRI? It was a pretty good experience, I guess. I attribute this largely to the MRI tech, who was a large man of extraordinarily good humor and perhaps of Polynesian descent (just a guess). As he cheerfully readied my pillow, merrily adjusted the machine, and jocundly fitted me with earplugs, he plied me with ease-inducing yet non-intrusive small talk. He was also pleased to explain -- in remarkably concise terms, I thought -- just how the machine worked. Let me try to pass on that explanation, based on this conversation and skimming the Wikipedia article as a follow up. As I understand it, the MRI machine generates a powerful magnetic field that causes the nuclei of all the hydrogen atoms in our bodies to align themselves in a certain way. (The majority of the atoms in our molecular makeup are hydrogen, which makes sense if you think about it.) Then, another magnetic field is applied to the body at the same time, which causes the hydrogen nuclei to realign themselves in a different direction, in the process absorbing a tiny bit of energy from the second field.

The second field is then turned off, which causes the nuclei to revert back to their original aligned position. Analogy: think of introducing and removing the second field as being like pushing the plastic bristles of a hairbrush down with your hand and then letting go. When this happens (when they snap back upright, so to speak) the nuclei release the bit of energy that had held them back. This energy released is in the form of an electromagnetic wave and its release is detected by the imaging device.

However, the hydrogen atomic nuclei within different types of tissue revert back to their original aligned position at different speeds. Thus, the energy is released at different rates, depending on the molecular makeup of the body stuff in question; bone will differ from muscle, for example. That difference in the rate of energy release is measurable, which allows the imaging device to distinguish between different types of tissue in the cross section of the body it is targeting. These differences, when combined with data concerning position, combine to create an image. At least, that's how I understand it. Isn't that incredible?

Anyway. So I lay face down on this big tray with my injured hand outstretched in front of me and held immobile in a sort of comfortable, cushioned clamp. As the tray slowly whirred forward into the tube, the MRI tech told me that the process could take anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes. "Just go to sleep if you can, man," he said helpfully. "I mean, I'm so used to doing it by this point I fall asleep right away in one of those things." This was the last thing I heard before the scan began, so I had lots of time to think about it while I lay down in the machine, listening to its raspy, oscillating whumps through my earplugs. Wait, why would an MRI tech be more used to being in an MRI machine than anyone else? Are he and the other techs MRIing themselves on slow days for the fuck of it? I could see it happening. It's a slippery slope. Sprained my ankle playing basketball yesterday. At least I think it's sprained -- oh hell, there's an MRI machine right here that I know how to operate, might as well check it out and see. Weeks pass. This sore throat just won't go away, and I'm running low on lozenges. Ho ho, throat, let's see what Mr. MRI has to say about you! And before long: See, I told you. You really can see the difference right here, in the duodenum -- the all beef franks totally digest differently than the turkey dogs. I'm worried about him.

Has anyone ever had an MRI done? Also, is there anyone who knows more about this topic than me who can tell me whether this description is correct?

A medical mystery

Since I am currently experiencing a rare spasm of health insurance, I just had an MRI done on my mysteriously injured hand. I have had chronic pain in my left hand -- specifically, in the little finger -- for about two years now, but during most of that time I've been uninsured. I did go to a free clinic in Durham once for this malady, but I could tell the doctor found me suspicious; all I got for my troubles and twenty bucks was the chance to watch coughing Latino children climb over chairs in the waiting room for two hours and a one sentence letter received in the mail a few weeks later: The X-ray of your hand was normal. The part written in invisible ink said, "...so at least come up with a plausible sounding excuse the next time you try to scam us into writing a hydrocodone prescription."

But it wasn't a scam. Normal X-ray or not, the pain has gotten worse over time. I don't remember exactly when it started, because it was a very gradual process: over months, a sensation developed gradually until it crossed some threshold and became pain. It comes and goes -- sometimes it's barely noticeable, sometimes it's unbearable. It's especially bad whenever there's a sharp temperature decrease, or when I jar it a certain way (thus utterly dashing my Winter Olympics 2014 dreams). So I was pretty thrilled when I finally was able to visit Dr. Harold Stokes, hand specialist of LSU Health. Dr. Stokes must be something special, because the two times I've seen him now he was being followed by several residents. Perhaps the residents are excited about the same thing that excites me about Dr. Stokes, which is that with a little squinting and imagination, he's not too far off from Doc Cottle of Battlestar Galactica! See if you agree. Yes, he's less craggy and certainly seems in a much better mood than Doc Cottle usually does, but then again -- with all due respect -- the problems he deals with probably cause significantly less stress. I'm considering bringing a cigarette next visit and seeing if he'd be willing to pose for a picture. Or is this in bad taste? In this day and age, I feel like asking a doctor to pretend to smoke a cigarette is sort of like asking a priest if he'd scrawl a pentagram on his frock for laughs. NOTE: I'm creeping my way through the third season right now, so no spoilers in the comments please.

But although he doesn't have Laura Roslin's life in his hands, Dr. Stokes does have my hand in his hands, metaphorically speaking and for a brief instance literally. After an initial examination and some very thorough X-rays, he said the following into his handheld voice recorder: "no restriction in range of movement. No outward sign of injury. However, X-rays reveal significant osteopenia in the middle phalanges." He turned to one of the residents. "Any idea what this is?" he asked. "No," she said. "I don't know either," he muttered, glancing again at my hand with mild interest. "We need an MRI."

I initially started this post with the intent of talking about the MRI itself, but now I have to go -- which means this one is going to be a CLIFFHANGER!!

Business Men

There are at least two perfectly viable coffee shops within a five minute walk from my house…and that’s not including the one that’s a 30 second walk from my house. And yet, today I wanted something new and so I headed north into the New Orleans Central Business District to search for new terrain. It was a bad idea. I ended up at a PJs Coffee outlet (a local chain) that I haven’t been to since I first stumbled into it on a chilly January afternoon a year and a half ago when I was visiting the city to interview for my ill-fated job. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now. The reason is that it’s filled with Business Men.

I don’t like the business class. Let’s be clear on the specific delineation here -- I’m not talking about capitalists, or the rich, or the upper middle class, or yuppies, or conservatives. Although there is obviously a good deal of overlap between all of those categories and the business class (and although there is most certainly plenty to say about each of them as well), I am specifically talking about the genus of businesspeople and legal professionals who inhabit the office buildings of urban centers and who meet up at coffee shops to hash things out. I am not making an ethical or rational argument here. I’m just looking at them, and thinking about how I don’t like them.

I am talking about men with leatherbound portfolios with small pockets or straps for pens and things, and yellow pads or folders filled with essential documents. About what? About SOMETHING, for God’s sake, something important. These are men dressed along a spectrum – some with wingtips, some with sneakers; some in jeans and some in slacks – but nonetheless all neatly put together, all dressed for success. These are men with clean, hefty, hairy fingers engirded with a glinting wedding band or a garish class ring – just the right dollop of tacky sheen to lend a whisper of masculine sleaze to the well-groomedness. These are men who go to gyms. Some may commute by bike. These are men who continually fondle their technology devices, devices which are continually filtering down to the rest of us over time (cell phone, laptop, smart phone, etc) in the same pattern as the technology is adopted by them – at first as power totem and later as indispensable life support system.

These men are talking to each other and smiling. They are nodding their heads and lowering their voices. They know what they need to say, and they’re saying it. They have glistening, attentive eyes locked in steady contact with one another (“I am here in the moment; I am listening to you and I am intrigued with your proposed goods or services!”) as they lean purposefully forward over their small tables towards one another, discussing prospects. These men call the shots, or at least they act like they think they call the shots. There are no women in here, except for the baristas. But what are they, compared to Business Men?

One just bumped my chair quite violently as he walked past, talking on his phone! He didn’t apologize, and in the bumping process his glasses fell out of his trousers pocket unnoticed. I tracked him down and returned them, and he gave me a brusque “Thank you” without looking at me, then walked out the door. Imagine – a Business Man saying “Thank you” to a guy like me! (It actually was very exciting for me, because I got to really savor the self-righteous memory of my abused gallantry when I sat back down to write this.)

Men like this are easy to dislike and easy to mock. Men like this are convenient because they provide a foil for people like me, which is to say people who have done a bad job of establishing even the slightest semblance of personal financial security. I’m sure some of them are ok. I would even concede it’s possible that they possess the same basic ratio of “ok people” to “not ok people” as the rest of us, as I have often discovered this to be the case among various groups of people among whom I at first assumed the ratio would be higher or lower. What do you all think?

Here, I'll try to write about food.

Last night we made a big dinner that included fried tofu spring rolls, a Thai red curry, and this bastardized pad thai recipe from my favorite cookbook that uses such exotic condiments of the sultry orient as Domino brown sugar and Hunts ketchup. The recipe is reproduced here. There were homemade oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies afterwards. (When Kaitlin and I cook Thai food in our house, we have a little tradition of ending the meal with a dessert from Heartland America to symbolize the hope that the West will one day establish full cultural hegemony over Thailand, thus avenging the affront to European colonial ambitions in Southeast Asia constituted by Siam's independence during that era.)

Anyway. Despite the inauthenticity of the above pad thai recipe, it's a pretty fantastic dish that I am hereby recommending to you. It combines three excellent vegetarian protein sources that can be somewhat boring on their own -- eggs, peanuts, and mung bean sprouts -- into a coherent stir fry of noodles and vegetables that's flavorful and rich and extremely filling without being heavy or greasy. I've tried making more traditional renderings of pad thai with tamarind paste and whatnot, but I've yet to find one that comes out as good as this...in my opinion. Arguably that's because I'm an American and thus my diabetes-prone palate is calling out "I LIKE KETCHUP GIMME MORE KETCHUP". This may be true, but I think it's also because it's a great recipe that just works.

Because I'm not a vegetarian, I usually substitute fish sauce for the soy sauce in the recipe (the original cookbook recommends this). You should do this, too, even if you've smelled fish sauce before and thought it was disgusting. You're not wrong -- it IS disgusting. But it's also amazing. Fish sauce is one of those alchemical ingredients that's stomach-turning in its concentrated form but that when used in just the right way and in the right proportions ends up cementing and centering flavor in an way that imparts the very essence of certain foods (much like nutmeg or asafoetida)*. And apparently, it is made by fermenting fish in brine until they literally dissolve. Which makes me wonder -- can this be done with other creatures besides fish? Could we make a fermented chicken or pork sauce that's made of dissolved animal flesh and that would keep at room temperature? I'm assuming that if we could, there would be an Asian culture that would have done so already.

*I was really wracking my brain for a humorous musical reference to throw into this parenthetical aside as well. Can you think of any that would fit the bill?

Good news

I am so glad to see blog posts lately from three of the most interesting, smart, and all around top-quality people I know. Because they all have strong (though highly dissimilar) personalities and place a premium on being their own person, perhaps each of them will be very irritated at being lumped in with other people in the context of a compliment. Let's find out.

I hope these people continue posting, but they probably won't because they're fickle and out to break my heart.

The best result for a Google search of these three names is here.

Bars, Part 2

About forty yards from my current home is a small neighborhood coffee shop that's ran by my neighbor, a lady who shares the other half of this converted shotgun with her young son and another woman. We've developed a low intensity friendship in recent months (not hard to do, as this coffee shop is constantly bustling with neighborhood activity). Now that the school year is ended and my days are filled with decadent leisure, I approached her with a business proposition: I can make a pretty good granola bar, and I wanted to sell them on her countertop. She agreed, and the results have been encouraging so far. The first eighteen I baked have almost sold out and I'm delivering another tray to the coffee shop on Tuesday. If you live in New Orleans, why not stop by and have one?

Though this won't make me any real money anytime soon, I'm excited about the prospect of it being an ongoing side project...especially if I can find other outlets in the city to sell my wares and it becomes worthwhile to order supplies in bulk. But there is one problem that's nagging at the back of my head. Because of this issue, the wholesome, caramel-sweet, berry-tangy crunch of the toasted whole grains of my granola bars are slightly laced with the chalky aftertaste of guilt.

Can anyone guess why?

Bars, Part 1

Bars, bars, bars. New Orleans is really into bars. There are at least six bars that are within a ten minute walk from our current house, probably more. I don't know the number for sure because in this city they're as noticeable and exciting as fire hydrants.

I've been to most of the bars nearby, and they're ok. Each one caters to a specific taste. The Avenue Pub is your bar if you want to eat a hamburger and drink a fancy beer on tap and feel very cramped while sitting down. There is the Bridge Lounge, which is where you go if you are well-dressed young people who like to spend your copious disposable income on $10 cocktails with fun names that are written in colorful chalk on blackboard menus while engaging in grown-uppy after-hours professional networking time and imagining you're hip because you're hanging out in a bar that allows dogs and makes a big deal out of doing so. If you are actually hip, though, the bar for you is the Saint, which is such a cool bar it doesn't even have windows and has its drink specials written on pieces of paper taped up over the bar, that's how cool it is, and there are usually foreign horror movies playing with the sound turned off, that's how cool it is, and a jukebox filled with albums by bands like The Gun Club for christs sakes, that's how cool it is. But if you are threatened or angered by the Saint's coolness, or if you don't like the feeling of being slowly smothered to death in a dimly lit shoebox, you can always go to the Half Moon, which has plenty of windows and is also not cool in the slightest. You can play skee ball at the Half Moon, so I guess it's for people who play skee ball, but other than that it's confusing to tell who exactly it's for, as everyone there seems somehow slightly uncomfortable and unified only in their blandness; they might be perfectly interesting people outside of the Half Moon, but something about the Half Moon setting draws out the inherent blandness lurking in everyone and smears it into an indistinguishable beige conversational puddle. For those of you who went to Hendrix, the Half Moon is a lot like Hardin Hall. (I have spent a significant amount of time in both places, if that tells you anything.)

And then, four buildings down from the Half Moon, there is Down the Hatch.

Now, because bars are always sort of stupid, I can say a lot of unkind things about each of the aforementioned places. But at the end of the day, the Bridge Lounge, the Saint, and the Half Moon all have redeeming qualities. They all do their job, which is to provide a social atmosphere and plenty of booze and sometimes fatty snacks. But this is not the case with Down the Hatch. Down the Hatch has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

First off, it's called Down the Hatch. The extraordinarily poorly rendered sign they've chosen to hang above their door depicts a revolting, red-faced leprechaun, blackout drunk and bloated with cirrhosis, who is inexplicably pouring a beer onto his scalp. (This picture to the right is the man himself.) The interior is dark, narrow, and boring, composed of brick walls studded with New Orleans kitsch so unremarkable it's invisible; the overall visual effect is that of one of those shitty chain burrito places after business hours. But it's the food that's the important part. The food at Down the Hatch is qualitatively different than other food. When most restaurants cook food it is intended to nourish and sustain you while pleasing your senses, but the kitchen at Down the Hatch believes that the purpose of food is to sicken you with as much years-old fryer grease as can be squeezed into a basket of limp, cold fries. Were there a way to inject an overpriced glass bottle of High Life with a syringe of befouled, cornmeal-speckled vegetable oil, I'm certain Down the Hatch would leap at the chance to do so. The existential bleakness of the ugly setting, the oil soaked bar fare, and the name of the place combine to summon to mind images of haggard sea birds or constrictor snakes distending their mouths to mindlessly gulp down great hunks of filthy meat. Down the Hatch!

Everyone – what’s the worst bar you’ve ever known and why?

I'll write anything that moves

I know it's not original, but I've found that the less I write, the less I write. I don't know why the feedback loop exists, but I'm positive that stagnation begets further stagnation. Conversely, the more I write, the more I write. Clearly, if my goal is to write, I should therefore...write more. I should turn up the tap. The problem is that I often have nothing to say except things that are dumb and boring, or things that are pretentious and derivative, or maybe things that are offensive and hateful, and so I usually second guess myself. The result of such editing, as we all know, is prose of only the highest imaginable caliber and refinement.

The other thing is that I do need to improve my writing. I need to develop the skills to be able to write about what I really want to write about, which includes things like this but that also definitely includes things like this. But the point is that any hope of improvement and development is only going to come with more writing, not further self-restrictions. So in hopes of writing more and sitting idle less, I'm going to try to consciously decrease the internal filtration mechanisms that regulate the refinement of my blog output (the technical term is "blougtput")*. This means more posts about astronomy, making lunch, and why Benjamin Netanyahu should be ground into kibbeh, and probably fewer posts about public education, because that was going nowhere anyway.

*This is where my new approach leads

Summer

I've been a pretty terrible blogkeeper lately. There's dandelions and nutsedge sprouting up between most of the line breaks, and a few of the older posts are almost illegible now for all the Virginia creeper. But now my job has ended for the summer, and my work to leisure ratio has abruptly and jarringly shifted. I have all the time in the world to write blog posts and read old Astronomy magazines and feel ambivalently about Odd Future. My daily to-do list looks like this:

• Redeem iwanttodrawacatforyou.com Christmas present that I just found buried beneath a pile of old crap last night, sorry Barry. (Don't worry, Steve says that the promo code is still good -- he responded in a personal email to my question within minutes -- so I sent him my request for "a phishing cat whose life is forever changed by unexpectedly making a very deep and real personal connection with one of his or her victims in the course of scam-based correspondence.")
• Redeem Amazon Rewards from Amazon Rewards Credit Card to make purchase from Amazon, perhaps to purchase a belated present for my dear friend JS whose wedding I attended weeks ago, empty-handed...or instead perhaps to purchase consumer electronics for myself
  
• Redeem trial StarCraft II guest pass for 7 hours of game time or 14 days from activation, whichever comes first. Real time strategy games are one of the most effective ways known to hone one's mental acuity, and employers are increasingly weeding out candidates who haven't developed multitasking, resource management, and Vespene gas gathering skills through sufficient StarCraft gameplay. On a lot of the job applications I've been filling out lately, you're told not to apply if you haven't successfully finished all three campaigns in the Brood War expansion.*
  
• Fix my car
• Register for continuing education classes
  
• Decide on a career and find a job

Yes, it's quite a list. But because I am on the ball, you will be impressed to know that in the course of writing this blog post I have already accomplished TWO of the tasks listed above.

*Just kidding - I haven't been filling out any job applications.

Noms de guerre

In documenting my time as a teacher, I've come across a problem. Clearly, I can't include the real names of the kids I taught, yet I need to reference individual characters. The problem with coming up with fake names, though, is that with the exception of one very nice and quiet Latina girl who liked to doodle pictures of Luigi in her off time, every child I taught was African-American. Therefore, many of these children had.....................................BLACK NAMES.

Like most things in the world, this threatens to open up a can of worms. Let's say I'm trying to describe a student with a name like Dejanay. What do I call her instead? Something like "Yolanda"? That seems a little racist. "Yolanda" is a perfectly reasonable sounding name if it is connected to a girl who is actually named Yolanda who is sitting in front of you, having a conversation; "Yolanda" is an uncomfortable stereotype if it is simply the black sounding name that I give to Dejanay because she needs another black sounding name to replace her own black sounding name. For that matter, what if I am describing one of Dejanay's classmates, a [black] girl named something like Brenna? Do I give Brenna a name that is as non-black-sounding as "Brenna"? Do I call her "Casey" or some similar bullshit just because her name is Brenna? It sure as hell seems like I shouldn't call Brenna "Yolanda"; oh my god. Maybe it's safer to give both Dejanay and Brenna nice racially-neutral names like "Michelle". That's a fine name for people of all colors (Obama, Pfieffer, Kwan, etc). But this sounds like a dishonest and futile attempt to render these characters cultural/racial eunuchs. They're black children from one of the blackest cities in the country. Am I pretending black names don't exist?

"Get over it!" you might say, disgusted. "This is stupid and embarrassing." Unfortunately, this is the thing about race. Oh, you can want to get over it. You can know that it's stupid and embarrassing. But, it won't go the fuck away. As far as I can see it, there is only one solution to this problem: in my writing, I will give all of the children the very whitest names possible. Fortunately, the smug assholes that wrote that sort of interesting book Freakonomics have done a regression or something to ferret out the whitest names in the contemporary American book. Thanks, dudes.

Coming up next: fun with Jake, Molly, Connor, and Claire.

A (Summer) Every Day

So I have mixed feelings about the turn that A (Summer) Every Day has recently taken. I understand and respect his desire to break out of the box, but I was such a big fan of the older stuff... Well, perhaps this new technique will grow on me with repeated views. There seems to be quite the gamut of reception among the other critics:

"Ethan's new pictures" immerses readers in an ocean of unparalleled depth. It is, without question, the first truly groundbreaking album of the 21st century.
-Billboard

"It's... really different. And oblique oblique oblique: short, unsettled, deliberately shorn of easy hooks and clear lyrics and comfortable arrangements. Also incredibly beautiful. "
-The Village Voice

"For all its feats of brinkmanship, the patently magnificent construct called "Ethan's new pictures" betrays Ethan playing one-handed just to prove he can, scared to commit himself emotionally. "
-NME

"In the time since "Ethan's old pictures", Ethan seem to have built up reservoirs of fresh bile and listened to a lot of Aphex Twin records.... The album's best features are its keening, lapwing guitars and a thin, atonal orchestral drizzle.... "Ethan's new pictures" will still baffle and upset those who are disappointed that he doesn't do "Ethan's Old Pictures" anymore.
-Q Magazine

"A photo album that might've been amazing if Ethan had only bothered to take some actual pictures."
-Resonance

Decide for yourself.

Glutton for something

In an unexpected turn of events, I am back in a classroom talking about a bunch of crap to a bunch of kids. This job fell into my lap a few days ago. I interviewed at the school in question months before and was politely turned down; then, they called me out of the blue five days ago while K and I were en route to Arkansas and asked if I could join the staff til the end of the year as a sort of teacher/substitute hybrid. Ok, I said. I started this morning, and I'm still a little disoriented.

Now, I know exactly what you're thinking. You're thinking, "but samtron77e. You know I respect your own decisions and wouldn't dream of overstepping my bounds in that regard. And you know that I, of all people, understand that sometimes even life's harshest lessons must be repeated multiple times before they are learned, sometimes for years on end. Goodness, samtron77e, you most certainly remember the mistakes I've made in the past and the fallout they produced! But if you please -- did you not start this blog in January of this year with the original intention of pursuing a catharsis of the dazzling array of shameful personal failures that plagued you as a teacher last fall? This was less than six months ago, you realize. And while we're on the subject, why do you never seem to get around to actually talking in depth about your day to day experiences as a teacher? Is it because it's too emotionally revealing and embarrassing, or is it because you're such a slow goddamn writer that you get bogged down in rearranging the syntax of one totally meaningless transition sentence for half an hour? Anyway. Considering the disastrous outcomes of your last venture into this profession, what the fuck are you thinking? Are you really that blind? Oh and Jesus look at the time -- it's 12:15 AM and you have to get up in six hours and you're writing on your fucking blog? This is your priority at the moment? Right, you're really ready for trying teaching again -- go ahead, be my guest, asshole."

But you know what? Go ahead and think that, because I'm totally secure in my decision.

So long story short, I may not be around for a little while, depending on my schedule (I'm still trying to maintain my old job for part of the day, for the time being). But if I am, expect lots of complaining!!!

But the gentlemen friends who used to call, they never did seem to mind at all

We're going back to Arkansas this weekend for a few days, which will be the best birthday present I can think of.

Fast Times at Bradish Alley

A couple months ago, a craigslist ad seeking “roadside techs” caught my eye. The title was appealing because it sounded manly and maybe a little futuristic –perhaps I would wear a biomechanical suit?—but most importantly, it was a job. After you have been fully unemployed for a few weeks, the whole scope of what the American Dream means is to have a place to be during the day that is not the couch or a coffee shop. A gruff and harried voice answered my phone call after the second ring with “May I help you?” I told the voice that I was interested in being a roadside tech, and he gave me a terse job description. It would entail changing flat tires, providing jumps, and delivering gas to people who can’t remember to fill up their gas tank. He said, “Call me back in an hour, at 10:00. I’ll be back at my office by then,” and returned to whatever activity was making him so harried.

I did as he said and called back at 10. The phone rang twice. He picked it up and said, “May I help you?”

“Yes, I called earlier about the job. The roadside tech,” I said.

“I’ll be back at my office in an hour, at 11:00. Meet me there.” The first tendrils of suspicion began to creep into my head: wasn’t he supposed to already be back at the office?

“I can do that,” I said. “Good,” the voice told me. He sounded less rushed, and therefore capable of now launching into an unexpected and unprompted exposition. “If you work hard at this job, you can make good money. You’ve gotta work hard and take care of yourself these days, that’s something Americans are gonna have to figure out. They expect everything handed to them. It used to be you could do that, just coast on a salary somewhere in a factory or an office, but that’s a thing of the past. You’ve gotta do it yourself. The days of a safe 9 to 5 job are over. You have to have initiative.” I agreed with him as blandly as possible and agreed to meet him in an hour.

His office was on Bradish Alley, a street that I have never heard of before and that I am fairly sure I will never hear of again. It is located near Tulane and Broad, just a couple of blocks from the Orleans Parish Prison. It’s in one of those dislocated slivers of city that most definitely would be categorized as a Bad Neighborhood but that also seems so peripheral and overlooked that it’s hard to feel that it contains much menace (especially on a sunny January morning). Bradish Alley is exactly one block long and contains neither businesses nor homes except for one tiny, inert apartment building surrounded by a high fence topped with razor wire. There is no address on this building, and it is guarded by a gate plastered with large vinyl posters advertising off-brand cell phone plans in bright, bilingual pinks and oranges.

The place seemed abandoned except for a minivan out front, in which patiently sat two squat Latino men. I called the phone number again. Two rings. “May I help you?”

“I think I’m here,” I said. “Where should I go?”

“You’re in Bradish Alley?” he said. I told him I was. There was a distinctly annoyed pause. “Ok, well – there’s only one place in Bradish Alley, and it’s mine,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Oh,” I said, staring at the apartment building. “I guess I see it.”

I got out of the car and walked a slow little meander around the gravel driveway, trying to look like I was nonchalantly waiting for someone and knew what I was doing. The squatter of the two Latino men got out of the van and approached me with a cautious geniality. He looked like he was in his late 30s, with bad teeth and a sad face.

“You waitin for him?” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “you too?” He nodded. “Electrician,” he replied. “Oh, ok,” I said with enthusiasm. “I’m looking for a job.” He nodded. Our conversational material exhausted, we lapsed into an awkward silence of staring off down Bradish Alley and avoiding eye contact. After about five minutes, a pickup swung around the corner driven by a man in a reflective vest. “There he is,” murmured the electrician, still staring down the street. “Ok,” I said, also still staring down the street.

**

My potential employer brusquely introduced himself as Eddie. He did not smile. He was thirtyish, black, and of medium build with quick, critical eyes and a stride and body language that indicated a constant energetic impatience with his surroundings. Once inside the gate, he set the electrician and his companion to work in an unfinished downstairs room with dangling wires and took me up a metal set of stairs to the upper story of the shabby building. We went inside and he offered me a seat. He threw himself into an office chair and opened his mouth to speak, but just then his phone rang. A spasm of annoyance crossed his face, but he answered the call after two rings with, a friendly “May I help you?”

While Eddie helped them, I surveyed my surroundings. This was clearly a man who placed few boundaries between work and personal life, as evidenced by the fact that the large room served as both living room and office. It was dim, comfortable, and quiet; a TV was going somewhere in another part of the house, accompanied by the light rustles of Eddie’s wife doing something in the adjacent kitchen. I believe she may have been making Rice-a-Roni. The brown walls were covered with phone plan advertisements like those plastering his compound’s exterior, along with copious papers held up with tacks or Scotch tape: numbers of clients and contacts, lists of various kinds, business cards, a handful of low-res family pictures spat out by an inkjet printer. Beige furniture was clustered around a large flatscreen, and the entirety of the wall behind the television was covered by a colossal painting of the interior of the cockpit of a plane. The place was not disorderly, but it was packed with what social psychologists call “behavioral residue” – the stuff we leave behind in our living space as a result of our daily actions. The rates on the phone plans actually looked pretty appealing so I pocketed a spare pamphlet from a stack atop a file cabinet.

All the while, I kept an ear open to Eddie’s phone conversation in hopes of gleaning insights into his character. He seemed to be giving directions to someone who was also attempting to find Bradish Alley for purposes of a job interview, and he was struggling to keep his irritation from coming through in his voice. Instead, it manifested itself in lots of grimacing and eye rolls. Whoever this other interviewee was, they seemed to be struggling with the basics of navigation. Eddie ended the call with a terse, “ok, see you then”, hung up the phone, and swiveled in his chair to face me. He stared directly into my eyes and was silent for several seconds, a look of anger and disgust on his face.

“These people want to work for me,” he finally said softly. “And they can’t even follow simple directions.” He paused and continued in the same tone of voice.

“I’m a decorated veteran.” Pause “And in those deserts over there, you learn to read a map. You know how to follow directions, and you know how to find coordinates.” Pause. “Because you know what happens if someone doesn’t know how to follow directions? You know what happens if they get off by one click when they’re reading their map?” Pause. “I’ll tell you what happens. Some son of a bitch drops a fuckin’ bomb on your head, that’s what.” He continued to stare into my eyes.

I nodded.

“These people.” He stabbed finger at the phone. “These people are going to drop a bomb on my fucking head.”

I nodded again and looked very serious, indicating that I understood the gravity of the situation.

Eddie shook his head in disbelief and attempted to move on . “So, you want to be a roadside tech. Tell me about your experience. You know how to change a flat?” I told him I did and made vague references to helping my stepdad with cars, hoping he wouldn’t inquire into the details and discover that by “help” I meant “bring my stepdad various wrenches when he asked for them, after which I would stand around listening to him bitch about metric sizes and secretly resenting the fact that I was twenty-five and still so comparatively mechanically inept that I was reduced to being his tool gopher whenever a serious automotive task was required.”

Eddie outlined the job: I would be an independent contractor paid $12 per service call, plus mileage for anything outside the Orleans Parish line. I’d be on call from 6 am to noon each day. His clients were large companies who provided roadside assistance to their management staff as a job benefit – thus, the cars whose flats I’d be changing and gas tanks I’d be replenishing would typically be Benzes, BMWs, and the like. “The job is easy, like taking candy from a baby,” he said, but the one caveat was that should I somehow cause any damage to a car, I would be personally liable for the cost. “That means if you don’t know what you’re doing and you put a bottle jack under a $60,000 car and miss the frame and it rips right through the body and the floorboard, guess what? You’re paying for it.” His voice was dark. Again, I read the situation as one appropriate for a very serious nod.

And then, without any transition, he said, “Americans are the laziest people in the world. Americans want everything handed to them – don’t want to get an education, don’t want to work, just want to sit around and complain. Complain, complain, complain. Like complaining about Obama. Jesus, the man has been president for two years and people are criticizing every move he makes because he hasn’t fixed all the problems with this country? It’s ridiculous.”

I generally agreed with Eddie’s sentiment on this issue, but I admit I was thrown off by the rapidity of these conversational turns. And he kept on going. “Thirty years. That’s how long it takes for the decisions to turn out. The stuff we see happening right now is happening because of decisions they made thirty years ago. And we won’t know what’s the deal with Obama for another thirty years from now.”

What the hell, I thought, roll with it. I experimentally engaged in a little softball shit talking. “Yeah, well, what gets me is when people blame Obama for the economic situation when the crash happened after eight years of Bush. It’s like they have no memory whatsoever,” I said. Eddie paused, nodded, and stared me down with even greater intensity. “Fifty years ago my people were getting hosed down in the streets of Selma,” he suddenly announced, “beaten and attacked by dogs because they wanted the right to vote. That’s how the government has always treated the poor.”

You want to open up to craigslist strangers, Eddie? Fine, I’ll see you and raise you. I said, “you know, a few days ago my roommate was listening to a speech by Dr. King that he made towards the end of his life. I’d never heard of this before, but Dr. King supported this idea of a guaranteed minimum income, where everyone in the country would get a minimum amount of money to live, no matter what. He believed in radically changing how America works. This idea of a guaranteed minimum wage says basically you still have to work hard if you want to be rich, but whatever you’re doing, whoever you are, everyone has the right to a certain minimum standard of living.”

I wasn’t sure how he’d take this. Eddie’s face was unreadable. “And do you agree with that proposal?” he asked in a low voice. I hesitated. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure, it’s so radically different from how things are structured today—” The phone rang again. His eyes narrowed when he looked at the number.

“May I help you?” His eyes widened in outrage. “You’re WHERE? You’re on Broad and WASHINGTON? Oh, my God, how did you get to WASHINGTON? No, I did NOT tell you to turn that direction.” He slouched back in his chair in bitter despair for all humanity, and I tried not to stare at him as he again spat out directions to Bradish Alley.

In my occasional forays into the twilight regions of the informal wage economy, I’ve learned that the division between jobs that are legit and those that are not is considerably more of a spectrum than it is a solid line. I was slowly coming to classify Eddie as a particular character type, a breed of person I’ve encountered before due to craigslist job postings and certain friends of friends from Arkansas: the Fringe Entrepreneur. The Fringe Entrepreneur is a self-employed person who works nonstop but hasn’t really made it yet financially. Despite constant setbacks and a gauntlet of enemies both real and imagined, the Fringe Entrepreneur still manages to cobble together a living by managing a neverending cascade of diverse business activities running the gamut from pyramid schemes to starting an LLC. Driven, excitable, paranoid, idiosyncratically opinionated, and ultimately ruthless, the Fringe Entrepreneur approaches all people and all situations with a brooding, calculating intensity.

“No. Take. A. LEFT. Onto. TULANE,” Eddie was growling into the phone. Strangely enough, I suspected by this point that he would hire me. I think I make a good impression on Fringe Entrepreneurs, probably because I will listen to them talk about their bullshit for as long as they want and nod along convincingly. Sure enough, when he ended the call he offered me the job. “You seem like a level headed guy” he said, and began rapidly jotting down a list of all the items I would need to perform my duties: reflective vest, four-way tire iron, rainproof clipboard, gas can, and jumper cables. I made the mistake of smiling when he asked if I knew how to hook cables to a car battery and he said, “funny, right? Real funny. But you know what’s not funny? When the red cap on a customer’s battery is on the wrong terminal and so you hook positive to negative because you’re not paying close attention and the thing blows up. And now you’re paying four, five, six thousand out of pocket to get the engine in a fucking Lexus repaired. Because something was funny.” I tried to keep from gulping, but I couldn’t help it.

This job is a bad idea, I told myself. This would be a bad working situation. Anyone could see that. But I was still intrigued. I could learn more about cars; Eddie also said that he could show me some basic locksmithing techniques after I’d worked for him awhile. And I could probably hang out with Eddie, which would be interesting. After twenty minutes in his presence I both admired and resented him. God only knows what crazy experiences would result from being his minion. A cascade of potential images flashed through my head: struggling to jack up a car in the pouring rain on the Causeway, chatting with Eddie over beers every night, being invited to family functions and camping trips, being seduced by his Rice-a-Roni cooking wife one morning when Eddie was out on a job, him attacking both of us in bed with a tire iron… Don’t commit to anything, I told myself. Get out of here and think it over.

I’d let him know in a few days, I told him. Eddie said he understood but also that he was looking to hire someone RIGHT NOW and that if he found someone else in the intervening time who was also level headed and available he’d pick them over me. Gotcha, I said. He showed me out and we shook hands.

Back in my car, I recalled the terms of the job. Twelve an hour. Liability for mistakes. Independent contract work. Yes, this was a flat out terrible deal. And upon further reflection, I most definitely did not want to work for Eddie, to be his sidekick and protégée and perpetually entertain his ramblings. I never called him back, and he never called me. I drove the thirty feet or so out of Bradish Alley and steered right back to craigslist, looking for my big break.