When I was 6 years old I wanted to be in the Beatles. But I didn't have a guitar, and it seemed awfully difficult to actually be in the Beatles, and, maybe most importantly, I was only six years old.

I wanted to be in the Beatles for quite some time, actually. You know, until they broke up and then no one could be in the Beatles, not even really excellent musicians. To fill the void that was left by the dead Beatles, between ages of 10 and 15 I wanted to be in a newer and decidedly more weird and dangerous crop of bands. Bands like Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and KISS.

But I was still far too young to be in these bands. I also lived in St. Paul, and those bands didn't generally hang out in St. Paul much, so my chances of meeting them and striking up a friendship close enough to get me into their bands seemed slim. And I still didn't have a guitar.

Then when I was 16, two really fucked up things happened. I saw the New York Dolls play a live show to a tiny audience (did they ever play to anything but tiny audiences?), and, the first Ramones album came out. I said, "What? Hey, I don't know what to make of all this!" and then someone handed me the Stooges albums and suddenly it didn't matter if I was old enough to be in the Beatles or if Black Sabbath was ever going to sleep over at my place in St. Paul. In fact, it didn't even matter if I could really play music. I could still be a rock and roll star!

As I saw it then, the only thing standing between me and rock stardom was a guitar, so I saved money, stole money, sold things and begged for money on the street until I had enough greenbacks to visit a real music store and get me a real ELECTRIC geetar!

Well, I walked into Torp's on Rice Street just north of downtown St. Paul, and there they were; every guitar bass, drum, keyboard and amp any band could want. I felt intimidated. I didn't have any idea how to play the guitar so trying them out would prove to be troublesome. I also didn't realize that the less than $200 in my pocket wouldn't really buy any name brand shit in there. I came to learn that later, of course, and Torp's pocketed about a third of my income for the next 8 or 9 years.

So I walked up and down the cramped rows between the amplifiers and just thought, "What the fuck? How do I pick one of these, and what the fuck am I going to do with one of these after I pick it out?" Just then Arnie walked up to me. Arnie must have been in his fifties, buzz haircut, pocket protector, and he had one leg shorter than the other that made it necessary for him to wear a giant shoe, just like the guys in KISS, so I figured he couldn't be all bad.

Without the slightest condescension, disdain, ridicule, pity, or anything else he could have felt toward me in my obvious virgin condition, he casually said, "Which one of 'em to you want to play? You really have to play a guitar before you buy it."

Well, I said, since I was standing in front of it, "I really like that red one." "The flying V?" "Yeah, the Flying V." (I had already learned my first rock term. I was well on my way). "Oh, this is a good one," he said. But then he probably said that about every guitar, bass, accordion or other piece of crap in the place. He was right, as it turned out, so maybe he wasn't bullshitting me. But probably he was. He was old school like that.

Arnie pulled it down, laboriously plugged it into some crappy amp and said, "let me get you a strap." A strap? How the hell do you put on a strap? Does it tie around the top part where the end of the strings are? Luckily Arnie connected the strap for me, and then, in the kindest and most understanding gesture of the evening, turned and walked away.

Because, remember, I didn't know how to play the guitar. So had he stood there and watched me I would have probably just shit my pants and ran home. Instead I plucked some stings, tried to put my fingers on the frets like I saw the bands do on TV, and then I unplugged the guitar, which made a huge buzzing sound that you recognize if you've ever just jerked the cable out of a guitar.

Arnie walked back over and took the V from me and hung it back up on the rack. "What else do you want to try?" He asked, but I couldn't take my eyes off the V. "None," I said, "I want that one." So he smiled and brought it up to the counter and I bought it. Somehow, the exact amount of money that I had in my pocket was what it cost! Isn't it amazing when that happens? I think it happened a lot at Torp's.

It was an Electra model - made in Japan (like all the copies of famous guitars were back then) at the Fujigen factory where they made Ibanez and a million other brands of guitars. In their catalog it was called the No. 2236 Flying Wedge. It had a Mahogany body and a really nice wine red transparent finish, so the wood grain really showed through. A beautiful and well-made guitar, because even budget shit was built with pride of craftsmanship back in ye olden dayes!

Anyway, it was the only guitar I had for a long time. I learned to play on it, and with my newfound appreciation of groups like the Ramones, Stooges and the New York Dolls, I was starting to think this rock band stuff was going to be easy. Shit, if they could do it, so could I. My friend Jimmy Wallin played bass and guitar, Roger DeBace and Brad Johnson played guitar, Mark Madden, Steve Nelson and Mike Reiter were all drummers, and John Ohr could howl and yelp and squirm around on the floor just like Iggy. Jesus christ, why didn't everyone have a band? Probably because everyone didn't hang out in the same circles as I did. You know, among the kind of people who could listen to the Stooges Funhouse 15 times a day and actually enjoy it.

Over the next few years I accumulated more guitars; a 1969 Stratocaster (that I ruined - more or less on purpose - during my first live show in front of a paying audience), a Les Paul Deluxe, a few 1950's Les Paul Juniors, even a one-of-a-kind, factory custom made-to-my-specifications Ibanez Iceman (you've never heard of it, but it's a really a stupid looking guitar, trust me.) Yet 90% of the time I found myself playing the cheap Electra copy of the Flying V.

I was a tinkerer though, so I couldn't leave well enough alone. I stripped the beautiful finish off the V (don't remember why), put in new DiMarzio pickups because that's what was advertised in Guitar Player Magazine (A Super Distortion in the bridge position and Super II in the neck position, if you were wondering). I rewired the knobs and switches because I kept hitting the volume knob with my hand (hey, it was punk rock). Put on Grover tuners - pretty much the only things left that were original were the neck and the body, but god damn it man, no other guitar sounded like that fucker. It didn't matter how much I abused it, I couldn't kill it.

Well, almost.

One night we were playing a show in someone's basement (hey, it was still punk rock), and I did a little shtick that I had done a thousand times - balance the V and let it stand up by itself, then let go of it and walk away and let it fall down and make a big ugly racket.

Well that night it made a real ugly racket - the neck snapped as soon as it hit the floor. You have to kind of expect that when you purposely let a guitar fall flat on it's face every day, but still it saddened and angered me. I picked up the headstock which was still attached to the rest of the guitar by shards of wood and string and I swung the whole contraption around over my head, which pretty much made everyone within 20 feet of me run away, but also tore my hand up pretty well. What with the shards of wood and strings and whatnot.

I tried to rip the neck off, but guitar strings are very strong, so it's not an easy task. I solved the problem by yanking off the tailpiece, smashing the busted neck repeatedly against the cinder block wall of the basement, and then picking up the body and throwing it against the front of my classic 2x12 Marshall combo amp twenty or thirty times. I couldn't break the body (god damn Japanese craftsmanship!), but I successfully punctured both of the stock Celestion speakers in the Marshall and effectively put an end to the evening's festivities.

I was bleeding like a motherfucker from several different places on my hands and face (how the face got involved, I really don't know), my best gear was ruined, and oddly enough I didn't even want to get drunk(er). The singer's sister, Karen, kept trying to pour rubbing alcohol on my hands and wrap them up in gauze but I sat on the basement stairs saying, "Take me home. Just take me home. It's only blood. Please drive me home."

I felt like someone very special to me had died that night and everyone was trying to tell me it would be okay, I should just try to forget about it, but I couldn't. I know that if you aren't a real guitar player that sounds like the most idiotic thing you've ever heard, but if you are a real guitar player, you know exactly how I felt.

Karen agreed to drive me home and before leaving the party I grabbed my only unbroken piece of equipment from the floor, an old MXR micro-amp stomp box. A really unsurpassed booster for when you need to be even LOUDER than loud. Which was a lot of the time back then. I put the micro-amp on top of her car while I was waiting for her to unlock the doors (it kind of hurt to hold things at that point), and when we finally got in and started to drive away, it occurred to me that I had left the micro-amp on top of the car. "Shit, pull over," I said. She did, and I got out and looked even though I knew it wouldn't be there, and of course it wasn't. We spotted it a few days later at the side of the road, flat as a Bay City Rollers groupie.

So, life went on without the V. A few days later someone from the party actually brought me the body and said, "Maybe you can put on a neck?" But people had stolen the DiMarzio's, the pots, the switch - even the fucking jack. I kept it for a wile, even painted it some horrible bright yellow color (because it was just so ugly), but could never bring myself to put some shit Strat neck on it or something. It wouldn't have been the same.

- - -

So flash forward twenty eight years. Yeah. I know. Long time. I played professionally in that time, in punk bands using mainly the Les Paul Deluxe and in Reggae bands playing various Les Paul Juniors (and even one of the old, original headless Steinberger's, which was more like a baseball bat than a guitar), but I never forgot the V.

I was recording a solo for a friend on a beautiful Reggae track, but he said he wanted a rougher sound for the solo (I was playing a Junior so I'm not sure what the hell is rougher than that - but anyway...), I immediately thought of the V, and wished I could go grab it and knock out the part. Because even though 10 years had passed since I played it, I knew it would have been perfect.

Anyway, one night a couple of months ago, for some reason I thought, "I wonder if Google will come up with anything for an Electra V..." I had searched and found nothing a few years before and expected the same this time around. And it wasn't much different. Precious little is known about the brand, outside a great Electra fetish site run on the rivercityamps.com domain - those guys have to be the world's largest (only) repository of Electra history.

But it was another link that caught my eye. Writer David Kilpatrick's blog, contained an old entry about being a teenage dude in the 1970's. There he was in his typically dorky 1970's pictures (hey, if you were there you have them too), but then - I could hardly believe my eyes - was a picture of him playing the Electra V. My Electra V. Exactly.

The last line in his blog about the guitar was, "I still have the guitar in its original case. If you know of anyone who wants to buy it, give me an email."

What? The post was from 2005, so I immediately deflated, figuring he'd sold it long ago. But still, I kept going back to that page and reading that sentence over and over - "If you know of anyone who wants to buy it, give me an email."

So I emailed him.

Well, David is a really nice guy and offered to sell me the V at a very fair price, which I immediately agreed to and sent off a check.

Yeah, you read that right. I just sent a check to some guy on the internet who I knew nothing about.

Well, I knew he had that fucking V, and that fact right there made me know that his heart beat in a different way that yours does, but in a familiar and comfortable way to me, and for that reason alone I knew could trust him. I never once worried that I would be robbed. In fact, the shipping came out to a bit more than he anticipated and he covered it for me!

It taught me a valuable lesson, because 12+ years working and playing on the internet has made me distrustful, but sometimes you just have to trust people. If you don't, we are all, as a species, extremely fucked.

So you know how the wait goes when you really really really want something to arrive in the mail or on that damn brown UPS truck. It feels like years, but the guitar arrived (In the original case!) and I immediately disassembled it.

I had vowed to myself that I would only clean it an leave it untouched, but I had to take it apart to really clean it, so what the hell. Took some pictures of the innards to show to the guys on the Electra forum, which actually helped them out.

Anyway, It's here, it's clean, and looking at it hanging in the rack next to my (modern) Junior is a very weird feeling. I am 48 years old, but I feel like I could strap on either one of those fuckers, drop the strap down real low (because that's how you play rock and roll, bitch!), and just blow the ass off some 15 year old Green Day kid. And I probably could, but I won't.

This is their time, and they are welcome to it.

I will always remember David Kilpatrick though, and my good friends at Torp's in St. Paul and how they could have blown my ignorant 15 year old ass right out the door with a few snide comments or simply by ignoring me, but instead treated me like a member of a secret society, and in doing so, gained a customer and a friend for life. And inadvertently (or not) sent me around the country and around the world playing the guitar.

So even if I only pick up the V once a month and play it on the couch, that's okay. We have been reunited, we know each other, we don't need a lot of chit chat. We communicate in a different way.

It's a beautiful time to be a photographer. Just like it's a beautiful time to be in a real band with real non-computerized music, or to be an artist who paints something other than encephalitic pre-teen girls in frilly dresses with dead deer eyes that only appeal to perverted Japanese wankers and U.S. hipsters who would worship dog shit if you told them it was cool to do so.


I say it's a great time because I feel the inevitable pendulum swing away from the dead and dying and back to the living. It may not happen tomorrow or next year, but there are a whole hell of a lot of disenfranchised youths out there who are aching for some truth. One of the ways they are finding their truth is with old music equipment, old artistic technologies, and crappy, less than precise photographic equipment.

I have taken about 30,000 pictures in my life - no exaggeration - I used to carry a camera with me everywhere I went, from the time I was about 15 years old and stole a Canon FTb, which, I can say at this time, kids, please do not steal shit. It's really not cool. And I got my ass kicked really bad for stealing that camera, so I'm living proof that crime doesn't pay.

Of course, ass kicking and all, I hung on to the camera. I went on to steal enough dark room equipment to develop my own black and white film and prints, and for a lot of years I did just that. Amazing friends and family with big old prints that they oohed and aahed over then stuck into drawers. If they could find drawers big enough to fit them.


I used that Canon until I was about 21 or 22 years old, then I traded it for a really big bottle of Jack Daniels and picked up the Minolta HI-MATIC AF2 pictured here. I still have the Minolta, in fact I took some pictures with it a couple of weeks ago. That camera went to a dozen countries with me and just about every U.S. state except Alaska and Hawaii. It's basically a point and shoot camera, but I got some wicked, wicked pictures out of the fucker. Very high quality and very much recommended since you can get them on eBay now for $10 - $20!

Then, dear friends, the dark days came down like putrid Seattle acid grunge rain. After 20 years of relying on the old trusty Minolta, I took out the batteries and put it away in the drawer to make way for the Kodak DX3600 Yes, a digital camera.


At first my joy knew no bounds - "Jesus christ, I can hold this thing above my head and see what's in the frame through the LCD readout on the back!" Yeah, that was great (actually, I still think that's the only worthwhile feature of a digital camera). "Holy shit, I just put a giant memory card in here, I can take 6,395 pictures! Wooooo!" Yeah, yeah. If only the pictures didn't look like flat, dead flowers, run over by every car in a funeral procession, sucked of all life and color.

I can barely put my disappointment with digital photography into words, except to say that I took maybe a few hundred pictures over the course of 6 or 7 years with the digital camera, that's it (and before you say, "Yeah, mjp, that Kodak is a piece of shit, try a real digital camera!" --- I did, I also used Carol's Canon Power Shot G3, which is (was) a pro camera, far from a piece of shit).

So, honestly I kind of gave up on photography. Because really, what is there to photograph anymore?

Well, as it turns out, there is quite a bit left to photograph.

Behold the Holga 120 CFN.

Let me list some of the great features of the Holga for you. You can buy one of these Chinese made masterpieces for $25 - $40, it leaks light, there is vignetting of the prints when you shoot 6x6 (kinda like looking at life through a toilet paper roll), very vague try-to-guess-if-it's-right focusing, and an imprecise and imperfect plastic lens. As if that weren't enough, the flash will go off twice if it is in the mood to do so, and sometimes the back falls off while you're using it!

Sweet jesus, how could you not love a camera like that?

Oh, did I mention that there's a little color wheel that rotates around the onboard flash so you can flash in blue or red or yellow? Come on man. It just doesn't get any cooler than that.

Listen, there are probably a million different 35mm cameras just as clumsy and error prone out there, but the Holga shoots 120 film for honkin' big 6x6 negatives. Oh yeah, kiddies - negatives 4 times the size of a 35mm negative (or is it two time larger - I was never any good at my gozintas...). So you can make big square prints featuring all the aforementioned fuckups and unpredictability.

Long story short, the Holga makes photography fun again. When I shot with expensive cameras, the majority of the pictures sucked. It was like you should only push that shutter button if something important or artistic was happening. I felt like that was a waste (and that I sucked as a photographer, which may be true, but now it doesn't matter anymore). With the Holga it isn't a waste, it's a surprise and sometimes even a miracle.

Beat that.

Have you ever heard of Dean Cameron? I know, neither had I. Then someone pointed me to a site he runs; spamscamscam.com. When I hit the site I was kind of shocked, since the design and layout is lifted - exactly - from a version of datapimp site that was up for about five years.

I'm not sure why I was shocked to see it. Honestly, everyone steals from everyone on the internet, design-wise. I didn't invent tables or green and yellow. The design (such as it was) was simple, but I think that was its strength. It isn't easy to be simple. If you don't believe me, go try to do something simple.

So yeah, I kind of said, "What?!" when I saw that.

But the funny thing is, even the premise of the site is a rip-off of other, better, Nigerian scam-baiting sites, like the classic 419 Eater, and many others.

So it made me wonder - you know, like Robert Plant in Stairway to Heaven - who the fuck is this guy, and why is his name all over his rip-off on top of a rip-off site? So I looked him up and it all became clear.

An ac-tor!

A marginal kind of, "Sure! I'll wash the director's car, and okay I'll also let him polish my balls - if it gets me the part, why not?" sitcom bit part actor (starting with The Facts of Life in 1984 and going downhill from there). Now that doesn't necessarily mean he is desperate, but he seems pretty desperate. Why do I say that? Well, this excerpt from his wikipedia entry for a start:

Since late 1999, has made a living as voice over talent for radio and television commercials, and recently decided to stop auditioning for roles in feature films and television shows, preferring to create projects with respected friends and others outside of the "sinking ship" of the entertainment industry.

Yeah, he decided to stop auditioning because the entire entertainment industry is so corrupt that they don't deserve him! Not because he's now too sad and pathetic to get even bit parts anymore.

If someone other than Dean Cameron wrote that, I'll eat his computer and your computer and all the computers in your local library. Yes, those filthy library computers. I will eat them. That's how sure I am that he has sculpted his own monument to himself on wikipedia. Which is very sad.

So, okay, la dee dah, who gives a shit. Really, when I thought about it today, I didn't. But when I look at the sites side by side there's still something in me that says, "Fuck you and the dainty unicorn you rode in on, Dean Cameron!"

It's been almost four years since there has been any Frida Kahlo content on smog.net, but far and away the most commonly searched term on the blog is still her name.

The internet never forgets! I can tell you that much for sure. Well, you know, parts of the internet.

In the early days of the WWW, all the print articles panted and drooled over the possibilities that such a permanent, freely available archive would offer. No longer would we be bound to those nasty old books and periodicals. Every grain of human knowledge would be a few clicks away (if not via WWW, then grab all the world's files with gopher!).

Man, it was a great time with such a promising future spread out in front of us. We didn't know it was no more than a cruel joke, and that a mere 10 years later we would have nothing but a wikipedia full of half-assed pseudo-information and an archive containing tens of billions of broken pages.

Speaking of those early days, I found a floppy disk that came with a 1996 issue of The Net magazine. I liked The Net because they wrote articles like, How To Get Online For The Price Of 30 Taco Bell Burritos, and also because they ran reviews which featured a few of my early sites, and that made me feel like an internet superstar celebrity.

What? Web site reviews? Yeah, imagine that. Imagine a web that was coherently reviewable because it didn't expand out to infinity. There were actually a few print magazines that reviewed web sites, and it didn't take a hell of a lot to impress them.

The Net shipped every month with an ultra high tech floppy disk (and later, CD) that supposedly contained links to all the sites mentioned in that issue, along with utterly useless and usually corrupt or nonfunctional little shareware and freeware apps. Recently I was overcome with a wave of nostalgia so I jammed one of those 1996-era floppy disks into the oldest computer I own - the only one that still has a floppy drive - fired up Netscape Navigator 0.91, and went for a spin.

Well, I tried to. The relic of a "home page" opened (it was even named home.htm), but every link on the disk is now invalid. Not most of them, or almost all of them - every one. One of these days when I'm feeling ambitious maybe I will dump the contents of that disk up here for your own nostalgic/masochistic pleasure.

So how are we supposed to recreate those glory days of 1996? Ah, there's the beauty; we can't. With the exception of a handful of sites that have remained relatively unchanged (you'll know 'em when you see 'em), 1996 may as well be 1896 as far as the web is concerned.

But wait a minute, I thought everything was being archived by some benevolent government agency or institute of higher learning? I mean, Google archived (archives?) all of usenet, right? No way, buddy.

I searched our friend Google for a few of my old poems that appeared on an early Lollapalooza site and came up with nada. Same story at archive.org. In 1996 I wasted boatloads of time posting on usenet as well, but searching my then email address in the Google archive turns up zero posts and only one reference to a post.

What does all this mean? Well, maybe nothing. Maybe it's best that no one can read my old usenet posts and bad grunge-era poetry. In fact, I know it's for the best. But what about the few tidbits of useful information that were out there?

If they still exist they are buried under a mountain of electro-rubble that we will never, ever dig out from under. And get this: we've only started on this landfill, babies. We are perched on the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

So remember, back up your data! Then stick it in the closet on a spindle of DVDs or old hard drives so you can throw it all away when you're cleaning house in 2018.

Unless this is your very first time here (in which case, hello), you should have noticed a change in flavor. Or as the kids say, layout and site design.

These things are very boring to everyone other than the site owner, so I will spare you the details. Other than to say, it should look and work the same way in all of your different god damned web browsers. If anything doesn't work, chances are I will find it today, and if not, I will find it eventually.

Or not.

Incoming links that reference the old layout are just going to drop in here at the site index, so too bad for those links out there, and too bad for the smog.net Google ranking I suppose. What can you do?

In any case, yeah. Here we are again.

...

Later that same day...

Okay, I added a little geekery to make the requests that come in under the old layout point to the correct article rather than just hitting the index.

I know, you're just beside yourself with excitement over that, aren't you?

I stuck the knife deep into the heart of datapimp.com on Sunday, and killed off my little 8 year old project. 8 years and three months to be exact, but who's counting. That's a long time to run an unsuccessful web business. I think we may have set some kind of record.

By unsuccessful I don't mean it lost money - we usually made money. Just enough to pay for the infrastructure, such as it was. No one who ever worked on it took away a penny. Aside from myself, over the past eight years the pimp was run and co-owned at various times by Steve Downey, Donald Sumbry, Brad Schuetz and Tom Sepper.

I wrote some shitty things about Steve and Donald over on the now-defunct datapimp blog, and I regret what I said. I did it out of anger and frustration, and while I have been known to write perfectly acceptable shitty things out of frustration and anger, I should know better than to ever aim that anger at my friends, and they were my friends. So for that, I apologize to both of them.

I don't really know if it has sunk in yet that it is over. Maybe because the hosting service will remain active until the last customer's account expires some time next year, then the lights go out for good. I spent most of sunday making the technical changes necessary to take the pimp site offline, then I went out and bought an expensive bottle of 16 year old Lagavulin Scotch and just forgot about it.

datapimp is still a great name, and I will probably use it for something in the future. But not web site hosting. Or blogs. Or free email, or pay email, or anything remotely related to any of those things. It's enough already. If you have enough money to spend on advertising you can become a successful web host. I had the notion that a successful web host could be built in other ways. It couldn't. Well, I still think it could, but not by one person.

Here comes 2008. What next?

I saw a really interesting documentary called, Danielson: A Family Movie (or, Make A Joyful Noise HERE), and it got me thinking about a lot of things.

Mainly about why so many "Christian" performers feel compelled to sing about the blood of Jesus in every song, as if a song that fails to mention Jesus a dozen times is some kind of one-way ticket to HELL. The only other genre of popular music that has such a strong biblical bent is Reggae, but those guys know how to sprinkle the Jah songs among other, more universal, messages.

Daniel Smith, or Danielson, is an odd, creative guy. He is also a devout Christian. But because he doesn't beat the listener over the head with continual references to his lord and savior (or his lord and savior's blood, or rugged cross), his art is accessible to everyone. At least everyone who enjoys weird stuff.

For the first half of the movie I was asking myself, "Is this guy ever going to crack the goofy facade and show us who he really is? This has to be some kind of ironic, post modern pose..." but it isn't. He is what he is, and it's really something to watch and hear. Inspirational even.

So what, am I some kind of anti-Christian? No. But I am an atheist, and that colors my view of all things religious. It isn't exactly cool to say you're an atheist, and when I was younger I avoided the tag, instead saying that I was agnostic. But that wasn't exactly true.

I believe I came by atheism naturally, as there was no religion practiced in my family. My parents were not atheists, however. In fact, my mother always said that we were Lutherans, but I never saw the inside of the Lutheran church in our small town. My father's Army dog tags said ROMAN CATHOLIC, and when I asked him what that meant, he said, "Nothing. But you had to write down a religion." (There is a great line in Ken Burns' documentary on World War II, taken from a letter written by an American soldier; "Dear God, please help us. But don't send your son. This is no place for children.")

So I was not raised by atheists, but without a religious doctrine presented to me every week I arrived at atheism through my own experience and observation. Which makes me wonder if a child raised without religious influence would ever come to the conclusion - on their own - that there was a GOD? Of course it's impossible to grow to adulthood and be completely unaware of religion, so the question is moot.

The majority of Americans claim they belong to one religion or another, whether they practice it or believe it. Unfortunately, those who are a little more vocal about it have never struck me as being particularly good people. What I mean by that is most Americans who are adamant about you knowing what religion they are, and want you to follow that religion yourself (or suffer the dire consequences), are fundamentalist Christians. But I'm afraid that I have yet to meet a Christ-like Christian of any flavor. Sorry. I have met many devout Christians, who, if you strip away that label, behave just like any other person. They gossip, cheat, steal - you know, the whole human gamut.

Outside of America you could say the same thing about fundamentalist Muslims, who are by and large even more insane than fundamental Christians. A fundamentalist Christian might hold up a GOD HATES FAGS sign at your funeral, but a fundamentalist Muslim might come to the funeral and try to blow themselves up and take all of your mourners with them.

"Well then your problem is with fundamentalists, not religion!" you might say. Okay, sure. But without religion there is no fundamentalism, so they are inseparably joined. Yes, I know that people would still hate each other if there was no religion, but at least they'd have to think up some creative new reasons for it.

The only group of people I ever knew who behaved in anything approaching a Christ-like manner were Rastafarians. You probably just said, "What the fuck?!" either out loud or to yourself (assuming you know what a Rastafarian is), and I suppose that's understandable. But when I think of all the people I have met in years here on the planet, those who were selfless, kind, accepting, non-judgmental and strict interpreters of the bible were all Rastafarians. I certainly never met a Christian who fit that bill. None have even came close.

Christopher Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair about the tour promoting his book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and in the article he made an excellent point about morality. At every stop on the tour he posed the following challenge to the audience; "Name one moral action or statement made by a person of faith that could not be made by a nonbeliever." He reported that no one could come up with an example.

That's an interesting thing to think about, and it elegantly disproves any unique relationship between morality and religious belief. In the letters section of the following issue of Vanity Fair a woman gave her answer to his question: "prayer." I'm sure she believes she just threw down a devastating trump card and did a little dance around her living room when she saw it printed in the magazine, but it's a ridiculous, naive answer. Prayer is hardly a moral action.

On the contrary, prayer is usually quite a selfish action. People praying for luck or good fortune or victory in a sporting event. It is a very self-important idea to believe that the superhuman deity that created you sits around all day watching how shit goes for you. Pulling a sting here and there to help you out. Those godless idiots sitting around in the dirt and starving to death in Niger will just have to wait, it's World Series time, and the Red Sox are praying!

The kind of God who takes an unhealthy interest in every individual is kind of a dick anyway, if you think about it. Creating you and then threatening to punish you forever and ever if you don't properly acknowledge him as the supreme be all and end all. Who wants to worship such an insecure, angry asshole? Not me. I don't want to worship Haile Selassie either, so I'm left with worshipping nothing. Which may sound terrifying to many of you, but it is very liberating. I can admire grass and sunshine and bees and dogs without a lot of worry over how they came to be here for me to enjoy.

Religion is an attempt to answer unanswerable questions, and put some kind of glowing golden frame around the chaos, disorder and ugly unfairness of existence. I understand that the idea of living amidst chaos bothers a lot of people, but I don't understand why more people don't embrace it as a positive and exciting thing. You may as well, you certainly can't change it.

Long time no see, bitches!

I have been caught up in a never ending nightmare of moving. First the company I work for relocated. Planning that move, top to bottom, was my job. Imagine what it's like when you move to a new house or apartment -- it was kind of like that, if there were 25 people in your family, and you had three months of construction to do the place you were moving into.

As the dust was settling on the work move, Carol and I left our beloved seaside shack in San Pedro and moved into town, so to speak, a few miles Northeast of downtown Los Angeles. When you say "San Pedro" to most people in Los Angeles, they look at you sort of blankly and say, "Oh, is that near San Diego or something?" So now we can say "South Pasadena," and everyone knows where that is. We're not actually in South Pasadena (we are not rich or fabulous enough for that zip code), but we're in the general area, so what's the difference, right?


What's the difference? Well, here's the main difference: my commute has decreased by 75 miles a day. I work in Pasadena, and to get to work from San Pedro I had to drive 44 miles each way. It was usually 2 1/2 hours a day (or more) in the car, just getting to and from work. Now I am 6 1/2 miles from work and it takes 15 minutes to get there. Half an hour a day of driving. And no freeways. I used to have to drive on five different freeways to get to the job.

I know what you're thinking, "Wow, you must be saving a shitload of money on gas and mileage!" Yes, yes I am. But brothers and sisters, that is not even a drop in the bucket compared to the savings of time. Think about it. I'm in the car for two hours less every day. Two hours sounds like a lot of time just by itself, but start to add it up and the numbers are frightening.

Two hours a day is 10 hours a week. More than one full work day. That's 65 full work days per year, or thirteen work weeks!

13 work weeks.

I had to type that again just to let it sink in. And forget work weeks, I was throwing away more than three weeks of 24 hour days behind the wheel.

I know that a lot of you reading this live in Los Angeles, and a lot of you probably commute more than I did, and you're thinking that I should shut up and quit whining (or gloating), so I will.

I loved the Point Fermin area of San Pedro. Living there on the cliff, the neighbors were mostly good, the weather was cooler than the rest of Los Angeles, you could hear the sea lions barking about who-knows-what all night. But there's a lot wrong with San Pedro too, and most of the people there choose not to think about it.

The pollution created by the ships and the port make the harbor area's air quality the worst in LA, by far. People in the area directly around the port experience higher levels of a lot of cancers. There's a gentrification move at work that threatens to extinguish the very things that made San Pedro a great place (as gentrification tends to do everywhere).

San Pedro is also secluded from the city center, which is one of the things that make it desirable, actually, but also the thing that starts to drive you crazy after a few years. If you want to go to a good restaurant, visit friends, see art, buy something (anything), etc., etc., you have to get in the car and drive away from San Pedro, far away, because there is really nothing in San Pedro. Okay, there are a few great breakfast places. But they all close at 2 pm. Yeah, I know. How many restaurants in your town close at 2 pm?

And specifically in the place that we lived, the noise was becoming unbearable. We were on the corner of a pretty busy street, a block from the park, and right in front of Sunken City. When we moved there it was February, foggy and cool, no one was around, and we couldn't believe our luck, finding such a gem of a spot.

Then summer came, and it was like living in the monkey house at a crumbling zoo in a forgotten Russian town somewhere. Just filth and noise and day after day after day of assholish behavior, loud music from the park (not good music - San Pedro loves - and I mean loves - really, horribly shitty oldies bands...take the worst possible oldies bands you can imagine and multiply them by 50, that how shitty each and every one of these bands were), and this went on for 5 or 6 months of the year.

So it was quiet and peaceful for the other six months, right? No, no it wasn't. Being a block from the park meant being a block from Walker's, a biker bar/hangout/joint. Even without Walker's, the street we were on was a popular cruising street. It's the southernmost street in Los Angeles, running along the coast...motorcycles day and night. Weekends, motorcycles times 20, plus low riders, extra loud stereos, and the aforementioned generally loud assholes everywhere.

These aren't just regular motorcycles I'm talking about. They are all straight pipe, 120 decibel, "look at me, I'm the world's biggest cocksucker!" motorcycles. If you were sitting on the couch talking to Carol or I on a typical weekend day, you would have to stop talking and wait for the bikes to pass about 100 times. It was that loud, and they were that close to the house. And just to make it even worse, about halfway through our 8 years there, the city decided that the intersection in front of the house should be a four way stop. What? Yeah.

So anyway, enough of that. The new place is great. Beautiful house, spacious (12 foot ceiling in the living room kind of spacious), quiet, peaceful, garden-like back yard, French doors, decks, long driveway (off-street parking, woo!) leading to a huge garage, central air. Ha. It is very refreshing to live close to things that people need: food, clothing, electronics, hardware, general ridiculous shit, work, civilization...

But I love you San Pedro, you were really something for a while there. I don't know what the hell you are becoming, and I'm not sure I want to see it, but I will always feel a little bit like I'm "from" San Pedro. Just like I'm from Mahtomedi, St. Paul, Venice, Topanga, Redondo, Lawndale...from everywhere and nowhere. I live in this box you're looking at. Feed me, motherfucker!

I'm typing this on the new IBM ThinkPad, part of a "get rid of all your big ugly shit" kick that I'm currently on. We'll see how that goes. Many have tried to simplify, and have failed. No doubt I will fail too, but it's something different for a while.

Speaking of getting rid of big ugly shit, the Trooper is history. I got into an unfortunate wreck on the 110 freeway a while back and the Trooper was totaled. So I got a little Honda Fit to make the commute. Now I have no commute, but I still have the Fit, which is a pretty good little car. Honda rarely misses. Carol and I have had Hondas that we had to get rid of because the bodies were disintegrating, but the damn engines and transmissions just seem to go on forever. It's hard to get rid of a Honda.

Okay, okay, enough already. We have been here for a week but still have no internet connection. I am posting this courtesy of some neighbors who do not believe in wireless security. See, the place is already better!

read older posts

   

smog.blog powered by buddy V2.0