Pacificapocalypse

Swings on BART!
Full Flickr set here.

photo credit: neiltron

Random anti Prop 8 street poster on Linden Avenue, San Francisco.

Click for full size.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

J.G Ballard has died.

While not unexpected, it still saddens me greatly.
I discovered Ballard by reading about Burroughs in an old RE/Search pub ‘Industrial Culture Handbook’. Jeez that was in 1983… wow. Anyway I was heavy into science fiction so I started reading ‘High Rise‘ then ‘Terminal Beach‘ and finally ‘Crash‘. From the first couple of chapters into ‘High Rise’ I knew this wasn’t the Sci Fi I was used to. By the time I finished ‘Crash’ I was deeply aware that this, perhaps, wasn’t the standard recommended reading material for ‘young adults’ (If you saw the movie version of ‘Crash‘ I can tell you quite truthfully.. they prettied it up. The book is… explicit.)
Ballard was the master of ‘dystopian fiction’ which after a steady diet of shiny plastic futures in so many previous books, fit nicely into my world view of the mid/late 1980’s. Punk/Industrial/Goth all were hitting their stride; I was ending high school with a big fuck you to ‘normal society’. I had blue hair and a leather jacket. I was mad at the world. What the hell did I know?
Ballard was perfect.

I thought ‘Empire of the Sun‘ was magnificent even before I knew it was an autobiographical account of Ballard as a boy in Japanese occupied China; after wards I sought out the book and was again floored by Ballard’s words.

“Death always presents the face of surprised recognition,” William S. Burroughs.

V.Vale who chronicled both Ballard and Burroughs said “I expected Ballard to live at least as long as Burroughs, who reached the age of 83, even after having been “a junkie” for years of his life. By a strange logic, I felt that since Ballard hadn’t been a junkie, he should live even longer than 83.”

Unreasonable of course, but yeah, I know what he means.

I am Legend
No really *I am*. Find out last Monday morning that the other two people in my department… left the department late Friday. Technically one of them is still with the company, she’s not lost, just doing something completely different. So the first part of this week was hectic getting all that nonsense squared away. All cool now. Think I’ll make myself Manager of my department, or perhaps Vice Admiral. And since I report to… me, I’m anticipating a rather splendid quarterly review. Hurray for me!
That’s called Job Security children.

Pet Sounds
Ok so the Butch Cat is all good to go. He’s healthy and peeing where he’s supposed to all this week, so we feel pretty good about that. It was stressful to say the least, first he’s sick then he’s peeing everywhere except the litter box. But it’s all good now; we’re done with the sub cutaneous fluids and the twice daily meds and he’s back to being a healthy happy pain in the ass. You know, a normal cat.

Wedding stuff.
Court paid off her Fluevog boots that she going to be wearing for the wedding; mine are still in lay-away, but soon baby, soon. She has her first fitting at Dark Garden this afternoon for the dress, which I’m being allowed the honor of attending (what’s the protocol on this? Technically it’s not ‘The Dress’ yet, so…?). We’re meeting the costume maker on Sunday afternoon for my first fitting, which should be pretty cool. We have a tasting with the caterer next weekend, so things are going swimmingly, I think. Oh yeah! And! We received two samples of the wedding invite from the girl on Etsy that Court contacted and they are freaking awesome. Just phenominal. More later.

I saw the saddest thing leaving work yesterday afternoon; stacked up behind the front desk in the lobby were about a half dozen moving boxes marked ‘Hold for xxxxxxx’. All filled with the cleaned out remains of peoples desks. The shoulder taps have started in earnest. On the plus side, the two other people in my department have left… so I am my department. I guess that’s job security of some sort.

photo credit: Brian Daniel Eisenberg