Pacificapocalypse

I hab a code… Couwtny hab it tube.

photo credit: vanherdehaage

We didn’t get it.

Picture unrelated.

Well fuck a doodle doo. They’re actually laying people off in the business and advertising section of the once mighty San Francisco Chronicle, right this moment. They’re literally tapping people on the shoulder, telling them and then escorting them from the building.  Is this the way you let people go? So friggin’ archaic. They might as well have a Bugs Bunny cartoon executioner bare-chested in the full face mask with a head lopping axe at the ready. Holy crap. Hey I just had a thought; if they can’t tap you on the shoulder, can they still let you go? I mean if you just dodge them all day, are you cool? Que the Scooby-Doo chase scenes and the Benny Hill music.
Guess who knew first? Not me thank god; the couple that run the little in-house cafe knew it – they were here at 0 dark 30 when the extra security guards showed up.
Extra security?
Well… yeah I suppose that’s just CYA.
More later.

photo credit: ooOJasonOoo

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 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

We have pets, specifically we have two dogs and three cats. That’s our furry family (with exception, Andy dog is a Chinese Crested Hairless, and Jayne cat is a Sphynx) and for the time being that’s how it’ll probably stay. So we had some drama start about two weeks ago with Panda dog; she started peeing in really un-cool places (the bed spread! Panda no!). We were concerned that it might be acting out since Jayne cat is a new family member, but not *that* new. We’ve had him for about a month now; a little late to start acting out and we’ve been careful to spread the love and attention equally among the kids so no one feels left out. We thought maybe a doggie UTI; off to the vet’s she went. Court brought her home with some general antibiotics and a doggie pheromone potpourri warmer. Supposed to calm their little puppy hearts and make them less prone to acting-out peeing.

And then… Butch cat started up. First he pee’d on the bedspread also (AAAARG!! We just got that back from the cleaners!) And then on the couch and finally the next day on one of the dog pillows. Something seriously up here; he’s never done anything like this before. So off to Coastal Cat Clinic he goes. By this time, the vet had called back to say that, yes, Panda dog did have a UTI and that the antibiotic she was on should get her through with no problems. Anyway, they take some blood and urine from Butchie and send him home. I get the call the next day; no UTI for Butchie, but something much worse. Apparently Butch cat’s personal chemistry cause his urine to be very high pH which cause crystals to form. These crystals can be very irritating AND clump together to cause a blockage, just like kidney stones in humans.  Very serious. The vet said to bring him back in the afternoon (that was Thursday last week) and we would need to give him sub q fluids for the next ten days and put him on a special diet to lower his pH, raise the acidity of his urine and hopefully dissolve the crystals. I freaked out a little. Sub cutaneous fluids? Like with a needle and shit? Holy crap. Thank god Court has done stuff like that in the past with horses so she had some experience, I would have been a complete wreck without her.
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I’m phenomenally pissed and depressed right now.

Lux Interior died last night.

I can’t even begin to explain how I feel right now. The Cramps were such a part of me when I was a teenage snot bag trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I never quiet figured it out, but Lux and Ivy made the not-knowing better. Then came the annual pilgrimage to Wolfgangs in the city, every Halloween, to see them play live. I don’t think I missed a show for like, five years running. This sucks.

God Rest and Keep you Betty Mae Page

Betty Page
April 22, 1923 – December 11, 2008

“We are made to believe when we cannot understand, and to obey so that we will never understand”

It’s been 30 years, and I still remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that a bunch of crazy people had killed themselves in some jungle somewhere. I was at the now closed James D. Phelan middle school in San Jose, and I had just turned 11 years old.

Crazy people in a jungle somewhere.

That’s all I knew then, but as time progressed and the story unfolded, I and the rest of the world, learned how absolutely bug shit insane the situation was.

I still don’t understand what really happened. There is, and always will be, a strong San Francisco connection to the People’s Temple. The majority of his followers came from Hunters Point, Bay View and Vis Valley and they still have relatives here. He had his fingers in City Hall and was courted and valued by politicians, as a guaranteed ‘vote getter’. So perhaps that’s why, people, good people, looked the other way (shame on you Chronicle, you fucking knew better) when word got out, before they fled to the jungle, that things were going very wrong inside the People’s Temple.
What force drives, what are to all expectations, reasonably intelligent people, to give up their lives, their homes and deny their families and move to a jungle, an absolutely primitive campsite really, thousands of miles away on an entirely different continent.
What makes committing, logically and methodically an incredibly illogical and insane act, seem reasonable?
They killed their children. They squirted the Kool-Aid down their throats and killed their children.

Kool-Aid in a jungle or new Nikes in San Diego. Something moves these people to commit these horrific acts.I don’t think I’ll ever understand, and frankly I’m not entirely convinced that I want to understand what drives these people.

There’s a lot of info out there; here’s a good place to start.
Jonestown 30 Years Later – SFGate.com

So sad, after 92 years, a California institution, Mothers Cookies, is no more.

If you’re a fan of those pink and white frosted Circus Animal cookies from Mother’s, either stock up or start priming your nostalgia, because this week the company closed its doors abruptly. They’ve cited the expected reasons—the rising cost of raw materials, and an inability to borrow in the frozen credit market.

That sucks.

So, I did what so many of my generation do in times of grief, I bought a commemorative t-shirt online.
Got the package and couldn’t figure out why it rattled, open it to find that in addition to the shirt, they sent me a memento mori bag of cookies. Check it out!