Thanks to radar and radio issues at Newark Airport recently, my flight home on Friday was cancelled. I did reschedule it for early the next day, but that meant I had to spend an extra day in Newark. This was a trip where I went to the Dark Force Fest in Parsippany, NJ, then went exploring through New England, mainly Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. With an Audi A4 Quattro that I rented, I drove all around to see what New England had in store for me. Those states are gorgeous. But fuck Connecticut. What a fucking waste of space.
I’ll put my thoughts together. But in the meantime, here is a picture of a Mount Washington Cog Railway train that took me up to the summit of Mount Washington where 60mph sustained winds knocked me on my ass twice at the peak.
With the way things are now, I really had no desire to write about things, my life, whatever. As things continue on, I find myself feeling more fatalist? Nihilist? Well, hopelessness to the point of apathy, paralysis. What will happen will happen. We all die in the end, anyhow.
Nonetheless, here is what has been happening as I have plummeted through my 47th year:
I’m still mostly taking public transit to work. It’s given me a lot of time to start reading again. Here are the books I’ve completed:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I actually started this during my Berlin trip. A strange little book. Not as good as the first 2 volumes of 1Q84.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. This is one of the only books I’ve read that left me crying at the end. Detailing a Korean family from the Japanese occupation to their time in Osaka, it broke my heart. Aka, it’s very Korean.
Ask the Dust by John Fante. I love imagining living where I live back in the 1930s. It proves that the blood of Downtown LA hasn’t changed much over the years. It was a shithole then. It’s a shithole now. But it’s MY shithole. And I love living in it.
Sula by Toni Morrison. This is my first Toni Morrison book, and it pulls no punches. It’s a great portrait of black life during the first half of the 20th century.
Queer by William Burroughs. I had to re-read this after watching the film. This is one of the few instances where I liked the movie more than the book.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. I’ve started this one so many times but have never finished it. A fun romp through the most drug-addled paranoid plot put on paper.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Oh man, that sermon on evil. A fucking classic for a good reason.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I’ve been meaning to re-read this the last couple of years, and here I go. I forgot how hilarious this book could be at times. The detached voice is a bit annoying, and some of those endnotes, come on. I like how the plot is shaped like a moebius strip, infinity symbol.
I’ve had a hemorrhoid for most of the year. It’s starting to go away now, but it’s been making things a bit messy in my underwear. It hasn’t been painful or itchy or anything. It just feels like something is a bit prolapsed down there. The annoying part is that I haven’t been active, so it really is a mystery.
I spent my birthday near Joshua Tree. Unfortunately, it was still a little too cool to fully enjoy the pool, but my Airbnb did have a hot tub. I did go to the Integratron for one of their public sound bath sessions. I probably would have enjoyed it more if the guy next to me didn’t breathe loudly and fart.
On May 2 to May 4, I’ll be in middle-of-nowhere Parsippany, NJ for the Dark Force Fest. My little blackened coal of a goth heart will be filled to the brim with what can be construed as happiness as I get to see Razed in Black, Haujobb, Funker Vogt, Covenant, Klutae, Suicide Commando, the Genitorturers, Beborn Beton. I’ll be in my 20s all over again! Except in this 46-year old vessel of blood and gristle. After the fest, I’m going to head off to New England and explore mostly Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
Here are some random pictures from my travels on public transit:
Oh yeah. I relented and got boxed dye to cover my white hairs.
No one reads me aside from some friends. Every now and then someone will stumble across my words, but I’m a bore so they immediately go away for good. Imagine my surprise when I see that someone spent around five hours reading a whole bunch of my shit throughout the years. Wow. I mean, I do have about 27 years worth of absolute bullshit and egomaniac blatherings on here, so it’s not like there is a lack of supply. Anyhow, my apologies to this person for a complete waste of time.
I’m really tempted to go to Dark Force Fest at the beginning of May. It would be really nice to see Razed in Black since I never saw him live during his active days, and seeing Haujobb, Funker Vogt, Klutae and the Genitorturers would be nice. But fuck, that would mean getting out to the middle of New Jersey.
I finished reading Pachinko the other night, and I don’t know if it was because it was 2 am or what not, but this was the first book that caused me to cry. What a fucking heartbreaking book.
Why didn’t no one tell me that Brainiac were touring again? Oh, because I only know one other person who listens to them, and I’m really not on social media anymore.
To be honest, this was probably more improbable than Unwound reforming last year since Brainiac’s lead singer Tim Taylor died in a car crash in 1997. When I saw they were coming to the Regent back over the holidays, I knew I had to go.
Brainiac were so great because the songs were heavy and manic forcing you to dance like a rhythmless refugee from the 80s. After their first album Smack Bunny Baby, they rarely relied on power cords and distortion instead using dueling jangly guitars that seemingly weren’t playing anything complementary or anything that could be understood as helping along a melody. And the vocals were so processed you couldn’t decipher the lyrics. So you just had to focus on the music. As solid as their final album Hissing Prigs in Static Couture was, Bonzai Superstar always fucking hit me. As “Hot Metal Doberman’s” gently brings you into their world, the sounds and noises on there are transfixing and hypnotizing. It climaxes with “Status: Choke” (which I knew they were not going to play) and drones out with “Collide”, fading out into the ether.
Here they were opening the gig with “Indian Poker Pt. 3”. You can get a sense of what I’m saying here.
Since they reformed when the Brainiac doc Transmissions After Zero screened and played after screenings in New York, LA and Dayton, they saw there was a hunger to seem the live again. John Schmersal now taking the lead role with Juan Monasterio on bass and Tyler Trent on drums, they added Tim Krug to round out the lineup. Even though I never saw them live back in the day, you get a sense of what they were and what they could have been. You hear their influence on almost all music in the 2000s from Nine Inch Nails to the Faint, Blood Brothers, At the Drive-In.
I know I say this just about every time I go to a show here in DTLA, but it really is wonderful to just walk to these venues from my apartment. Walking into the Regent there was the army of old folks like me with a smattering of young kids — you could tell them from their big unruly permed hairdos and shitty facial hair. It really was adorable and touching that they even cared to study up on old music — a lot of kids don’t do that even though it’s available at their fingertips.
I made the mistake of buying a drink at the Regent– a Hendricks and soda with tip was $22. Since I don’t go out, I don’t know how that falls in line with other venues. I knew that prices were going to be inflated, but that was bit too much.
As they got into their set, it was everything I was expecting. Manic dancing, chanting when I actually knew the lyrics (as nonsensical as they may be.) I was in my 20s again, not caring what a fat doofus I looked like up in the front and center. There really is a catharsis in screaming “2, 4, 6, 8, TELL ME WHO I’M S’POSED TO HATE/ CAN’T QUIT THE GOOSE STEP / TELL ME IT’S A TWO-STEP PROCESS” at the end of “Vincent Come On Down.” As outrageous and manic as the show was, it did get a bit wistful when John mentioned being shocked at the demand to see the band live again and honoring Tim with these shows. What could have been.
It was a tight hour-long set that ended with what is perhaps their swan song, “I Am a Cracked Machine.” And like that it was over. I was 45 again. At least this time, I only had to walk five minutes to get to my apartment, pet my cats and listen to Brainiac until I fell asleep.
Hearing politics getting thrown around during this fire is tired. I’ve heard Rick Caruso, Patrick Soon-Chiang, Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom, Donald Trump all play the blame game. As irritating as it is, it’s not the thing that is pissing me off the most right now.
While we all know the answer to this question, I don’t hear this being voiced at all: WHY THE FUCK DO WE HAVE TO CROWDFUND SOMEONE’S RECOVERY? Between someone’s house being destroyed to someone needing medical help to, it’s a reflex to expect a crowdfunding request on social media. Shouldn’t the insurance that we pay into cover these things?
All of our institutions are failing us here in the United States. If anything bad happens to us that is out of the ordinary, we now have to resort to being beggars in order to survive. As much as you can play by the rules, these rules are just arbitrary and can change at will to ensure the haves get to get more.
I’ll be getting back into the office tomorrow, so it will be interesting to see how things look from Arcadia.
Well fuck man. That’s about all I can say after the last several days. Absorbing all the information, looking at fire maps, seeing the videos, hearing the stories, listening to the blame game. I’m numb.
We were told a life-threatening wind event was going to happen beginning Tuesday afternoon. I knew this, and I think a lot of folks knew the winds were going to be bad. We’ve all lived through bad wind events. Seeing the Palisades Fire sparking up that day at work was bad but wasn’t a surprise. But fuck man. We never expected it to be this bad.
By the time I got home Tuesday evening, the Eaton Fire had already started out in Altadena. But without the aerial visuals on the news due to helicopters being grounded because of the winds, I tuned out for most of the evening. When I caught up with the news as I was going to bed Tuesday night, I saw that the evacuation warning zone for the Eaton Fire stretched all the way out to Arcadia — my office was a mile away from it. Fuck. I get in contact with other accounting managers and decide that we will be working from home. It became a scramble to get a hold of everyone to let them know not to go into the office.
This is the closest I’ve ever had any wildfire come to affecting me, and really this was nothing compared to what others are suffering through. As I’m sitting here in my Downtown LA apartment, I keep thinking about just how bad this has been. Fast-spreading wildfires and Santa Ana winds are nothing new to the Southland. I remember 1993, 2007, 2008, 2011. They were awful, and I was riveted to the news coverage, but they didn’t freak me out like this.
Actually the only other fire that really freaked me out was the Thomas Fire in 2017. Just like the Eaton Fire, this fire didn’t just stay up in the hills of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. The fire actually came down into the neighborhoods and burned houses. Not rich folks homes. Normal working class homes that were nowhere near brush or the hills. And seeing the homes torched in Altadena and Pasadena fucked me up.
Anyhow, those were some thoughts I had about these fires. The winds are supposed to pick up again in a couple of days, so let’s see what happens.
As I talked about in my thoughts after Berlin, I told myself I would get out of the house more often. Now is as good a time to start.
I wanted to see Queer before it left theaters and saw that it was playing in the former Laemmle Sunset 5 theaters on Sunset and Crescent Heights in West Hollywood. Fuck. The time and money I wasted at that fucking Virgin Megastore during the early 2000s was obscene. It is a wonder that they went out of business. The only tenant that has remained is the Crunch Fitness on the second floor which is where Madd and I ran into Renee Zellweger in the elevator all those years ago. And it was in those Laemmle theaters where I cussed out Drew Carey for talking too loudly during a movie — I believe it was during a sold-out screening for Bowling for Columbine. And running into Adam Duritz from Counting Crows in that Virgin Megastore and that Vietnamese dude that never aged from 21 Jumpstreet.
Buzz Coffee became a generic Starbucks; there is now an urgent care and a Trader Joes; the Laemmle is now a Landmark after being independent for a few years; and in the place of Virgin is now an AT&T and CB2 store. So yeah, it’s fair to say the vibe has changed.
As for the film, I don’t know how much I liked it. I think I have to re-read the book then re-watch it to make a final judgement. On the surface level I liked it, although there was something too romantic, too clingy with Bill Lee. Maybe it’s my projection of William Burroughs and his complete degeneracy, but I expected it to be more lurid and less linear. There was a gorgeous jungle scene with a choreographed moment of bodies melding into one another. I also appreciated that they used Nirvana songs anachronistically since Kurt and Burroughs did have a friendship.
I did use public transit to get there. Part of the ride involved using the B line which is the subway. The last time I used the subway about a year ago, the car reeked of shit, piss and pot (and probably other fluids.) This time, it was mostly odor-free I am happy to report.
I took the opportunity to go to the In-N-Out in Hollywood since I don’t live anywhere near one here in Downtown. You can never go wrong with a double-double animal style with fries and a 7-Up.
And if that wasn’t enough, I decided to go all out and got French toast and bacon at Blu Jam Cafe this morning.
I had a thought of going to Grand Park for the NYE festivities. It was a passing thought, a moment of psychosis really. It wasn’t going to be particularly cold, and there was going to be no rain. And as opposed to being at the first one in 2016, I live a few blocks away rather than having to get in from San Pedro. But I got ahold of my senses pretty quickly.
The annoying thing about living at this point in the evolution of technology is that there is always a considerable delay when you rely on a streaming service for television. So there I am on my couch hearing people in the bars on my block hoot and holler and light fireworks while the fucking ball in Times Square hasn’t even fucking started its decent on my television. (I was stupid enough and missed it happening live at 9 pm here, so I had to watch the tape delay version. If I had watched the live version, I could have just ignored it, but I’m gay so I need to see descended balls.)
With the fireworks going off, my cats predictably got spooked and ran underneath my bed. So happy 2025.
I’m writing this in the morning, so I will soon be off to my uncle’s in San Pedro to get the obligatory 떡국. It will be nice to see the family since I was in Berlin for our Thanksgiving gathering.
We’re halfway through this decade, so let’s see how things go.
I wanted to move to Downtown LA so I could utilize public transit more often, but the day I moved to my apartment the city announced it would shut down for COVID the next day. And just like that, we were shut down. Although everything has gone back to normal, I continued to drive drive drive mostly because it took less time than public transit. So I’d drive to the various markets I go to.
One of the things I noticed while I was in Berlin was the myth that public transit there was faster than it is here in LA. While that marginally might be the case, it’s not necessarily significant. It would regularly take me 40 minutes to get to anywhere not including the walking that had to be done. I resolved to take more public transport here in LA despite its imperfections.
Yesterday I needed to go to Hannam Chain Market in Koreatown on Olympic and Berendo, so I took the 28 that picks up near my apartment on 6th and Spring. I had music in my ears and a book to read, so I really tuned out my surroundings. I looked up and realized oh shit, we’re already there. In just 15 minutes we were there!
There has been a lot of talk about how unsafe Metro is, but on a Saturday late morning, a bus from Downtown through the Pico-Union district to Koreatown was uneventful. The worst thing about it were the fucking dots on the window:
Is there anything worse than dots on a transit window? Fucking ads.
There were two other annoying things that I noted:
People who don’t use headphones – I don’t want to hear your shitty music, your shitty video, your shitty phone conversations. I really hope you lose your hearing.
People who smoke pot in public – I get it. Pot is legal in California. Hooray. But that doesn’t mean you must smoke your shitty ass skunk weed wherever you damn well please. I still have PTSD from the time this really stoned motherfucker came over, and I had the worst sex ever. Just one whiff of pot makes me relive this experience.
This is probably why I hate leaving the house. But, to be honest, the dots were the worst.
Regardless of these quibbles, it was a completely pleasant experience. I didn’t have to stress about dumb ass motherfuckers who don’t know how to drive in Downtown. I didn’t have to worry about drivers who for whatever reason refuse to even come close to driving the speed limit. I just sat my ass in a seat, wait 15 minutes, and voila!
When thinking back on this year, I totally forgot about the eclipse back in April. It’s amazing how even though time seems to accelerate as we get older, April seems like a lifetime ago. Then again, time is an illusion.
But I remember driving out to Poplar Bluff, MO to see the eclipse and luxuriating in the four minutes of totality. Seeing the eclipse in 2017 in Newport, OR was a bit of an appetizer in comparison since totality was less than a minute where we were at. As great as it was to see the eclipse again, planning was such a bitch because of forecasted storms and cloud cover. I originally was going to go to Dallas, but the threat of storms forced me to be very flexible.
I also got my rental car stuck in the mud when I parked for the eclipse. But that was such a minor thing compared to the thrill of seeing the eclipse.
I am also grateful to work at a place that not only pays me properly but also has a good vacation policy since I was able to take this trip and a nearly-three-week vacation to Berlin recently. Fuck Disney.
I didn’t read as many books as I wanted to, only nine this year. But I did finish Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Hopefully I improve on that next year.
Here are some songs I liked this year. I really don’t understand the appeal of pop music, so while everyone gagged over Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan or whatever pop thing came out, I just ignored it. To be honest, I probably listened more to NIN more than anything else.
But all in all it was an okay year. Dull, sure. But hopefully I make changes to that in 25.
