20030311 - Viva Floss Vegas

Several months ago, I went to a bachelor party in Las Vegas.

No, no strippers, but there was a lot of watching straight guys watching sports.

The first morning, I noticed floss in the bathroom of the room I was in.

Dental floss.

OK, I understand that the groom's mother is a dental hygienist, but come on, really, bringing floss seems to betray the spirit of Vegas. Dental floss in Vegas is a sacrilege; those who break the covenant are surely forced to stand on the sidewalk flipping cards for strip clubs because they're not allowed to talk (ok, no, those guys didn't floss, either). I'm sure there's some sort of semi-sketchy use that it is OK to use floss for, tying doll parts to your scooter, perhaps, but it is certainly not something you are allowed to bring in and use for dental hygiene. They should have customs agents remove it from your bags while you lose your first quarter in the slots at the airport gate when you arrive.

Stranger still, it the floss was not the possession of the groom-to-be, much, I am sure, to the dismay of his mother.

One of the other guys thought it was perfectly natural to smuggle dental floss into Vegas. Someone else took the time while packing his bags to make sure his toiletry kit included a good bolt of floss, just to keep his dental hygiene at 100% for the three days and two nights of gambling and drinking. Maybe someone felt that floss would make Vegas a more sincere, loving kind of town, or maybe he'd meet someone at the hotel pool during his morning swim who would be impressed by his freshly flossed teeth. I don't know.

I may not be one to talk, as I did bring my Rogaine, but really, Rogaine seems to be more about what Vegas is all about: forced promotion of unnatural (if not downright absurdly fake) growth.
 

20030310 - There's a new girl in town and she's lookin' good!

The Drew Carey Show is the modern day version of the old sit-com Alice. Sure, he's not a waitress, but he is in a dead-end job, which may not technically be blue collar, but is in effect. The show focuses upon work hijinks and friends-n-family after work. (I work with some neat people, but our department doesn't go hang out together afterwards…well, maybe they do, but they've never invited me to the nightly wacky camaraderie location.) The only difference is that the people in Alice had aspirations.

I hit upon this realization when the immortal words of Flo rang through me head, "Kiss my grits!" and that cartoonish character was so easily recognizable as the outrageous Mimi. You could even carry it on further and assign roles to others, Lewis = Vera (AKA Dingy), etc. but the important part here is that while the show has lots of funny bits and a great laugh track, this is all going to be embarrassing and completely unwatchable in about 5 years.
 

20030309 - the next day

While getting into my running gear to go get in some chilly exercise, I looked down at my legs and thought about how all our bodies are decaying. In 50 years, we'll be lucky to be alive, sane, able to remember any of the Bush presidencies, let alone worry about this sort of stuff. I don't really mean to hurt people, but I will not spend all my time trying to not hurt anyone. This is stupid. I've got time to be friends, but don't want to waste my life on pointless melodrama. Matteo, you always did bring out the drama queen in me. Or is that just the ISCA-nostalgia?

For a bit I considered going through and editing yesterday's post so it didn't address Matt specifically, but didn't. My first real test of letting stuff stay. And there's plenty of other stuff there that needed to be thought out, anyway.
 

20030308 - Truly Disappointed

Maybe instead of titling this after a Morrissey song, I should call it "Watch Out For Goofy".

The Xmas/New Year's break was weird. We didn't organize; we just went and called people on the fly. Went with the flow, accepted what came. That works for my friend Tim. We bumped into him at Wheatsfield, the local hippy-food store in Ames, IA. He was between apartments, didn't have a phone, so we couldn't contact him, had we tried. But there he was, and we ended up letting him know where the rest of that 'set' of friends were meeting. Tim can pull that sort of thing off.

But since Tim just goes with the flow, he also doesn't necessarily follow up with people, stay in contact with people, etc. He just lets them (or the Universe) do much of the bringing back together.

So, on our vacation, we had a big list of people to see. Some just got voicemail that I was in town. If people were around in the short amount of time we had, we tried to hook up with them. We actively avoided some extended gatherings because we didn't want to spend time on some people. We avoided certain combination of friends. But we didn't have enough time to do that perfectly by seeing different 'sets' apart in every instance. So that made for weird situations when we met different 'sets' of friends together (even if those 'sets' used to run in the same circles). The gay ex-roommates who used to drive me up the wall with one half of the people I used to hang out with to avoid the roommates one night, the other half of the people (who don't get along with the first) the next. Friend from 11 years ago does not mix well with friends from 5. Context matters. Old friend has a new element.

And one of the people we didn't get to see was Matt13. Thanks to the inter-net, I know that we hurt his feelings.

I don't know what it is.... I liked Matt13. But I also have to go back pretty darn far to think of any interaction of any depth that we've had that hasn't been painful in some way. And it's not that we're actively trying to hurt each other. Several times 5-7 years ago, he came to visit, took me to a movie (and I'm a shit for never returning the favor). We would go out to eat, and (my interpretation is) we both felt pain at not being able to connect any more. And there's a phone call I made once, to just say goodbye, but things didn't turn out that way. Which is good, but at what point do people (like a romantic couple) decide that this hurts too much and it's time to stop? It's not that I want to, but no one ever does.

OK, it is something wrong with me. I'm overly wrapped up in utter bliss in my primary relationship and hardly have time for anything/anyone else. But even when outside of that, looking back over the past 10 years, I've got a brother, parents, extended relatives I can't connect with, friends that I don't write/email/visit/read blogs of, friends that I've been able to talk to about how we've grown apart into completely different worlds, at least one friend who "cut me off" when I was painfully honest with him about what it was like to deal with him when he was on crank, and lately I've been fearing that I'm becoming isolated from the good friends I had by socio-economic factors.

What did the bbs crowd actually have in common...college kids with an electronic, virtual social network. No wonder we're all messed up, that's all we've ever been. Sociologists need to study us as precursors to what is happening as more and more people get wired and experience the social isolation of virtual communities.

When someone goes through a slow, withering depression for a couple years, they come out different on the other side. Two cars are moving X km/h. They are going in opposite directions, so the distance which binds them increases at 2X. Insert more cars as necessary. Give each one of them a depressed, neurotic driver. I just don't think any of us realize how different we have all become.
 

20030305 - More camping for the Bushes?

I got a chill this morning when I heard on NPR the latest discussion of Turkey's involvement with the possible Bush War on Iraq. Turkey hopes to run rampant through northern Iraq, settling their old disputes with the Kurds (whether the Kurds are terrorists to Turkey is another debate), but the US is firm in its stance that Turkey's involvement in any upcoming war would be merely to set up receiving centers to control refugees. Um...who wants to go to the refugee camp run by the guys who want to kill us?

I wonder if Grandpa Prescott Bush is around to show them how to run their camps? (Prescott was involved with several business ventures with Nazi Germany, and ran afoul with the Trading with the Enemy Act.)

Maybe the Bush clan can start a new company to not only help finance, but also help in logistics and efficiency. "We don't kill your unwanted ethnic groups. We kill your unwanted ethnic groups, faster!"