ZOMG, Linerider is the best thing ever. I see now why we invented writing all those millenia ago.
INAUGURAL POSTCARD
ON THE BUS
Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker, Feb 5, 2001.
A couple of Saturdays ago, lacking any better invitation, you might have got up at five-thirty and left your silk scarves and your cashmere coat in the closet, put on your beat-up Red Wings and several layers of old wool, and cabbed up to the Harlem State Office Building, on 125th Street, where twenty young Socialists, a shoal of fellow-travelling Fordham students, and two stray Barnard College seniors who'd been drinking all night at the Village Idiot were waiting for transportation to Washington. David Schmauch, a member of the Harlem branch of the International Socialist Organization, was in charge of the operation. Schmauch, who resembles a clean-shaven Kenneth Branagh, was wearing duckboots, a nylon parka, and a goofy stocking cap. He'd paid fifteen hundred dollars out of his own pocket for a pair of antique yellow school buses, and he had sold nowhere near fifteen hundred dollars' worth of tickets. One contingent of sympathizers, he said, had backed out when it learned that the buses had no bathrooms. You might have been tempted to sneer at this objection, at the bourgeois primness of it; but after your very slow bus, slowed further by rain and fog, had made a bathroom stop at every service area along the New Jersey Turnpike each stop dilating into a cigarette break and an extended snack opportunity—you might have wished, yourself, for a motor coach with self-contained amenities.
On the other hand, the more time you'd sat on a warm, dry bus reading your fifty-cent copy of the Socialist Worker, the less time you'd have had to stand in the mud at Stanton Square, behind the Supreme Court, where the only shelters were the dope-scented portapotties and the plasticwrapped gazebo from which warmup speakers for the Reverend Al Sharpton were fishing for cheers in a sea of three or four thousand wet non-Republicans. Worse weather was imaginable: it could have been raining harder. If you'd lucked onto the slower bus and arrived very late, only your smaller fingers might have been frozen by the time Sharpton took charge of the mike and stirred you, against your will, with the brevity and force of his denunciations. There in the rain, among the wilting placards ("Hail to the Thief!" and "The People Have Spoken—All Five of Them') and the rain-beaded lenses of Bertolt Brecht eyewear, you might even have warmed to Sharpton's cheaper shots-his challenge to Dubya "to do more than get messy with Jesse," for example, or his calculated stuttering of "Clarence T-Tom-Thomas."
The crowd was all smiles as it formed a column and marched slowly up Maryland Avenue to surround the Supreme Court. If you'd been there, you might have been roused by the ceaseless chanting of "Racist, sexist, anti-gay, GEORGE BUSH, go away!" and "Hey, Dubya, what do you say—How many votes did you steal today?" even if you didn't actually believe that George Bush was a bigot or that he'd stolen any votes that day. Maybe, long ago, you felt similarly divided at high-school pep rallies. Maybe, although the cheerleaders in Washington wore dreads and leather pants and those burdensome-looking collections of buttons (those rosarylike skeins of explicit ideology), rather than letter sweaters and pleated skirts, you'd have once again found yourself simultaneously thrilled and repelled. But when the sidewalk surrounding the Supreme Court was fully occupied by drenched protesters, and the chant had shifted to a conga beat of "THIS is what dem-oc-racy looks-like, THAT is what hyp-oc-risy looks-like," with hundreds of wet arms pointing at the Court on every shout of "THAT," your irritation with the selfcongratulation of the THIS might have been swept away by a sudden, overpowering resentment of the THAT: the marble courthouse that loomed, silent, unlighted, unresponsive, behind a line of cops in riot helmets. You might have been glad you came down here.
But then, as the line moved on, and you rounded the southeast corner of the Court, you might have had the deeply weird experience of seeing yourself seeing yourself. There, in the Florida House on the other side of Second Street, behind tall windows hung with patriotic bunting, were men and women waiting for the party to commence, wearing the kinds of suits and shoes that you'd left at home, eating the kinds of food that you'd eaten in restaurants almost every night the week before, drinking the eighty-proof kind of drink for which you were all of a sudden thirsting, and peering out with a mixture of curiosity and fear and satisfaction at the sodden line of marchers of which you were at least somewhat, if only for a moment, and yet not entirely reluctantly, a living part.
The trip back took seven hours. The young Socialists—a first-year schoolteacher, an installer for Verizon, a bartender who was formerly a soccer star at Brown, among others-compared cell phones, read Marx in abridgment, unanimously praised "Friends," and split, along strict gaystraight lines, over the merits of "Xena: Warrior Princess." Few Pleasures compare with that of riding on a bus after dark, hours behind schedule, with people you violently agree with. But finally, inevitably, you get dumped back in the city. You may still be one version of yourself, the version from the bus, the younger and redder version, as long as you're waiting for the subway and riding home. Then you peel off the thermal layers, still damp, of the long day's costume, and you see a wholly different kind of costume hanging in your closet; and in the shower you're naked and alone.
This one is actually a good game.
It was devised by a friend-of-a-friend of the family; our friend showed up with it at Thanksgiving dinner once, said he wanted to test it on us.
Each player plays a "city manager" and builds one or a few cities in an unpopulated America (there are no native people in this game). You have to use your natural resources and decide whether to invest in infrastructure: roads for trade, education for more efficiency in the future, et cetera. There are version of the rules: Barter, Majority Rule ("The Socialist Game"), Making Money ("The Capitalist Game") and Autonomy ("We think Autonomy shows how socialism can be liberated and how capitalism can be disciplined," say the instructions).
It's meant to be educational, so I think the rules are designed to be disastrous in the barter, capitalist and socialist versions, yet workable in the last version.
Even so, we had a hell of a good time playing it that day—there were eight or so players, and there was a lot of discussion about how each of us should spend our resources. I don't think we even finished the game, and I've never had a chance to play it since, but I have fond memories.
Chief amongst the game's pleasures: it comes with a grease pencil, for use in drawing the roads your society constructs, directly on the board! How's that for fun?
When I was a wee boy, I begged & begged my parents to buy this game for me.
It's a bad version of Monopoly: here you buy fractions of the properties (labeled as companies: Du Pont, IBM, American Airlines) and get paid off "dividends" (according to your fraction) whenever another player lands on it. I wasn't hip to this at the time, but it was published in 1986 and the instructions say, "You are now a well-heeled investor ... ready to build a billion dollar empire with every intention of winning the game by becoming the wealthiest player."
There's nothing fun or interesting about it. It has nothing to do with the stock market—which is at least mildly interesting and educational.
But something about this box made me beg my mother, on more than one occasion, to get this for me, and she finally did, at a then-whopping $30. I never found a single person who wanted to play it with me. I played alone a few times.
Just call me Alex.
The first time I saw True Romance, I didn't get it. Some action flick. This time through, knowing who Quentin Tarantino is, video salesman, kung fu film fan, I get it. I get what true romance is.
It's playing in the Lotus Club.
I'm in New York. This is a town with enough street signs.
I'm in Boston.
They should think about putting up some street signs in this town.
So yesterday I was offline all day because I was at John Muir's birthplace. I bet you didn't know he was from Dunbar, Scotland! Well, he is. His family emigrated when he was 11. They had money.
I also didn't know that he got one eye poked out as a young man working in a factory. According to the wall text at the Birthplace, while he was convalescing he said, "If I ever get my eyesight back, I'll devote my life to nature!" He went on to do a whole lot of hiking and helped create the National Park system in the US, as well as the Sierra Club. He also partied with Theodore Roosevelt. They went camping together, just the two of them, for four days, while Roosevelt was president.
He was a crazy dude. He once strapped himself to a tree during a storm to feel what it felt like to be a tree in a storm. He took a trip around the world, visiting places like Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, South America, all in one go and not really in order. It seems like that would've taken ages in the early part of the 20th century. He also wrote a load of books; I can't tell if they were any good because the quotes on the wall were full of hyperbolic guff like "Then the clouds clear and the sun unleashes its incredible force on the countryside, clearing the moisture from every rock and warming even the smallest creature" (not an actual quote).
I was there because a friend of mine had put up an art piece on the coast outside of Dunbar: she silkscreened white-on-white flags and hung them between some rocks to be torn apart by the wind and tide. They quickly succumbed, though, to the groundskeeper of the nearby golf course, and for the winter they'll hang in the John Muir Birthplace.
Walking to the site where she'd hung the flags was fun because you have to walk along the edge of this golf course and avoid getting smacked by flying golf balls. The geology there is amazing: very pretty sandstone as well as some highly tilted slabs of rock that come up out of the sea at about a 60° angle.
Hello. I wanted to share this short story with you. It's by a guy named Richard Brautigan.
The Correct Time
I'll do a bubble the best I can and perhaps a few more. Not that they are overly important and would change things, except for the one that got hit by the Number 30 Stockton bus. That's another story.
My girl-friend was late, so I went to the park alone. I got tired of waiting, of standing there in a bookstore reading a novel about people who make love all the time in wealthy surroundings. She was good-looking, but I was also growing older, jaded.
It was one of those typical summer afternoons that we do not get in San Francisco until the autumn. The park was as usual: Children were playing these-are-the-days-of-my-youth, and old people were sunning now what the grave would darken soon enough and the beatniks were lying here and there like stale rugs on the grass, waiting for the great hip rug merchant to come along.
I walked all around the park before I sat down: a long slow circle gathered gently to its end. Then I sat down but before I could examine the territory of where I was at, an old man asked me what time it was.
'A quarter of three,' I said, though I did not know what time it was. I just wanted to be helpful.
'Thank you,' he said, and flashed an antique smile of relief.
A quarter of three was the correct time for that old man for that was the time he wanted, the time that pleased him the most. I felt pretty good.
I sat there for a few moments and saw nothing else to remember and nothing to forget. I got up and went away, leaving a happy old man behind.
The Boy Scouts of America taught me all I know, and I had done my good deed for the day, and all I needed now so that I could dwell in perfection would be to find an enfeebled fire engine and help it across the street.
'Thank you, son,' with its arthritic red paint smelling of old age, and its ladder covered with white hair, and a slight cataract over its siren.
There were children playing a game with bubbles at the place I had chosen to leave the park. They had a jar of magic bubble stuff and little rods with metal rings to cast the bubbles away with, to join them with the air.
Instead of leaving the park, I stood and watched the bubbles leave the park. They had a very high mortality pulse. I saw them again and again suddenly die above the sidewalk and the street: their rainbow profiles ceasing to exist.
I wondered what was happening and then looked closer to see that they were colliding with insects in the air. What a lovely idea! and then one of the bubbles was hit by the Number 30 Stockton bus.
WHAM! like the collision between an inspired trumpet and a great
concerto, and showed all those other bubbles how to go out in the grand
style.
