Just in Case You Were Concerned. . .
Seattle
Friday October 31, 2003
"NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 26 through November 1, 2003, as Protection From Pornography Week. I call upon public officials, law enforcement officers, parents, and all the people of the United States to observe this week with appropriate programs and activities."

Butterfly Farm
Seattle
Thursday October 30, 2003
My worlds neatly aligned last weekend, placing me in Kansas on business for Saturday/Monday which let me spend Saturday/Sunday celebrating my brother's birthday. Brian had previously placed himself and his wife Natalie in Kansas (not in "The Little Apple" but in Lawrence, which is a different piece of fruit). I had the chance to check out their new house, a great bunch of friends that make quick work of mimosas, Brian's office at the top of Fraser Hall (which I found mildly humorous since I work with someone by that name), and I got to scope out their extensive insect breeding facilities. That is not a euphemism for a problem with roaches or ants in the kitchen. Brian and Natalie, after much painstaking research, planted a "butterfly garden" this Spring and have been methodically collecting catepillars, raising them in jars, and tagging the newly born Monarch butterflies so they can be tracked on their annual journey to Mexico. There is, I was told, a squad of crack Mexican butterfly wranglers who capture and note the code number on these tagged butterflies. All of this information is entered into the global butterfly database, and I was assured that the tagging process is relatively painless and involves very small, modified firearm.

Fires, Birthday
Seattle
Wednesday October 29, 2003
Happy Birthday Mom! Today is my mom's birthday and while I'd like to think she'll remember this birthday for the glass-blown pumpkin Dia delivered during her visit last week, I know that won't be the case. When I spoke to her last night she told me that she and dad have backed up essential possessions and documents and are ready to evacuate their house if need be. This freaked me out, of course. None of the national news reports I've been following gave me a sense that Vista had anything to worry about, but the fires have been shifting, a couple are close to merging, and the fire map from this morning shows Vista unscathed but with fires on three sides. But from their view on the ground, they report it's just a disaster. The sky is black, everyone is coughing, our long-time friends the Haights house is in imminent danger, and the fires have jumped Highway 76. The town of Cuyamaca, which I passed through many a weekend on my way to go camping as a Boy Scout, has been completely destroyed and as of last night, Julian described on CNN as a "tourist gold rush town" but remembered by me as the home of Dudley's Bakery, is in danger of the same fate. As mom and dad were flying into the San Diego airport on Monday--they landed just before flights started to be cancelled--they said the cabin air filled up with the smell of a campfire. So today I'll be sending out both happy-birthday-mom and please-don't-burn-anymore-houses-down vibes out to the Universe.

None of Tomorrow's Parties
Seattle
Tuesday October 28, 2003
Our home insurance company has informed us, based on digital pictures we provided, that our backyard is "an attractive nuisance" owing, I susepct to the various Burning Man detritus that has not been cleared since the summer's frenetic artistic activity. I suppose is better than having an "unattractive nuisance" in your backyard, right? This, coupled with a pressing need to attend to various and sundry adminstrative activities, suggests that the best thing for Mark and Dia is to sit out the raft of parties this weekend presents and focus on the all important task of getting our shit together. So you won't see us cavorting this weekend in fabulous costumes, but I don't feel that bad as we spend an above average amount of the year doing that anyway.

Moving Vehicles
Lawrence, Kansas
Saturday October 25, 2003
I can't sleep in moving vehicles. Trains, of course, are excepted since their metronomic click-clack-click-clack can send even the most hopped up into dreamland. The not-sleeping-while-moving rule is especially true, was true anyway, with airplanes. Recently I stumbled across the secret to sleeping on planes. It involves being very very tired. Thus I only vaguely recall the surge of force as my jet took off this evening. The previous sentence vaguely suggests it was my jet, whereas in reality I was tightly lodged in seat 20H. In a very anti-Dorothy moment, I awoke from a dream to discover I was in Kansas anymore. Or at least just next to Kansas, in Missouri.

The Kansas City Airport is of the compact and pleasant variety. No long corridors, moving walkways, or trams to distant terminals. Pretty much an airport next to the sidewalk. My rental car is a Hyundai Sonata, which is Plan B since I failed to fit in the originally assigned vehicle. The Sonata is a curious car, an attempt to dress up cheap manufacturing with an almost sexy front grill and fake wood paneled interior and, well, that's pretty much when they ran out of the dress up budget. No matter, it's perfectly capable of doing 85mph down I-70 as I barrel across darkened Kansas. It's very dark and the road lopes through gentle hills. I listen to voice mail in my earpiece, make calls, receive calls, receive text messages, send a couple, and then turn my phone off and drive. I need to focus on why I'm here: marketing.

It's near midnight when I arrive at the Motel 6 in Manhattan, "The Little Apple." The annual clash of cross-state college football rivals K-State and KU will begin in thirteen hours and so the finer Manhattan hotels have been booked for weeks. I've slept in worse places; I don't want to come off as a snob. I've slept in the desert, in cars, on couches, in the dirt, and on the floor near a leaking bathroom on a train filled with livestock and drunken soldiers, yet none of these locales carried the same whiff of despair that I sense as I enter room #234. I can't quite put my finger on it. The room is non-smoking, so it's curious to find that it comes with an ashtray. The ashtray has been turned upside down and there is a stricker on it with the universal circle/slash no smoking logo. Being cost-conscious I would have thought the acountants at Motel 6 would have simply not purchased ashtrays for the non-smoking rooms. Obviously something else is going on here, but I really don't want spend too much time in this room with my eyes open and my stomach has been growling since I passed some sort of roadkill a couple of hours ago. Don't read into that.

A short drive from "The 6" as I've now come to think of my new pad, working to harness the the power of positive suggestion, is Aggieville. It is instantly recognizable as the sort of college ghetto that exists near every large university, but fully flowers only in places where a school is the prime reason for a town's existence. I wander the few square blocks that are presently responsible for intoxicating several thousand college students, telling myself I'm looking for a place to eat but really just wandering and working to reconcile what I see with my memories of being 18, 19, 20, 21. I'm struck by the fact that the noise pulsing out of most of the bars is hip hop, which wasn't on my radar when I was this age, unless you count Grandmaster Flash, which you should. Thousands of cornfed, Abercrombie Fitch youth bobbing gangsta style would seem ripe for parody if I weren't surrounded by it at the moment, and if it didn't seem so natural to the kids. But "kids" is a bit dismissive, and I don't mean to dismiss these future leaders, heroes, artists, husbands, wives, and car rental franchise managers.

I find a place that's not packed with sweaty drunken youth. I am very hungry, and I'd like to think that it is this overwhelming physical need and not a moral deficiency that allows me to order a beer and chicken wings. I know full well that chicken wings are a product of horrific agribusiness factories and I can envision only two scenarios that have produced the crunchy, tangy, poultry bits that I will soon enjoy. It's simply a fact that either there is a company that has developed industrial technology to surgically dismember and defeather caged birds that have been strung out on antibiotics since birth or there are legions of underpaid immigrant laborers who toil in factories that, if he were alive today, Sinclair Lewis would be writing about. I suspect that it's a savvy combination of both, but the wings arrive and I dip them in bleu cheese dressing and move on to more pressing matters.

Like the fact that college girls--sorry, young women--seem to have become incredibly sexual when I wasn't looking. Or at least they appear sexual on the surface. At least in Kansas. I don't recall the women I knew in college as ever having scurried around with bare bellies, sultry tatoos in the small of their back, or vinyl miniskirts which make sitting down a sin. I'm flustered. I want to blame this all on the pervasiveness of radically sexualized music videos pumped into the heartland by MTV when I remember that MTV no longer plays music videos. This remains a mystery.

On the precipice of crankiness, I retreat to the The 6, fall asleep, dream of unicorns--actually I dream of a dream of unicorns, which I read about--and wake up to my alarm clock, which is actually my phone. Everything is something else.

By 7:30am I am seated in a booth at the Village Inn ordering breakfast. The pot of coffee which the young waitress brings me runs $1.29. I am impressed with the price of caffeine in Kansas. I play a trick on myself as I read the menu. Dr. Atkins has shown us all that you can eat whatever the hell you want as long as there are no carbs, so I smugly order two eggs, corned beef hash, no potatoes, no toast, and then, as she walks away with her braces and pierced tongue I remember that corned beef hash involves potatoes by definition. Too late, I wouldn't want to cause a stir. She brings it to me promptly and calls me "hon" which, given that I've got a good eighteen years--not quite twenty, I'm sure, I think--seems odd, maybe inappropriate. But I don't say a thing and give her what might be her biggest tip of the morning.

I didn't come all this way for breakfast, I came all this way for marketing, and so I consult the map I picked up at The 6 and find my way to the Kansas State University stadium where several hours from now the purple-coated Wildcats will dismantle the University of Kansas Jayhawks in the most thrilling twenty minutes of live college football I have ever witnessed. That it is the only twenty minutes of live college football I've ever witnessed is not really the point.

But before these teams meet in gridiron combat, and before the K State marching band executes their own brand of precision wackiness on the field, and certainly before the elaborate public ode to the Constitution of the United States of America which precedes the Pledge of Allegience to the Flag of the United States of America which precedes the singing of the Star Spangled Banner which precedes the presentation of some sort of award to some executive from Altell in recognition of the fact that Altell is the Official Telecommunications Sponsor of the Kansas State University Athletics Department, before all of this there is marketing to be done. Hearts and minds to be won over.

A massive mobile phone manufacturer based in Finland that Americans often think is based in Japan and which posesses the sixth most recognized brand iin the world is here today, in Manhattan Kansas, doing what such marketing behemoths do: giving away free shit with their logo on it to a target demographic and associating their ever-expanding brand with something their target demographic loves, in this case football. Every college football Saturday, somewhere in this country, not one, not two, not three, but FOUR giant phones will be inflated, tents erected, a stage constructed, a giant TV screen raised high above the temporary compound, and college students, their parents, and alumni, many on their way to being drunk prior to the big game, will be exposed to the latest in mobile technology. Phones that take pictures, phones that play games, phones that play music, and even phones that make phone calls. A pair of up and coming (they hope) punk/pop bands in the style of Green Day will perform for thirty minutes each, after which they will sit down and use Sharpie markers to sign towels with the phone manufacturer's logo, which the target demographic can add to their goodie bag which might include logo beer cups, logo t-shirts, logo jackets, logo sweatshirts (which soft pedal the logo component in order to appeal to hipper segment of the target demographic), logo noise makers, logo little footballs, and venue-appropriate fight song ringtones.

This is how you market. This is how you build a brand. All you need is millions of dollars and pallets of goods Made in China. The event seems a success, but the true payoff will appear at fraternity parties later in the term where the logo beer cups get put into service, in the dorm room of the awkward girl with braces who's pinned the logo towel signed by the band that is going nowhere (but means alot to her) to the wall, and in the lecture halls on cold days where some students, not being on top of their laundry, decide the logo sweatshirt is the best they can do, and well, fuck it, it's a 9am lecture and I'm hungover and I'm going to class in sweats.

This is brilliant marketing, but I'm hungry again. My reward for working the event--in addition to the logo sweatshirt--is a ticket which admits me to the end zone just in time to experience the band/Constitution/Pledge/Anthem/Altell set up. I eat a hot dog. There is much cheering and running around and a season-ending injury to the KU quarterback, the soul of the team. I leave the stadium with cheers ringing in my ears, making a break for the parking lot, my rented Sonata, and I-70. The drive back is uneventful, both quicker and more monotonous than it was in the dark fifteen hours ago. I see a dead deer in the road, a dead fox (I think), and something else that's dead and furry but can't be identified. I pull off on the exit in Lawrence Kansas, needing to write, needing to eat. At non-descript sports bar the game I left two hours ago is loudly winding down. I order a beer, pull out my laptop, notice that they claim to serve the best chicken wings in Kansas, and order a salad.

Fellow Traveler
Seattle
Thursday October 24, 2003
I first met Mary, who Dia knew glancingly in college, after she moved to Seattle following a Peace Corp stint in Mali. That was many moons ago. In 2001, Dia and I, along with Jay and Karin, went up to Juneau and watched Mary and Kim get married in beautiful, moving Buddhist ceremony while new baby daughter Asha looked on, eagles circled overhead, and salmon jumped out of the water. It seemed as if the natural world was exuberantly celebrating these three. I last saw Mary when she was coming through Seattle on her way from Alaska and on her way to Thailand. This week I received an email from her--they are still in Thaliand--announcing the fact that her first published story appears in a new book: Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure As she noted, "books like this one make great holiday gifts for the armchair travelers on your list! ;)"

Elliott, Goddamn It
Seattle
Wednesday October 23, 2003
Elliott Smith, who I last saw perform at the now defunct Breakroom in Seattle, apparently killed himself yesterday in a sad and self-loathing fashion that just makes sad and angry. Here are Ten Reasons Elliott Smith was Cool. I understand depression and despair, but not the depths that lead one to take their own life. I'm not sure why I'm so troubled and disturbed by the suicide of someone I have met. I think it emphasizes the profoundity of human connections and the fact that important connections don't have to involve "knowing someone." I liked Elliott's music but was never an obsessive or even very thorough fan, but he wrote songs that tapped into something that I relate to and understand. When Cynthia Doyon ended her life earlier this year it was something different. She didn't (as far as I know) write songs. Her's was a different sort of art. I believe we're all artists, we're all creating something worthwhile for our own reasons. When the reasons to create and to live are outpaced by some other set of reasons that makes it seem rational to end creation and end life, I can't help but be sad.

48 Hours in Las Vegas
Las Vegas
Tuesday October 22, 2003
I managed to spend my entire 48 hours in Las Vegas without leaving my hotel. Given the size of Las Vegas hotels these days (9 of the world's 10 largest), I guess this is akin to spending 48 hours in Seattle without leaving Capitol Hill, which I've done. My panel went well as did the several meetings I had, and it was difficult to walk any distance without being stopped and handed a business card. I think this is a good sign. It's impossible, though, not ponder the huge irony in attending a mobile industry convention in a place where the cell coverage for my phones (from two different carriers) just sucked.

In a lovely bit of synchronized timing, Dia flew back from LA ten minutes before my plane landed and greeted me at the gate! She's unfortunately brought a cold back from LA (I would have thought colds would move south, not north), but we still enjoyed our first dinner together in two weeks where James both waited on us and helped stir enthusiasm for upcoming happenings: Night of the Dead, the Oracle Gathering, and SeaCompression. We're certain to make one of the three . . . not aure the Oracle is my bag (but I guess we'll see).

Wall-to-Wall
Seattle
Sunday October 19, 2003
I'll be zipping to the airport momentarily for a couple of work days in Las Vegas, a city with which I have an ambivalent relationship. I succeeded (just barely) in fulfilling the one commitment I made to Dia before she left for CA ten days ago: the unfolded laundry that was occupying the dining room the morning she left has been folded and put away . . . the fact that she required this commitment of me is a testimony to my ability to look past domestic chores as I pursue peak experiences, by which I mean intense work tasks and intimate human exchange. But, as I've noted before, at some point this tendency has diminishing returns which is why, now armed with my Franklin Covey Organizer(tm) I am methodically pulling my shit together to enable a higher percentage of these peak moments and lower percentage of unfolded laundry.

Work this week was more chaotic than usual and given what the next six months will look like workwise, I've filled up the last ten Dia-less days with frenzy of meal time socializing, including:

• Steaks with Kathleen who is fearlessly working to slay her dissertation, selling her loft in Vancouver, and bemusedly navigating a new relationship,
• Pizza with Andy who is enthusiastically diving into a new work role and who happily endured an hour of Burning Man evangelism, complete with pictures,
• Pizza with Mark who becoming fluent in the behavioral patterns of his cat, sharpening his resume, hanging his guitars on the world, and becoming more Zen by the moment,
• Pizza with Elaine, who kicking ass at work and refusing to have her ass kicked in the rest of her life,
• Sushi with Lara, who is endlessly logging film footage, working on that Voodoo priestess outfit, and tuning her life in the most admirable of ways,
• Salad with Joyce, who is confronting imminent unemployment with a smile, has one degree of separation (of course) from my best friends, and is a newfound source of amazement.

What I conclude from this is that I need to eat less pizza.

Un-confounded
Seattle
Satuday October 18, 2003
Mysteriously appearing recursive <font> tags (thousands) ballooned Joygantic's index page to a few hundred kb, choking my dad's Mac. This was not--I want to assure the world--a conspiracy against Apple-loving Mac users, it was just a stupid Dreamweaver(tm) trick.

Confounded
Seattle
Monday October 13, 2003
I have a report that Joygantic has suddenly started being whacky on Mac. And I can report that (perhaps due to the reconfiguration of my laptop) I'm experiencing unbearably slow performance from Dreamweaver (as in there is a five second lag between when I type a character and when it appears). In unrelated confusion, I have been trying to migrate to Moveable Type and am stymied by the collision fo a steep learning curve and a lack of time to ponder the the intricacies of CSS and MT tags. What does this all mean? Hold tight and keep checkin' back, I guess.

The Shift
Seattle
Saturday October 11, 2003
This is my eleventh autumn in Seattle and I can feel the annual shift in energy deep in my bones. I'm typing away at a favorite pub, waiting on lunch, and looking out the window at the grey sky and rain. People are driving around with their lights on in the middle of tghe afternoon. It's not just the weather that shifts this time of year, it's the energy; the desire to withdraw is profound. Fall also corresponds the beginning of work mayhem; the next six months will be a blur of work, travel, firedrills, and deadlines. I'm determined to try and get a leg up on things this year and not enter April feeling like I've just been forced marched through the catacombs. My strategy involves improved organization, increased exercise, better attention to this whole "sleeping" thing I hear so much about, and raucous fun with people I love. Step --organization--is a windmill I've been charging at for the last few years. I used to consider myself highly organized. Currently though--I'm baring my soul here--I am an informational mess, getting through each day juggling a completely obscene number of tasks, priorities, bits of information in my head. My to-do lists are scattered about, my contacts are stored in a dozen different places, and this is probably why I have not written a letter in over a year or sent you that friendly email you might have been expecting. But all this will shortly change. It must.

Governor A.S.S.
Seattle
Saturday October 11, 2003
So far I've refrained from commenting on the whole Arnold episode in Californian. The political scientist in me is intrigued by the high voter turnout and the split in the Democratic colation, and wonders if the middle of road social positions (groping notwithstanding) of the Governor can be worked by Republicans on a national level. The Democrat in me thinks it's pathetic that the flagship Dem in California was able to take power, be reelected, and still not have any friends. He probably should have written more thank you notes like the Bush clan does. The democrat in me is appalled at the shallow, mean, personalized nature of the (brief) debate leading up to the election. This includes the broadsides at the Los Anglese Times and the fact that a cult of personality could so quickly whip up around a candidate whose budget math was so transparently false. But then again, I think that's how cult of personalities work. We'll see how all this plays out, of course, and I expect to be disturbed whether or not Arnold S. Schwarzenegger is a success or not. In the meantime I'll ponder the email Mark sent me yesterday:

Holding Back the Evidence
Seattle
Sunday October 4, 2003
I have a habit of losing things, including the various widgets which allow me to make available to you, dear reader, the photographic panorama which is (sometimes) Joygantic. I lay at your feet candid photos that go like this: mark/dia/bernstein, sara/mark, dia dancing, an unusually cute pix of mark&dia, dia&trevor.

Prom
Seattle
Monday October 6, 2003
Seeing Lara Saturday was a treat since she's bunkered down these days editing her film and dodging goofy email. This hermit behavior is something I completely understand and relate to with a mixture of envy and empathy. Retreating solo into a creative project that you've spent years on is both an amazing feat and an adruous challenge. We shared five hugs, which is a bit above average, but I'm storing them up like a camel stores water since Lara needs to drop out for awhile.

When I wrote last week about Mark's efforts to scratch my Hedwig itch, I illustrated the point with a picture and exercised my editorial license, cropping it to isolate Mark, as all my recent solo Mark pictures were accompanied by the sullen expression only found on someone who's been stranded in the desert with a motorhome. It was (gingerly) pointed out to me that I had redrafted history in a Stalinesque manner. So above, please find the unedited photos of Mark and Lara and Sara and Trevor at the Space Virgins 2003 Burning Man Prom. Alas, there is no extant photo of me and my date, Gina.

Testing Continues
Seattle
Sunday October 5, 2003



Friday night we had dinner with Sara and Trevor to celebrate Sara's birthday. Saturday night we had dinner with Jessica and Dwayne to celebrate Jessica's birthday.

And then our car was stolen.

That's not the exact order of events. I skipped the part where after dinner on Saturday we went to Mark and Mikelle's house to join friends in the continuing celbration of Sara's birthday: Phil and Gina (up from LA)! Yay! Homer and Jen! Yay! Kelly and Joe! Yay! Mark and Mikelle! Yay! Trevor and Sara! Yay! A new Sara! Yay! Lara! Yay! Hot tub madness! Yay! An ever mutating playlist of great music which causes people to dance with wild abandon! Yay! A carrot cake with 28 candles, nearly all of which the birthday girl personally licks clean! Yay! Going outside this morning to move the Chakradjuster from our car to Mark & Mikelle's house only to discover that it's not there and has been stolen! Not Yay!

I will refrain from recounting the boring details which trickled out over the six or so hours between calling 911 and being dropped off at home by a cab that picked me up at the service station to which Heddy was towed. She was stripped of the stereo and her steering column was cracked open, damaging the parts that allow her to start and be driven by anyone who either has a key or is unschooled in the ways of auto theft.

I feel, a bit, like the universe is proctoring some exam to see if I can handle random annoyances and hassles with a Zen-like calm. I think I'm passing, hoping in the back of my mind that this isn't just some lead up to a bigger test.

LA Drivetime
Los Angeles
Wednesday October 1, 2003
Extra wide streets flat
Cn ar textures surround me in
unfolded city.

The Standard
Los Angeles
Wednesday October 1, 2003
Dennis, who I haven't talked to in far too long, is a hotel whore. Looking in the mirror, I guess I have to admit that I am also. If I'm not sleeping in my own home, I want to be comfortable and most of all I don't want to be annoyed. Dennis told me about The Standard in West Hollywood a couple of years ago when it first opened and I have to say that after a brief, twelve hour stay I agree that thel hotel is fabulous. For these reasons:

You can't derive any of this knowledge from the painfully hip and shallow website so you'll just have to trust me.

. . . . INFO. . . .

FAQ
Email Mark
Email Dia

. . . . WHEREABOUTS . . . .

Mark
Las Vegas
L ondon/Cannes, 2.18-3.1
Atlanta, 3.21-25

Dia
So Cal 11.8-21

. . . . STUFF . . . .

Vista
Happy 2003
Tickets

. . . . ARCHIVE . . . .

September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003
March 2003
February 2003
January 2003
December 2002
July/August 2001
April/May/June 2001
January/February/March 2001