33.775616, -117.996941

I am in LA.
It is much colder here than I expected. I'm kind of worried that I didn't pack enough warm clothes for the journey north. My sister lives in an Anglo ghetto in a Mexican ghetto in a Korean ghetto.
My sister works at a beauty store, so I've been slathering myself with hundreds of dollars of goopy products for the past week, and none seem to have an effect, though I did go in the sun without sunblock for about 20 minutes and got a mild sunburn.

Here are some pictures. So far I have taken 438.

Huntington Beach, a.k.a. "Surf City USA". I was very cold, and most of the people were ugly.


Some hippie tonic. The hippie product vetting process is complex.


Drugs. Take note of the memorable vendor in the upper right of the image.


Electronics store. Decent prices, too.


A a large, trippy, 70's-esque spinning model of the earth at the Griffith Observatory.


Chilling with bronze Einstein.


Poor beast. San Diego Zoo, around 3pm.

Mendi-can

I've become like an old squirrel, hiding my precious nuts about town and then forgetting about them.

When I came back to Sarasota from FSU, I moved into a tent in my mother's backyard. I couldn't deal with listening to her television blasting all night, or the hum of the air conditioner when I knew people were paying good money to experience the gentle summer breezes I got for free.

Over the next year my belongings gradually spread out across town at my friends' places, their parents' houses, and even in the trunk of one girl's car, though I don't think she knows I keep a pair of sneakers there. I have a full change of professional clothes in several locations, and about 4 complete sets of keys with keys to all these people's houses stashed in a few places, not including the set I keep with me; if I can't get to one, surely I can get to another. My important documents are mailed to the household least likely to move in the next year, my packages are sent to the household with the most attentive mother who will call me if something arrives; not the same house.

Since I live at what would traditionally be described as "no fixed location", I pay no rent. I have no car; I refuse to shoulder such an expense. I work at Starbucks, but with my minimized expenses, I'm saving over $500 a month and still buying everything I want. Hm....

This all happened organically, I didn't intent to become a bum, but I'm really glad I did. Having a fixed location to put my belongings and sleep would be nice, but will happen soon. I'm not sure I would opt to do this all over again but it's been fun.

I think the reason I'm happiest with how things have turned out is that I'm confident that I would be miserable if I had real bills to pay every month or other obligations looming overhead.

All in all, in spite of how it looks, I can't help but feel I'm in more actual control of my life than many of the people I know, and that's nice.

Hakuna Matata

The cat pissed on the couch a few days ago, so I stripped everything down to wash what I could and soak the rest in vinegar. Not to be outdone, kitty went ahead and pissed on the bare cushions, making sure to really soak her precious lemonade through and into the unwashable parts of our furniture.

The roomies and I have been talking about throwing out the ruined cushions and just stuffing the pillowcases with old clothing. None of us are opposed to this, and it makes me realize how happy I am to live with people who are unwilling to get upset over ...well, pretty much anything. We could probably replace the couch if we really wanted to, but it would only be to appear less ghetto for anyone who comes over, since we spend most of our time lounging on comforters and pillows on the floor anyway. We seem comfortable there.

Which brings me to my next point; I like owning replaceable crap. Its not that I don't LIKE having nice things, I just don't like using my precious waking hours to acquire them and I enjoy even less worrying about making sure they're safe and well taken-care of, and making accommodations when I move. Most of the things I own are either hand-me-downs or acquired objects, and I can honestly say I don't feel I'm missing out on anything.
Quite the contrary! When I think about all the time I DON'T spend worrying about my shit, I get downright giddy.

Meta-blogging partie deux

So the whole point in this blogercise was to "find my voice", that is, something like what a conversation with myself would sound like. That in itself is not difficult, any verbose doo-dah can learn to slow down their thoughts fast enough to keep up on a keyboard; what I wanted was to practice organizing my thoughts, and possibly even thinking in a more organized way. My problem isn't slowing down to keep up on a keyboard, its slowing down enough to explain the jumps between points. Like a higher-level algebra problem (to me), the steps leading from one statement to the next makes perfect sense when explained logically, but in my unexplored thought-tundra, the steps never need explaining and are thus rarely addressed.

That second step, coming down from my tower for a closer look at the gritty mechanics of my own thinking, has been a humiliating experience as I keep coming up against impassable moats filled with my own half-articulated refuse. I feel awkward and clumsy and I find it difficult not to express myself in prepopularized sentiments, not to imitate my favorite writers. I'm outraged at my own unoriginality. I got by in college with a bland writing style by just being really precise and functional, but those techniques don't adapt well to expression. I'm really embarrassed at how unrefined my communication skills are, but as I've said before, improvement in this area can only happen through practice.

My high school lit. teacher was wise to forbid us to read anything the first half of the year while we were building our writing fundamentals. I've been compiling a list of liabilities I've become aware of in my writing, and rules I try to follow to lessen the danger of sounding stupid. For example, I have a tendency to actually describe what I'm thinking and feeling rather than saying it. "XYZ make me feel" is a sentence I've deleted about 12 times since starting this post. Since realizing this, I'm simply not allowed to describe things like feelings objectively, I have to work to convey them in an accurate and genuine way. Its going to be hard but satisfying to internalize.

I don't feel unintelligent, just unintelligible. No wonder so many people feel misunderstood and unloved; its not because they are unworthy of attention and affection, they're just fail to realize how grossly they're failing to convey their important emotional innards.

Meta-blogging

A buddy of mine recently told me that he considered a good blog to be one with a link every few words. I was a little put off at this, not only because I had been thinking of starting one of my own and it put the pressure on, but because I don't think blogs should be mere 21st century radio-repeater/filters. Its easy to appear smart by seeming well-informed but frankly, the way its most often done is pretty lame.

Now, don't misunderstand me, I get much of my news from these repeaters, and political bloggers are just going to become more important as the internetless die off, but that doesn't excuse the fact that every A+ certified libertarian thinks they have insightful commentary to offer on world affairs.

If "writing is thinking on paper," it seems like a lot of people spend their precious mental energy compulsively reviewing what they hear but not really building with it. That's kinda creepy, eh?

Since there are already people, with either more time or more drive than I have, chaperoning the internet, I'm going to take advantage of my freedom from social responsibilities and work on my personal writing. By that I mean I want to become more articulate and interesting on the fly. The only way I know to do this is practice.

The only people who would be interested in reading this are people who know me. I will keep links to a minimum, and try to keep from making myself seem more interesting than I am by talking about things that have little or nothing to do with me. Words may be used incorrectly or out of context as I experiment both with new vocabulary and creative usage. The passive may be overused. Entries may be rewritten days after originally being posted. This thing will probably be fairly boring until I "get in my groove, and I will probably refrain from telling anyone about it until I'm sure its alive.