break down on the lonely blacktop of the info superhighway

Paper versus digital information. It is the divide the world is hovering over. Recent events in our society have shifted the debate on that topic from something substantial to a a decision-making process that is fueled by emotional thinking.

I'm not saying its wrong to love curling up with a hardbound novel or newspaper, but its important to not lose sight of the differences between a world in which information is indexed in a superhighway of totally accessible data and a one in which the world's knowledge is contained in reams upon reams of paper - in paper stasis essentially.



To illustrate what I'm talking about, I'll tell a story about a guy I used to know when I was growing up. His name was John Dent, and he must've been in his late 30's or early 40's by the time my friends and I started hanging out with him. Luke, Jerry and myself were the main people that hung out with Dent, and we were maybe 16 or 17 at the time.

It is strange to think - there are people that shameless in the world - a guy 10 or 15 years older than I am right now who hangs out with high school kids because they know where to find him weed - and the only reason we would hang out with him is because he was way more than old enough to buy us booze and he had a batch pad to kick it at. In fact, the place he was living at the time is maybe only a block from where I type this. That shit sty was a strange little basement apartment in the shadow of the 12-story Mendenhall building downtown.

Anyway, Dent would tell us all sorts of stories about the nineteen eighties and what it was like in that magical era of blow and neon Hypercolor shirts and the Mustang 5.0. After maybe a year of hanging out with him, taking knife hit after knife hit with him off of his chintzy coil stove, and at least one memorable episode of Mr. Dent passing out standing up while doing so, he told us the salacious details of his background.

I don't know if its true or not, but Dent told us chitlins that he was a con man back in those halcyon days of dead disco bleeding into New Wave music and I always imagined Dent having one of those Don Johnson, Miami Vice-style blazers with the sleeves rolled and the pastel shirt and the scruff and the aviator sun glasses.


His tale was a tale of woe, though, as he ended up getting busted and right before he went down he signed over all his possessions to a lady friend who subsequently ditched out on him. But for a few sweet years coinciding with the rise of Joy Division and the Cure he had the world on a string.

His deal was that he would find a person who was born in one county in, say, Florida and died in a different county in another state. Well, because records were kept in giant piles of paper somewhere in a court clerk's office, the only people who had access to that info were a few, overworked court employees, and even then they had to navigate the vagaries of a dead tree information system to find the data that needed to be communicated to another clerk somewhere back in Florida facing the same set of issues with regard to finding the physical, paper file - binders and two-hole punches and three-hole punches and files that have been sent somewhere else - a warehouse where the paper is essentially waiting to be burned, or as they call it, "in archive". There were no search engines and the flow of information was such that as recently as 20 years ago if you died in a different county and state than where you were born in, the change would basically go unnoticed by the world.

So, what I'm getting at is that stemming the free flow of information leads to massive inefficiencies, which lead to criminals like John Dent stealing your identity by gradually replacing well-forged facsimiles of birth certificates and social security cards with the real things by taking two fakes to get a real drivers license, (With his picture and your name, no less...) then taking one fake and a driver's license to get a new birth certificate and then suddenly he has stepped into the legal skin of another entity.

What he would do from there is make a map of all the grocery stores and other large retailers who cashed payroll checks and he would hit each one for whatever it was, a thousand bucks, and then he would charge up bad credit cards, too, and in effect go at it balls out, bull-in-a-china shop style doing that across large metro areas. Its like being able to print money.

Also, by keeping information proprietary, you give undue responsibility to the court clerks of the world. These people are the gatekeepers to the fundamental data that governs our criminal and civil court systems and vital statistics.

In the end, we are talking about the failure of a business model. When the notion became popular that automobiles would start replacing horse and buggies, there was almost certainly a similar uproar. Same for any major innovation, although none are quite apt as analogs for the predicament of newspapers and paper media.



When the printing press and all of the advancements thereof were introduced, written knowledge began to be more widely disseminated, which had all sorts of other effects, and those effects were more profoundly felt than the ones we are currently experiencing. People went from being totally illiterate to at least having the ability to acquire books and the accompanying skills. Eventually, modern schools came into being and now, at least in this country, there is a basic level of understanding of the written language by essentially the entire population. We all have the tools, or should.

The effect of digitizing information is more subtle. We still haven't seen the full measure of what this will start to look like simply because the population at large doesn't have cheap broadband access and also the majority of the population was born and became accustomed to a world in which paper and the pushing of it were the focal points of business and media, which creates a situation where the world of paper and all of its complications must be maintained as long as people are, for lack of better word, still stuck there.

The first major gains in efficiency won't be seen for some time as a painful reorganization must be undertaken where new, "green" industries that are productive to the basic aims of mankind are created for the workers who used to populate the old, paper-based, petroleum-based industries. Basically, my belief is that we need to fund the shit out of education in this country, because ignorance is becoming painfully expensive.

The business model of a newspaper is a product of this old style of thinking. I don't know how much newspapers spend on the production and distribution of their newsprint edition, but I would imagine that paying the employees that operate and maintain the printing press, paying delivery drivers and paperboys and the costs for the raw paper and ink and the cost of the complex and expensive printing press itself and the cost of the computers that control the press and the people that work on those computers and the HR staff to hire and fire these people and accountants and paper pushers to pay everyone and get health and dental insurance and on and on in the end amounts to a huge part of their expenses. To pay for all of that shit, they need to sell a lot of papers. The distribution model of an online-only newspaper is much more streamlined. Sure, they need to pay people to maintain the servers and what-have-you, but they are already doing that anyway.

It boils down to what ads are being sold for. I heard this statistic the other day, and it makes sense: Advertisers pay roughly 10 times more to reach a customer in a dead tree newspaper than they do for the eyeballs of an internet reader. Why the disparity?


I get it. Its not easy to just divest yourself of expensive equipment. I mean, who are all of these newspapers going to sell their printing machinery to? And it sucks that the good union people working on those things will lose their jobs. I would say it sucks that the delivery people are losing their jobs, but those jobs are part time affairs at best, and the waste involved in having a system in place where you have to drive to each of your customer's door every day, spewing more exhaust into the already burdened skies and then at each door step dropping a little turd packet of dead trees, you know, trees, the organism that does the most to replenish the vigor of mother nature, on the old front lawn there. Further swaddling it in a orange plastic, death-to-seabirds! screaming bag is incomprehensible and I'm glad, glad, glad that we can leave that little tradition behind someday soon.

I mean, should we all still be riding in horse carts because we didn't want to push horse drivers and saddle and buggy makers out of business? In the end, the companies that survive will be the best and the ones who were the most nimble in navigating the daunting and complex arena of ideas that is the internet. Its not enough to put a newspaper online, because newspapers and the thinking behind engraving your words on an unchanging surface and letting those thoughts be buried by the bodies of a thousand other pages in the paper quicksand of the dead tree dystopia is outmoded. We need to pool our information and knowledge and accept and embrace a future of more seamless information dispersal, because as Ronald Reagan would say, a rising tide lifts all boats, which I believe was actually a literal analogy - as in we need to melt the ice caps with carbon-based fuels so all of the poor people without boats will drown.

Is this thing on? Hey-o!

moving on is... you never know...

I used to be a suburban nomad in my early twenties, which, in the last few months, have sadly come to end. I am now in my late-twenties, I suppose, but just writing that seems like it can't possibly be true. Lo those many years that I should have been achieving higher education, puking in dorm shitters and generally advancing and retreating according to societal norms.

Fuck, its not really that sad of a thing. Perhaps we, as a society, just place too much value in being young. Seeing people warped by the strangeness of plastic surgery like a Terry Gilliam-acid dream gone terribly wrong can only confirm this. We know that your teeth can't be that white; your hair that robust and unfelled by gray; your anatomy that oblivious to the weak but constant force of gravity.

Thinking about the ways and means of middle America gives me a fucking migraine.


Alas, the time to move has come once more. I am departing an apartment building that is less than a block from my work for a place another block or so remote, which doesn't seem like that big of a transition, but it has been an incredibly grueling process of haggling with my current landlords and also looking for other suitable apartments in this domicile-starved town of shitty real estate options.

Long story short, my girlfriend and I got tired of a six-month long process of finding a one bedroom unit in the apartment building I live now. The dude who is the leasing manager right now is a douche bag supreme, and I can deal with a lot of onerous shit when it comes to a living situation, as exemplified by my sordid past of flop house-ing it, but one thing I will not tolerate is being under the control of someone who is a dumb fuck. You know, willfully ignorant, shit bags who lord over whatever security guard at the mall-type power they may have.

So a move is on the horizon, and consequently I've been thinking about moves past and some of the shit holes I've crawled into and out of. Among those memories is a gem I hadn't thought of in some time, basically what amounts to the worst moving experience I've had in my 26 short years.

I was maybe 21 at the time. Actually, I think I was 20. I had just moved to Portland from lovely old Juneau. I was living in a nice little, nondescript jobber right off of Interstate in the North part of town with two Juneau friends, Jared and Nick. My buddy Nick worked at a near-by Subway / Plaid Pantry until the place got held up a couple times and he had second thoughts about continuing on the road of the One True Outcome of food service path he was bearing down.


There was also a tiki bar (Portland's only!) called the Alibi right there along with a family diner place and a sandwich shop that made an unreal teriyaki-meat sub. It was a veritable buffet for someone used to the squalor of food options in Juneau, Alaska.

I remember moving out to the great Northwest from my home state and if I recall correctly the drive from Alaska to Portland took place in the 2nd of two Ford Tempos I was lucky enough to own. My friend Jared and I streaked comet-like across the dirt highways of Canada and through the State of Washington in what ended up being three days or so, which was amazing considering at one point in the great wild of Canada we thought the old Temp-ster might be down for the count. We let her cool down with a splash of sweet tasting hose water and a pint of transmission fluid and in two shakes we were back online.

I think I only lived in that house in Portland for maybe a month before we moved to new, larger digs. During the last bit of our term of residence there, Jared became embroiled in some sort of dispute with the power company, so we were without power outside of the few times we stole it from the neighbors via long chains of extension cords.


The weekend we were supposed to move, Nick went to visit his aunt in Washington, so it was just Jared and I, which was a raw fuckin' deal for me because I had only just showed up on the scene and already I was moving couches and cleaning floors. Whatever, if it had just been that easy it would have been just another notch of the old move-out belt.

The first thing that was majorly fucked was the bag of chicken in the freezer. During this whole whirlwind of a week, we had somehow neglected to remove a large bag of frozen chicken from the old ice box. Big fucking mistake. The slab of frozen breasts unthawed their salmonella special gravy all into the insides of the fridge during the power embroglio. I think the bag must've been placed over the drain in the freezer, because the soup of chicken juice sunk into the skin of that machine like no other shit I've seen before or since.


Over a few days of room temperature stewing, the solution became a fetid cesspool of beyond sewage ugliness. The rotten chicken stew was un-fucking-real, and we ran gallons of every kind of cleaning product through that son of a bitch and it never did get better. We would tip the fridge and each time the spew that came forth would be even more terrible smelling, a mixture of the industrial perfumes of cleansers and the pervading force of the lukewarm chicken slime.

I don't know how many hours I spent face first in a pile of that shit.

Secondly, in the act of cleaning the stove, I came upon a dead mouse that had lodged itself in the part of the contraption where the burner coil gets plugged in. It was obviously trying to burrow out of the oven to the safety of an adoring wife-mouse and a litter of newborn vermin when it got caught in the small cavity in between the prongs of the burner coil. The front of the mouse was stiff and in a state of beginning decay but otherwise fully life like, however the back half of the animal wasn't so lucky and had been incinerated to a charcoal cast. It was and is a pretty stark image of a painful death, a bit like discovering a mini- Pompei in the recesses of your kitchen.

The third thing that went pair-shaped was the weed plants. We were growing a few little fellows in said residence and there were a few large pots of dirt with stumps from the last crop left in the garage. I think Nick was supposed to move them before he left, and I can't remember now exactly how we managed to fuck that one up, but we left them there during the move and our landlord found them and realized what we were up to, which would have been fine if we weren't moving into another one of his pads. So he didn't take too kindly to us from that point on.

Shit, what gives?

Anyway, its strange how it all works out, no? I think of how things might be different if our gay landlord Max hadn't found those pots of dirt. The place we moved into was so perfect for what were doing and maybe we would have gone huge and maybe I'd be retired in some wonderful, alternate reality where a man can make his way in the world by a fistful of moxie and a trunk full of dank pot. And maybe in ten other realities I'd be reduced to a number on a striped suit, so there you go. You never know.

seeing Tom Selleck cruise by in a hoop'n ass bronco deuce

In the course of fulfilling my 9-to-5, rat-fucking obligations, I maintain a database of criminal defendants. Consequently, when I find my mind wandering to work during the weekend or on any off hours, its usually about some name or association between names.

I'm sure I've written about names before, and I always think about starting a list of the best names I have ever run across. I'm fascinated by the strange patterns of recurring names and the consequences of being called one thing or another.

I remember none other than C. Scott Fry, my mentor and life coach and, at the time, my boss used to tell me about the "President's Club", which was a list that existed in his head of all the people who had ever come though the revolving door of working for C. Scott at the front desk of the Alaskan Hotel and sleaze shack. There was a Bush and an Adams and a McKinley and maybe he even had a couple of more esoteric ones. Harrison? I'm sure. Washington? Maybe. Taft might be stretching the limits of believability. I've certainly never met a Taft.

One of my favorite things is when we have a client who shares a name with a famous person. I think its fun to imagine someone having a complex about carrying a burdensome name like Scott Baio or something; like the character in Office Space named Michael Bolton.

"Why should I change? He's the one who sucks." Screams non-famous Michael Bolton in Office Space, and collectively the psyches of every Tom Selleck, Dick Cheney and Harry Connick that has felt the sting of Fate and Celebrity's cruel chance.

We used to have a guy named Gary Cooper at work, but sharing that name is not even that bad. First of all, no one really knows who Gary Cooper is anymore and they certainly don't have any weird associations with the name. Secondly, Gary Cooper was a bad ass as far as I know.

The one that has crossed my path lately, and I know this seems insane, is Tom Selleck. Yes, there really are more of them out there. I feel like there needs to be a whole other website like Facebook for these people so all of the world's multitudes of Michael Jacksons and Jim Morrisons and Howard Sterns and Tom Cruises could commiserate in one nameless orgy of internet rantings.

He stopped by my office maybe a week ago. Tom is a smaller fellow and a bit older these days, too. He is fighting with tooth and nail against the pull of middle age. He has cultivated a look consisting of a pleather jacket that looks like Walmart's reimagining of the buckle and zipper infused number from Michael Jackson's "Bad" video layered over sleeve-less t-shirts that accentuate his scrawny, age sunken pipes. Still, he persists in trying to don this tough guy mantle. When he walked in to the office last week, he was sporting his old-school Oakley's and in a mock- Clint Eastwood growl asked if we were expecting him.

How could I have been expecting Magnum fucking P.I. to walk into my wage slave den? I mean, seriously.

I had to choke back the laughter. Tom is 5'6'' in hiking boots and is the sort of guy who would shove a dirty sock down the crotch of his acid washed jeans before going out on a weekend. He inspires a mixture of pity and derision. He keeps coming back into the criminal justice system on stuff like driving with a suspended license because I'm sure he has thousands of dollars and dozens of hoops to jump through to obtain a driver's license again.

A week ago, I saw the non-famous Tom Selleck (Although, how famous is the real Tom Selleck these days anyway? How far are we from seeing him in a real estate informercial a la Eric Estrada? Yikes.) driving his sweet '89 Bronco II around downtown, and I was almost sure he would get rung up again before he completed the short loop through town. After all, cops are posted all around the area and they can't help but know Tom Selleck and his low riding shitbox of a Bronco II.

What a strange junk vessel of a vehicle. Today as I was bringing in groceries to my apartment, I spotted the savage beast of a machine outside, parked on the street. The inside of the vehicle looks to be enveloped by the world's largest garbage bag, but a few household items and other random effects of a life fully lived peer out the slightly shaded windows of the rusted out Bronco Deuce. In the photo above, the base to a coffee maker can be seen. Tom Selleck is a man who likes his caffeine. I would envision his tastes to trend towards dark, bitter coffee and I'll bet he makes pots of joe that could take the stain off of a table.



Juneau Tom Selleck is a man who has the world by the balls, driver's license be damned. Now that I think of it, I think Tom Selleck might have got his license back because I think we got his case dismissed. We do that for all of our clients. I guess you could say we treat them all like celebrities. Hey-o! Rim shot!

I would like to note, for the record, the gas jug and the boom box that can be seen in the rear window in the photograph above. Three words: Mobile. Party. Station.

pizza psychic

Being attuned to the secret world of pizza is a weighty thing. It is a burden I do not carry lightly.

My story of the genesis of this strange and awful power is like a post-modern version of the post-modernist tale of angst and responsibility and the corrupting influence of power splayed across the technicolor-crisp pages of Stan Lee's Spiderman.

Here's the rough outline, and then onto a tale of pizza wizardry the likes of which you've never heard:

I was maybe twelve years old and my life consisted of going to school and every day in sweatpants and rubber boots and working at a book store after class making $4 an hour mailing brick-loads of rare books and endlessly organizing and dust-jacketing them all to make it to Friday, the day when I got my meager wage paid out in cash. Each Friday, I would take that hard-earned wad of maybe twenty dollars and go hang out at a local comic book store. Life was pretty wild in the fast lane.

The real highlight of my evening, however, was the mini-deep dish pizzas right next door at Domino's. They were so good and so cheap that you just knew that it was too sweet to last. They were like the CBGB of mini-pizzas in that once people started to catch on, the ride was over. Alas.

I remember they were five dollars and you could get any toppings you wanted. This led to the inevitable mini-pies loaded down with a back hoe full of extra-extra cheese and bacon and sausage and insane amalgams of ingredient combinations of endless complexity.

So, like a scientist plucked from the void and placed into a lab full of instruments, my pizza-loving nerd brethren and I set forth upon the outer limits. It was a long, strange ride; in fact it seems less than real, to be honest. Foodland was open 24 hours a day back then, too - the supermarket across the parking lot from the comic store and Domino's. Now-a-days, it closes at 9 sharp and the place has fallen off in general, as well. Everything in Juneau is trending that way, to be honest. Even the glacier that surrounds this semi-frozen waste is receding.

Now, some dozen years later, the lessons I learned as a pizza psychic prodigy have taken root in the way a golfer internalizes his swing or a violin player has feel for strings.

Tonight, par examplé, I rang my local Domino's branch and spoke with el hombre José about getting a pizza heat-waved on up to me. Mind you, I am fully aware of the current Domino's marketing firestorm. Sure, some asshole in New Jersey or wherever is right now squeezing a hot load of jizz into the marinara at a Domino's somewhere in the world, but much like the manner in which STDs travel, my rationalization goes something like this: It couldn't happen to me! It couldn't be José and Consuela and the local pizza professionals, no! I thought we were friends! You said that you are the only driver who brings little packets of parm and hot peppers and you wouldn't do that for just fucking anyone...

Or would they?

Anyway, Domino's can chalk one up in the win column on my account during what has got to be tough times for the low rent pizza pushers over there at the big 'D'. Most people read a story about the employees of a restaurant hocking loogs in a food item, and they avoid it like in-laws or the plague. Me, I'm wired a little differently. I knew that all would be well - I sensed it.

After placing my order, however, there was a nagging sensation like there had been a lack of closure. I got back in bed and was just about to stretch out and relax when my phone rang. The pizza couldn't be done yet, could it?

"Howdy." I said.

"Hello sir. This is Jose from Domino's. I'm sorry but the computer lost your order, sir. Can I have your information again?" The caller on the line said.

"Ha! Jose! I had a feeling you might be calling back, my friend." I said. I sat perched in the cool air of an open window in my apartment, cradling the cell phone in my neck. From the distance, in a marsh glade in the gradually warming, Alaskan spring, I could hear a whistle pig sing his eerie bird song.

janitors and stimulus cash: Things that I think about while filling out tax paperwork for 400, please, Alex!

Last night at around 7 o'clock, I had a couple of interesting and unexpected things occur to me as I was working on a tax return at my office in the dark - only spooky-lit by the flicker of a computer screen.

The first confluence was meeting the janitor who cleans the office building I work at every night.

The second confluence that occurred to me was that the toxic evil that is George W. Bush had finally done me a solid. Fucking irony, people.


So I was entrenched, balls deep in a sea of W-2 form font in my dark and deserted office space; and my office in particular is really an efficiency apartment in an old luxury apartment building that was long ago converted to office space as the topography of the commercial world and the people around the dwelling changed with time and circumstance.

In from the emergency-lit abyss of the hallway came the janitor who had a name tag on his janitor attire, which was something like the apron that one wears in the kitchen but more industrial and burlap-ish, and the name tag read "Julio".

I would attempt to describe the encounter with dialogue, but Julio can't be easily approximated. Suffice it to say that we talked for what might have been fifteen minutes. At least that long, alone in the relative dark with Julio with only the gleam of a monitor and the setting sun and the emergency track lighting bouncing and ricocheting into the efficiency apartment / office that we now shared.

Julio is a man of many opinions and with out prompting he started into a long riff about local politics, touching on Sarah Palin and the Federal stimulus money, the mayor here in town, the local education system and its lack of merit, lack of a sufficient minimum wage and so on in his amazing accent. Julio came to this cold place from Uruguay 26 years ago, I came to find through his soliloquy. He came from that small country in the tropics, a place he described as being somewhat of an idyll, but that may just be the fond remembrances of a 60 year-old man looking back on the splendor of youth.

I offered only sparse verbalization for my part. I think Julio asked where I was from and I told him here and that is how we started down the tangent of his tale of Uruguay and the slow pace of life there and the way it compares to the hectic sprawl of what happens here in the States. Other than that, I maybe was asked and offered my name and a series of affirmations and head-nods in response to Julio and his long string of consciousness. He is certainly the most gregarious janitor I have ever met and it seems like being a janitor would be a lonely profession to have and if one was socially inclined in such an avocation, it would lead to these breathless social outbursts like the one I am describing.

And Julio, as he went through his shtick about government and politics and life with the rhythm of a stand-up comic, would always return to the refrain, "But, I'm-a janitor. What do I know!", and the slight lisp and animated slur of Spanish-speaking annunciation made it so I was almost relying more on his expressive gesticulations and intonations and other, non-verbal communication more than the scrawl of words that he said.

The part that really sticks with me is that Julio, towards the end, remarked that I could stand to use a little weight; and yes, I could, but I wasn't sure at first why he would mention it given the tenor of everything else he said, but he subsequently started telling me a story about "Mitch", who after a minute I figured out was just Julio's Uruguayan translation for "Meachum", an attorney I work for; and in Julio's story, he was losing his vision and Mitch, who is a neighbor as well as a janitorial client, told him he needed to go to the doctor. Apparently Julio has diabetes and was going blind from the onset of the disease and the reason he was getting it was because he weighed 75 pound more at that point.

"You-a don't-a want to has to stick yourself. I stick myself, can't-a eat no wheat, no pasta." Julio said.

"Fuck that!" I said

"Yeah! That's-a right! Fuck that!" Said Julio.

It was a miraculous and deeply funny exchange. After he left, I thought about how interesting it is to meet the janitor because we share the same space but are likely to never meet because of our opposite hours. Ships passing in the night.

Secondly, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the W. for the stimulus check. I didn't get it last year, so its finally happening for me. $600 dollars in exchange for 8 years of fear mongering, greasing the corporate skids and generally shitting down the throats of tax-paying, working folk. Its like throwing a miniature life preserver to a turd before flushing the toilet. Thanks, friend-o.

But, in his finite wisdom, the sweet-tasting mercy of George W. has finally trickled through the circulatory system of the grand architecture that houses the grizzled mange that is the savage beast of Government and now, peaceful and hopeful for the future in the absence His Douchiness, I can suckle on the soft teet of stimulus money and sigh contentedly. Thanks, W.!