Ciao ciao

Welp, I'm going out of town for a few days, back to where my people come from.
What? Oh, ha, very funny. No, not jail. Not Planet Crazy.
Here.

In the meantime, look around. Take some pictures. Eavesdrop. Listen to cool music. Read something funny, delicious, profane, lovely, thought-provoking, polemical, or downright irritating.

If you're up to the challenge, noodle on this from George Saunders: Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.

See you in a few.

Before the jump

Last week my hike around town took me across the Aurora Bridge, which has spectacular mountain and ocean views, and is apparently 2nd only to the Golden Gate Bridge in facilitating suicide jumps.
Hotline signs are posted about every 10 yards across the entire cruddily-painted span and mais oui, have been (un)suitably defaced.

Going there

Yes so back to the whole narcissism thing. I continue to play with images. These doctored photos feel more honest and playful than the previous lot. I see a lot of Kansas in me. I have my grandma's lips. Wary eyes. I'm not a smiler.
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I met a masseur. His business card read "Massage Therapy/Performance Massage" and I got this mental image of the guy (the whole nerd package by the way--skinny, glasses, chiclet teeth) swanning around his massage space with a glittery scarf. "My patients are the performers and I massage them," he corrected me rather sternly, and I had to apologize for laughing.

So, I have news

I just got word from Writers' Bloc literary magazine that they will publish my short story, "The Shabiby Express," in July.
Thanks Writers' Bloc, stay tuned everybodeee, I'll post a link when it's up.

Mah next ink

So I'm working out the details of my next tattoo. I need to dig up a Xanax (man did the first one hurt like a fiend) and make the appointment, for late April. I'm torn between two ideas:

• A Haida moon, like this one, or along the lines of this amazing Robert Davidson design.
  
• Or, a crow silhouette. I love the damn birds--they're cranky and vocal and ubiquitous and yet mostly go unremarked. This one's cool. And I love this image.

Anybody care to cast a vote?

Wait who's running things again?

Bank machines blew my mind today. I don't think I'm a codger quite yet but I trudged over to my new bank to deposit a check and about 10 seconds later a scanned image of the check flashed on the ATM screen. When did this all happen? Not that I miss trying to stuff those weird oversized bank envelopes into the little jaws-of-life machine slot, but this seemed a little too slick.
*
Walking back to work I passed another bank machine. A guy turned away from the ATM, hands in the air. Wells Fargo wishes me a happy birthday! he shouted to his waiting pal, and the pal shouted, Dude, no way! We know of course that Wells Fargo couldn't actually give a shit about happy guy's birthday but his elation was unfeigned.
*
So here we are, the machines remind us of milestones, predict our tastes, run our refrigerators, stroke our egos, and we celebrate mindlessly. You do have to wonder who's in charge.

Self-proclaimed Tamil Nadu vocal chanting superstar

I sure hope this Wilbur Sargunaraj character is for real. Loves it.