things i learned while in boston/vermont last week:

• ‘the grass is green’ line in ‘paradise city’ might actually refer to weed. yes, i’ve only been listening to the song for 22 years and never made that connection until we heard it on the radio driving through vermont.
• my girlfriend is so attached to me that she will pull me down into snow and ice when she slips and falls on that same ice.
• you can go home again — i saw my best friend from 9th grade, who i hadn’t seen since 9th grade. aside from the different experiences over the last 18 years, nothing had changed. it’s comforting to see how this can work.
• the ben and jerry’s factory tour is not worth your time or money. it’s short, marketing saturated and doesn’t teach you much. also, it’s terrifying when you are the skinniest people in the tour group. no, wait, let’s say the only skinny people. also, the tour costs money and you basically get a tiny sample of an existing flavor and a 10 minute talk about the assembly line. (along with a 10 minute marketing movie and the joy of watching b&j commercials while you eat the ice cream you paid for.)
• waterbury is below burlington, so when driving up and you want to go to waterbury, you should stop there first. as opposed to driving up to burlington and then back down to waterbury. this was a fail on the navigator’s part.
• the mfa in boston might have amazing art, but they also take the award for worst display/presentation in any museum i have ever been in. the rooms, the lighting, the pieces they display — i could not have been more disappointed.
• the harvard museum of natural history has cool things, as long as you are into a quarter of the museum being filled with stuffed/mounted animals from the early part of the 20th century. the rest of the museum is pretty cool.
• when looking for vermont cheese on a farm, here is how you don’t do it: you check the farm’s website and they say they are closed for the winter. you call the farm and the recording says they are closed for the winter. the navigator really wants to go though, so you agree to drive by the farm, just to see. where you see a sign out that says ‘cheese .4 mile’ — which clearly overrides the first two communications about being closed. except your rented car doesn’t have an odometer that measures 1/10s of miles. so you drive a little too far down the road, get stuck behind a tractor and have nowhere to turn around once it becomes painfully obvious you have gone too far. at which point the farmer gets out of said tractor and asks why you are following him. and is nice, but clearly believes the website and phone should have been sufficient to keep us away until they actually had cheese to sell. the sign had been put up that day, clearly a bit prematurely.
• mud season in vermont isn’t too bad if the ground is totally frozen.
• one night in a bed and breakfast across the hall from a pastor is enough for tripp.
• i will still eat my weight in shanghai dumplings if allowed.
• colt 45 goes better with indian food than sam adams cream stout.
• there is an intersection in burlington that almost killed us. it’s a 5-way intersection — 2 normal streets intersecting and a one-way street coming in at a 45 degree angle. the driver (me) goes to make a right on red, finds himself about to somehow magically about to turn onto this one way street and panics. so he straightens and pulls through the entire intersection on red. no one honks, squeals or otherwise makes a fuss. and then realizes he just blew through a red light at an active intersection. slight aftermath panic ensues. and then much laughter.
• boston has a ton of bleach blondes. bad bleach blondes. maybe everywhere does, but it seems more obvious there.
• trader joes sells an excellent pint of frozen yogurt. that is slightly bitter — it really is frozen yogurt.
• fairfax, vt is boring, but it appeared that saint albans might really know how to party.
• my friend from 9th grade is building his own house. singlehandedly. while living in a finished apartment above his garage, with his wife. he has been doing this since july and is already up to wiring the house. even after being there and talking to him, i can’t fathom this. as much as i want to grow my own food and be self-sustaining, it has never occurred to me to build my own house.

there are more, i’m sure. but this is a good start at least.

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and here i am.  i’m still alive, and i guess i am okay, but  my world has shifted.  i’m alone, in this house, by myself.  the family i thought i created over the last three years is gone.  what do i do next?  i already feel lonely, and sad.  i guess that will get better with time.   even with the dogs -thank god for my dogs!- the house is so quiet, too quiet,  and empty.  i feel like a hermit.  i’m scared that there will be days that go by that i don’t speak to anyone.

i also know that everything is going to be alright.

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The Devo cover band was good. Good, in cover-band terms meaning that it bared a resemblance, however slight, to the original. but I honestly couldn’t figure out why something like that would even exist in the first place. The Heart cover band was just as pointless, but their outfits were clearly higher-budget. The Joy Division cover band didn’t go on until around 1 a.m., and we stopped caring and left long before they even started.

We went to a place called the Beauty Bar. Just me and “the girls.” The walls were bink and glittery. I hate glitter, but I left because of the music. We got there just in time to hear a twerpy guy and a girl who looked like she was trying very hard to look like she doesn’t have rich folks try a hard-core rap act. It was painful, but the kids at the bar seemed to like it. Was I the only one who wasn’t getting it?

Austin was a pretty good trip, even if it was only one day. The band we drove from Dallas to see sort of sounded like the Kinks and was actually worthwhile. And it was good to be away from Dallas for a night. But the whole thing made me feel old. We were around a bunch of college kids who were very much into themselves. The way you look seemed to matter a lot. My friend Jenny introduced me to her friend Jenny, who looked me up and down, rolled her eyes, walked two steps ahead of me and stood there… facing away. Then she went to greet they two guys walking in who looked exactly like RUN-DMC in 1984. The glitter freaked me out and I was stone sober.

I had to face it. I am old. Too old for the Beauty Bar, at least. Lisa cracked a Milli Vanilli joke and I died laughing, but the kids stood around looking confused. Milli Va-wholli? Sickening, yes. But it was still the highlight of my night. The Beauty Bar was more of a hell than the hell-themed bar we had been to earlier, with Baron Munchausen playing on the screens. I wished the Baron would crash through the wall on his cannonball, grab me and take me back.

Tonight, I’m back in my home with my kid and my pets. I’m sure I’ll sleep pretty well with a refreshed sense of perspective. Knowing that I have a life with depth and purpose. That I’ve worked hard to have something to live for other than myself. That I’ve learned that there’s more important things than acceptance. And knowing that I really know who I am. And that makes me a lucky guy.

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Everybody has something to say about the economy, the downturn, and who is at fault. And there are a ton of ideas for how to fix everything.

But fundamentally, somewhere along the line, we’re going to have to make the turn from our 1950s mentality to a sleeker, more sophisticated future. Using television metaphors, we need to move from “Leave it to Beaver” and start becoming “Star Trek.”

For years, Congress was cowed by the auto industry to NOT make regulations on fuel standards. One has to wonder if the Big Three (Big Two?) wouldn’t be in a better position now if they’d been pushed to be better a decade ago.

Some are crying about spending too much on education. Because, surely, all those great cuts in education, the denigration of learning as “elitism”, that came during the Reagan Era have put us in such good stead 20 years later, when all those kids are out of school now. What does it say when after 8 years this past president still has 27% of the populace ardently supporting him? It says that 27% of the American populace is straight up ignorant, unable to deal with rational thought, overpowered by faith as opposed to fact.

We hear “Drill here, Drill now!” That’s catchy. Republicans have always been good with words, turning a phrase, ‘making’ the situation. Which is fine if you have faith, but doesn’t work if you review the facts of how much there really is down there to drill, now or later. To enhance our stature in the world economy (we left isolationism along the side of the road a loooong time ago), we need to start making things the world wants again, not just running up our credit cards buying Hannah Montana dolls made in China. What the world needs are technologies that simultaneously solve our energy and environmental problems. By creating those, we can solve our financial problems and maybe, just maybe, start paying down our debt for future generations.

How do we come up with those technologies? Oh, right. Education! It’s hard to make the next electric car if you don’t start understanding currents and electrical theory early on. Not just at college. Earlier. Not high school, earlier.

Because the sad fact of it is, we may not be done with this downslide. It may take another generation to get our society truly moving in the right direction.

So … let’s give them the tools, the foundation, the philosophy and idealism to do what needs to be done when they get there. Because I hate to be the one to break it to all the Baby Boomers out there: Wally and the Beav are going to live forever on celluloid, but all of you guys are eventually going to die. So stop driving this thing like it’s never going to run out of gas, will never need a new transmission, and will never be any better than it was when you were a kid.

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Holymotherfuckingshit. I’m going to go see this movie.

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So I seem to have fallen off the posting bandwagon since signing on to that cursed wretch of a site, Facebook. Sigh. I suck. It’s been busy and hectic as usual, but rather than write posts, I play word games on FB. 

I think I need to go on a Facebook fast here in the very near future. See you real soon right here on this same Bat Channel.

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i’m flying across the country to see my gf.

i feel oddly postmodern, but that’s not it. it’s the network age. where facebook and im and flights and distance and im and video chat and cells and texts rule. it’s fucked up.

somehow, somewhere, it’s a shift. and i know people must have spoken/written about it, but i cant think of it now. as i sit in sfo, moving myself overnight from one coast to another. it’s more than weird; monogamy is a concrete choice, not even the expectation.

we have moved relationships beyond the black/white point, into a whole realm where things move so quickly we don’t even understand them completely.

distance and location and physical presence is an afterthought. sure, it’s postmodern to have a gf on the other coast, but it’s more than that. there is a weird intermingling of appropriate and inappropriate, a weird mix of how we deal with other people.

it isn’t postmodern. we are in the network age. and, honestly, virtual and physical don’t always play nicely together.

welcome to the future.

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