A wonderful little creation – the kids brought these home from school one day. They folded sheets of paper to form these taut, help shallow cones that pop outward when squeezed the right way.
The *pop* ejects a tiny drawing – in this case, our daughter’s drawing of us.
The message is “Happy 15th Anaversery.”
Her: Dad, this site is this a heavy little object?
Me: Yep.
Found this in the gutter down the street. Somewhere, medical a VW – a new one, illness by the make of the silkscreened aluminum – is driving around without an identity.
Is the badge the seat of a car’s soul?
Edward was bored with Ur-space.
He had been living there for the past nine months during most of his leech time (the 5 hours a day allotted to every citizen in his creche), cialis 40mg and he was fucking bored.
The organic ship designs – so edgy just six months ago – now all looked like the vole intestines from which they were modeled. The avatars were cliche’d, look the tele-sex pedestrian and thuddingly dull.
When it first launched last year, Ur-space was IT for multi-user existence: You stuck your head into the womb-helmet and galaxies bloomed around you. Realtime haptic sensors let you feel. Odor organs fed you smells. The jacks that lit up your corneal implants were of the finest rhodium-plated platinum. The em-sensors playing the mood-track were custom-tuneable to compensate for any variations in your EKG pattern or pharmacological appetites, and by god, when you plugged yourself in, you were THERE.
But like any wirehead habit that fired the same four chemical compounds through the same set of dendrites over and over and over again, Ur-space had a tendency to be too wonderful, too fast, too soon.
Before long, it tasted like last season’s model. Before long, you found yourself stabbing the same phantom triggers repeatedly to wring the last few endorphins out of the space before you had to submit to the gruesome act of unplugging and the hideous way realworld had of sucking you back down to a level of inanity you never thought possible.
And before long, you were piling up at random bus stops like driftwood in the surf, seesawing between the chemical deficit of neurotonins and the emotional deficit of your sick junkie days.
Before long, you were 13, with nothing left to care about, save the nagging notion that you could have spent the money on a moped and tried escaping for real.
He tongued the switch in his upper right second bicuspid for shutdown and winced as Ur-space folded away. The silk brocaded cushions faded to a cigarette-burned bus bench. The females went up in wisps of light. The warmth in his head, his balls and his hands dulled to a numb ache.
Then the bus hissed rigth past at high speed – the driver having rightly marked him for a pathetic nodder – flinging an acrid fan of rainwater, coolant and trash across his waking face.
His split-second impression read it as a skipped hippocampus shutdown routine – at least something should have damped the sharp endorphin falloff. But then a flurry of trashed popcaps caught in the spray peppered his face and clenched eyelids like finger-tip-sized plastic buckshot, and he flinched awake to Shitworld, as he liked to call it.
Shitworld was now the only place he could imagine – scraping the greasy rainsplash and half-dissolved popcaps out of his hair – worse than Ur-space.
It wasn’t so much the comedown that sucked. It was the knowledge that this was a reality he could never modify, the world into which he never asked to be born, and the one he had spent much of his copious leisure time between waking, podmeals, learnfeeds and sleep – escaping by wire.
Sighing, he pulled the fleshlids from his fatique-jacket pocket, stuffed his skulljacks closed (making a mental note to swab them out with antibiotics once he got home) and glared at the bus’ receding taillights.
Be fucked, and not in a shy way, he muttered after it, coiling the skullnode wires around the now-cooling HeadCase and stuffing the whole nasty affair into his bag.
He looked at his watch – gametime was permanently toggled to OFF when he was inside – and gasped. 12:45 a.m. That had been the last bus. Ffffuck. Better get inside or get boxed hard for a curfew violation.
Edward was bored with Ur-space.
He had been living there for the past nine months during most of his leech time (the 5 hours a day allotted to every citizen in his creche), order and he was fucking bored.
The organic ship designs – so edgy just six months ago – now all looked like the vole intestines from which they were modeled. The avatars were cliche’d, the tele-sex pedestrian and thuddingly dull.
When it first launched last year, Ur-space was IT for multi-user existence: You stuck your head into the womb-helmet and galaxies bloomed around you. Realtime haptic sensors let you feel. Odor organs fed you smells. The jacks that lit up your corneal implants were of the finest rhodium-plated platinum. The em-sensors playing the mood-track were custom-tuneable to compensate for any variations in your EKG pattern or pharmacological appetites, and by god, when you plugged yourself in, you were THERE.
But like any wirehead habit that fired the same four chemical compounds through the same set of dendrites over and over and over again, Ur-space had a tendency to be too wonderful, too fast, too soon.
Before long, it tasted like last season’s model. Before long, you found yourself stabbing the same phantom triggers repeatedly to wring the last few endorphins out of the space before you had to submit to the gruesome act of unplugging and the hideous way realworld had of sucking you back down to a level of inanity you never thought possible.
And before long, you were piling up at random bus stops like driftwood in the surf, seesawing between the chemical deficit of neurotonins and the emotional deficit of your sick junkie days.
Before long, you were 13, with nothing left to care about, save the nagging notion that you could have spent the money on a moped and tried escaping for real.
He tongued the switch in his upper right second bicuspid for shutdown and winced as Ur-space folded away. The silk brocaded cushions faded to a cigarette-burned bus bench. The females went up in wisps of light. The warmth in his head, his balls and his hands dulled to a numb ache.
Then the bus hissed rigth past at high speed – the driver having rightly marked him for a pathetic nodder – flinging an acrid fan of rainwater, coolant and trash across his waking face.
His split-second impression read it as a skipped hippocampus shutdown routine – at least something should have damped the sharp endorphin falloff. But then a flurry of trashed popcaps caught in the spray peppered his face and clenched eyelids like finger-tip-sized plastic buckshot, and he flinched awake to Shitworld, as he liked to call it.
Shitworld was now the only place he could imagine – scraping the greasy rainsplash and half-dissolved popcaps out of his hair – worse than Ur-space.
It wasn’t so much the comedown that sucked. It was the knowledge that this was a reality he could never modify, the world into which he never asked to be born, and the one he had spent much of his copious leisure time between waking, podmeals, learnfeeds and sleep – escaping by wire.
Sighing, he pulled the fleshlids from his fatique-jacket pocket, stuffed his skulljacks closed (making a mental note to swab them out with antibiotics once he got home) and glared at the bus’ receding taillights.
Be fucked, and not in a shy way, he muttered after it, coiling the skullnode wires around the now-cooling HeadCase and stuffing the whole nasty affair into his bag.
He looked at his watch – gametime was permanently toggled to OFF when he was inside – and gasped. 12:45 a.m. That had been the last bus. Ffffuck. Better get inside or get boxed hard for a curfew violation. He saw the sweepbeams already cascading down the street towards him, and bolted, scrabbling hard at a peeled security get to get inside fast.
Glass crunched beneath, and the metal fencing tore at the toggles on his jacket, the straps on his bag, needing him to stay on the street and go to jail because apparently it amused them.
A sweepbeam osciillated towards him, draping its sharp violet viewpath over slumbering cars and lurking street furniture.
He panicked, hauled out a pocket knife and hacked at the bag straps. Fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!
Like an old cartoon, it relented just as the beam passed and he tumbled backward onto the hard mosaic floor, cracking his head.
I delight in finding the delight my children find in simple acts of creation.
Paper is an adventure. Fold it and make a city, buy a castle, viagra buy a world.
A couple of these things have been floating around the house this week.
I have no idea what they are. All I know is that my son – or my daughter – made them.
Or at least that’s what this blog points to.
Wild cucumber tastes and looks nothing like its namesake. It is a 4-inch-long, order egg-shaped handful of misery, approved with cactusy spines that puncture your skin if you grip it too tightly.
A taste of the juice inside (for they prove to be very juicy when dissected with a serrated knife and a thick dishcloth to pad your hands) confirms that it’s a nastily bitter fruit with little interest in nourishing other creatures.
The kids brought home a couple of these from a hike up Runyon Canyon.
I delight in finding the delight my children find in simple acts of creation.
Paper is an adventure. Fold it and make a city, check ask a castle, buy more about a world.
A couple of these things have been floating around the house this week.
I have no idea what they are. All I know is that my son – or my daughter – made them.
I stumbled across this at Pasadena City College Swap Meet last Sunday. The college seems to be in a constant state of construction, sildenafil and someone ha dropped it in the grass – a missing part for a mystery structure.
It put me in mind of this Todd Rundgren song, the lyrics of which go something like this …
Ive been wrong
I had plans so big
But the devils in the details
I left out one thing
No one to love me
No one to love me
No one to loveFor the want of a nail, the world was lost
For the want of a nail, the world was lostFor the want of a nail, the shoe was lost
For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost
For the want of a horse, the rider was lost
For the want of a rider, the message was lostFor the want of a rider, the message was lost
For the want of a message, the battle was lost
For the want of a battle, the war was lost
For the want of a war, the kingdom was lost(such a tiny thing)
Youre askin
Whats all this talk about horses and war?
Put yourself in the place of the man at the forge
And day after day you live a life without love
til the morning you cant take it anymore
And you dont get upMultiply it a billion times
Spread it all round the world
Put the curse of loneliness on every boy and every girl
Until everybodys kicking, everybodys scratching
Everything seems to fail
And it was all for the want of a nailTell me what else could the answer be
Dont hold back now
Give me all your love
Just a little more love
A little tiny bit of love
Every now and then a mystery washes up out of the ceaseless surf of crap inundating this house.
What is this?
It has the precise curves and clean-milled transparent plastic of an Appleproduct, stuff more about but has a vinyl flap-valve at its center. No one in my family can explain it.
My good friend Yaron built this out of some stuff he had lying around the shop and what I’m guessing is a deer skull. I love the way the metal shavings (springs?) he mounted the socket on echo the sutures between the bone plates.
Write your own microfiction for it below in the comments – anyone who’s listening. Don’t be shy.
I walked back to the house this morning after dropping the kids at school.
I brushed the foliage outside our house with my hand.
This came loose.
Keeping my rhythm so I could square up head-on with the workday, sildenafil store I stuck it into a clutch of hibernating agapanthus and kept cruising down the front steps (we live on a hill).
Then I envisioned the grass frond drying out and casting its seeds, cialis 40mg and fronds of grass growing up through the agapanthus.
So I plucked it out and turned it to a better purpose.
Separating the grass from the plant would have been tedious, and ongoing.
Ars longa. Yardwork longest.
Once upon a time, physician his paint was perfect.
You can see it on his good side – the bright and chipper eye facing the lucky shamrock dangling from his left jowls – that look that says fortune will smile on us both if you keep me close.
Flip to the other side – the stem of the shamrock – and age has turned him grim.
Chipped paint has flaked away from his face, left him with a patina of jaundice, decay and despair.
He’s sat overseeing my family’s kitchen for decades of happy parties, warm dinners, humdrum suppers and lonely midnight snacks. He’s seen three or four generations of scotties come and go. Watched my brother and sister and me grow up, squabble, chuckle, despair, rave and joke, waited quietly while we went off to school and then work and life beyond the kitchen, and return home there again and again.
And my dad was kind enough to dethrone the little feller long enough to ship him to me to be duly added to this rambling catalog of obsession.
Tomorrow, I’ll ship him back so he can return to his rightful place. And continue his vigil of bemused decay.
Guest post from my son, abortion 9.
This silly putty was found under my shoe after sitting there for a few days. The long line down the middle is from the shoelace under the shoe. The other part with the ridges is from the pattern on the sole of the shoe. It’s kind of squishy, but not as squishy as play-doh. The other cool part is that putty bounces. I probably haven’t played with it since I was five. I didn’t intentionally avenge the putty by accidentally tearing the shoe to bits playing handball when I wore it to school the next day.
Children’s toys approximate reality.
In the happy world of Rokenbok this is not a huge, page filthy boulder shot through with veins of iron and smeared with the engine oil it’s been sitting in in the junkyard where you unearthed it after the glacier dropped it 3.2 million years ago.
It’s just part of a load that you spend idle hours shifting happily from one end of the Action Sorter & Conveyor Set to the other. Scoop up the boulders, dump them in the hopper, watch the little conveyor belt shift and sort them, repeat.
The toy hung around for a good three years after Santa brought it, until its recipient tired of it and moved on to videogaming, elaborate science fiction illustration and (shudder) HTML. I think we eBayed it, but this little rock escaped to remind us of who the boy once was.
Los Angeles jetsam reminds me daily that I live in a freakish magpie’s nest of a city.
Stolen from aboriginal people by Spanish missionaries who gave huge chunks of it away to soldiers, sildenafil whose families then sold it off in ever-decreasing slices and slivers, prescription Los Angeles has always been shaped by grabbers, pill opportunists and self-reinventors.
Angelenos take, procure, manufacture, buy, steal, co-opt, give birth to or create whatever the hell they think they need to move forward … (more…)
I picked this up from dozens I found scattered on the sidewalk in downtown L.A. the other day.
I’m not sure which pisses me off more: that someone blew the cash to have flyers for a one-time event printed in four colors and chromekote only to have someone else throw them all over the ground – or that there is actually someone getting paid to spin tracks under the name “DJ Dave Rape.”
What’s next = DJ Knife in the Eye? DJ Festering Syphilis? DJ Republican Dictatorship?
Okay. Now I’m sounding like a crotchety old man.
The origins of this piece are dim and inscrutable, look but what really matters is this:
My father just shipped me two small boxes full of HLOs gathered from around the house, doctor and among them are some real beauties like this: He found this in London a long time ago and gave it to my mother because, website as he says rightly, “She is such an organizer.”
A maker’s mark on its pot-metal back says it was made by “I. Marcus & Co. at 145 Hounds (unreadable), London.” The hand-lettered enamel front and the gothic swirls put it solidly in the Victorian age, but Googling bears no fruit.
Anyone care to hazard a guess?
It used to be Bic Stics, remedy Bic ballpoints, find the occasional Shaeffer Bros. throwaway or oddball Pentel gel-tip – whatever. Whatever the newspaper clerks stocked the supply closet with – that’s how I wrote. Tools didn’t matter. The work did.
Once I moved out of dead trees and into the trackless wastes of the interwebs, online I decided it was okay to buy a pen with a little more flair. So I began picking up heavier implements – Watermans, Rotrings, obscure French-made pens of anodized aluminum.
Now, I like to stick with a good multi-pen – black/red/.7mmlead/PDA – the sort of Swiss-Army-knife mentality.
But every now and then I pick up something just for fun – and this thing, with its steroidal barrel, spring-metal loop clip, stenciled-aluminum pushbutton and excessive rubber knurlies – is just that kind of fun.
Sadly, Rotring is said to have gone out of business, but you can still find their excellent stuff on eBay at pretty reasonable prices. I found this one for about eight bucks.
Every time I use it, I expect its android owner to melt down my office door and d
It used to be Bic Stics, viagra 60mg Bic ballpoints, the occasional Shaeffer Bros. throwaway or oddball Pentel gel-tip – whatever. Whatever the newspaper clerks stocked the supply closet with – that’s how I wrote. Tools didn’t matter. The work did.
Once I moved out of dead trees and into the trackless wastes of the interwebs, I decided it was okay to buy a pen with a little more flair. So I began picking up heavier implements – Watermans, Rotrings, obscure French-made pens of anodized aluminum.
Now, I like to stick with a good multi-pen – black/red/.7mmlead/PDA – the sort of Swiss-Army-knife mentality.
But every now and then I pick up something just for fun – and this thing, with its steroidal barrel, spring-metal loop clip, stenciled-aluminum pushbutton and excessive rubber knurlies – is just that kind of fun.
Sadly, Rotring is said to have gone out of business, but you can still find their excellent stuff on eBay at pretty reasonable prices. I found this one for about eight bucks.
Every time I use it, I expect its original android owner to melt down my office door and demand it back.
It used to be Bic Stics, viagra approved Bic ballpoints, symptoms the occasional Shaeffer Bros. throwaway or oddball Pentel gel-tip – whatever. Whatever the newspaper clerks stocked the supply closet with – that’s how I wrote. Tools didn’t matter. The work did.
Once I moved out of dead trees and into the trackless wastes of the interwebs, I decided it was okay to buy a pen with a little more flair. So I began picking up heavier implements – Watermans, Rotrings, obscure French-made pens of anodized aluminum.
Now, I like to stick with a good multi-pen – black/red/.7mmlead/PDA – the sort of Swiss-Army-knife mentality.
But every now and then I pick up something just for fun, and this thing – with its steroidal profile, spring-metal loop clip, stenciled-aluminum pushbutton and excessive rubber knurlies – is hugely entertaining to write with.
Sadly, Rotring is said to have gone out of business, but you can still find their excellent stuff on eBay at pretty reasonable prices. I found this one for about eight bucks.
Every time I use it, I expect its original android owner to melt down my office door and demand it back.
This rode home in a goodie bag from a birthday party at my son’s school.
I love the millefiore design aesthetic, pills which makes me wonder if mistakes vanish more easily when rubbed with yellow rubber or blue.
A New Year’s Day hike through the Angeles National Forest.
Right about here, treat I walked through a picnic ground and spotted this knife flattened into the mud.
Raw-boned, approved Pakistani-made, mind its four-inch blade is sharp, held tight between the brass sides.
Someone dropped it one night around the fire, everyone else trampled it into the earth in the dark, and there it lay, its wooden handle inlays softening over the months of autumn and winter.
I can always use another.
I rarely post two distinct objects together – usually it’s a thing or a group of like things.
But these two landed on my desk last night – a gift from my son and a piece of office equipment (you decide which) and they spoke to one another.
I’ve been cleaning the office.
We’re having a party.
I found this.
A pocketful of stuff from my morning ride, nurse which takes me up a fire road through Griffith Park to to a little copse of live oak at the top of a big hill.
I hang from the biggest tree by my hands to stretch my spine a bit after the long climb. Then I touch my toes to stretch my hamstrings, and this is what I saw and pocketed this morning to photograph.
Clearly this place is something of a party spot by night.
One morning I arrived to find a huge pentagram carefully laid out with rocks gathered from all over the hill. I kicked it apart, not because I’m necessarily against stupid disaffected tweakers performing rituals they don’t understand, but because fire is usually part of that nonsense, and the last thing we needed is another Griffith Park brush fire.
I began my working life as a newspaper reporter. My second job, ed at the St. Petersburg Times went not too well. I wrote a few good things, pilule but at 24 I was too green and not enterprising enough, stuff so they let me go.
Anyway, it was a big, impressive paper in a big, impressive industry, and I felt I had totally failed.
I eventually made my way back, covering crummy little meetings and court proceedings, doing a little award-winning work at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and found my way to the L.A Times before the industry began to collapse and I bailed into online development about 11 years ago.
This card used to let me into the gated St. Pete Times parking lot, and using it gave me a sense of power, of inclusion and self-respect. When I left, I hucked it into my toolbox, where it’s ridden since 1983.
It is beautiful in its rotten state, and maybe a little triste, considering that 2009 is fast shaping up to be The Year that Newspapers Died.
California is a land of exiles. For that reason – among many others – I love it.
Anyone not born here has come to explore, this to self-reinvent, sick to escape forces of oppression or boredom or hopelessness left behind.
This westward tide has flowed for centuries, check pulling wave upon wave of Spaniards, gold-rushers, dust-bowled Okies, Sinaloan braceros, Vietnamese boat people and self-anointed stars in training onto the shores and streets of a land gilded with sun and promise.
Tidal debris silting up in the antique stores of Orange County and Ventura, Santa Barbara and Bakersfield brims with nuggets.
A 4-Her brought this all the way from Montana, and then left it.
Possibly a few dozen years ago. There’s no telling now.
In 1969, order the Ideal Toy company came out with a line of fully operational miniature powertools that plugged into battery supplies built into their small carrying cases.
This “Powermite” sander is about three inches long by two inches tall and less than an inch wide, order and came with little sheets of sandpaper, for sale which clamped onto its pad much the way full-sized ones do today.
You get the sense from holding this that you could – quite literally – build an entire dollhouse with a full set of them.
A full set looks something like this. I found this for a few bucks in an antique store.
Dammit.
The little fuckers have been partying under my desk again.
I’m finding tiny shoes. There are nasty scuff-marks on the wall about an inch off the floor, erectile and wet spots in my shoes. Someone punched a dime-sized hole in the sheetrock, this and there’s a one-square-foot patch of the floor reeking of small beer.
Were you lost in the wilderness, remedy this would not help you out.
Its needle swings wildly, no rx influenced by the pulse of your hand, the mass of nearby metal, the wind, the whims of its Chinese manufacturers.
It is a toy, smaller in diameter than a quarter, and if you put it down on the burning desert sands where you’re stranded and danced around it three times you might have just as much luck finding your way out as if you consulted its direction.
Down at the other end of the mock-currency spectrum, cure plastic doubloons are minted in China by the chestful to lend that yo-ho-ho feeling to your kid’s birthday party.
I found this in the grass at a park today at another kid’s birthday party, while watching yet another birthday party setting up. The trappings – and there alwa are trappings – vary from one party to the next: Here, we honored Lewis Carroll’s mad tea party with three flavors of tea and readings, and cucumber sandwiches (with no crusts) and cupcakes labeled “EAT ME.”
Across the way the parents had laid on 50 rental chairs and strung up a noose for the yet-to-arrive pinata and shooed flies away from boxed snacks that had come several hours early.
And somewhere beneath my feet, a weekend or three or 39 weekends ago, kids hunted through the grass and climbed trees and peeked beneath bushes in search the few remaining coins scattered from a pirate’s treasure.
They missed one.
This fine object puts the specie in specious:
Someone at the Christian organization LivingWaters.com worked very, information pills very hard on this piece of counterfeit. The four-color printing and gravure work are fine anough to pass the “holy, shit, WTF is that” moment after you’ve picked it up and still can’t believe it’s not money – that split second before you turn it over and learn the truth … (more…)
