A fucking gas powered leaf blower going. Which is illegal,right? Gas powered leaf blowers are banned. But I have never seen a leaf blower operating without the sound of a fucking outboard motor blasting. The ban on gas powered leaf blowers has had absolutely zero effect. What did they do— was there some amnesty where you could turn in your gas powered leaf blower in exchange for a toy or something? For an electric powered leaf blower? I’ve never once seen anybody using an electric powered leaf blower.
Still, the fucking gas powered leaf blower. Accelerating now. Crescendoing. And then diminuendoing, murmuring almost, then roaring again as its operator discovers a new patch of leaves. What the fuck does the gas powered leaf blower do? How is this a more suitable tool for cleaning up the approximately 30 leaves that accumulate in front of an apartment building in Studio City, where the flora consists almost entirely of evergreen or tropical trees? Why, in the area I am from in New England, where there is a legitimate problem with the enormous mountains of leaves dropped annually by oaks, birches, maples, etc.— why in that place where there are genuinely a shitload of autumn leaves to deal with, do you never hear a gas powered leaf blower? People go out with a rake and rake their leaves into piles. Kids jump in them.
I think it’s because a gas powered leaf blower, or really, a leaf blower operating under any sort of power, is an essentially useless piece of make-work that only blows the leaves onto some neighboring property where they will have to be blown off with another gas powered leaf blower, etc., forever. So a gas powered leaf blower only works if you have no real problem with leaves to begin with. If the leaves don’t really need to go anywhere, and it doesn’t really cost you a significant sum, there’s a whole underclass of illegal immigrants willing to strap on this loud fume-blasting arm cannon and walk around blowing leaves three feet off their original location, and that’s just what’s done here. You just hire Mexicans to do things, they bring a bunch of big serious-looking tools, and you feel like they’ve been of some use. Back East where you don’t have a secret caste of slaves and there are actually a fuckton of leaves, you must dispose of them yourself and use the actually appropriate tool, a rake.
In rich neighborhoods in California there is a constant roar of gas powered power tools being operated by Aztec-looking illegals. Every tree on every fucking rich man’s block is constantly being sheared, and chainsawed, and otherwise attended to. The only cars that are parked outside Hollywood Hills homes during the day are ‘86 Mazda pickups with big illegal pipe-cages welded on the back, filled with branches or 2 x 4’s. And seriously nowhere— nowhere in this town will you go 15 minutes without hearing a sound like an old outboard motor, or an Ent getting thrown screaming into Saruman’s lumber mill. The amount of landscaping that goes on in Los Angeles is ridiculous— for a desert. We live in a desert. Our native plants are dry queasy herbs and gnarled chaparral bushes that grow point oh one millimeters per year and have roots that stretch five thousand miles below the Earth and are three thousand years old. Aside from just watering the shit, there shouldn’t really be anything to be done, because every other plant should just fucking die basically. But still. Even on my humble street there is never not at least one illegal landscaping business truck parked out in the street and a guy with no health or liability insurance hanging off a high branch with a long claw-shaped saw at the end of a catchpole, hacking off branches so some other, more desirable branch might live. So that the tree might not just be left alone. So that one’s neighbors might not be undisturbed by loud gutteral machines screeching and roaring and whining like a dirt bike making constant laps in your driveway.
October 2011
4 posts
Because we all know you like to be made to laugh; you’ve told us, over and over and over again. Collectively you have said “live laugh love” or “make me laugh” a thousand million billion times. Or you’ve put up the whorish-sounding “make me laugh and you can make me do anything.” Make me laugh and you can sneak it in my ass, is that what this means? Make me laugh and you can jerk off in my mouth while watching porn? Make me laugh and I will fuck guys off craigslist and bring you back the money? I mean, I shouldn’t complain about this— I am not a professional comedian, but I consider myself funny. And girls do in fact “do anything,” although the “anything” that I’m asking for is just to fuck me in the most vanilla manner imaginable. I don’t require that they cook me a meal or take me on a date or engage me intellectually or anything, and they certainly haven’t offered. Make me laugh and you can make me do anything. That pretty much spells it out— you bring the personality, I’ll bring the pussy.
And frankly not much else. I know this is sexist and has been done to death, but why are girls so fucking unfunny if they like funniness so much? It’s like fat guys who are really into televised sports. If you consider this activity to be the greatest thing in the world, why don’t you go out in the park and toss a fucking football around once in a while? If this thing brings you so much pleasure, why aren’t you interested in creating some of it yourself? Why do you have to be a completely passive participant? Don’t you want— like, even if you just selfishly want to be made to laugh without having to contribute, don’t you understand that being at least marginally funny or fast on your feet will help the person whose job it is to actually be funny to get out of his wheelhouse and create fresher, funnier material for you to laugh at as a precondition for fucking? Don’t you see the guys getting bored telling you their canned pussy-getting funny story for the ten thousandth time? Don’t you want to help the poor bastards out?
I went down to Occupy Wall Street yesterday. Occupy LA, rather, in front of City Hall. I wanted to see what it was about, what people were actually protesting, what they actually wanted. Also, I figured there would be girls there.
The talk on the internet seems to be that OK, it is understandable that people are pissed off about “the way things are right now,” but the “movement” has no concrete goals and really stands for nothing besides inchoate frustration. And so while it’s growing, while it’s spreading worldwide, while cops are cracking heads in Zuccotti Park and Carbanieri vans are on fire in Rome, until this “movement” gets its shit together and actually asks for something it’ll all be for nothing.
From what I saw at occupy LA this is entirely accurate. First, I was a little disappointed that it is in fact a peaceful, organized protest. There was a march right before I got there, which seems to have gone smoothly and in an orderly fashion. There is a tent city around City Hall that is completely confined to the grass with fastidious volunteers appearing out of nowhere every five minutes to pick up cigarette butts. Protestors happily stayed contained in the few streets that the city had conscientiously blocked off to keep shit from getting out of hand, and gathered around a stage and PA system that seems to have been set up with all the appropriate permits. There was an adequate amount of Port-o-sans. The few cops visible were the LAPD’s bike-bound squad of “courtesy officers,” or whateverthefuck they’re called. They wear purple shirts that make them look like the world’s most militant kickball team. They kept to themselves, returned eye contact and smiled when smiled at. This is different, I gather, from New York, where the NYPD is crushing people’s femurs and throwing haymakers at nancy-boy college kids. As is their wont.
I wonder if this comes down to the difference between the city’s mayors. Bloomberg is a billionaire businessman who made his business billions off a proprietary information network for other businessmen to get tips about business. A paper pusher for paper pushers. The ultimate meta-captain of non-industry; basically a glad-handing blue suit stuffed with hundred dollar bills. Of course he wants to just get the freeloaders off the lawn. He doesn’t strike one as the head cracking type, but if it gets in the way of money, that’s what needs to be done. Also all his cigarette-banning shit and no bicycles on the grass, etc., shows a totalitarian instinct. Villaraigosa is an unprincipled intellectually bankrupt game show host, but at least on the surface he stands for unions and immigrants and that type of Old Left shit, so it makes sense that his instinct is to peacefully let the hippies camp out outside his office.
Anyway. My shameful urge to see cops punched and tear gas going off was not slaked, and the protest was exactly what I expected it to be. The protestors stood for exactly nothing, or at least collectively they stood for nothing; individually there were countless micro-agendas that people had brought in in an attempt to glom on to the movement. Lyndon LaRouche disciples authouritatively screaming at people. Medical marijuana advocates. Anti-human trafficking activists. An Indigenous Peoples Committee with actual daguerrotype-looking Native Americans involved. There was a big banner about chemtrails, which is what people call visible jet exhaust that they think is the government dropping chemicals from the sky to sterilize blacks or cause autism or something.
And they had bands, and speakers. The speakers were middle aged Chicano Studies professors offering the exact reheated Trotskyist boilerplate you would expect, which the young people were politely supportive of even if they seemed a bit bored. The only people who seemed genuinely excited were the old people. The old hippies, who looked delighted to be pulled down from the attic and dusted off for some old-fashioned agitation. I’d seen plenty of these types up in Santa Cruz and our LA hippies were exactly the same; focused on Dick Cheney and the wars but now trying to tie this stuff into the issue of money.
I ran into a girl, someone I’d been on one date with off OKCupid and never called again. Despite this she was happy to see me and introduced me to her friend, who was, judging by her hairstyle, a true believer. The OKC girl was cute, way hotter than I remembered, and I had to go back and kick my past self in the ass for not getting a second date and sealing the deal. What was I thinking?
They asked me for my thoughts on the protest and I started to tell them the truth, that while I felt I stood for whatever vague principle they were having trouble articulating, that at least in LA this is a nebulous jerkoff that will ultimately amount to nothing. I brought up the chemtrails banner— shit like this is what gets legitimate movements dismissed as nuts. I was doing well, seeming smart about politics with a little humor thrown in; I was on my way to recovering from my earlier blowoff and earning my way back into the hot girl’s panties. I would text her later to say “cool to see you at the protest” and casually ask her out for a drink, and the ass would be mine. But then her friend was like “well, you know there is something to that chemtrails stuff.”
What do you do in this situation? There is nothing to this chemtrails stuff; only a retarded idiot could possibly believe in this type of thing even for an instant. I had an urge to bite her head off and yell at her for even suggesting that such a thing might hold water.
But I opted for the pussy. I shrugged it off and said nothing. I took a bus back home and texted the OKC girl and then jerked off to her facebook photos. We’ll see if she gets back to me.
Thinking about going down to Occupy LA today. Not that I give a shit. Or rather, not that I think it is a meaningful movement with any concrete goals. And if they did have concrete goals, they would be impossible to achieve.
Not that I’m against them either—while the “I am the 99 per cent” people complaining about student loans seem dopey to me, far worse is this “I am the 53 per cent (of legitimate income tax payers)” canard; the people holding up signs that say I bootstrapped my way to the bottom attending a state school while working 30 hours a week at a minimum wage job and never having an instant of freedom, now I will buy a shitty house in Phoenix and have kids who will also have to work 30 hours a week getting yelled at by some undereducated jerkoff because they didn’t adequately mop down the little channel between the beef and chicken grills at Arby’s — congratulations, you’re a fucking idiot. I wasted my youth grinding myself down to the bone in the most debasing manner possible and now I insist that people with billions of dollars be able to contribute nothing, is what you’re saying.
So I’m not going down there to yell at them or argue with them. Like most people, I am going down there because I think there will be young pretty girls in revealing outfits. I won’t talk to them, because they need a guy who sings for a band about communism or something, but you reach a certain age and just looking at a nineteen year old’s barely clothed tits and ass is enough.
And you know, it does suck to have just got out of college right when the price of education reached a high water mark; it cost you a quarter million fucking dollars to go to school for four years, and you got out at the exact moment when the job-getting value of all this education became utterly meaningless. Or, for certain “desirable” white collar professions this fancy education is necessary, but it is no longer even close to sufficient. You have graduated to a snowball’s chance in hell of being able to work in any kind of meaningfully air-conditioned environment. And in fact this fancy education now works against you at the kind of it-sucks-but-at-least-allows-basic-life-sustaining-expenses kind of gig that might be available— management at these places thinks you will get bored and move on; they don’t want to waste the time and money training you. And they’re right, you would move on. Except there won’t be any place to move to for at least a decade. The shortsightedness of these HR professionals for shitty jobs is that they fail to see that the guy out of Berkeley is going to have nowhere to go for ten years, and hell yes you want him telemarketing.
It’s funny, the 53 per cent movement seems dedicated to painting the 99 per cent movement as rich, elitist snobs. Overeducated, over-worldy layabouts. They are saying “we are even poorer than you, and we are proud of it.” Not necessarily monetarily poorer but somehow culturally poorer— we are the real blue collar bedrock of this country and blah blah blah, and so stop complaining, you lazy rich people. Stop complaining and let the really rich people keep their money.
I mean, what the 99 per cent movement wants, at least the college kids, certainly is some kind of socialist, redistributive shit to happen. In their bones, that’s what they want. Give us money. They want a jubilee. A forgiveness of debt. I don’t know why they have to be so cagey about it, and couch it in demands for nitpicking banking reforms— we all know that’s bullshit. They want money. They should come out and say it. French people aren’t chickenshit about this type of thing— they say “we want the government to give us money.” And good! Fucking give it to them.
