Iron Fist

Is it just me, or does anyone else find it completely disgusting that OJ Simpson is going to publish a book about how he killed his wife? And that he’s going to get away with it since 1) he’s talking about it as a “hypothetical situation”, and 2) double-jeopardy laws prevent him from being tried for her murder a second time.

America, please: don’t buy this book.

Update: common sense prevailed somewhere down the line and both the book and show have been canceled. Now we get to watch black market copies of the book crop up on eBay, since I’m sure that not every single pre-release copy will be accounted for and destroyed, now that all the hype has made this a sick collector’s item.

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[Note: the following is a letter that I sent to a dear friend back in April. I decided it was amusing enough to share, and so is presented below with only mild editing.]

Last Wednesday I got off work, went home, and just had about enough time to wolf down a peanut-butter sandwich (one of my principal food sources as a bachelor who isn’t very picky) and clean myself up a bit before I had to head outdoors to wait for my buddy Niels to swing by and pick me up. We were on our way to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs play at the Roseland, just a few blocks down from the Burnside Bridge. My last check at Ticketswest revealed that there still tickets available for will-call pickup. Sweet.

Neither of us had really eaten dinner, so we grabbed a parking spot a few blocks away and walked up the street to the Baja Fresh next to Powell’s Books, and talked our nerd talk about world affairs and technology. Around 8 o’clock, when the door were scheduled to open, we headed back out the door to go watch the show. “They’re fuckin’ rad live,” Niels assured me. He’d seen them before, opening for the White Stripes a few years ago. He also related to me the story about how he met Suge Knight, but that’s one I’ll let him tell you sometime.

We get to the front door of the Roseland and get in line. I sneer contemptuously at the scalpers outside, before noticing the sign on the door proclaiming in bold all-caps that TONIGHT’S SHOW HAS SOLD OUT. “Fuck!” I proclaim in response. I look at Niels; he looks at me; we look at the scalpers. We hate scalpers. “Fuck, man,” he says.

“Well,” I start. I don’t want to go home yet. I’ve earned a night out, dammit, and I’m sure he has to. “Want to start drinking?”

“That works for me,” he grins. And so we wander off, trying to remember which bars in Chinatown won’t get us shot, or expose us to hepatitis, and yet won’t totally suck ass. We both mourn the loss of the old Hung Far Low and its treacherous set of stairs and stiff drinks.

“How about Berbati’s Pan?” I toss out. “We can shoot some pool, too.”

“Sweet!” It’s decided then, and we loop back around and across Burnside towards Berbati’s. On the way, I catch a glimpse of who’s playing at Dante’s. “Hey dude, you want to see Storm and the Balls play at 10?” This is also greeted with enthusiasm. Niels has been to a couple of her shows, but I’ve yet to see her.

So we arrive at Berbati’s and Niels buys us a couple pints of a micro-brewed Porter. I feed some quarters into the pool table, which miraculously aren’t accepted when the table disgorges its billiard balls. We play through our free game and nurse our beers, talking about old times, and our pal J. from the CS trenches gives us a call mid-game. He tells us that his interview with the [agency] went well, and that through a contact he has, his resumé has been reviewed by the [other agency]. J., incidentally, is the guy that first introduced me to concepts like public key cryptography and secure channels. But you’ve already heard that lecture from me.

It’s a little after nine when we wrap up our second game of pool (this time the table took my quarters, but we still came out ahead with a free game). We decide that now is a good time to bail out and walk over to Ground Control, since it’s past the time when they start serving beer. Ground Control is an arcade in Old Town that evokes all sorts of teenage memories when you enter it: it’s dark, and a little seedy, and is packed with video games. There’s about three or four games there that are from the last few years. Nearly everything else is of an early 80s to mid-90s marque, and most are rigged to play for only 25 cents. Upstairs are pinball machines that span about three decades. Also, they serve beer. Fucking awesome. I buy us a pair of Full Sail Sessions, and get some quarters; we discover that most of the pinball machines upstairs have bottle holders mounted on the sides, which are sturdy enough to hold onto a beer even when an alcohol-addled individual like myself slams his pelvis into the game in an attempt to jerk the ball towards one of the paddles. I play Star Wars and Black Knight 2000 pinball; unfortunately, the Star Trek: the Next Generation game is down for repairs.

We get our game on, playing Tempest and Missile Command and Pole Position and Star Wars and Tank Assault. We race against each other in Hard Driving or whatever the hell it’s called; I can recall racing against [one of my high school friends] in this same game at an arcade in Palm Springs. I feed two quarters into the Virtua Cop game so that I can enter two player mode and use both plastic handguns. This ends up being rather tiring after a while, but Niels shows up just as one of my players dies and picks up the slack. We both gun it through a car chase and a hostage situation before getting our shit ruined. Which worked out well: we were out of quarters, and it was after ten.

From here we made our way back to Dante’s to watch Storm Large and the Balls play. I sip at an Iron City beer while we wait for her to come on stage. I strongly encourage you to check out her site and see some pictures of Storm: a Portland icon, she’s a ravishing Nordic beauty, tall and strong with “Love” tatooed across her upper back in Gothic letters and a voice to die for. She starts out singing a lounge-style cover of “Enter Sandman.” I am in love with Storm. I am torn: on the one hand I wonder what her inner thighs must taste like, but on the other I hand I can’t help but notice what great muscle definition she has and wonder what it would be like to fight her. Maybe we can duke it out, punching and wrestling, and once we’re all sweaty we can 69 it for a while. In the meantime, she’s an incredible performer, saucily working her way through her set list. I am hoping she’ll do her number that Ash told me about, the one about Rumsfeld and Cheney being secret lovers and washing each other down in the shower.

We stay through about a half-dozen of Storm’s songs. It’s 11:30 on a weekday, and although Storm is rockin’, both Niels and I are worn out. So we bail out, and luckily Dante’s is only a block away from where we parked. Almost as if we planned it that way.

It would have been nice to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I’m kinda bummed we didn’t get a chance to see them play. But all in all it turned out okay. Sometimes the best evenings out are the ones you didn’t plan at all.

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On a Friday morning not too long ago I landed in Salt Lake City for my first ever business trip to involve flying and expense reports and official paperwork and all that jazz. My company had abruptly decided to fly me out to the Utah end of the operation to — well, actually, it’s kind of hush-hush. So they booked me on the earliest possible flight to leave Portland so I could get straight to work at the SLC office. In keeping with my usual tradition of getting almost no sleep the night before my early morning flights I’d gone to bed around midnight and rolled back out onto my feet a little before four in the morning. In the past this has worked out just fine because I’ve only flown anywhere for vacation, where upon landing I wasn’t required to make any sort of difficult decisions, and when I inevitably suffered from a messy collapse later on in the day, it was of little consequence.

This time, however, I would be required to drive to the office upon landing and perform a series of somewhat meaningful tasks for several hours. Since I wasn’t getting paid for my travel time in any way (other than being recompensed for my expenses) I had previously decided that I was going to work till about four-thirty and call it a day. This didn’t quite work out as well as I’d planned: I reported to my boss-away-from-home a little after five and gave a stuttering, incoherent summary of the changes that I’d effected, a report which involved a lot of hand-waving and spastic blinking and stopping and restarting nearly all of my sentences. It wasn’t until nearly six that I stumbled out of the office to attempt to find my hotel.

A word about Salt Lake City, for those who haven’t been there: the Mormon Temple sits at the middle of the city, and the streets are set up as a grid around it with street addresses given as coordinates so that at any place within the city a traveler might know the distance and direction to Mormon headquarters, like a Cartesian plane with the Temple as its origin. My hotel, for example, was listed as being at 100 East 600 South.

I checked into said hotel and got settled into my room, fully expecting to be there just long enough to take a shower and grab a snack before heading back out. It’s not that I thought that Utah had a whole lot to offer me, but I absolutely love driving around new places at night and getting thoroughly lost before finding my way back home. At this point, however, my body decided it was going to have a conversation with me.

Body: Hey. What do you think you’re doing?

Me: I’m going out! I’m going to go exploring.

Body: Ha ha, no I’m serious, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?

Me: I just told you I’m–

Body: Listen up, dude: you had three hours of sleep, sixteen hours ago in a different time zone. Today you’ve eaten 1) airplane peanuts, 2) a banana and some milk, 3) a minor chimichanga. That’s not going to cut it. Go eat up, the company is paying for it anyway.

Me: Sure, but first I’m just gonna –

Body: Oh, I get it, you think I’m fooling around here, right? START THE CONVULSIONS!

On cue I began to twitch and blink and bump into the walls as my body went on strike. I limped down to the dining room and managed to pull together enough hand-eye coordination to get my meal into my mouth. I thought this would fix me up enough to allow me to get out and roam around, but in reality my body was now shifting from hunter-gatherer mode in a hibernation state. So I went back to my room and collapsed.

This, too, was foiled by the flurry of text messages and phone calls I received at 11:30 from friends who I’d neglected to let know that I was leaving the state for the weekend. Between the erratic sleeping-and-feeding schedule I found that I was still awake at one AM, although I wouldn’t necessarily refer to my state as being ‘alert.’ Too tired to read but not able to sleep left me with the option of watching cable TV, so I ended up watching “The Island” until three in the morning. I tossed and turned and ended up finally falling asleep around the time (after adjusting for the time change) I had woken up the previous day.

In the tumultuous four hours of additional sleep I had before getting up I remember having a bizarre dream that I was meeting Al Gore, who smiled his plastic politician’s smile at me as I shook his hand and struggled to come up with something nice to say to this man who I didn’t much care for and in fact thought of as a fat hypocrite, as well as an idiot. So I think I ended up telling him that I knew someone who’d read his “Inconvenient Truth” book and thought it was pretty good.

After my complimentary breakfast and a hasty check-out I went back to the office to put a few hours work in before deciding I was past the point of diminishing returns and checked out to get in some sight-seeing before my flight. As long as I was in Salt Lake City I decided that I should at least take a look at the Mormon Temple. Visiting the Temple turned out to be not unlike what I imagine crashing an Amway convention to be like, in that everyone I met was very polite and not only eager to sell you something, but also wanting to recruit you to go out and sell their product yourself. I turned down an official tour at least four times, preferring to wander around the complex on my own. The Mormons were very polite but also very insistent that I not sit on their special Gentiles-Only Tree:

The Temple itself was an imposing castle-like structure. I walked by numerous statues of Joseph Smith and his brother, and of Brigham Young. I also came across the Seagull Monument, which told an interesting tale of how the early Mormon settlers trying to raise enough crops to get them through the winter found their fields besieged by a Plague of Grasshoppers from the mountains. It said that they fought the grasshopper incursion with water and clubs and fire, which made me wonder if they’d really thought that one out very well. Seriously, when was the last time you discovered bugs eating the corn in your garden and thought, “What I really need to get rid of these insects is a club and a torch”? Anyway, the Mormons found themselves on the losing end of the battle with the invading arthropods and prayed for a miracle to deliver them from the Plague of Grasshoppers — a miracle which took the form of a Flock of Seagulls, who drove the grasshoppers back into the mountains with their synth-heavy pop jams and guitar riffs. And so it was in gratitude that the Seagull became Utah’s state bird, and “I Ran So Far Away” became the state song. Or something like that.

After the Mormon Temple it turns out that there really isn’t much else to see in Salt Lake City, so I decided to go west to see if I could get to the Great Salt Lake. I lost interest in driving before I made it there, but I did get a better view of the mountains from outside the city.

I went back to the airport after this. Trust me when I say I’m glad to be back home.

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Up until relatively recently I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life working on the weekends. Usually this was because I was in school, or because there was more money to be made by working on a Sunday. Few other people that I knew had the weekends off (or any sort of regular schedule at all, really) and so getting up early to work on Sunday morning didn’t bother me too much.

But I’m done with school and with working part-time (for now, anyway) and so now having a regular schedule with weekends off is a bit of a luxury for me.

At first, I didn’t know what to do with myself. It had been years since I’d had Sundays off on a regular basis. I went several weeks in a row where I woke up early on Sunday anyway, feeling apprehensive and seized with the anxious feeling that I needed to desperately be doing something.

No longer. Today I’m appreciating being able to wander off by myself for a few hours and enjoy a double capuccino while the rain pours down outside.

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