A Day At the Races

Ah, another beautiful day on the island of thieves! The mellow tropical sun's rays caress mother Earth in the afternoon's radiant glow. An aroma of tropical decay hangs in the sultry morning air. The whispy coconut palms dance to the relaxing serenade of the sensual tropical breeze. And here, but a mere hundred or so yards from a massive government office mecca, I sit in a tranquil isolation, alone amidst the whitewashed sand, trailing vines of morning glories and the denizens of the crashing surf near my feet.

Getting lost in the trance of the breaking waves is easy to do, and time in the traditional sense disappears. First on the edge of the barrier reef, then lapping innocently aboard the terrestrial shores of our world, it is incessant. At some point, however, the scene has to change, and I have to leave this idyllic island of isolation that serves as  a sanctuary when compared to the mad and chaotic nature of the world. 

I sauntered back to my chariot to carry me home. It's quick and looks fabulous. It hugs the curves like no other, and weaves through the furious island traffic listlessly. Where am I on my way to I wonder? It's a life of spontaneity so I have no real direction in mind, however north seems like a good idea. Making my decision, I hop in my trusty steed to carry me forward on my dawning journey into the ferocity of the future. The local station belts out “Love Me Two Times”--what luck! My jam; a hazy, heavy batch of nostalgic euphoria drifts into my head hearing this melodic genius tenuously flowing through my speakers. It charges me to the point that I feel empowered somewhat amidst the seemingly untamed, uncontrollable world in which I reside in. 

Turning onto the ribbon of pavement before me, I start to unleash the powerful innards of my vehicle, and the distinct roar of the engine growls angrily and confidently. Despite the super performance, something seems amiss. I start looking for answers. I notice in my rear-view mirror something coming up fast, gaining on me.

This rambling wreck, this rust bucket, catching up on me and my mean machine? How incredulous! He draws near me as I am slowing down to the upcoming red light. What could this be about? I chalk it up to a speed demon of another sort; a scofflaw endemic to this day and age, disenfranchised from the modern material world, a soul burned from looking for meaning for meaning in a meaningless place. 

Deep into this near-meditatition, the red light turned to green, and I peeled out of my sauntering pace. Unfazed, the rust bucket next to me maintained its breakneck speed as well, defying the laws of gravity, however numerous they may be. 

I was stunned; clearly, to be risking this much by driving like that in a condition like that, he must be out for vengeance of some sort; surely a blood lust was coming my way. I had undoubtedly incurred the wrath of some sort of village vendetta due to incessant flaunting of my automobile!

This is it. I'm going to have to fight someone over this...race. I didn't even want to race. The light ahead turned red. The Bronco or Blazer or whatever heap of should-be scrap metal from the late 80s was coming up next to me. I came to a standstill. I looked over; the guy in the car had his window ajar, motioning for me to roll mine down as well. This is it. I'm staring death in his round, mustachioed, bespectacled face.

“Nice car,” the corpulent driver yelled jovially, “follow me to my house, I want to race you in my Camaro.”

All I need is to have my car destroyed racing some yahoo in his Camaro. I have much to lose, and little to gain.

“No.” I replied laughingly.

The signal turned to green, I sped away. The rust bucket stalled. Victory was mine for another day.

Bad Craziness in Boston

Late one night, several moons ago, I found myself on the cold, barren expanses of the Syria-Lebanon border, in the middle of a decrepit, cinderblock shack without windows. On this particular instance, the “immigration” lanes were crowded with armed troops, disinterested looking military types stamping passports, and the queues were overflowing with cross-border travelers, mostly Syrian workers going back to make their bones in Lebanon, a tradition in this part of the world.

In the middle of this bureaucratic ritual, I encountered a somewhat bizarre sight; a 6'4ish Ginger standing amongst the generally shorter, and darker complected crowd. This character looked like someone you'd run into having hashbrowns and whiskey at the Oxford Saloon in Missoula, Mont., not someone you'd expect to see out here. Thinking it was another American, I started up a conversation. Being in Syria, it had been a long time since I had run into someone who spoke good English.

“Hey man, how in the hell did you get here?” I inquired in my road wearied state.

My greeting was returned with a blank stare, like one who has no idea whether or not to shit or go blind, followed by rants in Arabic. Clearly, he wasn't at the Oxford last Friday. It turned out he was from Jordan, spoke little English, and was on his way to manage an internet cafe in Beirut.

Though my diatribe may seem as if it has no point, it does. We can't always judge people by what they look like. This was illustrated with my experience on the Syrian Frontier. Just because someone looks like something, doesn't mean that they necessarily are. Hell, here I thought the guy was someone I could swap stories about drinking Oly and being cat-called at by drunken, sloppy women. Instead, he was a complete foreigner, someone who had little in common with the bar denizens of Higgins Street, even though he looked like he could definitely play the part.

This may seem simplistic, but nowhere was this more prevalent than the aftermath of this past week's Boston Marathon bombings. The blood was still fresh on Boylston Street, the explosions and chaos still freshly ringing in Bostonian ears, and already, people were jumping to conclusions about who did it, and why they did it. Within minutes of the bombings, the armchair Defense ministers set the Twittersphere ablaze with rampant speculation. It was a gun nut, protesting tax day! It was Al-Qaeda! These theories and myriad more set the tone. On websites like Reddit, would-be gumshoes had a field day looking for suspicious looking brown people within the crowd, doing pen drawings on pictures that would have made John Madden proud, and creating suspects, based solely on the fact they looked Middle Eastern or South Asian.

A Saudi national was arrested. He was deported rather suddenly. Evidence, conspiracy theorists maintain, that this was part of a government plot and his deportation part of the cover up.

The mainstream news was no better than this array of crackpots, perhaps even worse, on many occasions putting on ranting talking heads on the various opinion shows, talking heads who asserted it had to be some sort of Iranian plot, or how it was the Al-Qaeda's Malian arm, trying to exact revenge for US support of France in the Mali Campaign.

And now, in the end, it looks to have been the work of two Kyrgyz-Chechen immigrant hatchetmen who by all accounts were pretty normal people who led pretty normal lives. Just regular looking white kids. One was an aspiring boxer, the other, an apparent pothead who was good at wrestling. Ordinary people, who, for some reason snapped.

Everybody had the perpetrators of this whole terrible incident fingered long before there was any evidence. And everybody was wrong. Worse, people wrongly fingered by the internet “sleuths” remain threatened by violence by would-be vigilantes. It wasn't some international plot, it wasn't some deranged crackpot who was angry about his guns being taken away, it was just a couple of suburbanites who lost their marbles.

The world isn't always what it seems.

Digital Insanity.

Though I'm not a particular fan of Facebook, I can't deny that it's part of my life. In a few short years its gone from internet backwater to global trendsetter and hub of activity. Truly bizarre. I find myself drawn to check it though, and I'm generally unsatisfied by what I find on it, and wonder why I come to it in the first place.

And it's not as if I visit this rest stop on the information superhighway for enlightenment; Virtually of the place is seemingly updates about how their Trix were at breakfast, political memes with cookie-cutter messages like “Freedom Ain't Free”, “or “Obama's a Kenyan Marxist!”, or something that has to do with guns and how the various government brown-shirts are coming for them because some obscure talk show host said so.

Lately though, I've encountered a barrage of other sorts, this time the “equality” moniker that so many users seem to have adopted in the last week. You've all seen it, because I'd gather unscientifically that somewhere around 88% of Facebook users have switched to this symbol as their avatar, done so under the guise of supporting “equal rights” in the ongoing row at the US Supreme Court over Prop 8, same-sex marriages, and the DOMA act. So in place of a duck-lipping female posing in her flash-stained, dorm room mirror or a guy dressed in a warrior-Viking costume he fashioned out of empty boxes of Olympia Beer, you instead have what amounts to a simple picture, of an equal sign.

What is this madness, and where are the duck-lips I lust over? Is nothing sacred anymore? God damn it, some things deserve answers! No, minimalism hasn't swept across the US in a great fervor. From what I've gathered, the movement's point is apparently that, having your moniker be a colored version of an equal sign in a pink hue makes you a champion of individual rights and freedom, an individual who is sensitive, and caring, and a hell of a great person and all around snappy dresser.

But are you really? Or are you just someone who has adopted this as your flavor-of-the-week cause du jour, you doing it because everyone else is and it seems trendy? Because that seems to be what a lot of the US is anymore, trendiness, in everything. And it's kind of a sad state of affairs. Instead of people actually being engaged on issues, actually being involved, they feel that simply joining the trend, and switching their Facebook avatar to an equals sign makes them seem as if they are above the fray.

Because amidst all the hullabaloo and avatar changing and general fervor, things have still gone on. The government's still continued to pull shenanigans, all with citizens foisting nary an outrage, too busy changing their avatars to compete with their Facebook friends for the title of “most tolerant”.

In the last week, the “Monsanto Protection Act” was jammed through our legislative body, without an expansive avatar campaign and signed into law by the President on Tuesday. The act, which was an anonymous rider on a spending bill, wasn't debated by anyone or objected to, and as a result of being signed into law, Monsanto and other giant agricultural monoliths are shielded from federal court prosecution or lawsuits in the event something harmful is found in their genetically-modified seeds. I suppose getting poisoned by corporate barons in the name of profits isn't that important anyway. What could possibly go wrong with Flounder-infused tomatoes? Yes. They exist.

The bottom line is, you changing your avatar isn't going to change anything. The 9 justices aren't going to take note of someone's Facebook avatar being changed when they pen their decision, and you changing your avatar isn't going to help someone's plight in anyway. It's just another trend, like skinny jeans and yelling “Yolo!” after doing something completely asinine. Something to make you feel great about yourself without actually doing anything.

Midnight in Samarkand

Recently, while waiting between flights at the San Francisco Airport, I found myself sitting at the airport bar, as I normally do, imbibing a Harvey Wallbanger as I normally do, watching the action on the tarmac and admiring the strangieties of the surrounding venue. In many ways, this place is a present-day remembrance of a Silk Road outpost, a crossroads and exchange of foreign ideas and peoples.

The airport has always sort of been that kind of place, an odd place populated by odd travelers of myriad trips, all randomly converged in one spot at a given time. I have spent entirely too much time in these huge transit hubs in my life to this point, and despite the overpriced drinks and generally disinterested employees, one of the redeeming qualities of the experience has always been to meet different people, and have random conversations that went on about random things, in the process gaining a perspective on life I never otherwise probably would have.

How often in your everyday existence, for example, have you encountered a Hungarian Freedom Fighter, some dirt farmer named Joe from Lusk who struck it rich because of the vast petroleum deposits on his land, or a girl named Anemone from the Netherlands who was out of the Old World for the first time, let alone have an actual conversation with them? Some of the strangest conversations I have ever had occurred at airports, yet this veritable mosaic of multicolored views seems to be slowly but surely going the way of the buffalo.

SFO, itself somewhat of a modern-day Samarkand, once a buzzing hub of communication, has like so many other institutions succumbed to the perils of modern technology and devolved into yet another example of the “alone together” society that seems to unfortunately be one of the hallmarks of the 21^st Century. Looking around, I noticed virtually everyone to be stoned on some sort of digital opiate. Everyday people reduced to the stupor of Haight Street junkies, strung out on the marvels of modern communication devices, chasing dragons on their iPods.

In a way, this experience is indicative of the direction our society as a whole has shifted toward in the recent past. Gone are the days of spontaneity, and in its place, a dull feasting on information, an increasingly voracious lust satisfied only by the frenetic pace of living that modern-day technology provides. This constant craving is further stoked by the peddlers of technological smack. Each year, the pushers put out some new product that is deemed “must have”, which is followed by a tsunami of junkies scurrying to their respective local brownstones to get a sweet taste of it, and enjoy that one until the new, even more bitchin' stuff shows up a year or so down the road.

People live for the junk. People constantly have to update where they are, who they are with and what they are doing on the 36 different social media platforms they use all for approval of their digital minions. I can think of multiple incidences in my own past where something totally ludicrous and zany would happen, and the first reaction of those around me isn't awe of the spectacle, it's a usually rather abrupt chorkle of “I gotta post about this on Facebook!” People more excited about what someone else will say about what happened to them, rather than enjoying the raw insanity of what just actually happened.

It's a different world nowadays. With innovations such as the Google Glass coming online, a set of digitized glasses which allow the wearer to essentially “live” with their profiles, where does it all end?

After a couple drinks, I sifted my way through the sea of digital dope fiends, the absence of a stale-piss aroma the only thing making me totally sure I wasn't in the Civic Center MUNI station at midnight.