Old Friends

Robert Moses: "To operate in heavily populated urban environments, you have to hack your way through with a meat axe."

Long time; Atavistic endeavor; birth, death, rebirth--of the cool;

Dark times on the edge of reality, the phrase that first popped into my head at the beginning of this post. I don't know what it means or why it's in my head, but it's there, so it must be real.

Greetings to my few remaining readers--the rest long gone after a season of alienation, disrespect and in some cases utter contempt. What's new with me? What's new with you is the better question. In these days, it's best to circle the wagons and take stock; the introspective turn before projecting judgment.

I'm in San Francisco; I'm at a geography conference doing a bit of cheeky research from inside the monkey house, and the only thing that makes me nervous is succumbing and going native, which will probably happen within the hour after I fling some feces and smear it on the window. But, I digress. It's all actually a continuation of a project I started a few years ago in Denver--The Academic Conference: an Ethnographic Approach. In my own peculiar brand where I seek to get into the nerve-wire of the whole thing to find out what really makes it tick. It almost killed me last time, but I'm rebuilt, better, stronger, faster and more cynical. I've gotten beyond that intial research phase where everything is exciting and new and have slipped into the second bitter self-loathing phase, and now I'm watching a lot of academic geographers with fat asses walk buy as I'm typing, the scorn barely masked on their faces becuase they know that i know that they can see through my polite demeanor to a sneer of contempt. I've still got the biggest pair in ther room, they know that, and they percieve that I will not hesitate to stomp any pretentious, twitchy prick that stands between me and my beer, or more recently, the pool. So stay tuned for a periodic update of to the minute ovservations--a pod-cast without the pod and assuming I know what a pod-cast is...I don't.

At the moment, my biggest pet peeve is trendy academics with equally trendy facial heir and dutch architect glasses Two of the three is fine, but combined, they equal a death brew riveled only by caster oil and strictnyne--which, now that I think about it, won't kill you, and I just got stared down by the former for checking out his wife to which I responded with a gaze of utter disdain only to watch his man-hood shrink with dispair.


All in due time.

In the theme of gentle self-reflection, I'm going to level with you all--I don't think I'm long for this world of ill fitting shirts and pleated, cuffed cotton trousers; of sagging bellies, fleece, and sharp hair cuts, or of t-shirts with trendy slogans. It's hard to be a Marxest from the 42nd floor executive lounge of the San Francisco Hilton, and if I hear one mor prick talk about social justice and the "homeless problem," implying that the evil forces of the city are conspring against these poor marginalized people, I'm going to throw them out the fucking window and hopefully not hit a bum when they splatter on the pavement. Heavy handed cynicism for a Tuesday only vindicated by the man running up the street carrying a 27inch tv on his shoulder on Mondday--he was barefoot, and in an adventure like Kane, in Kung Fu, but he was still just a bum. This whole environment is another horrible vision of sentimentality--disaffected moderns fetishizing the rustic past, made worse by self-indulgent money grubbing and the filty mendacity that surrounds it: academics meeting, engaging in critical discourse that is not actual discourse, nor is it critical; and networking--code word for figuring out how to better one's own lot. There is no such thing as purity of knowledg, just dirty self-preservation and self-perpetuation of a simultaneousy corrupt system and self--but the times are even darker because the Church of Reason now longer believes its own lies--but I'll let that thought hang, I must introduce myself to Don Mitchell who's seated at the window--talking about social justic and the city to a brood of moon-eyed disciples.

Stay tuned dear friends for more notes from the wasteland.