Somebody sent me this on facebook.  Any time I try to write more than 38 characters on facebook, it usually crashes or tries to sell me auto insurance, so I will answer it here.  Also, I am so bored of the book I am trying to write that I almost went and googled “writing prompts” which is always a waste of my time, like googling “android vs. iOS” and expecting something concrete.  So here’s a bunch of answers to a bunch of dumb questions.

1. What time did you get up this morning? 4

AM, but then I reset my alarm to 5.  In a perfect world, I would have written for those 74 minutes, but having a dream about selling a moped to Spiro Agnew in an alternate reality where Hulk Hogan was killed on the cross and every church had an effigy of Hulk on a cross was preferable to staring at a blank screen for 74 minutes.

2. How do you like your steak? I like it the way the chef prepares it.  I.e. I don’t like it with spit on it, so I leave him or her to decide how to cook it.  Paying $75 for a steak and then requesting that it be overcooked is like buying a Prius and then bolting a giant fucking bike carrier on the roof that doubles the amount of wind drag.

3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema? The Debt.  It wasn’t bad.  Any movie set in East Berlin has got my attention until it no longer deserves it.

4. What is your favorite TV show? TV is dead, and the only thing I watch with any regularity are stupid reality TV shows about cooking, and I’m usually reading the web at the same time.  The last show I really liked was this alternate history show that was on, although it was a pilot shot on like $37 and probably won’t get picked up.

5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be? What is that saying about LA being nine different cities?  There are at least two or three of them I would like.  One of the ridiculously huge and esoteric beach houses in Playa Del Rey or one of those weird things on the canal in Venice.

6. What did you have for breakfast? A bowl of fiber one raisin bran and a thing of fat-free yogurt.

7. What is your favorite ice cream? That fake Mexican restaurant Chi-Chi’s used to have fried ice cream, and I always liked that.  I went to a Mexican restaurant a couple of years ago in Daly City and ordered it, and they forgot to fry it, so it was a block of impossibly hard ice cream with the breaded coating on the outside.

8. What foods do you dislike? Mushrooms, cauliflower, cilantro.  Mushrooms because my childhood was filled with slimy, canned, Kroger mushrooms that taste like fermented rubber tire pieces; cauliflower because I have a memory of my aunt pressure-cooking a huge amount of it until the house smelled like fried ass; cilantro, I have a weird reaction to it and even the smell of it tastes like soap to me.  I’ve heard this is genetic.  It means eating Mexican food in northern California can be very hit-or-miss for me.

9. Favorite Place to Eat? How many of these god damned questions are about food?  Jesus christ, no wonder 114% of our population is obese.

10. Favorite dressing? Field.

11. What kind of vehicle do you drive? A Toyota Yaris.

12. What are your favorite clothes? Jeans, t-shirt.

13. Where would you visit if you had the chance? Mars.  Antarctica.

14. Cup 1/2 empty or 1/2 full? If you answer half full to this, either you are a goddamn liar, or you live in some rural part of Africa where there is no water.

15. Where would you want to retire? I thought I answered this in #5.  Or do people retire where they don’t want to live?  That would explain Florida and Arizona.

16. Favorite time of day? Right after work, right before this west-facing house turns into an oven.

17. Where were you born? I should probably stop answering this question online before someone identity thieves themselves into my mortgage account.

18. What is your favorite sport to watch? Baseball, although demolition derby is a close second.

19. Who do you think will not tag you back? I am not tagging anyone.

20. Person you expect to tag you back first? See #19

21. Who are you most curious about their responses to this? Ibid.

22. Bird watcher? What?

23. Are you a morning person or a night person? I used to be a night person, but I’ve become more of a morning person.

24. Do you have any pets? Two cats, plus by proxy eleventy billion pets because of all of the animal shelters were dump money into.

25. Any new and exciting news you’d like to share? I fucked your mother.

26. What did you want to be when you were little? A person who answers lists of questions.

27. What is your best childhood memory? Best as in what I remember the most, or the best thing that happened that I remember?  I remember all of childhood pretty well, and I don’t really want to.  My best memory is probably when I turned 18 and childhood ended.

28. Are you a cat or dog person? Cat.  Dogs are followers, but cats do not give a fuck, which I can appreciate.

29. Are you married? Yes.

30. Always wear your seat belt? Only when I’m in a car.

31. Been in a car accident? Yes.

32. Any pet peeves? See also the last thousand entries in this blog.

33. Favorite Pizza Toppings? Chunks of gold.

34. favorite flower? What is the one they make opium out of?

36. Favorite fast food restaurant? Subway.

37. How many times did you fail your driver’s test? None.

38. From whom did you get your last email? printroom_support@printroom.com.

39. Which store would you choose to max out your credit card? The blank credit card store.

40. Have you done anything spontaneous lately? Combusted.

41. Like your job? It doesn’t involve food.

42. Broccoli? I think broccoli was one of the first vegetables I really liked, although that was only because in Indiana, you can only get broccoli with two and a half pounds of cheese whiz on it.

43. What was your favorite vacation? Hawaii is always good.

44. Last person you went out to dinner with? My wife, to this Thai restaurant called Summer Summer.

45. What are you listening to right now? The Naked Lunch soundtrack.

46. What is your favorite color? #FF3300

47. How many tattoos do you have? Zero

48. How many are you tagging for this quiz? Zero

49. What time did you finish this quiz? 4

50. Coffee Drinker? No.

Yesterday marked the 42nd anniversary of when Muammar Gaddafi assumed the title of Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council of Libya by ousting Prince Hasan as-Senussi. It’s disputed whether or not he’s currently in Libya or if he still rules the country.  And if he does show up, he’ll probably end up prosecuted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Even though he’s been in the news constantly for the last year, there’s a lot we don’t know about the Libyan leader. Here are some amazing facts about Muammar Gaddafi:

1. He shares a birthday (June 7) with Dean Martin, Tom Jones, Prince, Bill Hader, and Allen Iverson.
2. His first car was a 1958 Ford Thunderbird hardtop.  He now owns a large collection of classic Thunderbirds, including a 1960 hardtop/sunroof model with the 430 engine, of which only 377 were produced.
3. As per his decree, Libyan TV has a channel that repeatedly plays only his favorite movie, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
4. Prior to the US Embargo, his favorite town to vacation in was Rochester, New York, largely because Gaddafi is a great admirer of Millard Fillmore.
5. Every year on September 1, he celebrates the anniversary of his coup by eating an entire squid for lunch and drinking a cup of Turkish coffee for each year he has been in office. These lunches are broadcast nationwide on the Al Nadi Sports Channel.
6. Gaddafi often uses the various spellings of his name to his advantage.  For example, he has been known to join the Columbia House record club up to 32 times at once.
7. In addition to Arabic, French, and English, Gaddafi was at one time studying Klingon, and announced in 1991 his eventual plan to translate the Green Book into the constructed language.
8. His favorite WWE wrestler is Joanie “Chyna” Laurer.
9. His parents made him play the alto saxophone in junior high school.  As a result, he has banned music programs in all Libyan public schools.
10. He applied and was accepted to a graduate program in atmospheric sciences at Howard University in Washington, DC, but did not attend.
11. A long-time fan of Lionel Richie, he admitted during an interview with Larry King that he listened to the album Can’t Slow Down daily for almost two years after its release in 1983, but was initially disappointed with Dancing on the Ceiling, because he preferred the album’s original proposed title, Say You, Say Me.
12. His score on the GRE in 1967 was 505 verbal / 485 math.
13. Aside from the Green Book, his favorite books include The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller, The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer, and You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again by Julia Phillips.
14. He often bought and sold collector beanie babies on eBay with the username “gandalf69” until the US State Department discovered it and shut down his account.  He is rumored to have amassed a collection of over 500,000 of them in a storage facility on the outskirts of Tripoli.  Beanie babies purchased from him that can be verified are exceedingly rare and have sold for four and five figures on the secondary market.
15. There is a Libyan law that prohibits anyone but Gaddafi from playing as Colonel Mustard in the Parker Brothers board game Clue.  In Arabic translations of the game, Colonel Mustard’s turn is first instead of second.
16. His favorite classic video game is Q-Bert.  He owns a restored coin-op version and his high score is 492,000.
17. His customized Airbus A340 jet, which was captured last month in Tripoli, contained a collection of all 41 Steven Seagal movies.
18. Gaddafi refuses to fly over any country with exactly two vowels in its name that ends in a consonant.  He also avoids flying on Tuesdays, never eats fish when traveling on ship, and will always travel with an even number of bags.
19. He was long-time friends with Gary Coleman, and was devastated after his death.  He is still convinced that Coleman was murdered by Mossad agents.
20. He bowled a perfect 300 on the night of his birthday in 1976.  It was during official IBA league play, and he is often seen wearing his official 300 ring.

Wired did a cover story on the light bulb, which is fascinating to me, for many of the same reasons two freight trains containing rocket fuel and napalm colliding at full speed is fascinating to most people. Wired never has more than four god damned things a year even worth reading, unless you’re always in the mood to buyer’s guides for $700 headphones, or twelve-page ad spreads for crap Toshiba laptops, the glossy layouts disguised to look like actual articles. (I got a free subscription by trading in some about-to-expire miles on an airline I never fly, something that looked like a borderline identity theft request. Wired was by far the best magazine offered, with the second and third place choices being Vibe For Pregnant Teens and Country Shitkicker Kitchen.)  What fascinated me was the fact that Lightbulb-Gate has reached the level of fury where you can get guaranteed linkbait with a title like “Five things you need to know before Congress takes all of the light bulbs out of your house and rapes your children in the dark”, and we’re an election cycle away from adding a Constitutional amendment prohibiting any legislation regarding incandescent lighting.

It amazes me that people can get so bent out of shape about manufactured swing issues. I think all it takes is convincing side A that their mortal enemies on side B hates something, and side A will suddenly champion their complete opposite. If I could find the magic place to leak a story that the President is trying to criminalize the consumption of dog shit sandwiches, you’d see within three days a photo-op of some far-right nutbag with a foot-long hoagie of Doberman links, lettuce, and tomato, screaming “TAKE THIS ONE AWAY YOU GODLESS COMMIE BASTARDS!”  Sarah Palin would be working part-time as a night cashier at an Arco gas station, collecting food stamps, and living paycheck-to-paycheck in a studio apartment if the left wouldn’t keep blathering about how much they hate her.  And yeah, both sides are guilty; I’m sure that NASCAR does not implicitly endorse slavery, chaining women in kitchens, or impregnating first cousins, although that’s generally the opinion held by most people with an extensive secondary education.  I’m not saying I’m ready to tattoo a giant number 3 on my face, but I’ve never watched more than two seconds of a race, so I’m not about to condemn it.

News isn’t news. People argue that the news is the reporting of fact, and that the reporting of “incorrect” news is “bias”. We don’t read news to find out facts as much as we read it to validate our worldview.  You could replace the root page of CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and all of the other media sites with a single story that says “Your beliefs have been validated, and that makes you the center of the universe”, and 90% of the function of the media would be functionally replaced.  News stopped being news when the media realized that the most important part of journalism is pumping up your number of page impressions to increase ad revenue.

Here’s a cheat sheet on the “light bulb ban”:

• It doesn’t “ban” anything; it sets new standards for efficiency that will eventually make the use of incandescent light bulbs impractical.
• It was signed by law by George W. Bush.
• The whole issue with Chinese workers getting mercury poisoning while making CFL bulbs would probably be irrelevant if people stopped buying so much Chinese-made shit at Wal-Mart.
• Mercury thermometers contain way more mercury than CFLs, and you put those in your kids’ mouths and asses. (They are also banned in many countries but not the US.  If you’re looking to manufacture next year’s fake crisis, maybe something involving Nancy Grace screaming about how our babies are going to die of fever because Congress is takin’ away our thermometers.)
• Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb.  It’s not an American invention.  Joseph Swan patented it a year before Edison, and Edison avoided litigation by eventually merging with Swan’s company.
• CFLs are not condemned, condoned, or even mentioned in the Holy Bible, at least not in the version I stole from a Las Vegas hotel room to use as a coaster.
• The focus of all of the fury is currently on the CFL bulb, but LED bulbs are coming down in price, don’t have the weird flicker/refresh effect, can be dimmed, are more efficient, and produce a more natural looking light.  I expect that once the LED bulbs break the $10 price point for an equivalent 100-watt incandescent, we’ll start hearing stories about how they’re really produced by homosexual Muslim terrorist splinter cells that abuse children.

I keep hearing that this is a libertarian issue, that we need to keep Big Government off of our backs, that we’ll spend some ridiculous amount of money on the light bulb police to kick down doors and send felon soft-white-light lovers off to maximum security prison.  And all of these laws and regulations will stifle the growth of business and kill jobs (even though all of the biggest industries in this country — pharma, telecom, aerospace, finance — are all heavily regulated.)  People keep talking about a return to “simpler times”, when we could dump raw sewage in drinking water, cut the mufflers off of our giant V-8 engines, and buy a table saw with absolutely no warning labels, guards, or any other pussy communist safety features that would prevent one from cutting off their fingers or launching a piece of wood at 800 miles an hour into your abdomen.  (Those lightweights in Europe only sell table saws with riving knives to prevent kickback when ripping lumber, but where’s the sport in that?  If I want to risk fatality and save $3 on a $947 table saw purchase, god damn it, that’s my right as an American!)  I wish we would return to simpler times - like the ones where idiots were too afraid of computers to use them.

And none of this is about the math, or the savings, or the efficiency.  It isn’t about mercury poisoning or the color of light produced by CFLs or the up-front cost of bulbs.  It’s because one side said “don’t do this,” the other side had to say “well FUCK YOU I am totally doing this.”  It’s about people who have been told to be angry by a for-profit news source that they feel validates their lives.  It’s about millionaires becoming billionaires by telling the poor that they should be pissed off at someone trying to save them a dollar.  It’s a non-issue.  Let it go.  There are more important things to fight about.

I was listening to Mark Maron’s podcast the other day - specifically, an interview with Aubrey Plaza - and they started talking about how they both used to live in Queens.  But then Maron said where he lived, which was at 37th Street and 30th Avenue, and it completely blew my mind, because I lived about a block from there, at 36th and 28th.  And we both lived there at the same time, which means we shared the same subway stop, and the same restaurants and bodegas and fruit stands and drunken assholes sitting outside of cafes, blocking the god damned sidewalk.  And I’m sure my day job and his life as a late-night comedian probably didn’t place us on the platform for the N train at the same times, but I’m sure there must have been at least a couple of occasions when we were up there, looking down the tracks and wondering where the hell the next train was.

That’s a reminder that the world is much bigger than I imagine.  Or maybe I mean more dense.  I came from a life where you knew every single person in your neighborhood.  Our subdivision had a homeowner’s association - not like a condo HOA where you were required to be a member, but rather a group of do-gooder PTA motherfuckers that liked to be overbearing and have a Christmas decoration contest and post crimestopper signs that did no good and that sort of crap.  And they used to put out an annual directory, a photocopied thing that listed every damn person in the subdivision, along with their kids’ names and if any of them did chores like babysitting or snow plowing or whatever.  I think the whole purpose of the thing was to shame people into giving twenty bucks to the group, or maybe because people were so god damned proud of their kids, they needed to show everyone how many of them they had.  I don’t know, but I know in my infinite boredom stemming from a life of only five TV channels, I pretty much memorized that book and knew the names of every person in every house of our neighborhood.

The entire city of Elkhart - not just my little subdivision - had a population just under what Astoria’s population was, except Elkhart is about 25 square miles, where the 11103 is maybe three-quarters of a square mile.  So you’re talking about a serious number of people piled on top of each other; nobody’s got a giant ranch house or a backyard or even a place to park a car, let alone a collection of cars, like pretty much everyone in Elkhart has on their front lawn.  And at first, this was overwhelming to me.  When I first visited New York, I was amazed that it wasn’t just one single main arterial street had clusters of stores and shops, like every town in the Midwest.  Every time you turned off of one street and onto another, that would be a main drag too, with wall-to-wall storefronts.

But at some point, I got desensitized to all of this, and had this mental picture of my neighborhood as having vast amounts of nothing.  I mean, I’d have this internal diagram that would say “my house, five blocks of nothing, the Key Foods, two blocks of nothing, the subway stop, and then ten blocks of nothing until the tunnel and the city.”  In reality, every one of those blocks of nothing had thousands of people living there.  And even though half of the storefronts in Astoria are abandoned and boarded up and probably used as illegal gambling halls, and of the other 50%, a certain plurality were these stores with maybe $17 of merchandise on all of the shelves, probably because the place was a mafia front. But there were all of these places where you could get lost forever, that were their own worlds within one street address.  I’d duck into that horrible Rite-Aid on 30th, and it was not the world’s biggest drug store, but it was its own universe, once you got in there and got stuck waiting an hour while the only cashier finished her cell phone call and rang up your purchases.

I still feel like that now.  I mean, there really is nothing in my neighborhood - we’re like on the edge of the ghetto, patiently waiting for gentrification to happen, maybe the next big earthquake to suck under a mass of old Victorian crackhouses and leave room for a new Trader Joe’s. But then when I go back to Indiana, everything truly looks abandoned.  It always amazes me when I go back there, because it looks like some post-apocalyptic movie, where the whole population has vanished.  And when I did go back to New York, I felt overwhelmed again, which means my sense of scale has reset itself.  But the moral of the story is I should be taking a closer look at what’s around me.

Anyway.  I spent far too long looking at the picture above, then looking at Google Maps, to see if that is indeed 37th Street and 30th Ave, and I think it is, but you can’t tell because so much of the stuff has changed hands.  Someone said you’re officially a New Yorker when you say “do you remember when this used to be a ______”?  Yeah, something like that.

It appears that someone over at HarperCollins saw my previous review of Colby Buzzell’s first book, My War, that I wrote last March, because they sent me an advance copy of his latest, Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey, which is coming out in September.  I remember looking for more info on him after reading My War, and not finding much, except for an article at Esquire, and some blog posts about how he got called back up for IRR duty, but got discharged before going back to Iraq because of PTSD or alcohol abuse or whatever they call it these days.  So I was happy to hear he had another book coming out, and I was curious to see how it went.

I mentioned in my other review that I’m always skeptical of people who do a successful blog and then turn it into a book, which was all the rage a few years back.  It’s not that I think this is good or bad; it’s just that when people blog about their life and the biggest moment in their life and turn it into a good project, when you ask them to do a second book, it’s almost always garbage.  I mean, Citizen Kane might be the best movie in the world, but if it came out in 2011 and made bank, you know they’d do a CK2 with reporter Jerry Thompson played by Ted McGinley or some shit, and they’d do it in 3D, so there would be all these scenes of Chuck Kane throwing glasses of water or shoving spears into the audience.  (“Wow, that sled was coming right at me!”)  And half the time, the second book by a blog-to-book author is this whiny tome talking about the huge letdown of having to do talk shows and meet famous people and go to dinner parties and get their URL plastered on the sides of busses.  So I was seriously curious what would happen in this book.

Buzzell’s assignment was to take the great American road trip, to retrace Kerouac’s footsteps and head across the country and report what was going on in that big space between New York and LA.  He was told to “write a love letter to Kerouac”, and fortunately, he didn’t really do that.  I was hoping this would not turn into some overly academic circle-jerk that treated the Kerouac journey as authentically as Olive Garden turns out Italian food.  In fact, very little time’s spent talking about Kerouac, finding parallels between his work and the world today, or pondering why Jack looked for kicks.  That was all quickly brushed aside as Buzzell set out in his ‘64 Mercury Comet, driving east and looking for his own version of kicks.

There are some strange parallels that Buzzell doesn’t consciously ponder here.  Kerouac and friends set out on their travels partly as a reaction to the Iraq of their generation, which was World War 2.  Jack struggled with the death of his father, and Buzzell talks greatly about the memories of his mother, who died from cancer right before he started his trip.  And like Kerouac’s attempts to reconcile his place in humanity, Buzzell wonders about his recent marriage, his new child, and how all of those pieces are supposed to fit together.

Probably the biggest takeaway from the book is that the middle class is dead, and the middle of America is a prime example of it.  He stumbles through various jobs at day laborer places, talks to people living on minimum wage, hangs out with guys stripping Detroit buildings of their copper pipes, and sees firsthand the abject poverty and lack of any hope in places like Cheyenne, Omaha, and the former motor city.  It’s like his own version of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, except I thought her book was a pretentious slow-pitch to the NPR crowd, while his was more authentic.

Is this pure journalism?  No.  But that’s the struggle, and one that he acknowledges: you need some kind of plot or gimmick or device to provide forward motion in a book like this, and he struggles through the 297 pages to find that.  You can’t just load up a car in San Francisco and say “go!” and write down each place you stop for gas and call it a book.  There could have been many different ideas that would have propelled the book more, that he mentions but never returns to.  Like, what if he would have taken that book advance and drove from SF to NY and stopped at every VFW in between, hoisting beers and asking the patrons what they thought about America?  What if he did try to only survive on the money he got from those shit jobs?  What if he tried to look up every army buddy in his platoon, John Rambo style, and see what they made of their lives?  What if he pulled a Hunter Thompson and searched for “the American Dream”?  He has his motives and he ends up doing the work as far as remembering his mom and his past, but it’s not a focused effort toward any one thesis.

The writing in this book seemed a bit better than the last.  I don’t think he’s completely found his voice, and I found some clunkiness in places, but for every point where he violated the show-don’t-tell rule, there was another point with incredible detail and clarity.  Some of the best examples of this were his depictions of Detroit.  It’s easy for outsiders to simply say “Detroit == Somalia/Bosnia/Tripoli/whatever”, but there is some strange duality in the old houses versus the abandoned stores, the proud residents and the scared whiteys.  He explores a lot of the urban terrain, which is something a bit cliche now that every hipster doofus in a fedora is out wandering abandoned warehouses with their digital SLR, but it’s coming from this guy who was in the shit, who had the crazy experiences in Iraq and knows what real devastation is like.

This book is sure to piss off some people, because Buzzell isn’t easily pigeonholed.  He’s got some strange allegiances, like his odd infatuation with Wal-Mart and views on Fox News.  He didn’t drive a hybrid, instead choosing an old dinosaur V-8, and instead of being fiscally responsible, he spent his nights blackout drinking.  It’s not like his last one, where it’s easy to pitch it and say “read this if you want to know about Iraq.”  There are a dozen other books about cross-country driving or exploring the underbelly of poverty that I’d recommend over this one.  And yeah, the message is not cheery, from an economic standpoint. But this one was a good read, and I’d love to see what he knocks out next.