Fuck your ribbon

NOTE: I originally posted this to Facebook, where I figured it'd earn me a lot of apathy and maybe a couple of defriendings. Instead it was fairly well received (shocks me, I wrote it in a white heat with no editing. It should suck.)

Okay, these Facebook avatar-based movements are starting to piss me off.

Hey, go ahead and support something, that's cool guys. But what's aggravating is that the sum total of what you're doing is nothing. Yes, I see your green squares and your pink equal signs and I'm pretty much there. Other people see them and they're way over there, but what you've provided is the opportunity for the both of us to just nod or shake our heads and get on with our lives. Basically: Volume minus Message equals Bullshit.

Put another way, for every pro-Prop 8 or whatever ad that's out there, there's real damage done to the collective psyche. For every pink and red avatar, the healing is nil. You are not helping, you are making yourself (and your friends) feel better about yourself.

Now writing and communicating is scary as hell. I HATE putting this shit out for even limited public consumption because I have friends who disagree with me and at the end of the day, I just want to be kind of likable. Well, what I can tell you from recent adventures in my trade is that the concept of rejection is two metric shitloads scarier than actual rejection and that at the end of the day, people can be petty and bullheaded and mean but they are accepting that you will dissent with them in certain ways.

Writing is a holy chore, and needs to spread like a virus. Communication is a tool that's atrophied down to a collection of call and response on these issues because frankly the people benefiting from rhetoric want it that way. You need to get out there, practice your craft, and when people hit you with something that's difficult to deal with you go back to your hole, you study everything relevant, and you come back stronger than ever. You evolve. You understand how these people developed in such a vacuum of basic decency toward human rights and you will, slowly and maybe only incrementally, bring them toward the enlightenment that you only just previously sought out.

But your avatar is useless.

I was heading to the store last night when I heard the crazy bellowing cyclist freak boy.

In case you don't live in downtown LA and haven't read my previous missives about this guy, he's some swarthy, racially indeterminate mutt who apparently does nothing all day except bicycle through several parts of LA (he's been spotted in East LA) and he does these tricks requiring incredible core and quad strength, leaning the bike over 45 degrees to one side and circling the street, shaking what is now his upper arm and leg and performing for the crowds of astonished and scared onlookers. And he's FUCKING LOUD. Like this guy has some opera background, has to, I'm sure of it because you can hear him three blocks away in this booming, dangerous baritone voice. To top it off, his screaming is context sensitive to the neighborhood he's in. In Little Tokyo it's Asian-sounding gibberish, and in East LA it's "ARRIIIIIBA!"

One time he was doing his thing outside my shop in Little Tokyo and I went outside to watch. I applauded, and then the fifth most frightening thing in my life happened. The guy rode up to the newspaper box on the curb, put his face to the thing so I could only see his eyes, and then started smacking the metal top hard enough to make his hand bleed while yelling "IDON'TNEEDYOURFUCKINGOPINION!" about five times before riding off.

You may also remember that I'm trying to get footage of him. I also call this guy my own personal Moby Dick.

So last night I hear him and think "Damn, I don't have my tablet." But then I realized that I was on my own bike.

Oh hell yes, I was going to ride with the psycho!

I've been on this kick for a bit where I try to do anything I can, say yes to experiences, because for the last year I've been a procrastinating shut-in. One exciting near-deal and then a creative slump from hell. Total lack of inertia. And it felt absolutely horrible. Recently I had started working out again, much to the chagrin of my elbow joints and the one knee with acute tendinosis, as well as spending all night humoring a drunk friend who was desperately trying to get me to move into some 2,000 square foot art loft with him and his prick roommate. Read between the lines, the opportunity to ride next to this nut for a stretch was right in line with what I wanted to be doing.

And I did. I stopped on the curb, waited for him to catch up, and then kicked off next to him BUT AT A RESPECTFUL DISTANCE. And he was doing his thing, circling through the brutal, crushing downtown traffic, almost getting creamed by a white Honda (he never heeds the traffic, often coming mere feet from city buses, and in five years how this hasn't killed him is a mystery).

Then he looks at me and I basically go through puberty backwards with panic.

And he throws me the devil horns and screams. Hell yes. I throw them back. Rock n' roll.

I only stayed with him for a few blocks before peeling off to head to the store. Whatever weird graces some greater power protects this freak with, I'm sure it doesn't extend to myself.

Going to the store

Okay, positive energy. I can try that.

Spring Street, between 4th and 5th. Two women and a stroller, behind me. One of them is speaking passionately and mangling any quotation her sentences stumble across. I don't care, she's energetic. She's the real deal. She's a far cry from beautiful, but I'd take her over a lot of these plastic Wilmas because she's just awesome. In a city where people obfuscate normality by just picking three character tweaks, somebody at least wants something.

It occurs to me that this is where, not three weeks ago, the cops swerved up to the curb right next to me one night and came running at me. I thought I was going to get it. Instead they tackled a black guy on a bike who was passing right next to me.

Seventh Street. A hobo wearing a towel where there's usually a shirt panhandles me. Drops the towel to make his point, revealing too-large pants that hang so far down that they expose his unkempt bush to the entire block. I tell him I never carry cash. He laughs and pats me down gently, jokingly. Then he pats my cock before quickly moving away. I yell "Whoa, buddy!" but I'm laughing. I'm way past giving a shit and so is he, with eyes redder than they are white and a wasted body.

The next corner sees a beautiful Asian girl in a designer coat that probably costs more than all my clothes put together, no hyperbole. She's on the phone and using the word "like" the same way old telegrams used "stop". There's a kind of poetry to Valley Girl when you hear it enough.

So like he's been really great
This has been like the worst week of my life
and he's like been there for me

It sounds like she's trying to make a case for the underdog to a skeptical friend, or maybe that's just what I want to believe, and I don't begrudge her a damn thing but I do have to wonder how the worst week of her life stacks up to that last guy's best.

A quick stop at the library. Not a week ago I taught Sota, now fifteen, the same thing my buddy Casim showed me when I was that age; take a well-read book from the girly porn or "Romance" section and hold it by the spine. Let it fall open. Sex scene, every damn time. Amaze your friends with this tested and true trick.

Reading the script to Apocalypse Now on the sky bridge, dwelling on the themes that tend to flit by when you're watching it, and some guy is using the place the same way a coyote uses a row of houses with chained up dogs. Scan the tables, pick the babe, start chatting. Loud. I switch the music piping through my headphones to from Sarah Blasko to Slayer and crank it up. When he finds that husk dried up and only as responsive as the social contract compels her to be he moves on. I hear him barking at others for five minutes and then he leaves. No books. Probably the vaguest awareness that they're even there.

I glance over my shoulder at the woman after he's gone. She throws me a look that may or not say "Eat shit." I'm fine with either interpretation.