16/365

Christmas day.

Merry Christmas to all!

15/365

Everyone is sick: I sit here celebrating Christmas in a swirling miasma of phlegm.

It was a relief when we headed out for a walk in the cold, snow-covered woods. It was the same conversation as always: plans, money, music.

I keep saying the same things over and over again. I'm bored. Life should be better. I need to change something. I don't know what.

And I keep not saying the important thing.

14/365

Fearing the worst from the Christmas rush, I pulled into LAX Parking Lot C a couple of hours before my flight, and hopped on the van to the airport. As we rounded the loop, I saw all the TV vans were parked by Tom Bradley terminal so they could do the holiday travel photo-op. Predictable. But there was no drama, and I was in the terminal in no time. I opted for a sit-down breakfast.

I see people sometimes and think that it might be fun to walk around in their shoes. On the plane, across the aisle from me was a shave-headed mid-thirties guy, scruffy, some tattoos. He wore a T-shirt and jeans on the plane and spent most of the trip working on reading (unsimplified) Chinese from a folder, and then writing Chinese on blue-lined paper. Homework? I wondered. Translation?

When he left the plane, he pulled out a coat that was nearly a parka, with a fur-lined hood.

13/365

After my brutal, one-day work week, I headed home to pack.

I'm superstitious. If I am going to fly, I like to leave with the house scrupulously clean. But I don't have the time or the energy.

At least I got the clothes in the wash.

My brain is buzzing, buzzing.

12/365

When I was at the tea shop in West Hollywood, I was waited on by the same cheerful man that spoke in movie quotes. I was glad that he didn't remember me from the last time, when I told him something untrue that I was too proud to recant.

11/365

(In the style of Gertrude Stein.)

For the block club Christmas brunch, I brought doughnuts. I bought a box of doughnuts from the Krispy Kreme from a woman that only had a couple of teeth. When I entered the rec center, I stood about, looking sheepish. A half-dozen of the neighborhood women brough food for brunch. I put a box of doughnuts next to lovingly prepared southern food.

The older black women chatted. The women talked about incivility and children. I felt like an interloper.

I am not one for normal conversation. I tried to find a topic of discussion for a crowd of women. Having no children and no wife, I have nothing to say to normal people. I lied when I said that I still kept up Irish traditions. I spoke to the gathering about Irish food, with its blood and grease that speaks to that cold, cold country.

I took a plate from the brunch home with me, for it would be incivil not to. There is a plate of dessicated food in my kitchen.

10/365

I was a little dismayed to find that I'd received a Christmas card from the Altshulers and a Christmas present from Dad and Viv. I'm not ready for this. I'm not ready for Christmas.

The best I can seem to do when it comes to holidays like this is to buy gifts a couple of days before Christmas and bring them with me. Anything that requires planning and mailing is just beyond my abilities. So I'm always saddened when I get Christmas stuff in the mail. It makes me feel useless.

Tomorrow, I begin my shopping.

The White Menace

There was an unusual column in the LA Times that noted the incredible homogeneity of the Latino communities in East LA County. The column was really about the residents of East Los and their commitment to the community, and the demographic info was sort of an awkward intro. But anyway, the columnist Hector Tobar stated

After crunching some census numbers with my Times colleague Doug Smith, I found out that East Los Angeles had become the most ethnically homogeneous place in Southern California. It seemed to be the tragic underside to the happier news we reported last week -- that Southern California suburbs were more racially integrated than ever before.

In the center of Southern California, the numbers showed an opposite reality, with a bigger slice of the metropolis a de facto segregated Latino barrio than in any time in history.

After studying Census Bureau surveys from 2005 to 2007, Doug and I concluded that about 1 million people live in Los Angeles County communities that are 90% or more Latino. And more than 800,000 of them are in one contiguous area that stretches from MacArthur Park to Pico Rivera and from the fringes of downtown's Garment District to South Gate.

East Los Angeles, it turns out, had become 98% Latino. The community lost a quarter of the tiny white population it had in 2000.

The little liberal in my head told me to be outraged. After all, the numbers seemed to me to confirm a central, underlying injustice of Los Angeles -- that the separation of ethnic groups lives on in our 21st century city.

Well, how much of this is self segregation? How much of this is linguistic segregation? How much of this was a lack of goods or services targeted to departing communities, and the indifference of the shops and stores of the majority community in serving the needs of the minority communities?

It didn't take long for a response like this one to pop up.

But this week I clicked a button to read the LA Times and got slapped in the face with some bullshit about how East LA being all Latino was so sad and as the title stated “tragic,” so I decided to look online and to talk to some white people who lived in Orange County.

“So is Newport Beach pretty white,” me.
A white person, “Hell yeah.”

I discovered that Newport Beach wasn’t as white as you could get, Newport Coast was as white as you could get.

Apparently in Newport Coast there are lots of Starbucks and lots of shopping opportunities and even more if you go to Newport Beach.

And I want to know are any papers going to do any stories on the tragedy of Newport Coast and Newport Beach and Malibu and Brentwood and all of the other places that owing to the fact that they have a lot of money can play this game and make their cities look a lot more nouveau multicultural than they truly are.

Pretty typical bullshit from Browne. She managed to find one tiny incredibly rich, beachfront corner of Orange County where some 2,000 people are 75% white, and that suddenly becomes some sort of moral victory or statistical equivalence. But she was never one for facts. "Fact-checking is for people who've never been a victim of the LAPD" she once said. By that criterion, I'm glad I don't have to ever to any fact checking myself.

She goes on to complain about gentrification: new money never has any respect for the communities in place. And yet the current occupiers of whatever community don't care or mourn those that came before: Tongva, Spaniards, Californianos, Gold Rush, Americanos, Japanese, ranchers, farmers, WWII immigrants, new Mexican immigrants. Every single group felt little or no guilt about the displaced and that their possesion of the land was their manifest destiny.

I always find it funny the amount of handwringing about the tiny corners of LA that have become slightly less immigrant or less Latino, like Echo Park or Silverlake or Downtown. That it is part of some great racist conspiracy to keep others down, when, in truth, there just are more white people than there used to be, and they can't all live in Newport Beach. Yes the newcomers don't have much respect for the community in place, but, the community in place doesn't usually have the will to market to the newcomers. Thus ethnic markets spring up. And for my community, our ethnic markets are Starbucks and the Gap.

Whatever. Either we believe in integration or we don't. I'll mourn your losses if you mourn the losses of those that came before you.

9/365

The day began with pushing my dead car from one side of the street to the other to avoid street sweeping tickets, and then taking my mom to LAX so that she can head back east. Then off to work for a semi-functional day in which I actually implemented a new feature on the death ray. It is in the lab right now, killing lab mice. Death Ray takes a long time to run, so I read the intarwebs.

I logged into Amazon for the first time in a long time to see if there was a going to be a translation of Yang Jisheng's Tombstone. I found that now Amazon is happy to reduce me to a tag cloud. So apparently, I am African American, Alternative Metal, Anthologies, Calculus, California, Christian Alternative, Christian Rock, Classics, Emigration & Immigration, Emo, Ethnic Studies, Explicit Lyrics, History, Indie Rock, Literary, Mathematics, Poetry, Post Grunge, Post Hardcore, Punk Revival, Punk-Pop, Rock, Rural, Urban, West.

More plotting on the details and feasibility of what I am now dubbing "Plan B".

8/365

To prepare for the cold and rain as I headed out for the bus stop, I wore a hoodie under a wool trench coat. When I wore the hood up, I looked something like a modern-day version of the crusaders in Assassin's Creed. When it rains in LA, the road system collapses under the insanity. I waited forever for a bus up La Brea because someone had skidded and knocked over a streetlight, shutting down the road. It would be the perfect day to ride my bike to avoid all the traffic, but, I don't dare ride my skinny road bike on the roads when it is wet. So ninety minutes on the traffic-snarled bus today plus half an hour standing in the rain. My "no driving a personal vehicle to work" pledge doesn't seem so smart on rainy days.

But, anyway, let's talk about feelings. I'm numb. Numb and tired. Of the two ("numb" and "tired") I'm not sure if one descends from the other or if they are coincidental. My weight is down to 175. 160 is the indicator that I'm failing. So I'm still okay. I've just got to step back up to the basic plan: nutrition, exercise, water, sunshine, temperance, air, rest, theology.

I'm thinking about buying a new Jeep, but, I want to wait and see if Chrysler goes bankrupt first.

7/365

Semi-functional and not useless at the job today. A little scattered but functional. I'm rather seriously behind schedule and I'm beginning to panic about it. I keep playing last night's confrontation back in my head. If I were to do it over, I would try not to get aggrivated. I think an even better strategy would be to fully wide-eyed about it. Something like "It takes all of us to do our part to make this the best city it can be." Something more likely to "turn away wrath". The house is a complete mess. My mom comes by today to spend the night, so I feel bad about it, but, I can't seem to get on top of house stuff right now. I spent more time planning my escape. With the fed at 0%, inflation inevitable, and higher taxes in the future inevitable, maybe cashing out the 401k now is not a bad idea, even given the tax penalty.

6/365

I waited for the 212 bus at the bus stop at La Brea and Wilshire. On the bus bench, a man unwrapped a CD and threw the shrink wrap on the ground. There was a trash can three feet away. I watched him. He unwrapped another CD and threw its wrapper on the ground. I walked up to him and picked up the wrappers from the ground.

"Here, let me help you with that," I said. I picked up the cellophane off the ground and threw it away in the trash can.

"Oh I see. You want some more? Here's some more." He tried to hand me another wrapper.

"I showed you how to do it," I said. "Now you try."

"You better watch who your talking to," he said.

I walked away and stood by the wall waiting for the bus.

"Thank you," a lady said. "I already called him a litter bug."

"Some people have no respect." I said.

And the 212 bus came. We all got on it. I sat up front, just in case litterbug guy was insane. He was dressed semi-bum. I wasn't sure if he was homeless or just slovenly. He didn't smell homeless.

Litterbug guy walked up and down the bus, trying to sell his day pass. I don't know if he found a customer.

Half an hour later, we both got off on Adams and Crenshaw.

He waited for me to catch up. He said something like why don't I pick up trash if I care so much about it.

"I do," I said, truthfully. "I pick up trash all the time because of people like you."

"There's some trash. Pick it up," he said.

I crossed the street, and he walked beside me. There was some more back and forth. I forget what exactly.

"Shut up," I eventually said.

He had some response.

"I'll give you respect when you deserve respect," I said.

"Suck my dick, faggot. Shut up your faggot ass," he said.

And I walked on down the street as he crossed to the other side of Adams.

And I felt good, because I had stood up for my community, and I had felt no fear.

5/365

Three Christmas parties in three days, spanning a large arc of the culture of Los Angeles: punk kids at a punk show in Hollywood, scientists at a fancy restaurant in Santa Monica, activists at a pizza parlour in Silverlake. It is the third one of which I am most proud. It is the closest I've come to making new non-work friends as a grown up. New friends are hard to find as an adult, because most adults have no need of new friends: they are either in the insular world of their married relationships or hang out with the friends they've known forever. I was feeling pretty good about today. I hope I can hold on to this feeling for a little while. I've certainly expanded my acquaintanceship: now I need to see if I can convert any of this into useful friendship.

I don't know if it is the graphics card in the new machine, or X, or GNOME, or if it is the bloatware that is Firefox, but, even with a 3.00 GHz CPU, I can type faster into this Blogger editor window than the characters appear. This should never happen.

4/165

It is not easy to have fun. It is not easy to lose yourself in the moment. That is why I love punk. Last night, at the Aquabats (barely punk, I know, but, work with me here) in that space and among those people I can let it all go and just be happy. I can forget about what I look like or how I am perceived and just goof off. The bible says that there is a time to put away childish things, but, the bible never tell you how to make adulthood worth living.

3/365

Slightly improved today. I was able to force myself to do a little bit of work at work: the crazy buzzing and swirling of thoughts in my head cleared enough for me to actually open the IDE and track down some bugs. I'm still not at 100%. Probably at about 25%. But that is better than nothing. My new computer arrived, a sleek black Dell T100 server. I have big plans and can't wait to give it a try, but, first the Aquabats and the Suburban Legends. I once hit on the brother of a guy in the Suburban Legends. He was hot.

2/365

My head has been throbbing all day, and there is a dull ache in the center of my back. I did manage to go to my hearing today down at the city hall. I played the part I was meant to play. But I just wanted to get home to hack around on my computer. Pointless hacking on projects of no value. But it distracts me from feeling. I lose myself in the sweet numb routine of typing and coding beautiful routines of no practical value.

1/365

Where has my mind gone? I know what I have to do, but, I just can't seem to do it. Look at the data. Analyze the data. Plot the data. Write the report. I has been days since I've been productive. I've tried all the tricks: sugar, caffeine, sleep, clothes. As this drags on, I feel more and more like a fraud. I'm back on the web again, looking at new cities, new houses, new scenarios, and new lives for me. I suppose I should go back to the drugs, but, I don't want to do that.

I'm going to do a 365, to see if that helps anything.