Two Miles an Hour so Everybody Sees You

Hunger roused my dormant stomach at a cruel, cruel 5:37 in the evening: I was shut inside my own car, rolling across L.A. at a pathetic 10 miles per hour, watching headlights grow bright and everything else lose form. Anyway, I was like mad jonesin' for tacos for weeks by then, so I turned off my radio, remained motionless on the 101, and said to myself, "I bet that one place is open." I wedged myself out off the Lego locked traffic to head to that one place for tacos. That one place, I discovered, was off on a family vacation. Disappointed and now feeling the sharpened pangs of my hunger, I kept driving down the avenue, hoping to find a McDonald's to ease the pain quickly and cheaply. And that was when I saw it. A TACO truck! A big, bad taco truck with little lights across the top like a semi, but smaller and filled with corn tortilla optimism. I made a sharp U-turn, pulled over, and ran up to the truck with a sack of coins in my hand. Carnitas y buche! Carnitas y buche, I demanded. The guy looked at me like he didn't know what was on the menu. What the fuck?, I thought. I looked up and around at the truck to find the name of the business. Los Cinco Puntos? El Taco Loco? Maricela's? Nothing. Suddenly it dawned on me that this wonderful taco truck was actually a useless Hummer: a big useless piece of shit with no true function on these urban streets. You want me to stop hatin' on you, Hummer owners, do you? Well start selling some carne asada!

What is love? Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more...

I shake with excitement when I think of the DMV. I find I cannot get my mind off the DMV, so I take time off from work twice this week to tour the DMVs of central Los Angeles. Two DMVs in one day, in fact, a record that left me feeling proud and fulfilled by dusk when the doors shut behind me at 5:00pm. Today I returned once more, lied about needing a motorcycle endorsement on my class C license, just so that I could stand in line...and have my picture taken! Hell, it was a huge bonus for me--I wasn't even expecting it! I have to say, I was surprised by this particular DMV office, how it appeared that they actually wanted to take my picture. You would not believe the difference in photogenic quality compared to my last photo when I was broken-hearted. I mean, any cop or grocery store clerk could see that I was delighted to be at the DMV! Nowadays, few people can say that and mean it like I do. I admit, I overheard one of the clerks tell someone they were open tomorrow, a SATURDAY, so I, with purpose and vigor, failed my test. The rules state you've got three chances to pass. Look at me, making the most of it...

Sylvie Tales

Write to your local PBS station, and it might be me looking at your letter, making faces, genuine faces of astonishment:

"...all your nature shows use the word evolved continuously.
Why don't you find just one piece of evidence that supports this theory...before
deceiving all the children you pretend to love so much. Don't you think kids
would have more self esteem knowing they were created by a loving God instead of
their ancestors coming from some green slime?"

My reply:

Dear Madam,

Kids have long been deceived by vegetables that evolved just enough for biblical inculcation. Please don't hate me though; I lack self-esteem is all.

Sincerely,
Sylvia

My Favorite Link...EVER!

http://emrl.com/~dz-015/pm/pm_tron1.wav

Your Donald sucks. The one at Hong Kong Disneyland is more charismatic.

Recently, I took a trip down memory lane and ended up in Disneyland.

In line waiting for a Mickey-shaped rice crispy treat, I discovered I was within earshot of a perturbed middle-aged lady who deemed our happiest place on earth "ridiculous" because the manager of the Mad Hatter store wouldn't allow "P. Diddy" to be stitched on a mouse ears hat, as it was the name of a rapper. I went through a list of disallowed names myself before someone unwittingly stitched "Kool Moe Dee" onto my hat so pimp.

No one wanted to go on the Jungle Cruise in Adventureland. Too bad for the suckers who preferred to wait an hour to ride Space Mountain. Nothing rouses a venturesome spirit like the redolence of hot dogs coating the air as you're travelling down the dangerous Nile, shooting anything that's got eyeballs on him. That night, I dreamt of grilling franks in Africa.

Even the happiest place on earth couldn't keep me from frowning when I saw that It's a Small World was closed for maintenance. It wasn't a small world, after all: it was a shitty world, a shitty, shitty world.

Things got shittier when I saw for myself that people were no longer moved along the lines where the PeopleMover once moved. In the twenty-eight years that it provided low to moderate enjoyment to Disneyland goers, only two people died after boarding it. This was not the fault of the PeopleMover, however. This was the fault of the two people who hadn't the capacity to supplement the imaginatively open ride and therefore chose to cast themselves from the 2 mph travelling carts to extinguish their anguished boredom forevermore. I wonder if it worked.

The happiest place on earth? Barely. From the monorail above I witnessed with great horror that my beloved Submarine Voyage was no longer. Once a deep sea wonder filled with giant oysters and mythical mermaids, the space was now a parched tract, awaiting the installation of a stupid fish named Nemo, along with his wide-eyed Pixar cast of imagination destroyers.

Soles heavy, I trudged over to Star Tours, a Star Wars inspired simulated ride, which I, as a child, waited two hours in line to experience. No line this time, but I remembered the meandering path well, and it occurred to me that Tron really was a frightful movie and that Ewoks should never die under a pile of rocks when a child is watching.

On the whole, Disneyland remains pretty aight. I really like that ride where you sit on a boat going 1 mph and sail into a whale's mouth like Pinocchio.

You can hear it in your sleep too!

It's a Small World

It's a world of laughter
A world of tears
It's a world of hopes
And a world of fears
There's so much that we share
That it's time we're aware
It's a small world after all

There is just one moon
And one golden sun
And a smile means
Friendship to every one
Though the mountains divide
And the oceans are wide
It's a small world after all

It's a small world after all
It's a small world after all
It's a small world after all
It's a small, small world

Pumpkin Thoughts

People can't get enough Starbucks out here. Starbucks serves holiday-flavored drinks: eggnog, pumpkin spice, gingerbread, and my current addiction, turkey gizzard. I was a Starbucks barista for Halloween. I was not popular. I wanted to be a hackneyed pimp instead. Halloween is...tricky. Insert your laughter here. That better be genuine or else the Halloween Hag will come get you in your mother's kitchen on Thanksgiving night. You will be exposed for pumpkin hoarding. I will be the victor, somehow. Me, the victor, in my hackneyed pimp costume.

Happy Halloween!

Kids are thirsty.

Drink, my children.

Please help! (No, she's not dead.)

Recently, I purchased an oversized plush bed for my Siberian husky. After a week now, she is still sleeping on the floor. I've tried everything to get her to use this bed: put a few pieces of kibble in the middle of it, refuse food altogether until she goes on it, threaten her with the vet's office on the phone. Nothing has worked. I find her behavior tremendously disturbing. I fear that she has adopted the bed as her own child. I don't want to take the kind of action that would traumatize my dog, i.e. bag the bed and return it to Petco. How should I tell visitors that my dog has difficulty separating fact from fiction?

The English Major Writes: An Essay on "Come Sail Away" by Styx

Come Sail Away by this band Styx is a mantra about a guy’s first time sailing a majestic cruise liner across the perilous oceanic expanse. The main idea is that this cruise liner is figurative. In other words, the boat is all in the guy’s head. Another important main idea is that our protagonist undergoes all these adventures before he renounces his everyman religion to join an angelic cult.

As I stated in the introduction, the cruise liner is figurative. The way we know that is by investigating the impossible feasibility of the lines. He, the speaker, goes, “I’m sailing away.” And more importantly he goes:

Set an open course for the virgin sea
For I've got to be free
Free to face the life that's ahead of me
On board I'm the captain
So climb aboard
We'll search for tomorrow
On every shore
And I'll try, oh Lord, I'll try
To carry on
I look to the sea
Reflections in the waves spark my memory
Some happy, some sad
I think of childhood friends
And the dreams we had
We lived happily forever
So the story goes
But somehow we missed out
On the pot of gold
But we'll try best that we can to carry on
A gathering of angels appeared above our heads
They sang to us this song of hope and this is what they said
Come sail away
Come sail away
Come sail away with me
I thought that they were angels
But to my surprise
We climbed aboard their starship
And headed for the skies.

As evident, the whole thing is figurative because none of this can be possible. Also, we don’t know who he’s talking to when he beckons someone (who? me? you? us?) to climb aboard, as he is the captain, the skipper of the boat-a-rockin’. The fact that we don’t know who he’s talking to makes us come to no other conclusion than that the boat would sink if you tried to sail it. In other words, it is figurative. The speaker, or, more precisely, the singer also talks about reflections in the waves that spark his memory. It is a known fact that it is impossible for waves to reflect memories, especially because waves move really fast and no one can dictate Mother Nature’s speed. Again, figurative language infiltrating the piece.

Now that we’ve established that the piece is not literal, we can explicate the epic journey condensed in the lyrical piece. First he announces that he is sailing away and says his course is “open,” implying he is not bound by the constrictions of nautical charts, which in turn implies that his sea is indeed “virgin” because no other nautical explorers have “hit it” yet. He is optimistic about his journey, saying that he will “search for tomorrow on every shore,” which is the most poetic line of the whole work, because you can’t really see “tomorrow” as a thing you can spot on the shore with your telescope. No, you have to dream it.

Mystery unraveled. It isn’t until a few lines later that we realize who he’s asking to climb aboard and search for tomorrow: it is Jesus, for God’s sake. So he talks about how he grew up with Jesus and the other kids and had good and bad times. Suddenly, he realizes he missed the pot of gold, which shifts our attention from Jesus to leprechauns galore. Since a lot is lost through oral storytelling tradition, we will never know of the bloody battle of the sailor and the leprechauns, but we do see some deus ex machina in action: angels come to the rescue. We can surely assume that the speaker lost his faith in holiness and shunned the angels, because in the end, he renounces his everyman religion to ascend to a starship, which, by the way, is an underlying message by Styx to say that traveling by boat is out and that the Here and Now is the modern, industrialized society, where we can all travel by plane and retain our spirituality. The cult of modernity is too strong to deny.

Lyrics, deep and cruel, kinda like the sea.

Come Sail Away by Styx

I'm sailing away
Set an open course for the virgin sea
For I've got to be free
Free to face the life that's ahead of me
On board I'm the captain
So climb aboard
We'll search for tomorrow
On every shore
And I'll try, oh Lord, I'll try
To carry on
I look to the sea
Reflections in the waves spark my memory
Some happy, some sad
I think of childhood friends
And the dreams we had
We lived happily forever
So the story goes
But somehow we missed out
On the pot of gold
But we'll try best that we can to carry on
A gathering of angels appeared above our heads
They sang to us this song of hope and this is what they said
Come sail away
Come sail away
Come sail away with me
I thought that they were angels
But to my surprise
We climbed aboard their starship
And headed for the skies

I Eats Spam.

Spammers are relentless with this righteous blog. I swear, it makes a sister not want to blog anymore; that is, until I was spammed by "Enlargement" who had some things to tell me about scrapbooking embellishment:

Interesting blog you have here, I landed here on accident. I was searching for something else and came across your site. I found it pretty interesting and entertaining. I got you book marked.

I will pop back in from time to time to see what you have new here.

My site is a bit different than yours, but just as entertaining and educational, I run a scrapbooking embellishment related site pertaining to scrapbooking embellishment related articles.

That shit really piqued my interest, but, I gotta say, it was that comment about how your site is "just as entertaining and educational" as mine that killed it. Word. Your shit don't even compare. I hope that when you "pop back in from time to time" you see this post and improve your wack site.

I got somethin', I say. I got borrowed lyric.

Up
and down.
And in the end
it's only round and round
and round...

I've lost my voice.

Check back in a month. Activity might be seen elsewhere.

Postcard of flags and a Space Needle looking structure.

Mr. Happy Crack Ain't the Only One that's Happy

Yesterday a Sidney Crackstein from St. Louis' Crack Team left a comment by my original Mr. Happy Crack post (making the streets of St. Louis safe again). I removed the post entirely and e-mailed Mr. Crackstein to be certain he was all right with my voluntary endorsement of his fine crack-loving company. Needless to say, I was struck with ultimate delight when I received the following e-mail from Mr. Happy Crack himself, addressing my concern that Minnesotans like myself have cracks up the wazoo--especially after the winter months:

Sylvia: Hopefully Minnesota will be seeing Mr. Happy Crack very soon, as we have plans on opening an office in your fair city within the next few months. I just can't sleep at night knowing a large group of very nice people have cracks up their wazoos. It pains me Sylvia. Regarding our image on your blog, don't be silly. Slap it up there as you wish...And as a reciprocal measure we'd be delighted to send you a free Mr. Happy Crack tshirt for the nice mention on your site. May all your cracks be happy, Mr. Happy Crack

Anniversary Post

A year ago today, Mediocrity was. And Mediocrity was the light in the basement of my water-damaged life. Like a soft-spoken miracle, Mediocrity began to prosper like some well-nourished philodendron, tendrils of tolerability clinging and expanding across the web of the wide world. Blessed with Mediocrity, I was never a bad writer, and that was safe. Then came the people, the blog readers, bitching, whining, and feeling sorry for me whenever I was having a bad month or three, despite that which my blog explicitly claims: mediocrity is safe. And you all wonder why I curse so much. For misty watercolor memories, see below:

• August 2004: I wish I were Snow White, so them twelve elves could clean my pad, but I ain't.
• September 2004: Check me and me and me out.
• October 2004: Mediocrity for life!
• January 2005: Asian at work.
• March 2005: Children love me.
• April 2005: Something for the haters.
• May 2005: It's hard work--it's not easy!
• July 2005: A heartfelt letter to my readers, expressing how I wouldn't be here if it weren't for them, but thanks first and foremost to the dear Lord almighty, for allowing me to cross paths with Ginuwine at LAX in the winter of 2001.

Winowhere, MN

Blogless friend Patrick has never been so eloquent...in a motel room in Winona, MN:

I got to my motel room at midnight and vegetated on beer and cable TV. It was so, well, Winona. I was up until 4:30 though, partly due to a headache and partly due to just plain old insomnia (not even nerves induced). Around 3:30 I walked over to the 24-hour grocery for aspirin. On the way back to the motel room, I noticed two things. One was that the message board below their sign read "Even a broken clock is right two times a day". Another was that the "l" on the cursive lettered neon "motel" sign was burned out, spelling "mote", which led me to wonder about the mote in my eye, and if that was what was giving me a headache.

Hatin' on my dog.

It kills me that my dog is cuter than I am. When people give her biscuits, I get jealous. When she is sleeping, I want to step on her head.