sizable k money

I gave Greg a hard time about printing a black and white document to the color printer in the office today. Why print that to the color printer? We have two others lined up directly next to it expressly intended for printing in black and white. I’m no conservationist, especially when it comes to ink, but even to me that seemed wasteful. He turned around and said, “It doesn’t matter – black isn’t even a color.”

I felt like I had been slapped in the fucking mouth.

“What are you talking about?” I said. Black is a fucking color – Darth Vader’s helmet? Tires? Black bears? Black beans? Blackbeard?!? Quit flipping my goddamn world upside down, dude!

“Black is not a color,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Look it up, bro-ski.”

I pointed at a keyboard I had until then believed was black. “What’s that, then? Is that not black?”

He stared. “Look. It. Up.”

I did. Wikipedia, shining beacon of knowledge and cliff notes to the entire world (wouldn’t that be a good slogan for Wikipedia?), told me that black is a color: “Black is the color of objects that do not emit or reflect light in any part of the visible spectrum; they absorb all such frequencies of light.”

I quoted this to Greg, and he cocked his head to one side chidingly. “Seriously? Anyone could’ve wrote that – Wikipedia can be written by any idiot.” Granted, Wikipedia is a user-edited encyclopedia, but it’s also a moderated user-edited encyclopedia – I know plenty of people who’ve tried to replace Wikipedia entries on a variety of subjects with dick jokes and swear words , and every time it seems to me that within a few hours those entries are changed back to normal. There’s someone keeping an eye on what people are putting in there. I tried explaining this to Greg. He shook his head.

“Whatever, dude – just accept it. It’s not a color.”

I was left frustrated both by his insistence on arguing something like this without any supporting evidence whatsoever and by the implied question that his point, if correct, raised: what is black?

I realize this belongs in the long, sad list of things a stoner wonders about while high, next to ponderings like “Hey, what’s with my hand?” and “Maybe the pot is smoking me, man,” but I’m really troubled. What do you call black? It’s not a color? Fine, then explain to me how to re-form this sentence: “That lump of coal is the color black.” What do you do? That lump of coal is the absence of color?

That’s what Marissa said to me, that black is the absence of color. This doesn’t seem to answer the essential quandary here, which has more to do with the composition of a color, the why it appears a certain way then whether or not it is a color. I understand that the way you perceive a color has to do with the way that the particular surface absorbs or reflects light, but isn’t a color just our perception of that interaction in the first place? That is to say – how does it matter if there’s no light being absorbed or present? The point is that we’re perceiving that interaction, regardless of how limited the interaction is, right?

I’m really just clawing at semantics, obviously, because none of this is important. Here’s why:

1) I’m right – no one else is.

2) The more important question is this: why do I have enough time to be looking up the color black, our perception of the color black, color theory (really, I did), and polling my friends and loved ones as to whether or not black is a fucking color?

It’s Willem Dafoe’s birthday today. I love Willem Dafoe. To be fair, I have an abiding affection for nearly all peculiar character actors, but Willem’s firmly on a special level, reserved for people whose first appearance on-screen in any movie makes me point happily at the screen like an idiot and yell, “Hey! Hey…..you!”

You can put Buscemi in this club, too – you can tell I love him and consider him to be almost family by the fact that I refer to him affectionately by his last name, like we were buddies in high school or we worked together on a construction crew and bonded. “Hey, Buscemi!” I’d shout good-naturedly, cupping my hands around my mouth. “Get me a fucking stack of two-by-fours and a sledgehammer, you son of a bitch! We gotta finish this house!” And then he’d give me the finger and that weird, sneering smile of his.

They’re both weird looking guys, who, as a weird-looking guy, I feel a bit of a kinship with. They’re not movie stars, in the glitzy, pejorative sense of the term, who automatically seem distant and thus also a little bit like assholes – they’re just dudes, who as far as I know might have just taken a wrong turn on their way to the heroin dealer and ended up on a movie set. Regular people.  I like that.  I am giddy when they’ve got a role.

The funny thing about Dafoe is that, although you’d put character actors as a group obviously lower than the proverbial megastars in the Hollywood hierarchy, I feel like his career is responsible for just as many, if not more, iconic, memorable moments as those of your Will Smiths or your Tom Cruises or whichever film hero you’d like to line up. For every Risky Business Underwear Slide or “I HAVE GOT TO GET ME ONE OF THESE,” I see your bet and raise you things like:

THERE WAS A FIREFIIIIIIIIIIIGHT

There’s an old saying about summer in New Hampshire; it goes, “Holy fuck.”

It’s pretty close to unbearable outside these days. The temperature hovers in the low to mid 80’s, which isn’t bad, but the humidity is registering daily at approximately 1,000. This is helpful for when I’m looking to work up a quick full-body sweat on my walk from the parking garage to the office, or when I decide to skip a sandwich or a slice of pizza at lunch and grab myself a delightful little helping of heat stroke. I need to either bolt a battery-powered personal fan on my shoulder or just roll out a slip n’ slide on the fucking sidewalk.

I know there are places where it’s hotter, like in cities, or the inside of an active volcano or something, but the difference when it comes to New Hampshire is the sheer unpredictability of unpleasant weather. Around here, it’s 50 and overcast for a week, and then without warning we’re seriously eyeing 90 degrees the very next day. I don’t necessarily always hate it when it’s hot, but I do always hate it when there’s a one-day, 40-degree swing on the thermostat that catapults us screaming from winter directly into summer. Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I’d prefer to “wade in,” as they say. Give me a few minutes to retire my fucking parka and whaling harpoon, at least.

My biggest problem is the heat’s tendency to follow me even when I go indoors. In winter I can turn the heat up or grab a blanket or slaughter a Tauntaun, but since it’s been hot, it’s been hot everywhere. It’s hot when I wake up, it’s hot in the car, it’s hot at work because the air conditioning in my office breaks down because for the first time in history the massive basement generators fail and the maintenance company has to order replacements from out of the fucking country – it’s insane.

Even in my room, my one sanctuary from most things that bother me, I find myself miserable and perspiring like I’m in the goddamn French Foreign Legion. I’m sweating so bad even now that I won’t even have to walk to the bathroom in a few minutes; I can just fall out of my chair and use my body sweat to slide across the ground.

I have a big fan just above my bed. It came with the apartment, but I’ve avoided turning it on until now because I’m vaguely freaked out by the idea of it being on while I’m asleep. I know nothing’s going to happen, really, but it makes little creaky old-sounding noises, and part of me can’t help but think that the fan blades are going to burst into flame somehow (they’re rusty…friction? Centripetal forces? Dark matter?) and I’ll wake up just in time to see it snap off and drop down onto my fucking head. Come to think of it, I can’t think of a better way to go during a heat wave then being burned alive. I’d be dead and all, and that sucks, but at least my friends would be able to appreciate a little last bit of irony at my expense, right?

I’ll leave the fan on tonight.

“Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?”

-George Carlin

I was driving to work in the morning when I heard on the radio that Carlin died. “What?” I said to no one. I turned the volume up. Dead last night, the radio said. Heart failure. With no immediate recourse, I called Ryan.

“You hear about Carlin?”

“What, his show in July? Or did he die?”

“Yeah.”

“He died?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck.”

“What a dick, huh?”

And that, oddly enough, sums up how I feel about his passing. It’s not necessarily grief, but instead a sense of being personally affronted, like I’ve been unfairly denied something I’m due. How dare he die? Didn’t he have more to do? George Bush is our president; the economy is in a recession; food and oil prices are skyrocketing; there are catastrophic natural disasters cutting swaths of destruction across the world; Madonna still releases albums; for God’s sake, this is the perfect storm of bullshit, and suddenly the most vitriolic fuck you out there succumbs to measly heart failure?

Heart failure – what a crock of shit. As if there wasn’t a better way for Carlin to go. Heart condition? No, there’s no showmanship in that, no entertainment value. Detonating a nuclear warhead with your dick in the center of the Vatican? Now there’s a show that’d get Carlin in the audience! You could put that on HBO!

It seems perverse to me that a bad heart would be the thing that felled the guy; that seemed like the very last thing he lacked. With Carlin’s stuff, you always got the sense that yeah, he thought you were an asshole, but also that it was in a frustrated, twisted fatherly way – he was never angry that people were idiots, only because he knew they could be so much better. He sensed humanity’s potential, and railed against shit like contemporary values and beliefs because they get in the way and cause people to waste their goddamned time. He cared.

I think people sensed that, too – the exterior Carlin, but simultaneously the sort of interior Carlin the exterior suggested had to exist. You knew he cared, and that knowledge engendered a degree of almost familial fondness between the guy and his fans; he was giving us all shit, but he was giving it to us like an uncle, or like that grandfather that gets shitfaced and shows everybody at the Thanksgiving dinner table his dick. You love that figure in your life despite how much of an asshole he is, and you miss him when he’s gone – perhaps to God, or to complete, nameless, eternal oblivion, or perhaps, fittingly, just down to the local porno theatre.

1) Hillary Clinton done lost her damn mind.

2) It’s a good thing that Keith Olbermann doesn’t have easy access to a flamethrower. See below.

The brief account of the recent death of an old acquaintance of mine.

I’m trying to think if I actually have a memory of Jason Marrer. I can get at the idea of him – standoffish is the word that comes to mind, perhaps unfairly – but I don’t know how accurate my memory is. This is the scary thing about getting older; I lose track of whether I truly remember what he was or simply developed an idea of him, a summary for my own reference, and have clung to it ever since.

My mother reminded me on the phone today that Jason and I were in the same Cub Scout troupe, which puts him, surprisingly, pretty frequently in my house when we were children. Mom was a Den mother and we hosted meetings occasionally; in the winter we made our own candles by pouring hot wax into holes we dug in snow drifts, and in the spring we colored Easter eggs with dye and carved tiny race cars out of blocks of wood. I think his worked well for racing, while mine won a trophy for best paint job.

I’ve got a single picture of him in my possession, unexpectedly, and it comes to mind immediately whenever I try to summon some sense of who Jason was. We weren’t close friends (I haven’t spoken to him in years), but the picture found its way to me – I was offhandedly involved with the people who put together the yearbook in my senior year in high school, and when they finished, I made off with a stack of pictures of people I knew. Included was a shoulders-up snapshot of Jason and Cris Salomon – another classmate of mine – smirking at the camera. They’re in my high school cafeteria; you can see the gray tables and the tall windows that looked out on the football field in the background. Jason’s got a baseball cap on and he’s wearing a ski jacket. The brim of the cap casts his eyes in shadow and the collar of the jacket stands up straight around his neck.

For whatever reason, it’s not the shared Cub Scout memories but the picture that shapes my memory of Jason. The Cub Scout stuff is fun, innocent - but the picture, I think, stays with me because it plays into the idea of Jason that I’m already carrying around. He had a reputation for being something of a dickhead and someone who was on the wrong (or unlucky) side of things, but was in that position, I think, mostly as a result of tough, underprivileged circumstances he was raised in. This was a kid from a trailer park, and regardless of what intelligence or character you might be born with, it’s not hard to imagine someone falling in with what the luckier of us can call “the wrong crowd.” As I’m no doubt one of the lucky ones in regard to the relative privilege of my upbringing, it’s much easier for me to be able to categorize Jason – to write him off, in other words – as just another asshole from the trailer park.

And sure, that’s easy enough, and it might even be true to some degree, but here’s the thing: I can’t recall a single time he was ever unfriendly to me. It’s hard for me to think negatively about a person who has never done me any wrong, and for the life of me, I cannot remember Jason doing any wrong. I can’t remember, in fact, anything but being friendly exchanging good-natured banter with him in passing. Maybe this is a product of the rosy-colored glasses we use when unexpected death spurs us into wistful remembrance, but I find myself haunted that what I’m feeling isn’t simply nostalgia, but something in a corner of my mind trying to tell me that in a minor way, I’m doing an old friend of mine a disservice, that in my head I’ve got him wrong.

What I’m left with is two vague signposts of memory, neither of which will ever be enough to give me an answer as to what kind of a guy Jason was and what he would have become. I’ve got a hazy, idealistic recollection of him as a kid, and an equally indistinct picture that reminds me of what I felt about him as a teenager. Maybe he was an asshole – troubles with drugs, with the law. But maybe he wasn’t. Perhaps he matured as he got older, and uncovered something of the spirit I can only vaguely recall being so fond of when we were little, like he was wiping dust from a windowpane.

Since I certainly didn’t know him well enough in his last years, it’s not my job to pass a verdict on whether he was truly one thing or the other, because of course no one is simply one way or one category – no one’s memory can be summed up with a single snapshot. In my clumsy way, though, I’d like to say as a kind of condolence to his family and an apology to him that whatever kind of person Jason was, I regret that he was lost before I had a chance to sit down, have a beer with him, and decide for myself.

This isn’t a news flash if you’re a) from Utah, b) know someone from Utah, or c) have a functioning brain, but people in Utah have a way of being really, really huge assholes -especially at sporting events.

The Utah Jazz are playing the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Playoffs right now; point guard Derek Fisher played for the Jazz last year, and after a heroic performance for them in the postseason, he asked management to be released from his contract so he could be closer to his ailing daughter. The daughter is suffering from a rare form of eye cancer called retinoblastoma; she can only be treated appropriately at a handful of institutions in the country, and one of those happens to be in LA, where Fisher relocated to play this past season.

You’d think that the fans would be understanding of this, right? Maybe appreciate his efforts and show some compassion? We are talking white, privileged, god-fearing folks here, so they couldn’t possibly be anything but respectful and polite! Um, well, no, not quite:

“As Derek Fisher went to the line to shoot free throw after a technical foul, a fan behind the basket covered his right eye and began screaming at the Lakers’ point guard.”

HOLY FUCK. But wait - that’s not all:

“This isn’t all though. Several fans who attended the game have said that some Jazz fans were chanting “cancer” over and over again when Fisher would touch the ball or shoot free throws.”

Remind me to never venture outside the borders of New England - my home. I’m just fine with my quiet, stewing bitterness, thanks. No open hatred, irrational screaming, or pro-cancer cheering for me at this point.

Okay, to be fair, I’m pretty sure I’ve heckled, say, Derek Jeter before - on my television set - with taunts involving a hope that his face would cave in, but at least I didn’t do so directly after reading a well-publicized story about how his whole family was killed by having their faces caved in during a freak sledgehammer factory accident. I’m respectful. People in Utah, well - I don’t want to generalize, but let’s just say that they’re the guy with a hand over one eye.

This is an old article about internet piracy I stumbled on a little while ago. It’s a few years old, but reading about the people behind The Pirate Bay is just as interesting/relevant today as it was in 2006.  People’s behavior is no different now than it was then in regards to file-sharing, and the position of the power players in the affected industries is just as stern, if a little less in the spotlight as it once was.

I remember when the RIAA and the MPAA first started suing people over illegal downloading. The initial reaction was shock, outrage; how dare they take someone to court over something they did on their computer!  That doesn’t even make sense!  It didn’t seem real, or even possible.  What was next?  Litigation based on how much porn you’d downloaded (oh jesus oh jesus please god no)?

These days, though, I don’t see much about it in the news.  Occasionally I’ll read about someone taken to court and forced to pay an exorbitant fine over a few dozen songs they’ve downloaded, but the anger I felt before has hardened over into frustrated resignation.  This is simply the ways things are now - everyone downloads what they can while they can, and every once in a while someone plucked at random from the masses has to be raked over the coals.  It sucks, but it’s a small price to pay for the flourishing of the widespread privilege.

I don’t see anything changing in the near future, which leaves us, the companies and the individuals, at the same annoying stalemate as always.  They’ll keep suing, the people will keep sharing.  What I’d be really interested in is a sit-down with someone from the MPAA or the RIAA - someone who ranks high on the proverbial food chain and can give me an accurate idea of just what’s going on in their heads.  “What is your end game, here?” I’d ask.  “You can’t reasonably expect to sue everyone; there are millions upon millions of people, all over the world, doing this.  It would take decades and many millions of the same dollars you say you’re losing, devoted exclusively to legal fees, to even address half of the problem.”

And maybe the executive or president or whomever would shrug, then.  He’s smoking a cigar and leaning back in a leather chair.  Exasperated, I’d throw up my hands in the air.

“I mean, say you somehow successfully sue everyone using the internet and put a complete end to file-sharing.  What do you do about people just handing their friends or family a burned cd instead of sending them a file?  Isn’t that the same thing?  What do you do, go to their houses and just open fire?”

I catch the executive distractedly blowing a smoke ring towards the ceiling.

“Actually - don’t answer that.”