emperor_norton

Sunday night was our monthly staff meeting. As usual, we had to watch a safety video with horrific production values and had to endure our district manager lecturing us on the current Arizona comics market (X-Men good, X-Force bad, Ghost Rider good, Punisher bad..... yaargh!). A silver lining quickly surfaced during the evening: one of my co-workers told me that he had recently procured a bag of pot and wanted to know if I wanted to partake. He had discovered in the past that I liked the occasional blunt when we were both working the buy counter and he leaned over to me and whispered "do you know anybody with connections" (he was miming having a toke while saying it). My co-worker, a family man in his mid-40s with a talent for art, a love of hiking, and an appreciation of the kickin' sounds of Roxy Music, asked ME where to score some weed when I was thinking of asking HIM the same question. Sadly, neither of us knew anybody at the time who could supply our demand, as it were. Providence occasionally smiles on me, for he called an old friend this weekend and got a bag of the good stuff. I hadn't had a puff in two months, so the odds of me turning down a chance to cloud my senses on a nice cool night was about as good as me turning down a blowjob from THE Helen of Troy (the odds being 'nil' and "do I look crazy to you?").

So after the excruciating meeting, my co-worker (for discretion/convenience sake, I'll call him 'M") and I got into his car and did a leisurely cruise a couple of blocks away from the store, found a couple of segments of the road that were nice and sparsely populated, and we lit up. I must say right off the bat that I'm not a connosieur of the sweet leaf. I'm not the type of person to ever get a High Times subscription, and I would rather bareknuckle box a silverback gorilla than listen to Bob Marley, but this stuff he was holding was Quality. And by quality, I mean after one puff I felt a wave of heat shoot up from the tips of my toes right up to my forehead. I was lit up like a Christmas tree. The only other smoke experience where I felt a similiar wave of sensation was about four years ago when I was still living at my brother's house. I got home from a California trip just in time for his Christmas party, and when no one was looking, my brother and I, along with our belovedly-flaky hippie cousin Paul and his strange friend Donald (I still don't know what this guy's deal was: he was pushing 60, wore a deer-antler hat during the entire thing, and emanated this bizarre aging-hipster vibe, kind of like William S. Burroughs, but 85% less cool) climbed into a car and rolled around Mesa. Whatever Paul was holding that night shook me up: much like M's stash, I felt as though I was immersed in hot, thick water. Its a feeling I dearly wish I could experience more often, but sadly future mary-jane excursions have not yielded the proper sensory gold.

What I enjoy most about the whole experience is that I never sleep as deeply and as peacefully as I do after a proper smoke. A part of me wants to stop writing this entry so I could shuffle off to sleep and count sheep with gusto, but I still got things to ramble about (what, did you think you were going to get off that easily? You underestimate me, faithful readers).

Theology + Gelato = Creamy Goodness. Sunday morning/afternoon was spent with my dad, his girlfriend (a very nice woman with a love of The Scorpions, Motley Crue, and she always has Trident gum on hand), and my little brother Elliot. After lunch we couldn't figure out what to do to kill time: there were no movies playing that were appropriate for the little man to see, bowling was a bit pricey, and frankly there isn't a whole lot of shit to do in the Phoenix/Scottsdale area on Sunday when you're trying not to spend too much money. We ended up going to a gelato place and for reasons that escape me in my current mental fog, I ended up getting into an hour and a half discussion with my brother over the existence of God, Buddhism, the death of John Lennon, evolution, Israel, the suckiness of 90% of disco music, why sniffing one's fingers after stepping outside of a bathroom is a bad thing, and why he should groan VERY loudly if any of his future English teachers assign him an Ayn Rand novel to read. The debate that raged between I, a 23 year old hulking bookworm, and my brother, a cherub-faced 12 year old clad in sportie-prep finery, was both 1) epic and 2) completely ridiculious. I could hear the people seated behind us pausing in their conversations every once in a while just to eavesdrop on my brother and I and our heated arguments (heated argumentation is a trademark in our family: as a clan we are very slow to anger, but like a tea kettle set to a slow boil, its only a matter of time before the shrieking starts). The one thing about our conversation that side-swiped me is discovering just how much bullshit his school is feeding him right now. Granted, he's going to a Christian middle school, so some amount of indoctrination is expected, but when he told me that he believed in Noah's Ark and that his teachers said that the only reason the state of Israel is in near-perpetual conflict with its neighbors is because God is REALLY pissed at the Jews... I was incensed. Luckily, my brother is vvvvvvvery smart for his age, and he can see how something is bullshit once its pointed out to him, but he worries me sometimes. He tries too hard to be liked by everyone he meets, so much so that he's perfectly willing to change his opinions just to make someone like him. He believes in whatever people say to him far too much (and I include myself in that charge: I've bullied him out of some of his ideas on more than a few occasions, and I feel like a complete ass every single time I do it).

Still, I love philosophical debates almost as much as I love gelato (or is it that I love gelato almost as much as I love philosophical debates? *shrugs*), so the afternoon was a win-win situation for yours truly.

I finally received the new Hold Steady album in the mail this weekend. I've been listening to it a lot, and so far I've got to say that I think that "Seperation Sunday" is the better record, but not by much. What I like about "Boys And Girls In America" is that 1) Craig Finn's voice isn't quite as bellicose and grating as it occasionally was on the last album, and 2) there is a LOT more piano on this record. Seriously, this album is chock-full of an almost ridiculious amount of Bruce Springstein/Meat Loaf-esque piano parts, and while I wouldn't be caught dead listening to "Born To Run" or "Paradise By The Dashboard Lights", I must say that the cheesy bar-piano meshes perfectly with The Steady's sound. The only reason why I would rate "Seperation" above "Boys + Girls" is that the guitars were a bit louder and had more bite to them, and I think the lyrics are a bit more evocative and consistent on "Seperation Sunday". All that aside, "Boys +Girls" is still reallly good.

On the book front: finished the "Worldly Philosophers", and I got about 200 pages into Antonio Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" before I felt my brain start to overheat (damn overly complex Italian marxist jibba-jabba... great stuff, but damn does it take forever to sift through). I'm going to put Gramsci on the backburner for a bit, and I just started in on "The Accessible Hegel". I've also picked up a couple of poetry books at work (Langston Hughes and Wallace Stevens), so I'll probably take a break from all this politico/philosophical brainfuckery and read some verse (which I haven't done in ages).