(Non-San Franciscans, avert your eyes, this will make no sense.)
I was kind of unhappy to see Guardian Angels starting to hang around my neighborhood in the last few weeks—I'm sure most of those guys are fine, but as a movement they're creepy, even if the super-creepy Curtis Sliwa has moved on to bigger things (now he's a right-wing radio asshole). Anyway, I was totally bewildered to find out Ammiano was involved in bringing them here.
Vigilantes: bad idea. Government openly outsourcing neighborhood peacekeeping to vigilantes: worse idea. Really bad idea? Putting a bunch of guys who wear red berets in a government-sponsored office in the north Mission, where red is a rival gang color. I can't believe Ammiano's Green opponent seems to be the only one pointing that out.
1.
If you're ordering gang (curry) in a Thai restaurant, don't try to be all non-Anglo by saying gahng. It's gaang like a nasal Midwesterner would say.
2.
Corona Heights is one of the best hills ever, but you can't see it when you're wandering around a few blocks from it; you have to look for the signs for the Randall Museum. Also, if spooky rocks and moonlight over a glowing city turn you on, Corona Heights is the place to be. On the way down, if someone tells you "It's good to be alive," be prepared to start crying like a baby and agreeing.
3.
When you clean a Vandercook-4 letterpress, you can use vegetable oil to thin out the ink on the steel rollers first so you don't have to use so much solvent.
4.
I might not be able to do that tap-while-you-hop-backwards and then step-heel step until I get some real arch supports. I have the flattest feet in the world.
5.
My good old bike, Lenny—a lanky, bookish, lesbian three-speed with a wire basket and a little headlight—which attracted cries of "Hey, nice bike, you fuckin' pussy!" in Brooklyn, here attracts cries of "Hey, nice light, you fuckin' hippie!"
6.
The difference between a banjo and a harmonica, according to Gillian Welch (who stole my heart at a concert in the park): "A harmonica only sucks on every other note."
7.
If you're going to take an impulsive trip on a BART train to the end of the line just to see what's there—don't go to Pittsburg/Bay Point. Nothing is there.
I used to think the president's remarks made no sense, but that's because I couldn't hear the music. It's Hard Work, it's incredibly hard work!
(By John Handy, George Walker Bush, and Harry Genius Shearer)
Here are some excerpts from "Fragments from a Diary" by Wallace Shawn, written almost two years ago when there was still a tiny chance that the war in Iraq wouldn't happen, but when the war against reality was already in full swing. I was reminded to go back and read this again when I saw this thing on television featuring a 60-year-old intelligent career politician and a swiftly disintegrating 58-year-old adolescent cokehead, both trying to convince me what incredible bad-asses they were.
The awfulness of each country picking its special little men to be the "leaders." What a terrible way to live. Here, we think about our leaders all the time. We dream about them. It wasn't so many centuries ago that kings and emperors were remote from their subjects. Their subjects didn't even know what their faces looked like. But I'm as familiar with the face of Richard Cheney or of Donald Rumsfeld as I am with the faces of my closest friends.
. . . . It's as if there were some sort of gentlemen's agreement that prevents people from stating the obvious truth that Bush and his colleagues are exhilarated and thrilled by the thought of war . . . . it is utterly wrong for me to imagine that Bush is violent and I am not, that Bush is cruel and I am not. I am potentially just as much of a killer as he is, and I need the help of all the sages and poets and musicians and saints to guide me onto a better path, and I can only hope that the circumstances of my life will continue to be ones that help me to stay on that path. . . . . But it's clear that Bush and his group are in the grip of something. They're very far gone. Their narcissism and sense of omnipotence goes way beyond self-confidence, reaching the point that they're impervious to the disgust they provoke in others, or even oblivious to it. . . . . They're so unshakable in their belief that everyone will like them that they happily summoned the world, a year ago, to observe what they'd done to the people they'd taken as prisoners, proudly exhibiting them on their knees in cages, under a ferocious sun, with their faces hooded and their bodies in chains. In other words, the only thing you can really say about them is that like all of those who for fifty years have sat in offices in Washington and dreamed of killing millions of enemies with nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and biological weapons, these people are sick. They have an illness. And it's getting to the point where there may be no cure.
Meanwhile, I read my New York Times, and it's all very calm. The people who write there seem to have a need to believe that their government, while sometimes wrong, of course, is not utterly insane, and must at least be trusted to raise the right questions. These writers just can't bear the thought of being completely alienated from the center of their society, their own government.
. . . . I kept walking for a while and wondered what would happen if we allowed some of the fossils to simply lie there under the sand, if we decided not to try to dominate the world. We'd have no control over what would happen. We'd let go and fall. How far would we sink? How far? How far? Sure, it's been great, the life of comfort and predictability. But imagine how it would feel if we could be on a path of increasing compassion, diminishing brutality, diminishing greed—I think it might actually feel wonderful to be alive.
The first question in last night's debate made me flee the room for a little while: can our children and grandchildren ever have a world "as safe and secure as the one we grew up in"?
Between me and my parents, we'd have to give our descendants a whole lot of gifts. Abroad: the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Argentina, Afghanistan, Chernobyl. At home: duck-and-cover drills, race riots, police riots, the assassination of the President, the assassination of the President's brother, the assassination of our foremost civil rights leader, Kent State, the Manson murders, the Weather Underground, Three Mile Island, and a military buildup presided over by a brain-damaged figurehead and a circle of criminal idiots. (Let me know if I left anything out.)
Too bad both candidates answered the question Yes.
Last night:
1. I'm briefly visiting this house and no one's there. Tall narrow flight of stairs, room at the top with some abandoned papers explaining forthcoming mystical events--the Queen is planning to generate a whole series of these. The first appears immediately: several giant chickens, about 5 feet tall, so rounded & yellow that they're more like marshmallow peeps, emerge from the shadows & start nosing around the room, bumping into me pleasantly like dumb dogs, till they finally make their way down the stairs & out of the house. I take to the sidewalk too, feeling happy that this is obviously not a scary dream (though this suburb is a little austere and deserted). What's next? A small tree is moving slowly up the sidewalk, sliding on its chopped-off trunk. I'm prepared to see this as a benign creature, but when I walk past it, it falls over trying to hit me. As other much larger trees start doing the same, I realize this might be a scary dream after all.
2. In the hospital, a woman comes into my patient's room dressed like someone's lame idea of a nurse, carrying a suspicious briefcase. When I question her identity, she panics and tries to bolt but I grab her arm and yell for security. In the briefcase is a large bag of alcohol--enough to kill the guy easily, she explains. Why is no one coming to help? "Oh," my lazy co-workers explain as they saunter in, "When anyone yells 'Help! Security!' here, it just means they want to do a background check or look for lost property."
Dream, night before last:
1. The Lady of Consequence is shopping for magic wands (as in Harry Potter). It turns out each of these is made of a large rolled-up green leaf. When one of them turns out to be evil(*), she unrolls it and trims the leaf carefully to a smaller size; they get their power from surface area, and power corrupts.
(* The test for evilness: she told the wand "See that other wand? I don't like it; I'm going to break it", and in a blurry greedy little voice it said "YEAH YEAH GO AHEAD BREAK IT".)
2. I'm writing another damn article for Wikipedia—as usual, on a subject I don't know incredibly well & have to research online as I write. This time it's about a very specific type of BDSM relationship that's based on the medieval apprenticeship system. I find the terminology irritating.
A Child's Life, by genius cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner, was removed from the library system of Stockton, CA after it was found in the possession of an 11-year-old. That's a sad but not very surprising reaction... but the mayor's explanation is pretty disgusting: the book has to be kept away from children because it's a "how-to book for pedophiles."
This is a miserable slur on a great artist, and a loss for the several intelligent people who probably live in Stockton. And it expresses a touching faith that all you have to do to keep children from seeing nasty things is to get rid of the books that have pictures on the cover; then all you have to worry about is someone like me at age 12, thumbing avidly through the library's copy of Gravity's Rainbow.
It's also a great illustration of how you can get away with saying just about anything, logic be damned, as long as you just mention child abuse in the same sentence. This rule is probably written somewhere in a manual for aspiring politicians. Careful though! It may not work so well with other subjects. For instance:
"Beloved should never have fallen into the hands of a black reader. It's a how-to book for slaveowners."
"Trainspotting makes selling heroin look cool."
"The Diary of Anne Frank is practically a how-to book for Nazis."
Can it be? Has Sexy Post Office really not been described on the Internet yet? Then I will do so.
Sexy Post Office is a cartoon improv game. (Sorry.) It was described in the zine of the same name, produced by Leo Lopez and Jason Martin (see below* for how to get their zine)—who didn't realize that it had already been invented in France under the more boring name "Double Blind" (so OK, I guess it has been described)—and has since been passed around in the Bay Area by that guy Jesse Reklaw. Jesse has since released a small book* containing all this hilarious (to us at the time) material we've been doing while drunk.
Instructions:
1. Get two people.
2. Cut out a comic strip from the newspaper. Preferably a really stupid one (sadly, not hard to find.)
3. Person A looks at the drawings, ignoring the words, and makes up new words that might conceivably fit the drawings.
4. Person B looks at the original words, ignoring the drawings (and unaware of what person A has come up with), and draws new art that might conceivably fit the words.
5. Person B now adds the new words written in step 3.
6. You now have a (frequently very offensive) new comic strip that (usually) makes no sense. Reward yourself with another drink!
I must admit I was skeptical about this game: wouldn't you often end up with some really funny idea that then gets sabotaged because the other person's idea doesn't match? That's the good part!
Examples: "Dr. Doctor", "Wee Pals". More will follow if Jesse ever gets around to scanning them, but I'll describe one that occurred last night at the Edinburgh Castle Pub (while karaoke occurred above us).
Original comic (from Frank & Ernest): a lizard(?) walks into a motel and the desk clerk, who is a rooster, says "Do you want a wake-up call?" Person A, trying to be really clever, changes the words so the chicken is saying "Is it true you taste like me?" Person B, trying to be really clever at the possible risk of his immortal soul, changes the art so that the crucified Jesus is being laid to rest in a tomb and Joseph of Arimathea is asking him, "Do you want a wake-up call?" Result: Joseph asks Jesus, "Is it true you taste like me?" It's not Dada—there's intent behind it—it's just that the intent can never succeed! I find great comfort in this.
* Lopez & Martin don't seem to have a website. For Sexy Post Office and their other zines, write to them at lafacewithaoaklandbooty@gmail.com or PO Box 1268, Berkeley, CA 94701. Unauthorized Sexy Post Office, Jesse's compilation in a tiny format with a gold foil cover, is intermittently available at Global Hobo and zine stores.
Okay, everyone agreed the old paperwork system was really a pain. Here's one solution:
1. Send all the nurses to training classes [three weeks ago] to explain the new paperwork system that we'll be using. Tell them this is a rough draft and you're seeking feedback. Everyone will provide a lot of feedback saying these new forms are kind of confusing and don't apply well to every unit's needs. Tell them you value the feedback. Also, mention that about 25% of the new forms aren't available yet even as a rough draft and will be discussed later.
2. Don't say anything for the next three weeks.
3. Suddenly switch everyone over to the new forms and take away the old ones, halfway through a day, so all the nurses have to recopy all their notes from the last 24 hours (and all of the care plans written by everyone who previously took care of their patients for the last 2-4 weeks) into the new format in one day while still trying to get their work done. Encourage some of the supervisors, who don't do any patient care and didn't really understand the old system either, to help with this, since no one else will.
3a. Also, introduce those never-before-seen 25% of new forms at this point, with no explanation. Make sure they're based on a system of nursing diagnoses that no one in the hospital has used for at least five years.
4. Give no information at any time during this process to the ward clerks, who spend all day processing this paperwork. I mean no information—don't even tell them there's going to be a change; everyone likes surprises. (And the clerk who just started training a brand-new clerk on my unit, to replace the one who suddenly quit—he likes surprises most of all.)
5. Very important! Do all this the week before we start JCAHO review drills.
Or, here's another solution: talk to your fucking workers. Warning: that will require pulling your heads out of your asses first.
(At least, since I work at a public hospital, I know they didn't shell out $20 million to some consultant for this work of genius. It was probably someone's nephew, who was taking a community college class in information theory, and he got paid in movie tickets and cat food.)
“People in zee ‘ospital, zey do nothing but kill each other. Zis guy, all ’ee ever do, with one ‘and ’ee make a McDingus [gesture of holding a hamburger] and with zee other ’ee make a gun [gesture of holding a gun], and ’ee say, “Suicidal! Bang!”... all day long. Why zey not let ‘eem go? Zee world ’ave enough burgers... ’ee cannot hurt no one."