To Catch A Douchebag

Last night, some silly little cocksucker stole my friend Amanda’s camera from the Coffee Bean while she was hanging out talking to me.

Fortunately, he was a stupid silly little cocksucker…and consequently, the entire incident was captured on tape. We’ve got him red-handed.

If we can find him.

So: do you know this douchebag? If so, shoot me an email at my name at this domain, or just leave a comment. Feel free to be anonymous, if you can provide us with more information. Help me find this shitbag and — if he’s lucky — send him to jail.

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Green, for lack of a better word, is good.

I thought this was worth posting: a few weeks ago, Alex Steffen over at Worldchanging sent out an email to some friends (including myself), asking the following question:

What would America look like if 1970s environmentalism hadn’t met such a quick and brutal end? What would sustainability itself look like — would we all be living in a world of arcologies, living machines, and whalesong?

Would America be a green superpower? Or would we simply be Europe, living better on less? Or would we be living in a stagflationary sweater-vest hell? What do you think might be different if that election had gone differently, and what lessons might it have for us this year?

My response — which Alex posted in the comments to his post on Worldchanging — was this:

I think people would have figured out a way to make sustainability ridiculously profitable a lot earlier in the game. And then they would have spent the money on coke and ridiculously expensive krill-based nouvelle cuisine. Imagine a cross between The Greening Of America and American Psycho and you’re getting the picture.

Seriously, though: I’ve always believed that environmentalism has been crippled by all the weird bullshit attached to it. Sustainability and Native American rights have fuck-all to do with one another, for example, but you would have gotten lynched if you’d suggested that to hippies in the 70s. (I’m not minimizing Native American rights, of course, but you take my point.) Environmentalism has traditionally been handcuffed to the most ridiculous aspects of post-60s Leftism.

We’ve been changing that in this new century, thanks in large part to people like you and Big Bruce Sterling (and, to a much lesser extent, um, me). But if Carter had been elected? Was the hyper-capitalism of the 80s connected entirely to Reaganism? I like to think my first statement would have been the case. There’s a lot of money to be made in cleaning up the environment, and the best part — if you’ll forgive my cynicism — is that much of it comes from fat government contracts.

I think you would have seen a weirder form of socialist-capitalism emerge. And I do think that we’d be a good deal less consumerist as a society.

And the fiction writer in me deeply digs on the image of an alternate Gordon Gecko, in an Armani suit woven from renewable bamboo fiber and Nia Peeples yuppie glasses made from recycled pressed sunflower seeds, moving billions of dollars between coal-pollution suppression firms and multinational reforesting conglomerates.

Green is good. Green is right. Green works.

Heh.

Naked City Story #291,847

I was at Starbucks again late tonight, working on stuff. Around 4am I decided to head home. As I approached the corner of Flamingo and Paradise (where, you may remember, I found a bloody shirt a few months ago), I saw a pretty girl standing on the southwest corner, next to the gas station, trying to hail a cab. She was weaving a bit.

Then she fell over, into the street.

I jogged over, pulling my headphones off, as another man (who was filling up at the station) ran up to help her. She was crying and shrieking. At first, I thought she’d hurt herself, but she didn’t seem to be physically hurt. Her makeup was streaked down her face and she was in hysterics. The man and I helped her to her feet and she clung to him like a baby.

She was tall, very pretty, young, in her twenties. Platinum blonde, well-groomed, or she had been when her night began. But her nose was leaking blood and snot like crazy, and she was completely off the fucking reservation, not to mention wearing a skimpy black and white cocktail dress, impractical high heels and no jacket in 40 degree weather, like she’d been out at expensive places and hadn’t expected to be out in the cold at all. She was shivering and screaming that she had to get to the Hilton or something horrible was going to happen. I looked down and noticed that she had three puppy-dog paw prints rubber-stamped in black ink on the center of her right foot, like something a little kid would do.

The man offered to give her a ride in his van, and we tried for several minutes to get her to climb in. But she was out of her mind. The security guard from the gas station came out and told the man to move or he’d call the police. I discreetly took the man aside and told him maybe he ought to let the cops deal with her. Not that discretion was really necessary — I could have stood two feet from this girl and told the guy we ought to take her out in the desert and sport-fuck her until the sun came up, and she wouldn’t have noticed.

She just kept screaming that she had to go — first to the Hilton, then to the Hyatt, and then to “51 Minds”. I asked her what that was. “It’s near Sahara!” she screamed. “I need to go…oh, my God, I need to go right fucking now…I need to go to the HILTON!”

Eventually, he got her into the van, where she crouched on the floorboard of the passenger side in a fetal position, and they drove off. The security guard told me a cab had dropped her off, and she hadn’t had money and had tried to get money from the ATM inside the station, but couldn’t work the ATM and had finally stumbled out onto the street, which is when I saw her fall down.

“Crazy drunk bitch. She’s lucky that nice man’s helping her,” the security guard, a small grizzled Filipino or Vietnamese guy, told me. “She’s lucky a bunch of niggers didn’t find her. They’d take her home and fuck her in the ass.”

After that, I dunno. And normally I’d just chalk it up to coke or meth. But I’ve seen lots of people on lots of different shit, and I’ve seen raving tweaker lunatics, and this was something else. This girl was genuinely terrified of something — something that had happened, or something that was going to happen if she didn’t get to where she was going. And she didn’t look like a heavy tweaker — she was in good physical shape, none of the usual lines on her face, nothing like that. She was obviously fucked up on something…but I’m wondering if it was something she took on purpose or not. Someone who got dosed with something without their knowledge would act like that, I think.

I Googled “51 Minds” and it turns out it’s a production company that does reality shows like “The Flavor Of Love” and “The Surreal Life”. They seem to film in Vegas a lot, based on random casting company links and production credits, but they don’t have a permanent local office, or one that I can find. And this girl was pretty enough to be on one of those shows. She was pretty adamant about getting either there or the Hilton — I think she said “the Hyatt” by accident, because she only said it once — and I can’t think of any particular reason why a random tweaker would be so desperate to get to some production company’s office in the middle of the night.

I don’t know. I hope she’s alright. If I thought she was just another random coke whore, I’d be more bemused than anything else. But again, I’ve seen people fucked up on everything from crack to PCP, and this was something weirder than that.

I should just start bringing a video camera when I go out for coffee, huh?

Thanks, everybody!

Thank you so much to everybody who stopped by my little projection show at First Friday last night! It meant a lot to me that y’all showed up. I was pretty happy with how it turned out — despite the fact that I had klieg lights pointed at my screen, which made it kinda hard to see all the pieces, so I had to rewrite the code on the spot to give everything brighter backgrounds.

But on the whole, I was happy. Big props to Jen and Brian Henry for inviting me and holding my hand through the process. And now I’m going to go figure out if I can do this again, only better. 🙂

The Clam, He Burn Me

Fucking ouch. Whilst working on my video installation for tomorrow’s First Friday show (you remember that, don’t you? And you’re coming? Awesome!), I stopped to make myself a soup ‘n’ sandwich. The making of the sandwich was uneventful as such things go — mayo, pickle loaf (don’t judge me), tomato, cheese, pickles, wheat bread.

But it was the clam chowder that done me wrong, for when I opened the microwave and went to stir the quite-hot chowder, something inside of it exploded and sprayed me down with boiling soup. Which is really surprisingly painful, particularly when you’re shirtless.

It’s funny. But now I have all these painful chowder burns on my chest and stomach and upper arms. It’s no less painful for being absurd.

Christ. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.

Temporarily Phoneless

For the past year or so, I’ve been using a free Sprint Ambassador cellphone. That service ends today, and since I owe Sprint money on my normal Sprint account (which I couldn’t afford to pay last February or so), and can’t afford the deposit I’ll undoubtedly have to pay, I can’t just get it turned back on right now. So as of probably tomorrow, I’m phoneless.

However, I do have a GrandCentral account. So I have voicemail until I can get another phone, and I’ll be giving out my GrandCentral number from now on anyway.

So if you’re someone who ought to have my phone number, send me an email and I’ll pass it along to you.