Captain’s Logos

This was how Mary and I dressed up for our halloween party this year. For those of you who understand the significance, we thought ourselves quite clever for thinking it up. For those of you who do not, you can still enjoy the spot-on attention to detail that was displayed in creating white trash, right down to the trashy Bud-ice bullets and the pregnant/drinking aspect.

If you are going to commit, I say go all out. If not, get off the damn porch.

Sagely recited by the lead singer of Everlong; or was it Everclear? Everlast? Anyways, the point of the song is that we (we being white collar, WASP, suburban, naive to the real plight of people Americans) are so quick to pass judgement upon those on 'the other side of the tracks'. Those degenerates who are doing cheap and dangerous drugs, killing one another, holding up liquor stores, and we scorn them and their ways. BUT if we were to walk a mile in their shoes, well then we would really know what it's like to have the blues (or play to lose? drink the booze? Anyways.)

Well I have lived, for the last 20 odd days (odd in every sense of the word), on the other side of the tracks. You see, due to an unfortunate cultural phenomenon that is equivalent to manifest destiny on crystal meth, everyone and their 2.34 children have moved to California, which has effectively made housing prices skyrocket out of missile range much less first-time buyers, which has created a massive urban sprawl that creeps daily into the outerlying cities, one of which where I used to live (Valencia? Anyone?), which boosts our housing to insane levels, and the upshoot is that it puts me smack dab in the middle of a trailer park, in an even further outerlying city (Los Angeles? Yeah, I think you head down about 60 miles from here. Gosh I'm not really sure. You sure you mean Los Angeles???), and paying $600 dollars a month rent (yes, $600 is inordinately expensive for a room in a trailer park) and sharing a doublewide with a 47 year old woman named Theresa, who I have determined is a real life witch, or maybe wicca, and her two cats. And everything smells like smoke and vinegar.

Now that I'm moving out, I can be a little bit more casual about the plight I was in, before it would just make me too depressed.

But the point here is not to draw attention to my calamity, although that is certainly an important thing to do, the point is to say that maybe in some way, I DID walk a mile in the shoes of others. And I didn't really learn anything. So my point, I guess, is that you can't trust the message that pop music is sending, which is sort of a given.

Nuts.

Because this country has lost its common sense in a bad way, and I’m not sure what we can do about it any longer.

Remember in middle school when some new policy would be instituted by the middle school bureaucracy, and they would announce it over the PA or at an assembly? It would usually involve dress code or lunch rules or something fairly trivial, but it was such an obviously half-baked idea that the entire student body would threaten to revolt. It would go like this:

Principal: “In matters pertaining to the dress code, all open backed close-toed shoes for girls will be banned, and all t-shirts that have printed monograms, unless that monogram is done with 400 dpi resolution images and does not include the colors yellow, off-yellow, or chartreuse, will be outlawed for boys. Boys can wear high-backed open heeled toe ended shoes, as long as there is no print on them, but women can only wear military issue hiking boots or wrap their feet in duct tape.”

This would be followed by an explosive burst of epithets directed towards the principal, the administration, etc.

Mid-pubescent boy thinking of the ‘No Fear’ t-shirt he just bought for $17 at racquet and jog: “This is so stupid. I hate this school. I’m gonna wear that shirt! I don’t even care if I get d-hall, how else will I get Christie to notice my pecks?”

Girls in back: “oh my gosh, this is like, totally unfair. Do they even know that you can’t, like, look cute with your feet wrapped up in duct tape? I swear if they do this I will get my daddy to write a letter. He’s like a lawyer and he will totally sue this school if I tell him to.”

Girl # 2: “Totally!”
Girl # 3: “Yeah.”

15 year old 2nd year 8th grader who has worn nothing other than black jeans and a solid black t-shirt for the last 3 years anyways, and more for the self-amusement than anything else: “I’ll kill him. I’ll f***ing kill him.”

Assistant principal under his breath to principal: “Uh, I think we got a problem here Bill.”

And after a few hours of squabbling, homeroom teachers threatening mutiny, hate letters written, petitions signed and angry parents on hold, the administration will relent.

See that is how a democracy works.

So when the F.A.A. institutes a new policy that says that any liquid substance brought on a plane has to be less than 3 ounces or it will be confiscated and you either have to check said 3 ounce bottle of liquid or surrender it, we shouldn’t really be blaming them. We should be blaming ourselves.

I flew to San Francisco this weekend, from LA. It was a short trip and I didn’t want to check a bag, as all I had was a change of clothes and, sadly, my toiletry kit. So on my way there they confiscated my Old Spice high endurance shower gel in the security screening line.

Unfortunate, I thought, but nevertheless, I suppose I can understand that in keeping with this new ordinance, they had to do it. My bad, airlines. I haven’t flown since the new rule and it slipped my mind. We’re cool you and I, and after all, I could have kept a shitload of C4 in that baby.

On my way back, they took my toothpaste. This pissed me off a little bit more, because first of all they didn’t take it on my way there, so obviously they are getting more nitpicky and secondly, it was a little tube of toothpaste, probably barely 3 ounces. And not even really fluid, more of a…well… paste. So I began to wonder if they were systematically depriving me of hygiene products and if so, why???

In addition to my toothpaste and shower gel, which were now history, the only things I had in my toiletry kit were a toothbrush, and a little bottle of cologne, clearly less than the critical 3 ounces. Because of course, everyone knows that it is absolutely impossible to blow anything up if you have 2.9 ounces of it or less. James Bond did it with a stick of gum stuck to the window; anthrax on an envelope can kill hundreds, but whatever.

So seeing that they were SOL when it came to confiscating my bottle of cologne, they simply determined that were this a hazardous material, having it in a Ziploc baggie would confound me to the point that when it came time to unleash this plague upon my fellow passengers I would be thwarted by the interlocking seal of freshness.
So they escorted me out of security, sent me on my way to find a Ziploc baggie, and once I did (luckily, because those things are never around when you need them) made me go through the entire screening, id checking, wand waving process once again.

Next to me on the plane was a guy who carried on two oars. Yeah, like oars. Like Talented Mr. Ripley to the back of the pilot’s cranium with medulla oblongata stuck to the paddle oars. Next to him was a lady who brought on a pool cue. So apparently bludgeoning is not a threat we are overly concerned with. Meanwhile I’ve got no soap and no toothpaste and I can’t seem to figure out how to open this Ziploc baggie to get to my cologne.

It doesn’t surprise me that much, what these people are doing. Does it make any sense? Of course not. Unless they have discovered that the only true terrorist deterrent is hassling them so much that they just don’t want to fly anymore it does absolutely nothing, and deep down everyone knows it. Nobody is thinking, as they sit on the plane next to a guy with a towel on his head, “This guy looks like trouble, but if he made it through that rigorous screening process, at least I know he won’t try to brush the pilot’s teeth to death.” Let’s face it folks, you wanna bring a plane down badly enough, you will find a way around the toiletry ban.

But the thing that troubles me is that we, the PEOPLE, are letting this happen. It is in keeping with large bureaucracies to make ridiculous rules, that is what they do. But up until recently it seems, when these things would happen it would incite the people into such a near mob-like frenzy that they would change these rules. But now we are just letting them take our toiletries, strip us down next to naked to get through the xray thingie, and very few of us are actually terrorists to begin with.

People! Sack up and do something! Didn’t you learn anything in middle school?