Dear Drivers of New Orleans,
First of all, let me start this off by admitting some fault of my own. As a cyclist, I occasionally ride like a...how to put this?...asshole. I occasionally ride like an asshole. I'd like to take just a moment to explain
why I ride like an asshole - it's just a bit of simple arithmetic.
me + my bike = ~220 pounds
you + yr car = ~2000 pounds
So, on average, you have nearly 1800 pounds of sheer mass on me at any time. I only have a small number of things that make the difference between me getting home or to work safe, or getting dead: assholery, chutzpah, lights on my bike (which I have), and yelling at you when you fuck up driving.
Now that we have that out of the way, I'd like to move on to the point of this letter: who the FUCK taught all of you stupid, inconsiderate, lazy, mean, angry, selfish, doltish, fat fucking pieces of flaming shit how to drive? At what fucking point in your pointless, banal life did you decide to never use a goddamn fucking turn signal? When exactly did you figure out it was okay to yell, honk, and get pissed at bikers for simply riding on the road? And what the fuck gives you the fucking right to open your door into us and then get aggravated with us for not riding on the sidewalk, when it is impractical, inconvenient and OH YEA FUCKING ILLEGAL.
Ok, look, here's the thing - as much as all of you people and my ex-girlfriends wish I was, I'm not a fucking mind reader. I can't tell when you're going to turn right as I ride alongside of you. I don't know when you're going to run a red light to make a left turn. But luckily, someone thought of this dilemma at the dawn of the fucking automobile, and came up with a solution - one so common and simple and convenient that it comes standard on every vehicle - A FUCKING TURN SIGNAL. Fucking use it, you goddamn choad monster! Your hands are going to be turning that way anyways, and get this -
it turns off automagically. How about that?!?!!
I don't really feel like getting into the whole "we're saving oil by not driving" argument, because I find it to be a slippery slope argument. But we're sure as shit keeping a car off the road by riding our bikes, and at the very least we're giving more road and parking spaces to you fucking turkey-necked asshats. Not that I would ever think of it as doing you, who I could give less than the one shit about, a favor. I like riding my bike.
By my conservative estimate, I've ridden somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 miles on the roads of New Orleans. These are not isolated incidents - this is a pandemic of the worst fucking childish behavior I have ever seen. I've seen friends in the hospital because of you mouth breathers, in accidents that could have easily been avoided. To paraphrase Dominic, I hope the carcinogens in your truck give you and your whole family ass cancer.
To all the drivers who are considerate to bikers, use turn signals, give us the three feet REQUIRED BY LAW when driving past us, and don't get mad at us for no reason - thank you. But please tell all your dicknose driver buddies to stop fucking up.
Hugs and kisses,
Drew
revered comix dude john porcellino (of king-cat fame) stayed at my house with my buddy dan a little while back, and he started a blog sometime recently called
"maybe blogging will help". i love the title and the sentiment. i wanna start writing in here again, and writing in general. i feel lazy and unproductive and shiftless. so maybe blogging will help.
really i came on here today to make a post about a Band That Not Enough People Know About, which i kinda wanna make into a regular thing.
they're good, and make sure you read the last.fm page about gay for johnny depp, aka the best band in the world.
ok, not that anyone reads this anymore, but i'm coming crawling back anyways.
i came up with what i think is a pretty good idea for a zine last night. carl helped a lot, in a way that is somewhat indirect, but also very direct.
my friend carl - he of so many biking and other adventures - has been banished by the us government for at least five years to his motherland of canada. needless to say this has made many of us here in new orleans very sad, shocked, distraught, angry. his sister came into town this week to pick up a bunch of his stuff, and last night we had a bonfire/party at his old house. he wrote a long letter and a poem that liz read to us, and supplied a bag of planting corn from his parents' farm. we each took some corn, and his letter instructed us to hang on to the corn and think of it as a little piece of carlito as we go on with our lives.
so this gave me an idea - i'm gonna do just that, and i'm gonna write another volume of something happened here, dedicated to carlito, in which i take "him" on all of our adventures this summer (or at least the ones where he won't get lost) and take photographs, write stories, have fun, be merry, drink too much, and generally do everything that would make carl happy and proud. it'll also provide some breathing room to write some more reflective stuff and give the thing a little depth, or something, running with some ideas carl touched on in his letter on the nature of government, immigration, what it means to have friends and something to come home to, etc.
oh, also, the piece of corn is named carlitoito - little little carl.
so a toast to carl, and a promise - "something happened here, vol 2: the adventures of carlitoito - summer 2010"
Ok, so - I am writing a zine. I am moving offline for this project. Crazy I know. But, must be done, I'm afraid. I am not shutting this down, but, ah, as the one to two month break between posts can attest, I've fallen a little behind.
As such, I thought I would share a little bit of the stuff that I've been writing. It's gonna be called "Something Happened Here" and it's gonna be about the crazy, weird, amazing, fun-as-hell summer we had here. It's written in the form of dispatches from different times and places throughout the summer, and I'm collecting artwork from various folks to make it look all purdy. Here's one of the entries....
dispatch 6 August 2009
in which
"who puts a pile of pillows out for the trash and then yells at you for being too loud in the inevitable pillow fight that happens when a dozen dirty punks on bikes ride by?!"
Full moon bike ride! We haven't had one since the water tower one that kicked off the summer, so it was great to have a wicked fun adventure with 11 other punx and one random "very important street artist" named Rain (Reign??) who joined up with us halfway, just in time for spin the bottle.
Callie and Carl, those lovable rapscallions, organized it, of course. The idea for this one was that everyone takes a sheet of paper and writes five directives on it - anything from "go two blocks, take a right" to "sing a Green Day song" to "Spin the bottle" (which we found out later was not even the real directive, but a beautiful improvisation!). Then, everyone took a sheet that wasn't theirs and read off their directions and we followed them. We started at Molly's, got organized, and we were off!
For some reason, at Dauphine and St Philip, someone put out a whole stack of pillows. It took us about .2 seconds before we realized our sacred duty - pillow fight! Ten minutes later, it was on to the next direction, which was (supposedly!) spin the bottle. After just a couple smooches, the guy whose house we were next to (and who put out the pillows?!?!) came out and yelled at us. We invited him to play but he seemed uninterested.
After a brief delay we found another spot and the smoochfest was ON. Much tongue action was to be had, as well as some ass grabbing, dry humping and even one cigarette smoke shotgun between Christopher and I (while open mouth kissing lolz!) Rain/Reign was not impressed at the prospect of making out with other boys (prude) and was constantly muttering stream of consciousness half nonsense. Boo to him.
Liz L came late and didn't write out directions, so she didn't pick one out of the hat. We decided that she would make up a direction for us at the end, when everyone else had read all their directions. She decided that the last direction was to go to back to Molly's and trade one article of clothing with someone else. One member of the troupe was wearing just a dress and underwear, so complained loudly about this directive. Liz simply responded with "Sorry love, but yr gonna have to get a little naked at Molly's!"
Sadly we never got to Molly's, because we suddenly got a rash of flat tires and had to fix them. As we waited, we all laid on each other and sang the entirety of "American Pie" by Don McLean. I think everyone but me knew all the words to that friggin song. It was unbelievable. But, since it was somewhere around one in the morning by this point, security guards came and kicked us off the river walk. Another rousing success of a full moon bike ride!
Sometimes, it's
easy to remember why this city rules.Just returned from a weekend trip to Austin. That is also a really fantastic city. It's just as hot as NOLA, though in a drier-but-hotter kinda way. But the big thing about Austin? SO MUCH FUCKING SWIMMING.
Barton Springs is obviously amazing, and we swam there twice. We also went to the Red Bud swimming hole. Both of these are within a five minute drive of downtown.
It's also a cool place because there are so many young people and so much stuff to do. Whereas in New Orleans you hear people lamenting about "oh my god EVERYTHING is happening tonight!" on a night where there are three things going on, in Austin there seems to always be about 648 things to do every night.
And damn is everyone there ridiculously good looking! I got whiplash at Whole Foods.
But now it's back to New Orleans, and the thrilling/depressing roller coaster ride that is living here...
You know, I never intended to turn this into a political blog, but seeing as I've been a bit of a political junkie for the past, oh, 235346 years, it just kinda happened.
So,
queen of the welfare queens Mark Sanford disappeared mysteriously on Thursday, and didn't tell his staff or even his wife (who "was not concerned because he'd told her he wanted to get away and do some writing" lolz) where he was going.
Here's the good part! Sanford returns today, through Atlanta so that he could avoid press in Columbia, SC, but is cornered in the ATL by
some podunk the SC paper of record (?). He gives a bunch of contradictory answers re: his whereabouts. Finally says he was in Buenos Aires driving along the coast and couldn't be bothered to check in.
And then the AP (!!!)
gets snarky.
Sanford told The State he was alone on the trip to Argentina. He declined to give any additional details about what he did other than to say he drove along the coastline.Trying to make such a drive could frustrate a weekend visitor to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, the Avenida Costanera is the only coastal road, and it's less than two miles long. Reaching coastal resorts to the south requires a drive of nearly four hours on an inland highway with views of endless cattle ranches. To the north is a river delta of islands reached only by boat.
AP FTW!!!
You know, there's a term for people like Mark Sanford that I vaguely recall....what was it....oh yea:
God, just when I thought sniveling, slimy, wide-stance-having senatorial tulip Lindsey Graham
couldn't get any more offensive, he goes and says
this shit about Sotomayor.
Although Graham said he would not use the word racist to describe Sotomayor, he indicated that her past statements raise concerns that, as a Supreme Court justice, she may not treat white males fairly. “Being an average, everyday white guy, that doesn’t exactly make me feel good,” Graham said.
Yep, that's what I'm concerned about - losing my white male privilege. That's going to happen. I mean, I'm sure that the SEVEN WHITE MEN ON THE SUPREME FUCKING COURT prove that white men have no positions of power left in this sad little country of MEXAMERICA.
