YACHT LOG

Ha ha! When the sun came blazing out at 10am on Thursday, December 1st, I realized, after an extensive search, that I didn’t own Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild! Sheesh!

Trying to pick things to be thankful for at this time of year is so corny and cliché, but it’s also practically irresistible. This year I am going to express thanks to my co-worker Shane Greene for helping me see the light about Springer and other such television shows. Almost invariably when he turns it on in the Yacht Club at 5pm on Thursdays there is a little groan that runs along the handful of patrons at the bar, but it is, by God, accompanied by an indisputable settling in, a scooching of buttocks for maximum comfort on wooden stools, an adjusting of eye glasses, and, most astonishingly, a call for fresh drinks to eliminate the possibility of running dry before the show ends and possibly missing some crucial absurdity.

Almost without exception, everyone greets their first viewing of Springer with arrogant contempt and self-righteous indignation. The Springer Show is stupid. It’s raunchy fluff to pass the time. It could conceivably turn your brain into mush. I have no problem with any of these opinions. Hell, we all know they’re true. Springer is merely entertainment; like Battlestar Galactica or Housewives of Atlanta or Monday Night Football.

When people smugly tout the NBC nightly News with Brian Williams or one of those other clone news-shows with Diane Sawyer or what’s-his-name, as if they were intellectually viable, that I take umbrage.

Every few weeks or so I’ll sit down with a hot meal and try to while away a half an hour watching one of those charades. Invariably the first segment is dedicated to some absolutely beat-to-shit feature about a violent occurrence in the Middle East. Always between ten and 75 people have been killed. This is labeled a crisis. Often there is some sub-moron, United States citizen caught up in it; someone from the same local gene pool as the dumbass on Mt. Hood being rescued by helicopters in a blizzard. Yawn. Please behead them so we can all have another thing to be thankful about.

Now, admittedly, if there is any type of story in which wealthy white children are being sexually molested, that will get top billing, but that only happens about once every two or three months.

After the current crisis in the Middle East and/or the white-children sex-abuse the evening news than proceeds to totally put Springer’s writers to shame with their skills at pandering to the lowest common denominator. The one I had the great good fortune to watch on Tuesday, Nov. 22nd went right into a feature about how there was something in the metal of canned foods that was “bad for you” and how this Thanksgiving that would include cranberry sauce. (Wooh! Nice tie in!) Now, although the news anchor pointed out that no government agency in any country has ever been able to find any evidence of this “thing that is bad for you”, in Canada they are not allowed to make baby bottles out of metal. This announcement, of course, is made with the same look of extreme concern on Brian Williams’ face that he would have if he were announcing the discovery of a small nuclear bomb in New York City’s subway system.

Next story: Delta is canceling its non-stop flights to Shanghai.

Fourth story: A fat, old, white congressman and a fat old white professor from Rice University quibbled like six-year-olds about the frozen wasteland/pristine wonderland that is Alaska (tastes great!/less filling!). Pure Springer! Except they didn’t rip their shirts off on the House floor. But they raised their voices! I got excited! My pulse put in a brief appearance!

Fifth Story: A woman video tapes her little boys tearing a bag of flower open and throwing it all over their nice, upper-middle-class living room. No, I didn’t say she stopped them from doing it, I said she videotaped it. Yay! It went viral! Tomorrow, November 23rd, she appears on the Today Show with her two adorably bad boys. (Kiddie Springer!).

All I’m saying is don’t be so self-righteous in your contempt about shows obviously not meant to be taken seriously when there are plenty of shows that do take themselves very seriously, flaunt their journalistic integrity in our faces, and are just as retarded as the silliest episode of Springer ever! They expect you to take them seriously, and yet those are the five stories they present as The World News for that day.

* * * * *

I’m also thankful I don’t desperately need attention any more. Have you ever been talking with someone and suddenly realized that, in fact, you were not talking with them because they were saying 100% of the words in the conversation? If this ever happens to you, try not to be too annoyed or angry. I used to be that person and I reformed. Maybe you, using gentle persuasion, could help one of these offensive interlocutors. They make great listeners when they finally come around.

As I was saying, on Thanksgiving itself I had a wonderful revelation. I figured out a way to eat. It involves getting a bunch of food (in this case left-overs) and keeping them at meticulously maintained levels of refrigeration/frozenness, but also (and this is the new part) always, (except when you are asleep or not home) keep a little something warming in the toaster oven for those rare times that a wee bite of food won’t spiral into a nightmarish torture.

I’m thankful for the solid dozen readers who will allow me the following vent and still know in their heart of hearts that I am a decent, unselfish, empathetic human being. I feel this will be very therapeutic for me, as well as enlightening to those of you who have seen me suddenly melt down for no apparent reason and act like a complete dick. Believe me, my guilt is immeasurable and I dole out severe punishment when I get home alone (thus the rope burns and the tape-in-the-hair etc.

PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS ARE BLATANTLY SELF-PITYING. I AM NOT TRYING TO SLIP IT IN ON YOU UNAWARES.

IN FACT, I RECOMMEND THAT
YOU SKIP DOWN TO WHERE IT
SAYS, “SKIP TO HERE”.

I have this thing called Crohn’s Disease, which I think is a totally suck-ass name since diseases are what one associates with rats and turtles and gross, dirty things, and which seem like they should be contagious. Well, it’s not at all contagious and in fact no doctor on earth has the slightest idea why some people get it and some don’t. There’s no known cause, and no known cure (Don’t be fooled by the internet, where there are hundreds of known causes and millions of cures). One thing, however, is indisputable. Crohn’s Disease comes with a bursting-full war chest of various physical pains. Why don’t I just reproduce the Doctor’s literature, which is calculated to minimize patient’s feelings of hopelessness and overwhelming despair at being diagnosed with a chronic (never ever going away), incurable disease? Without further ado, here’s what the doctors say.

“As you have probably figured out by now, pain is inherent in Crohn’s Disease. Muscle pain, back pain, rectal pain, oral pain, abdominal pain, sharp pain, cramping pain, wavelike pain, pain that keeps you up at night, pain that prevents you from eating, pain from extra-intestinal manifestations, pain from headaches, joint pain, pain from arthritis, pain from iritis, painful skin nodules and fissures. And this doesn’t even address the emotional and financial pain you will encounter with Crohn’s. It may seem at times that the only thing that doesn’t hurt is your hair.”

You get the gist of it, I’m guessing.

SKIP DOWN TO HERE

The point of all this self-pitying is this . . .when I reach my wit’s end from the pain, sometimes I get crabby, and I’m sorry.

Which brings me to the next thing I am thankful for. . . .

BREAD AND CIRCUSES

People know about bread and circuses from surprisingly diverse sources. Yes, yes, of course it’s from some Roman who meant that if people have food and entertainment, they will be happy and pliant and then the small handful of weird people who don’t require those two things can rule the world (for all that’s worth) and have all the power. But in a recent survey of my 31 friends and regular clients, I discovered that a surprisingly high percentage identified Bread and Circuses as an episode of the original Star Trek series (which, thankfully dealt with the theme of placating people into utter submission with food and entertainment). God! For all I know there’s probably an episode of Twilight that does the same (although, to the best of my knowledge there is not yet an installment of Allen Gregory).

So, anyway, I’m going to skip over bread for now (since food and I don’t really see eye to eye any more) and express my gratitude to the mind boggling circus which is the BCS’ system for picking the top 2 football teams to play in the college championship. It is an endless, pointless rigmarole, and has served to take my mind and the minds of millions of others off our troubles for countless hours this fall. It is allowing me to pass the time until my huge winter project kicks off on January 11th, 2012.

Obviously coinciding with the conclusion of my five year technological hiatus (which Crazy Mike impossibly didn’t know about because A) he is not a reader of this column, B) he thinks Texas is a big, ugly, featureless state, C) he thinks Football is the only team sport, and D he is crazy) the HUGE WINTER PROJECT is going to be (once the Republicans nominate a candidate for president of The United States Of America) an exhaustive compilation of all the negative things the Democrats and Republicans say about the nominee of the opposing party. It is going to be especially fun to do it this year because this will be the first presidential election since the Supreme Court ruled that independent groups could accept unlimited contributions from anonymous donors for the purpose of creating political advertisements. These independent groups are called political action committees or SUPER PACs and what they do is enable the candidates to outsource their negative advertising and bombard their rivals with attacks. It’s going to be brutal!

Mitt Romney’s independent SUPER PAC is called RESTORE OUR FUTURE.

Newt Gingrich’s independent SUPER PAC is called WINNING OUR FUTURE.

President Obama’s independent SUPER PAC is called PRIORITIES USA.

You see how this is going to play out. All the candidates will have their regular ads talking about all the positive things they will do when elected and showing them with kids and kittens and butterflies, and all those adds will be officially endorsed by the candidates.

The SUPER PAC ads will depict shockingly evil caricatures of the candidates, accusing them of amazing depravities and instigating a slew of slander scandals and lascivious libel lawsuits.

I absolutely will be accepting submissions, but only hard copy, and only handed to me in person (well, ok, you can leave them off at the Yacht Club). These submissions will constitute the new political psychology wing of the TERRY WILLIAMS MOBILE SCIENCE-RESEARCH FACILITY, which is currently located at the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club (1136 Euclid Avenue, 30307) 404-688-CLUB. Maybe when my technological hiatus is over I can hire Ross to help me install a section for viewing video. I have a feeling that’s where all the most vicious tidbits will be.

Since the next ten months of our lives in the public house are inevitably going to be peppered with political palaver and prattle I thought it might be a fun exercise to sort my friends and clients into the three known categories of political orientation. In so doing, I think I may have discovered a fourth category

Which of these categories do you fit into?

Category #1 Everything the Republicans/conservatives do is negative.

Category #2 Everything the Democrats/liberals do is negative.

Category #3 I don’t care about politics at all.

Category #4 THE EXCITING NEW CATEGORY! You find politics very interesting, even fascinating! You would like to watch or listen to a show in which an extremely qualified Category #4 pundit gives you a weekly synopsis of both the party’s outrageous allegations against each other and you wouldn’t even mind if they had a segment cataloguing the positive goals and objectives of each party which you would listen to extra carefully and mull over in your mind.

The first inkling I had that there could conceivably be a new category came to me while I was asking around for an alternative to Rush Limbaugh who is a very famous Category #2. My very simple question was, “Who is the category #1 mirror image of Rush?”

This question poses way more of a problem than I would have ever imagined. If there is someone with a national talk-radio show who constantly disparages everything the Republicans do and puts forth conservatism as the single most dangerous and destructive enemy of The United States, they sure as hell aren’t anywhere near as famous as Rush Limbaugh.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

There is a horrifying new image to be considered in the Sandusky situation. A young man has come forth who claims that Sandusky locked him in his (Sandusky’s) basement when he was ten years old, and that between rapings he (the young man), would scream for help. He is certain that Mrs. Sandusky could hear him, because he could hear her praying.

Now, of course, that could be a big fat whopper of a lie, but it doesn’t fail to evoke a sort of umbrella-structure to the entire lie that Happy Valley lived for the last fifteen years. Namely, that in the name of something which seemed more over-reaching and almighty than the Catholic Church or the United States federal government, but which was, once you took a step back, just another American college-football program, and just one of tens-of-thousands of big businesses with a lot of media hype attached to it, an entire community closed its ears to the screaming of children being raped because they were caught up in a juggernaut too big and important to be stopped. But now that the whole shit house has fallen down around their ears, thus unobscuring their eyes, the key enablers are lawyering up. They are, in essence, saying to themselves, “Damn! What I did looks bad.” It’s like that scene in A few Good Men where Jack Nicholson is finally goaded into admitting he ordered the code red. “You’re damn right I did!” Oh Joe pa! Are you getting lawyers who specialize in creating massive clouds of confusion and obscuring the truth? Because what you didn’t do sure looks ugly in the naked light.

Anyway, I am excited about escaping into a fantasy world, which I am going to do January 11th, 2012. By assembling the puzzle pieces above it is possible to discern that our world needs a shake up, real or otherwise. Previously I have considered faux shake-ups to be unpleasant and possibly mean-spirited and thus developed an aversion to them. And so, of course, just as my mind has ceased to even recognize them, except to warn others not to dwell on them, I realized that I was absolutely alone feeling this way and that even the most hard-core cynic among my coterie of co-workers absolutely relishes these airings-out. Oh well. I have things that shake me up and air me out too! And the beautiful symmetry of it is that my co-workers are completely dispassionate about these events! Ah, Fortuna! Ah, My lottery lass! Thy numbers are . . . Oh no you don’t! I’m not divulging the code wherein I use the letters from the names of all the cute American Apparel girls who are in love with me and transpose them into the winning lottery combinations! Just because I’m having a moment of ecstasy doesn’t make me stupid! In fact, I order everyone to have a moment of ecstasy!

Coming soon to the Yacht Club Log

Saturday, January 7th. ZOMBIE PUB CRAWL. We open at noon so, what the hell, come then.
Gino
Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921

Don’t misuse your talents, or God knows in how many lifetimes you’ll be paying for it!

While trying to remember how to use a word processor, after an inadvertent writing hiatus, complicated by technical difficulties, sloth, baseball, and excessive peristaltic activity, I, Gino accidentally wrote the following very short story about people who work and play in the Yacht Club. And it goes like this . . . 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. . . .

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a moocow coming down along the road. But then it turned into a crone and entered the Yacht Club. The Crone, which has a name, which may or may not be Barbara, sat at the big, empty table by the window and prepared to do what she had done every day for the past three weeks, which was create mayhem to alleviate the terrible boredom afflicting her.

Unfortunately for her, the first person she engaged in stimulating conversation was Hippy. And as she spewed forth her rigmarole-spiel, her rap, calculated to cow any member of the timecard-punching class, and started making queenly demands, she was brought up short by a simple Hippy question. “Who are you?”

Oweee! When you ask nobody who they are it upsets them. It puts them off.

Carving out the unpalatable fat of the conversation (Yes, yes, I realize the fat is your favorite part, and that it adds flavor, but I have a hyperactive gag reflex) it came down to Barbara telling Hippy that “These little people” (gesturing with a dismissive wave of her hand at, not only the staff, but at the bar) had committed this and that outrage against her royal personage. That’s when Hippy said, and I quote, “On behalf of the little people who work here, I must tell you that I don’t want you on the premises.”

And so, of course, she pulled out her big gun and demanded to know who he was. And, well, as we all know, he’s Hippy and he and Michel own the bar! Oops! Undaunted, Barbara proceeded to tell Hippy that she was worth a million dollars, and that she was going to buy the bar and throw everyone out! YIKES!

Luckily, Hippy backed down and told the crone she could do whatever she wanted and that she could abuse the staff to her hearts content on account of her being so wealthy and all. NO!! That’s not what happened at all! She, in fact, got the old heave-ho!

(Somewhere above insert the physical description of Barbara the crone, how she had crazy, wiry gray hair, a wart on her cheek with a single thick black hair, and mention the way her long pointy nose practically touched her long, pointy, warty, hairy chin when she cackled.) Also, mention her all-around-I-eat-children aura. Or just leave it here and claim it’s a new style.

And but so then, so anyway, (as Faylynn would say), Barbara’s name was entered into the Rolodex of Shame, and I guess if you’re reading this, you probably know what the RoS is.

So! Stay tuned for more Yacht Club Drama Stories featuring the REAL NAMES of employees and customers!

COMING SOON! Crazy Mike vs. Dennis the Menace!
And
How The Gamecock Gnome turned a nasty little cat into porcelain!

Also in the days ahead, everyone’s friend (and yours), Mike Griffin will be writing something in his smallest, most satanic handwriting, and then typing it into some sort of device which will ultimately allow you to view it through the miracle of the internet.

Oh my God! Mike Griffin is trying to steal my job! I just realized it! The way he has carefully manipulated me into not writing anything for months and then making me go on vacation to Oregon for 10 DAYS! And then making Frank deploy my airbags so that I couldn’t write for a couple days, and then making me feel like not writing!

Well, I’ll show you! I feel like writing! I feel like writing about everyone’s favorite subject! The sex lives of Yacht Club employees and customers, using their real names, and the way those sex lives relate to my ten biggest gripes about modern physics. As you swallow the load of sordid details that follow, try to read between the lines and see if you notice that, maybe, beneath the unsavory surface, the cold hard facts of modern physics mingle with the steamy, chrysanthemum-scented breath of Yacht Club lovers as they fumble and grope with the elastic nature of reality.

#1) FAYLYNN – Even inside a black hole, neither the density of matter, nor the force of gravity become infinite. (Accept this fact and you are well on your way to solving a big puzzle, which you could do IN BED!!) Fighting and struggling won’t help. Infinity is a man-made concept. It’s dumb, unlike Faylynn, who is very intelligent. Don’t spend your life wallowing in the mud like a dragonfly larvae that didn’t metamorphose! Shed the condom of infinity.

#2) Clay – The theory of General Relativity is inadequate to explain what happened one second before the big bang. If someone asks you, “What happened one second before the big bang?” don’t answer that time didn’t exist before the big bang. That’s just sad and pathetic. Don’t get me wrong; General Relativity is great 99.9999% of the time. I love it. But I also have enough compassion to put an old blind, lame dog down when its time has come.

#3) Danni – If light can be a wave and a particle simultaneously, it means that it is not impossible for something to be two different things at one time. It means I can be a bird and a fish. It means Danni could be a man and a woman. It means the vacuum of space can be warm and cold. If you weren’t an unbelievably close-minded nerd physicist, what would you conclude from this? That’s right! You would conclude that light is in fact not a particle and a wave, but seems to have the properties of both. Then you would man up and admit that quantum mechanics is simply inadequate to explain light, among other things, although, like general relativity (see Faylynn) it is wonderful and useful 99.9999% of the time.

#4) Scottie – You are really not going to like this one . . . Reality depends upon our existence. The “real world” does not exist independently of Scottie’s ability to observe it. If Scottie wasn’t doing it, and nobody else was observing it, reality wouldn’t exist. It is impossible and futile to try and prove otherwise.

#5) Hippy – The coldest, hardest fact of all . . . There isn’t, and can never be a unified theory. “Nature” works in different ways for different things. Just because in theoretical models where you plug in your sideways eight and get nonsensical answers . . . that’s no reason to have a temper tantrum. It’s like God making a rock so heavy that he can’t pick it up. I suspect there is an analogy here somewhere between the long, slow evolution of the human brain and the quick development of the brain of a (human) male adolescent. Maybe even an analogy involving the evolution of the giraffe’s neck. Like when the animals get together at their evolution-discussion groups and talk about their necks and the giraffe says stuff like, “ Ooh! I’ve got such a long one!” and “I can really get high with it!” and “I can eat stuff high”. And then the human (man is an animal) has to be a dick and bide his time and say, “Well, I got a really big brain. After the other creatures think about it for a minute, they begin to murmur. Some of them get the chills; some feel their hair stand on end. This is a truly “Oh shit!” moment as various creatures realize the implications of not having drawn the big brain card for their own species. Humans will be able to invent stuff. And they have those damned opposable thumbs. They’ll be able to invent and build stuff to enable them to fly, to breathe under water, reach things up high, burrow beneath the ground, protect themselves with hard or spiky armor, shoot, stab and squirt their enemies, see things far away, see tiny things close up, make poison and stink bombs, move super fast . . . emulate any other creature’s evolutionary benefits. They had not so much drawn a card as a deck.

Anyway, back to the cold hard fact that the universe can work in different ways for different things (and you thought it was just a theory! Sorry, but my big brain was just doing its thing!)

That the very forces of nature can work differently for the miniscule quantum particles and the colossal galaxy-clusters is just another growing pain for the human brain to assimilate. Nor is it even the first or most distressing. Remember when Copernicus forced us to confront the absolutely inconceivable fact that the sun didn’t revolve around the Earth? For crying out loud, you could walk into your front yard and see the sun revolving around the Earth.

Plugging infinity into equations that already have over a dozen manufactured constants is juvenile and self-serving. Like God and his heavy rock, creating a paradoxical situation that can’t be solved is merely self-defeating and meaningless. Well, we drew the big brain card so congratulations! We can create a Paradoxical Situation that can’t be Solved! But that’s the extent of the accomplishment, or failure, depending on how you look at it, as long as one doesn’t waste an entire, precious, human lifetime trying to solve the P.S.T.C.B.S. That’s probably what happened to poor old God; he’s off somewhere trying to lift the rock he made too heavy to lift and that’s why he’s not on hand any more to cure my ills and solve my problems and be the buddyroo I’d like him to be. Don’t go the way of God and the dinosaurs (I think that would be a cool name for a band, by the way.). Having established that the human brain is capable of creating a Paradoxical Situation that can’t be Solved, it’s time to move on!

JEN – Unification of physics through a single law is an unnecessary goal and a waste of time. It is simply not how the real world out there operates.

Anna – Constants are silly and embarrassing, unless they have some divine DaVinci-codesque meaning, which maybe they do. Maybe those constants are the names of the various gods in their various realms. That would be cool.

Meredith – There is no such thing as dark matter. Sorry! But the existence of dark matter is based on the “observation” that the mass of the gas, stars, planets, dust and various debris in a galaxy doesn’t jibe with Newton’s laws of gravity and motion which are derived by using the speed of a star and the distance between said star and what it is orbiting. Aye yi yi! The only word which comes to mind when considering the claim that calculations about a distant galaxy’s mass have been made using either of these methods accurately is hubris (and I actually would have liked to put hubris in bold face but this stupid double-meaning, reading between the lines “Sex Lives of the Yacht Club Staff” trick using real names disallows it, as Meredith would undoubtedly zoom in on this sentence and think that I was accusing her of hubris, when, in fact, she is possibly the least hubristic person God ever put on this green Earth, and is in fact very humble and self effacing and if anything, lacks the confidence she needs to take over the whole world because she is super organized and thinks ahead, like Michel, as opposed to, say, me.). Fuck it; let’s call it hubris on high to not only claim to have made both of these calculations, but to then posit that the reason they do not agree is that there is invisible matter in the universe, and that, hmm, come to think of it there is even more invisible matter than visible matter! That is . . . wow!

Just for fun, let’s revisit something we all learned in high school, (even though you may not remember, trust me, you learned this.). There are around 100 billion stars in an average galaxy. (You can see already where this is going and the staggering, breath-taking margin of error we are building up to, but let us forge on, like the scientists we aren’t!). We are nowhere near being able to detect planets around any of those stars, but some stars probably have some planets, and planets have a decent amount of mass, so I guess maybe throw in an average of 3 planets per star? (I’m assuming you know that the stars are like the sun but way far away. If you just learned that, I want to give you a hug.) Then you have to know how fast all the stars are moving around the center of their galaxy. Seriously. Oh my God let’s just, for simplicity’s sake, say they are all moving at the same speed. Whew! So then, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada, and the results are in! Oh my gosh! The mass of the galaxy as we observed it doesn’t match the mass of the galaxy as we calculated it using Newton’s laws! That must mean that the galaxy is full of invisible matter! OMG! I don’t like invisible, it sounds like 1950s comics. Let’s call it dark matter. Ooooohhh! Meredith is awesome.

Michel – Oregon is cooler than Georgia. I just mean in a temperature way. However, I think I could get used to gazing off at snow-capped mountains, and the thought of millions of tons of lava being regurgitated from the Earth and falling down on my head as dry, choking dust does not bother me at all. In fact, I find it rather stimulating. Plus, stagnation is abhorrent.

Laura – It doesn’t matter who is elected president of the U.S.A. There is going to be a presidential election next year, and it’s going to be the first one I ever enjoy, because I just read a book that had a ten-page synopsis of every single election since the 18th century, and I learned that the candidates, and their “people” accuse the opposition of the most despicable crimes against humanity that can possibly be fabricated, but it’s funny and doesn’t matter, much like the job. There is no way that any normal, likable human being could endure the rigors of a presidential campaign, which means that whoever is running is a scary sociopath. To get an inkling of what it would be like, consider a mailman. One of those kind that go about on foot, like the Inman Park mailman. And just for the sake of this analogy, say you own a couple little dogs, like a Chihuahua and a Jack Russell terrier. As you’re relaxing at home reading a book in the early afternoon you start to hear dogs barking faintly down the street. Over the next ten minutes the barking gets louder and nearer, until finally your dogs start barking and a useless pile of cable TV circulars falls through the mail slot in your front door. The barking of your beloved pets reaches a crescendo. After a few minutes they quiet down and fainter and fainter barks can be heard until, finally all is quiet and peaceful and you can resume your reading. The ordeal has lasted twenty minutes.

But if you’re the mailman the barking dog is always barking at you. You can hear the dogs ahead on your route, and you can hear the ones you left behind. And they don’t start barking until new dogs have taken up the task. The mailman doesn’t come out of peacefulness to endure your barking dogs for a few minutes, than return to his tranquil, idyllic walk. Much like presidential candidates. A group of people doesn’t appear around them for ten minutes accompanied by dozens of television cameras, microphones, and reporters, then melt away so the candidate can go back to his calm life. Every waking minute of his life for a year those aggravations are constantly around the candidate getting more and more aggressive as November approaches. And then, what is the reward for enduring such a torture? Four more years of the same! Good God! What kind of a sick freak would want that?!

Lionel – We have one year of election coverage to get through, starting in November. And you thought that malls putting up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving was bad (you are right, by the way.). For a solid year we will be subjected to, what in no way could be considered a serious discussion of how best to resolve the problems the country is facing today. Nor will it be an opportunity for the American people to see what the two candidates stand for, nor how those values will be employed in addressing the serious social, financial and medical issues the United States is grappling with. It would be awesome if someone could just draw a line in time and tell the candidates, “No talking about what your opponent has done or failed to do in the past. Just talk about the country’s problems and how you would solve them.” But that is not going

Susan – Sometimes, when I call someone, the person I am calling (and they usually don’t answer my call, so I find out about this much later) tells me that I was identified as UNKNOWN by their caller ID. It’s inconsistent, and seems to happen more frequently with some people than with others. Usually it’s no big deal, but recently I tried to call my unbelievably awesome automobile technician, Pete (Pete’s import auto, Dekalb Ave) and I got a message saying that the number I had reached was not able to take calls from phones with “blocked numbers”, and that I could hang up, unblock my number and try again.

Who do I get mad at?

It’s like when you are as ignorant about your cell phone as I am and you are right in the middle of composing a time sensitive text and some one calls you with the best of intentions and it totally fucks you up because you are too ignorant to figure out how to deal with an incoming call and maintain the integrity of your text. It is very frustrating and your anger gets misdirected at the people calling (some of) whom are really trying to help you.

Thom Doyle – I’ve decided to model my life on God’s.
God, in his infinite wisdom, has shown us the way. Whatever God’s reasons and rational are for not helping anyone; my reasons are the same. “I’m sorry, but I will not help you, for the same reason that God won’t help you.” If God is sorry I am sorry. If God has nothing to say, nor do I. I am totally modeling my life on, not the teachings, but the practices of God. I don’t see how I can go wrong, unless you have to earn the privilege of acting like God by creating the universe or something. Hopefully not. I’ll reread the bible again and see if I can find where this specific philosophical quandary is addressed.

Which brings me to the fulfillment, last Wednesday, of a quest I didn’t even know I was on! I would say it started years ago when Kim and Mike Bogen turned me on to a book called Lamb by Christopher Moore. It is the gospel according to Jesus’ childhood friend, Biff, and has been suppressed for centuries, by royal councils and Arch Angels, among others. Damn, is that ever a funny book!

Around a month ago, Kim and Mike started calling me, and I made a few half-assed attempts to call them back. This situation was aggravated by the fact that they (like Laura) are not into texting (OMG! My spell-check didn’t recognize texting as a word! It’s like Mike and Kim and Laura!) and I have done a complete about-face on the topic and basically don’t feel I ever need to talk to anyone on the phone ever again, except my mother (Although I feel that her aversion to texting is age-based, although, come to think of it Mike and Kim are older than me and may be on the other side of the Mendoza Line which is an age-determined inability to accept new technology. But that wouldn’t explain Laura. Obviously there is a lot of research that needs to be done in this area.). So, if Mike and Kim’s calls are hint #1, hint #2 comes in the guise of my sudden and shocking realization that I had never read Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. In spite of Ross’ attempts to ruin the book for me, it being one of his favorites, by asking me if I had gotten to this or that part yet when I had not, I finished it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Upon returning to my regular, steady diet of science fiction, I was slapped in the face by hint #3. I was dissatisfied and bored with science fiction. Now came, what I consider more of a puzzle piece than a proper hint. Crazy Mike, when he moved from the Bass Lofts, gave me his entire book collection, most of which were indisputable works of greatness. Among those works were several by Heller. I read Something Happened, which was excellent, but also pretty depressing. A couple years ago I cut depressing music out of my listening diet. I’ve found that as I age I am more and more inclined to bouts of depression myself, and so, taking this as a sort of combination hint/puzzle-piece, I looked to see if I might have something by Heller that was funny. And arrived by this circuitous route at the Holy Grail. Last night I started reading a book by Joseph Heller called God Knows, and I believe it just may be the smartest, funniest book I have ever read. Not only that, but it seems tailored philosophically to my personal desires and needs. It’s like the HBO version of Lamb. Larry David is to Seinfeld what God Knows is to Lamb. Yes, yes, I know everyone hates Curb your Enthusiasm (I’ve never seen it myself) but the analogy is unassailable, so stop assailing it already!

I am about to try something desperate and exciting

I have this other short story in another file about real people at the Yacht Club using their real names, and I’m going to try to cut and paste it below, so if a story of that nature follows, you’ll know it worked, otherwise blame it on . . .

Coya –
And

This is going to be a totally untrue story that I make up, but it’s going to have real people in it, and so it seems like I should get in trouble for writing it. Just to make this totally clear, all of the people in the following story are 100 percent real, but I am making up blatant, bald-faced lies about what happened to them. According to my calculations I should be enjoying tremendous fame from a comfy jail cell by Halloween

Well, it all started when Crazy Mike decided that football was the only true team sport. “In football,” said Crazy Mike, “Eleven people must coordinate their actions to achieve a goal, whereas in other sports, such as baseball, basketball, and hockey, it’s basically just a bunch of individuals doing their own thing.” Needless to say, Frank came flying out of a cabinet, where he had been hiding, trying to get some peace, and tackled Crazy Mike. A melee ensued. Punches flew. Chairs were smashed in two! There was blood and a single gunshot, but just who shot who? At the Yacht Club! Yacht Club McYacht Club! The hottest spot north of the hot tub!

Never the less to say*, as we (my lovely and talented co-worker, Thom Doyle and I) separated the combatants, Barry Manilow, who was in town for a show with Elton John at Phillips Arena, walked into the bar and said in a very rude Garfield New Jersey accent, “Hey, can I get a beer, or do I just piss on the first retarded midget I see?”

OH MY GOD! The PC crowd went nuts! Even members of the PC crowd who were huge Barry Manilow fans! Moleen (Not her real name only because I personally promised her I wouldn’t use her real name) started clawing Barry Manilow’s eyes out and shrieking at the top of her lungs.

So, of course, that’s when Michel showed up with her dog Chaco, because she “had to get out of the house before she went crazy”. (Editor’s note: Never go to the Yacht Club to prevent an onset of insanity. It flat-out doesn’t work. However, once you have accepted and embraced the overwhelming, relentless, insatiable insanity of the universe, come to the Yacht Club every day.) So Michel rushes up to Barry Manilow, peels Moleen off his face and yells, “Oh my God! Chuck Norris! Get the Hell out of Dodge!” And so she takes Barry/Chuck back to the little table by the dartboard and commences a quiet conversation about the intricacies and technological headaches of photographing nematodes on a Shure 57, and then they spoke of the rain.

Meanwhile, back at the motel, Frank is applying a raw goose liver to his eye because he got punched in the lip and although he doesn’t like the taste of raw goose liver, he still thinks it looks pretty cool, which, all things considered, to have a discerning eye of that caliber kind of means you won the fight/argument with Crazy Mike, even though Crazy Mike is still in the bar, as opposed to being in a motel room, and is not nursing any wounds at all. In fact, it’s almost as if the entire altercation took place in Frank’s mind!

Hmm . . . what else might be in Frank’s mind that we can all take a look at. Mm hmm, a lot of fighting, a lot of sex . . . there’s some music floating around, a big pile of money! And Air bags. Lots of air bags. Also, I see a white pick up truck. I am getting a very hostile vibe regarding Frank from this white pick up truck. Frank! My brother! Stay away from white pick up trucks!

And but so then, so anyway, there I was, my legs freshly shaved, short tartan skirt, immaculately clean white socks scrunched down to that precise point between calf and ankle, super cute sparkly silver and pink tennis shoes, and who should walk up, but the ghost of David Foster Wallace. And so he says to me, he says, “ God, I am so ashamed of myself. I wanted to write something like Ulysses, that you could just go pluck off the shelf and play Bible Roulette with and just . . . anything your eyes fell on was totally worth writing down.”

And I said, “Well David, may I call you David?” Because I practically worship him and I think he may have had similar wardrobe issues, so I’m sort of intrigued that he has caught me in this unguarded moment, not that my front door isn’t wide open and any large man couldn’t come in and do something funny to me, like slit my throat and steal my eighty dollars. Funny, ha ha, get it?
“Just open it,” David says wearily. I have Infinite Jest on my desk, but also Ulysses, so I hesitate. I look at his “I just ate lemons,” face and open Ulysses. And it says “Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? Looking at yourself in the mirror.” So I get up from my desk, collect up the three $4 mirrors positioned around my bed, and throw them out the window, where, hopefully they will land in the soft grass and not break so I can go collect them up the next time I have one of these unbearable fits of narcissism. When I turn from the sash David is gone, but it puts me in mind to inspect the merit badges on my girl scout uniform. Everything is satisfactory and ready for Halloween, the only time I . . . say, wait a minute. I’m sure I don’t need to explain to any of my readers that the reason I shave my legs and then spend an hour working Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion into them is because I have a bicycle. Whoa! I’m not gay or anything, but by shaving my legs and dressing in cute little outfits, and then making sure my legs are smooth by applying lotion, I can shave (Haha, pardon the pun!) a good .003 seconds off my 50K ride! God! Will you please get your filthy perverted minds out of the gutter for two seconds!?

The point, obviously, is that God is a crazy, sneaky weirdo, and he made you (and me) with quirks that can push one over the edge. So, make his day and just laugh and indulge yourself and then throw yourself on your face and weep in shame, but remember, it’s all His fault. You are blameless. You are the way God made you. Just don’t hurt anyone else or the game is off. If he made you so that you enjoy hurting other people (and he can be a dick like that) you’re just going to have to put extra effort into finding someone he made that likes to be hurt. Yes, when is life ever fair? And remember, no matter how bad your troubles seem, there is always a fresh batch of exciting new ones lurking in your future, problems that will make your current ones seem like child’s play. Unbelievably, some day you will wish you only had your current problems to deal with, so enjoy them! These are the good ol’ days!

Sigh! Since Tommy has a job now we are unable to get together to get this farce on line. Five year Hiatus blah blah blah.

*This is an exciting new malapropism I am working on, a cross between needless to say, and never the less. -Ed

And then she kissed me, and it annoyed me because she loved me and I couldn’t feel that. So I put on an immaculately clean white blouse, a navy blue skirt, white tights, and red canvas Keds and watched Taxi Driver because it was 911. I am a patriot! Like Doyle, only less weird.

Which brings me to an exciting new important fact. Possibly this piece is called 9-11, which, when I wrote it was supposed to be a little joke because 9-11 was so far in the future, but now it’s really far in the past, but it’s not because of my procrastination . . . it’s because of a breakdown in a system in which I would bring Tommy a flash drive and he would put it on the web site, which worked out great for me because Tommy didn’t have a job, so of course he was wisely hanging out at the Yacht Club, but now he has a job which is totally fucking me up, as far as my publication dates go.

BUT! First he entered the room. Or he would have, had he been able to find the room. But let’s take freedom of the press for a little test drive and see if it means anything to Mel.

I got a nice little letter by snail mail from my dear, dear friends, The Krewe of the Grateful Gluttens (sic) asking me if I would like to be a member of this creative hotbed. Needless to say, of course I would!

But, (Everyone has a big butt, Simone) someone had to text me to get my snail mail address. This, of course, hurt my feelings, as any of my 29 readers would understand, considering that I always state my snail mail address in every column along with various bribes on what my readers could get in return for writing to me.

Well, all seriousness aside, I got chastised for not having an e-mail address! And now there was the insurmountable problem of conveying to me when and where the welcoming party would be!

Well, in the 11th hour I got a petulantly hand-drawn map which accurately directed me to some rednecks bachelor party, where I had a pretty good time until some naked dude started running around. After several calls and texts to . . . people I knew (?) at the party I was invited to I just went home.

Too bad I’m not online, everything would have been fine. Too bad the people in the group who know me couldn’t communicate to me in person. Too bad no one ever read my little Yacht Club column so they could make my day and send me a snail mail. Too bad communicating has come to this.

Too bad for me.

-Gino

As much as I like the new REM album, it reminds too much of March 2011. But April has arrived, and I always listen to Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables in April. It’s nice and quick and clean and gets things done. And I know it may be cliché, but fresh new stuff does always seem to happen in April, and for some reason I always end up being glad to say good-bye to March. I don’t know if you can tell from the flavor of those last few sentences, but I took my first peek at Facebook the other day. The real Facebook, not my silly, pseudo-facebook page on the fridge door of The Yacht Club, which is really just a novelty tourist attraction that no one would ever construe as a serious information source about my life.

This is not an exact quote, but the very first facebook page entry I ever read went about like this:

Well, it’s April, and I’m glad. Had a bowl of cornflakes with a banana for breakfast. Decided to break out my white, canvas Keds and walk to Starbucks. I think it must have rained last night.

Wow! Seriously?! Thanks for satisfying my fetishes, but. . . .

“Well, what did you think Facebook was?”

“Something different. A regime-changer. A government-toppler.”

So, anyway, I’ve decided to take a shot at doing Facebook properly by telling you about my day, which day was Thursday, March 31st, 2011. It went like this:

I woke up again because I had to go to the bathroom. It had been raining for five days, so I couldn’t tell the time, but it seemed like night. I never put my glasses on, but I don’t specifically remember seeing a blob of red light where my clock radio sits on my night table. I peed and returned to bed and instantly fell back asleep during which sleep I may have heard sirens. The next time I woke up it was clearly daytime, as I could see. What I saw was that I had no electricity, so I donned my glasses and then spent around a half hour forgetting that I had no power. I flipped various light switches fifty times, tried to turn on my computer, my TV, my stereo, my Zebulon X3000 mind-reading device. Nothing would work, and it was still cloudy and too dark to read, and my house was getting really cold really fast (while the interior of my refrigerator warmed up nicely). I decided to take a little walk since it was still three hours until noon at which time I was to meet my co-worker, Danni, in L5P so that I could use her PC to pay my traffic tickets. (I’m assuming that you would already know that my tickets were for running a stop sign and not wearing my seat belt because I certainly would have already ranted and raved about what a lying piece of . . . well, anyway, that whole story would already have been on my Facebook page, I guess. Hmm . . . actually, I wonder how long posts stay on your F.B. page, and how lengthy can they be and all. Hmph.)

So I put on my black, suede Osiris tennis shoes, with the logo of Venus and the crescent moon, and set out to walk around the block. I was halfway through my Ulysses-esque odyssey when a very pretty, young, perky woman accosted me. The clock on my cell phone said 10 AM. She asked me if I lived in this neighborhood and when I admitted I did she asked me if I “knew what happened.” When I admitted I did not she proceeded to tell me that earlier that morning two men had been involved in a high-speed automobile chase with the police and that they had lost control of their vehicle and that they had crashed into a telephone pole right around the corner and that 600 people were without power and was I one of them and would I mind being interviewed on channel 2 Action News! “Hmm,” I said (and now I realize I should have said “huh”) and so I was whisked around the corner to the scene of the disastrophe and I was given a little more information by the perky young woman such as that one of the suspects had to be extricated from the demolished escape-vehicle by the jaws of life and but the other suspect had somehow managed to flee on foot (He had his seatbelt on I’m thinking) but was almost immediately apprehended with the aid of K-9 police dogs in the yard of my next door neighbor, which is pretty much where the perky young woman first accosted me. I said my witty little thing about my house getting colder and colder while my refrigerator warmed up nicely and the perky young woman got a sort of puppyish thrill thinking about how great of an interviewee I was going to be. I felt pretty dang good about myself.

So, she asked me what I was doing when the incident occurred and I said I was just getting ready to go to bed and so when the power went out I just went ahead and hit the hay. She looked very crestfallen and said falteringly that, but the accident had happened at 5:30 AM, and instead of being all suave and cool and saying something like that that was what time I went to bed because I was a bartender or something endearing, I got kind of defensive and offended and said “Well my power went out at around midnight and it must have been something else beside the high-speed chase incident that caused my power to go out, when in fact I don’t remember the power going out at all and I totally felt betrayed and ambushed by her harsh interviewing tactics. We parted formally and politely, but both of us felt that our date had been ruined by an unfortunate misunderstanding and we were embarrassed that it had to happen in front of the friendly, pudgy cameraman who was less sexually attractive to the perky young woman than I was, but who got to leave with her in the Channel 2 Action News van.

I skipped breakfast, thank God, because if I had to give you a lengthy description of every meal I had, I would never get to the part of my day where I got to see Danni’s unbelievably cool pad with a Taj Mahal sort-of pool with a waterfall, and I surely never would get to the part of the day where I finally, actually went to work but where, immediately Frankie and Michelle had an altercation which resulted in Frankie not being allowed into the Yacht Club anymore again and then the part of my day where I finally, actually went home from work and there was a kitten stuck in my kitchen wall that was mewling pathetically and incessantly and so I called everyone I know and had long conversations with them about what I should do, and then I was on the phone with my friend who is also an excellent customer and coincidentally my neighbor and who had also lost his electricity earlier that day, and who, since he was on his way home, was going to stop by and check out my kitten-stuck-in-the-wall situation but who was t-boned by some punk fuckhead right in front of Starbucks on Moreland and who was concerned that, even though the accident was totally not his fault, that he might still get in trouble because he had stayed at the Yacht Club maybe a little longer than he normally would because he was taking a lot of the load off of myself and my co-worker, Shane by telling the high-speed-chase/loss-of-electricity story and the Frankie story which every single person that came into the Yacht Club had to hear and which there was no possible way that Shane and I could tell them all if we were to keep up the incredibly high standard of service which Yacht Club customers have come to enjoy, and expect since Robert trained me.

Wow, I just don’t think Facebook is going to work out for me. I don’t think it was designed for people who have days like I do. I mean, I still haven’t even gotten to the part of my day after the automobile accident when the distribution of traffic citations was finally resolved and how I got my friend Ross to come over and try to help me get the mewling kitten out of my wall, and how we stayed up practically all night trying various tactics which failed and how he told me the story of how he gave Hippy the idea to open up the Yacht Club.

Maybe there will be a new thing for people who have such days by the time my technological hiatus ends, which is January 11th, 2012. Which reminds me that I would like to clear up a contest that I announced but never got around to posting the details of. But it needs to be set off with bold-faced letters thusly.

HOW TO WIN THE CONTEST

First of all, to refresh your memory, in January of 2012, or, roughly, in 280 days, I, Gino, am going to enter the Guinness book of world records by writing a sentence with the most commas in it, ever. In addition, I am going to buy a gadget, a device or some geeky technical thing. If I buy something that someone recommends to me, I am going to reward that person with a $25 gift certificate to the Yacht Club. Now, before you get too smug and self confident and lazy, and say to yourself, “Oh, I still have 280 days before I have to worry about winning this contest,” consider that I am going to award the prize to only one person, so if two people bring me a magazine article about the new 3000z mind reader, and I decide that’s the gadget for me, the prize is going to go to the person who brings the information first. So, conceivably you could find an article about a prototype of the 3000z now, bring me a copy, it will be put in Gino’s special folder and dated, and if I end up getting a 3000z, even if a million other people bring me press about it around Christmas, when it becomes available for purchase, only you will get the prize!

So, get on your bad motor scooters and ride! Ride right down to that place where you find out about all the exciting new technical gadgets that are coming out next year and win yourself twenty five dollars worth of delicious Yacht Club food and beer! The sooner the better, because I feel many exciting distractions coming on. The Inman Park Festival is right around the corner (April 29th), not to mention 4/20. Baseball season is upon us and I feel a Braves playoff run coming on under Freddie Gonzales (even Scottie is excited about baseball). Then there will be swimming at Danni’s and sunbathing and drinking and then it will be back to school before you know it and Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas and the Gingerbread trailer park and new years and then BOOM! My technological hiatus will be over and you will be thinking, “Damn! Where did the time go?” The entire rest of the year will probably take less time for you than March 31st took for me. Don’t get caught with your pants down, on a scooter, in Avondale! Research your entries today! -Gino

The second worst thing that can happen to someone without making the newspaper (not counting famous people who make the newspaper for having nothing happen to them) happened to me briefly this morning. I couldn’t think of anything to write about! It was like opening your bedroom door in the middle of the night on your way to the bathroom and there was nothing but a gray fog. You could walk through the fog, but there were no walls to define your location, so you couldn’t even go back to bed. Also, you still had to pee really badly, but for some reason you had an unreasonable, disciplined inclination to not pee without a toilet. Also a feeling that your bones wanted out of your skin like feral cats on a snowy night, trapped in a nice, warm house where there was plenty of food. It very much reminded me of what a few of my clients over the years have assured me was the worst thing that can happen to a person which is withdrawal from heroin. Boy, does that ever sound unpleasant! In addition to the bones coming out of the skin, and the desperately needing to pee thing, you get these exciting bonus features: Nausea, diarrhea (Fuckin’ A, I spelled that right without looking it up) fatigue, sweats, chills, Parkinson’s-like inability to stop moving, every flu symptom such as aches, sneezing, runny nose, more nausea, and then your soul starts climbing on top of your feral-cat-bones in an all out attempt to get out of the freezing cold/boiling water they’re all drowning in except there is no they, it’s all you, the whole sick, fucked up bag of nightmares topped off by the grand finale realization that it would be way better to be dead than to go on feeling this way for one second.

Oddly, these hellish feelings are caused by a strictly biological process in which the neurotransmitters in your CNS (Central Nervous System, which consists basically of your brain and spine) are disrupted from doing the thing that they usually do perfectly as long as you don’t dick around with them. But here’s where it gets really weird, and significant for you, and where it will get weird for me on January 12th 2012. There is an exciting new disorder that is only just now rearing its ugly head, mostly among teens (but aren’t they always the first to experience crazy new malfunctions), and that disorder, which smacks of heroin withdrawal and writers block is being entered into the PDR (Physician’s Desk Reference) as Facebook Depression.

Don’t believe me? Well, I don’t blame you. But the article is posted on my facebook page, which is on the door of the wine cooler, which cooler is all the way on the left behind the bar as you’re looking at the liquor bottles. My page was scientifically designed by experts to negate Facebook Depression. I’m not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed, but it has become the 2nd most photographed spot in Little Five Points, barely edging out the big Vortex skull, but still miles behind the black-painted alley between American Apparel and Earthtone. Just to put this all in perspective, the fourth most photographed spot in Little Five Points is the telephone pole with all the staples in it, so. . . .

I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but they are building something on the corner of Moreland Avenue and Hosea Williams (still settin’ ‘em free!). The previous structure is demolished and the ground leveled. A building could go up at any second. But what will it be? OH MY GOD, I HOPE IT’S AN ARBY’S. Please don’t let it be a gas station with a convenience store, like the two across the street from it and the one next door. Please don’t let it be vintage clothing. Pizza or subs would be idiotic since Goodfella’s is a block away. The nearest Arby’s isn’t even within a parsec. (If you want an awesomely entertaining explanation of what a parsec is, see Marty the Plumber. If you really want to know what a parsec is see Ross. If, like Goldilocks, you’re interested in something in between, see Roy.

Not many people know this, but the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club is the bar farthest away from any Nuclear power plant on Earth. This information was compiled by the G.A.S.P. Vetting and Ombudsman-Concubine Committee mostly from conversations with Mark Berg, three-time-finalist for Yacht Club Customer-of-the-Month as well as an electrician who works exclusively at nuclear power plants and who “Always has to drive a really long way.”

Whew! Boy, I’ll tell you, that’s a load off my mind. To think, that just by being at the Yacht Club, where most of us would want to be anyway, we are also in the safest bar on Earth. Maybe not the safest place, but the safest bar. And, seriously, would you rather be at the North Pole than at the Yacht Club just because the Pole is two inches farther away from a nuclear power plant? Me neither! They don’t even have a bar at the North Pole, (though if they did, actually, that would explain a lot of the inappropriate sessions I had with Santa at the Jasmine Mall in Sumter, South Carolina).

Hey! Whoever you were the other day . . . is that still you? Are you sure?

That’s not what I meant to say at all, but I decided to go with it and see where it led. Luckily not far.

Hey! Whoever that was that asked me why you have to identify wavy letters whenever you purchase something on the internet, I now have an answer. Those collections of wavy letters are called Captchas, which is short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Well, I think that’s pretty cool, and anyone who knows me will also know that I tumesce at the slightest mention of Alan Turing, who is my hero, but who has somehow never inspired anyone to write a definitive and comprehensive biography, at least as far as I can tell.

Where’s Troy when you need him? He was able to find a copy of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, (who cares if it says “please return to Douglas Both” on the front, inside cover) and I’m certain that, had he not disappeared off the face of the Earth, he would be able to find, or write a wicked biography of Turing. Dang, I hope he’s not in jail for robbing poor ol’ Douglas Both.

I don’t do this often, as you know, since I am not prone to negative thoughts, but sometimes I want to get things straightened out in my mind and I never know when my last chance to sit down behind a keyboard and reach out to thirty people is going to be. So, if you don’t want to read something that might bum you out and that also has graphic, violent passages involving animals and children, then DON’T READ THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH. So, I was reading the Tuesday New York Times, because it has a science section, even though I wasn’t reading the science section, and I came to an article about an 11-year-old girl who was really bubbly, and always had a smile on her face, and was an honor roll student, brimming with enthusiasm and liked to plant trees with her youth group and then who was repeatedly gang-raped in her small Texas town which was community-oriented and where everybody knew everybody else. When I say I came to the article, what I mean is that it was the very first article at the very top of the front page. I guess it was pretty much the headline article. Then, to take my mind off that, I started sorting through some of my stuff because I needed to rearrange said stuff after my friend came and got his furniture back which I was holding for him until he could get settled. So, anyway, I found pictures I had taken of my cat after I found her eviscerated a few feet from my back door. My mind was sort of out of the frying pan and into the fire, so to speak.

And so, I was wondering, do you think the perpetrators of the crime in the first scenario above were sick? Because, if so, I don’t think it’s really right or moral to smash sick people’s faces in and slowly torture them to death. So don’t be too hasty to say they were sick. Because I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that they were evil, and sometimes evil needs a good smack down. Granted that there is probably a fair amount more of philosophical and moral ground to cover here, but I don’t want to hog the whole internet again.

So let’s move on to scenario two. I really loved that sweetie-pie cat, and I’m afraid to think of what I would have done if I had captured the animal (And I really hope the fuck it was an animal, and I was assured by the special cruelty-to-animals police officer who responded to my call that it was not Satan worshippers) that gutted her. And in fact, I don’t want to think about it anymore. Sorry, but often when people come into the bar, they have heavy-duty experiences on their minds, and I want them to know I’m here. C’mon, bring me your sick and your evil. Let’s sort them out.

See what happens when I spend too long not fantasizing about the future? I get morbid! Future-withdrawal is the same as all those other tortures where your brain is suddenly cut off from the pleasure it craves. And that whole shaking and fidgeting thing isn’t just some annoying tic. It slightly alleviates that unbearable coming-out-of-your-skin-feeling. The heck with this! I’m going to the bookstore to buy some science magazines and then to the Yacht Club to talk to my friends about the future!

Speaking of the future (he he he), I need my hairs cut! (For those of you suffering from Facebook Withdrawal Depression, or whatever, I’ll also throw in that I had Apple Jacks for breakfast, walked to Publix to buy the NYT, then came home and shaved my legs before emptying my rattraps.) And when I need my hairs cut, there is only one person I would trust with the job, and that is Jessica Mark at SALON. Seven-time customer-of-the-month with over twenty years in the business, including eleven right at the Midtown/Buckhead border and four right here inL5P, Jessica has finally opened her own place at 331 Elizabeth St. which is right where Elizabeth crosses Highland. If the next time you see me I don’t have a magnificent haircut it means I missed my appointment and there will almost certainly be a very justifiably angry woman pursuing me with a pair of scissors.

And as if that weren’t enough stuff for you to assimilate and ruminate over, I am going to try to quit smoking. (No lie, right now I’m fetching my cigarettes so I can finish this paragraph). I have been steered towards someone who has quit smoking for 17 months, which person steered me to a nurse in Chicago who (I’ll leave out all the parts about really wanting to quit) swears that FOUR pharmaceuticals are the key. Hell, I’d try four hundred, I’m so sick of smoking, but here’s the combo I’m employing May 1st (yes, that’s May Day!). CHANTIX, WELLBUTRIN, NICOTROL (nasal spray), and NICOTROL (inhaler). This is war! I no longer care if they’re antidepressants that will instantly make me kill myself, that is how completely sick I am of smoking. As long as everybody else keeps smoking so I can still experience the beautiful aroma of cigarette smoke, I’ll be fine.

So, I guess that’s it for today kidlets. I hope I’m not incapacitated with writers block, or heroin withdrawal, or facebook depression before our next session. Because, not only am I going to have a follow up to my smoking saga, but I plan as well to get a handle on the whole gnome controversy which has evidently erupted on Hippy’s scooter facebook page.

Also, I may want to barely mention new advances in nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. We shall see what shall be sent. Write to me at 1768 Pennington Place Atlanta, GA 30316 and win a free SASE!

I know it’s taking me a million years to review this new REM album. It’s probably not even their newest album by now. And just so you don’t think I’m some REM fanatic, I’ll explain my reasoning for wanting to talk about their latest effort, why I specifically want to do it here on The Yacht Club site.

No matter what you may think of REM now, it is pretty indisputable that they were a hot young band in the mid 1980s. And guess what else was hot and new in the mid 1980s? That’s right! The good old (young at the time!) Euclid Avenue Yacht Club. And we all know the recipe for success when it comes to partying and having a great time. Combine two hot young things! I’m certain that the Yacht Club was where I first heard half of Rem’s new albums before Bill Berry left the band and I especially remember when Robert first played Document because Mike Mills was at the bar drinking a bottle of Budweiser and I was giddy with hero-worship. And Peter Buck was here when I first heard the album Green. After that they pretty much became too famous to hang out, and the Yacht Club knocked down a wall and got high chairs and started selling Jagermeister and taking credit cards and then the Braves kind of made me forget about music (And that was an extremely fun era in Yacht Club history, watching playoff baseball from 1990-1993).

Well, here are a couple songs that I like on REM’s newest album called Collapse Into Now. I will include anything negative I have heard about them.
Also, I think it is worth noting that I have played the album a few times in the Yacht Club and didn’t see any sour faces, or signs of physical discomfort. Not even from Hippy!

Mine Smell Like Honey – So catchy it’s scary. I wrote the title on the chalkboard in the ladies room at the Yacht Club and someone responded, “Then you should see a doctor, because they’re supposed to smell like shit.” I thought that was pretty funny. Also Fifi Tim didn’t like the song because he said it was their first single. I don’t understand that, and probably I missed something in the conversation. Also, my mom and sister said to say hello to Tim in a telephone conversation I had with them on Tuesday, March 22nd.
Uberlin – Currently my favorite on album, though that changes daily. Kind of reminds me of Electrolyte and flying over a city at night and seeing lots of twinkly lights. Some magazine I was thumbing through (probably Rolling Stone, since I am not a big thumber) said that this song was not good despite its clever double-meanings, which, again, I probably misunderstood, or either I am too dumb to get the double meanings.
It Happened Today – If you think Michael Stipe and Mike Mills singing their hearts out is the greatest thing since sliced beer, you’ll love it. Otherwise, you might not like it much.
Walk it Back – If you think you did the right thing, you’ll love it, otherwise. . . .
That Someone is You – Currently my second favorite, although that now changes hourly. It’s one and a half minutes of get ‘er done!
Alligator_Aviator_Autopilot_Antimatter – Super fun to babble along with, like ITEOTWAWKI (AIFF). Peaches sings on this track, so I got to have enlightening conversations with people because I didn’t know who Peaches was. (I had never heard of The Black-Eyed Peas either until Superbowl Sunday).

Since my review basically adds up to a confession that I don’t have the slightest idea of what’s going on in the music world anymore, I think it would be best if I, after one more minor anecdote, quit the field and attacked Yacht life from a direction that any fourteen-year-old-kid couldn’t stalwartly defend. And that anecdote is this. . . .

I said I wasn’t a big thumber, so understand that this is the story of the second thumb job I gave in 2011. (Twice in three months is well within respectable parameters. I don’t even know any tricks to keep the infinity of circulars from cascading out of the magazines and onto the polished floor of my Publix.

Anyway, there I was, furtively thumbing Rolling Stone magazine at 7:15 a.m. on a Tuesday morning (I totally can’t thumb if there is anyone around who could be watching me. It is not an altogether uncommon medical condition referred to as shy thumb.). Not surprisingly (to me) I was unfamiliar with most of the entertainers in the articles, but what did sort of take me aback was being ignorant of every single act in the top 40, with the horrifying exception of one artist who held three positions; numbers 4, 8 and 34. That artist was Justin Bieber. But really, all I mean by that is that I’ve heard of Bieber. I’ve never actually heard any of his songs.

So, of course, having seen Idiocracy several times, on account of owning it and everything, I couldn’t help but wonder if the world had become unbelievably stupid while I was playing Everquest where I had attained the 70th level of Paladinhood, while becoming unbelievably stupid myself in the process. So I rushed right out (yes, yes, I was already out) and bought a copy of The New York Times, because it was Tuesday, which day they have a science section, and the first article I read addressed the question, Do you have free will?

Well, I’m pretty sure I was eight when I realized that the question of whether or not I had free will was utterly, totally, and completely meaningless. Of course the article is based upon a study painstakingly conducted by this and that egghead from super-famous schools, (basically Yale and Harvard, just to give it ironic plausibility I guess) and asks the question; Suppose Mark and Bill live in a deterministic universe where everything that happens, from the big-bang on is completely caused by what came before it and that every single thing you do is completely inevitable. Then they give you scenarios in which Mark and Bill commit increasingly heinous deeds, from cheating on their taxes to raping and murdering their teenage daughters so that they can be free to have whores over. Then they ask people if Mark and Bill are morally responsible for their actions, and most people say the tax-cheater isn’t, but the murderer is.

Umm . . . everything that happens in their universe is predetermined. It says that at the beginning of the scenario. Nobody ever had a choice to do anything different, not the tax-cheater, or the guys in between, or the murderer, or the question-answering people, or me with my righteous indignation and outrage, or God (if there is one, it doesn’t say) or the judges and lawyers, or the scientists, or you reading this log entry! It’s just stupid and meaningless (I can’t help saying this, I have no choice) and why would anyone ever even spend one nanosecond thinking about it?!

OK, just to prove I can be calm and think rationally about this; if given that no one had any choice about what they did, and everything was predetermined, and whatever happened was inevitable, and everything that was going to happen was inescapable . . . THAN WHAT THE FUCK DIFFERENCE DOES ANYTHING MAKE???????

And this is in the science section of the New York Times, which I look forward to reading all week. I would rather have read a two-thousand word description of a piece of corn that a bird was eating out of elephant poop.

Of course I don’t feel qualified to conclude from these unrelated incidents that all magazines and newspapers are idiotic, but I do think I’ll give Idiocracy another viewing, maybe start working on the screenplay for Idiocracy deuce.

I’d love to think that if I had thumbed Spin and read The Wall Street Journal I would think everything was fine . . . and maybe it is, maybe I just hit a bizarre patch of retardedness.

Now, at last, back to intellectually worthy topics. Did you know The Cars have a new album out? Oh my God, I am so totally going to buy it. Ric Ocasek is back writing the songs. Actually, I don’t think there was any period where they existed in which he didn’t write the songs. I know they toured a few years ago with Todd Rundgren fronting the band (which, how weird is that) but I think it was just them performing classic cars tunes. And, evidently, that Benjamin Orr died. He was the guy on the back of the Candy-O album cover with the red lolli-pop. And, oddly, although his voice was absolutely indistinguishable from Ric Ocasek’s, he sang most of their big hits.

So, Friday, March 25th was the day in 1655 that Christian Huygens discovered Saturn’s moon Titan. When I texted Ross this tidbit he shot back that his five computers were named Cassini, Huygens, Titan, Voyager and Saturn. I can’t believe I’ve never named my computers. The idea never even crossed my mind. I’ve named my car, and every feral cat in my neighborhood, but not the single-most useful companion I have. Crazy! I’m open to suggestions. I feel I should maybe name my cell phone too. It’s just an old dumb workhorse, but it’s in very close proximity to my mouth and face an awful lot. Maybe I’ll name it What do you want.

If you want to know how to pronounce Huygens, please see Roy (Dr. Love) Lovell.

Dang, I just discovered a new bummer, which is just what I needed. I sort of know how Hippy feels now when he wipes off his hands after spending three hours fixing some super-gross, dirty piece of machinery, looks up, and sees the health-inspector telling him that he can’t open his big beautiful window. I’m sorry, his big, beautiful, expensive window. Did I mention that it was the first day of spring?

Anyway, my thing that I discovered (and in all honesty, it’s more of a rediscovery, since I was in a band in the mid-eighties) is that it totally sucks to depend on anyone else to help you do anything. And I’m only talking about anything creative really. Because when you’re trying to do something creative and you need someone else to help you do it, they are often totally ready to help you. And then you might get in a crabby mood and they might get sick of your shit. Then, conversely, you might have a spurt of productivity, and all of a sudden the person you depend on gets into a crabby mood and your spurt is totally dampened and ruined and all you can do is fret and wish you could do everything yourself, but at the same time you feel guilty because you weren’t at your best when the other person was having moments of genius, which of course just makes you feel worse.

And then there are groups of creative people, and I have to wonder; is it like what I described above, but a hundred times more maddening and frustrating, or do they flow around each other and fill in the cracks so that whoever is on has plenty of help and support? I don’t know, but, there is such a group of very creative people who hang out at the Yacht Club called The Grateful Gluttons, and I was sitting with a few of them at the big window table Thursday night and they were planning. And here is what I came away with. There is a gnome event in the works. Well-groomed men wearing jackets shook my hand and asked about the event in a forced casual manner. Liz says, “Psst, if you’re serious about participating, be at The Yacht Club at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 29th.” The chalkboard out in front of the Yacht Club refers to it as a “gnome pep-rally.”
Their office did not return our calls when we sought to clarify these details, but that may be because all the details were flawlessly perfect, or it may be because they edit this internet entry and talking to me would just be redundant silliness, or maybe they were busy planning! Anyway, I’ll be at the Yacht Club on March 29th, and I don’t even have to work that day! I want to investigate this secret gnome pep-rally!

Oops! I hope March 29th isn’t the day Jesus is returning to Earth! Actually, I hope it is! Has anyone seen those billboards proclaiming the date? I had a copy of the newspaper article hanging up on the Yacht Club’s employee work schedule; so that people would know to take some time off or whatever they needed to do, but it mysteriously disappeared the day Hippy wrecked his scooter into the Waffle House Museum. Coincidence? Not a chance!

OK! Who’s up for a little prognosticating? Ha ha! Just kidding.

Very recently the Yacht Club burped up another very creative person. Jess is writing an intriguing piece which must be heard to be appreciated, like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Trust me, you don’t want to read Finnegans Wake without an accompanying audio recording of someone with a nice Irish brogue reading it aloud because there are so many phonetic puns. Once you’ve heard it a few times it’s more rewarding to read without the audio. Anyway, I hope Jess continues the project. Jess Joyce has a nice ring to it, eh?

As you probably know, there used to be a very cool bookstore right across the street from the Yacht Club. I can’t even count the times that one of my clients J-walked Euclid Avenue to purchase a book to settle some philosophical dispute we were whiling away the hours on. (While means to spend time idly and pleasantly! We do a fair amount of whiling in the Yacht Club, and you should too! Hint: The absolute best whiling time at the Yacht Club is noon on Friday.)

Now there is an American Apparel clothing store across the street, with a blindingly bright sign. It sounds like a terrible trade off, but if you are sexually attracted to slender teenaged girls who are compelled to wear tight, fetishy outfits, and who look angelic, but who secretly may be bad girls, you can somehow find a way to get beyond the letdown. C’mon, I’ll show you.

One way is to count the seconds until dress the manikin day, when the little hotties come out from behind that hateful wall that runs down the middle of the store. On this day they work in the big picture window putting various tights and leggings on the half-manikins. Sometimes dress the manikin day coincides with short skirts and childish leggings day which is when the employees are compelled to wear . . . you guessed it! Compelling big picture.

Some women think I’m a pig. And some pigs think I’m a woman. I can’t get involved too deeply in the psyches of every creature God ever put on this earth. If I’m having regular sex with something, I will usually become interested in its philosophy, but otherwise. . . .

As you may or may not know, depending on where you started reading this log entry, there used to be a really cool bookstore across the street from the Yacht Club. The owner, Frank, (no, not that Frank) claims to be a James Joyce fan. And yet, every year I try to get him to participate in a Bloom’s Day celebration (June 16th) but he never does. Even though I publicly excoriate him and offer to have Guinness specials at the Yacht Club and leave abusive messages on the A Capella Bookstore answering machine! There is obviously something going on with him that I am not getting. Maybe he wrecked his scooter or something.

Well, as I promised, we will be discussing springtime activities that will compliment your Yachting pleasure. One of the surest ways I know of to get up and get out is to pretend that if you stayed home you would have to pour over hundreds of pages of physics equations. (NOTE! This is only true for 99.9987% of the Yacht Club’s clientele. If it is not true for you, please see me immediately! YOU ARE NOT IN TROUBLE!)

Very very soon we will be opening the big window again, if I have to wrap chicken wire or screening or whatever around the entire building myself. Don’t think I won’t do it. In fact, I bet I could recruit some help. A person, who previously mopped the floors and cleaned the bathrooms at the Yacht Club, (Remember that honest, wallet-finding guy from last year?) is back in town. Back in town from the harvest. Man, I’ll bet he’s got some tales to tell. We could probably wrap screening around I-285 while listening to his tales. If you want the big window open, just walk up to Hippy (if that’s really Hippy and not just Hippy’s body with a different brain put in it!)) and hand him a quarter. If you never want the big window opened again, don’t do anything. Exercise your rights as an American!

OK, OK! More fun things to do in the spring. Ahhh! Go to the Yacht Club and sit by the big opened window!

Go to the Yacht Club and talk about physics and science fiction!

Look at hot babes in L5P!

Walk around in L5P and pop into the Yacht Club every half hour for a beer or mixed drink (or a tasty beverage as we like to call them.)

Use all your well-learned politesse to figure out if your role as confessor/ psychiatrist/ marriage councilor/ referee/ babysitter/ cop/ enabler/ unrolled model makes people feel uncomfortable when they see you anyplace other than the Yacht Club.

Get over yourself.

Fly a kite. (Up to the highest height!)

OK, on that note the new fad in women’s fashion must be undressed. But first, a little MUFUMBA! Evidently, in the sixties, women, and young women, hit on the potent fashion of short skirts, sometimes with knee socks. Then, there was an inevitable backlash against it, and women, and young women, started wearing pants, than big baggy pants so that they could be as equally unappealing, sexually, as big fat men, and then they attained the pinnacle of unattractiveness by wearing dirty, baggy jeans and dirty, ratty skirts over the jeans! Incredibly ugly! In effect only the geekiest freaking male who was sexually attracted to the human brain (such as myself) was satisfied. But a few Ivy League eggheads who conducted some studies concluding that women are also sexual creatures mitigated the disaster. In other words, these nerds put forth that women liked sex (although they spend nowhere near the amount of time men do pouring over pornography or just looking at members of the opposite sex). So, realizing that men can easily subsist on masturbating 80 times a day while looking at pictures of girls in skirts, a new fashion was conceived and overpopulating the planet into catastrophe is back on track.

TIGHTS AND T-SHIRTS

This is beyond belief! At first I thought I had slipped into a fantasy world in which all of my secret fetishes were being humored, but I have had several very analytical and scrupulously honest friends verify that this does in fact seem to be a new fashion trend. Ladies, this is a HOT look! Woot!! If there’s anything we males can do in return . . . bathe, get rich, anything, please let us know! Just please don’t go back to those big pants! PLEASE! Also, if you want me to teach you how to play chess while you wear tights and a t-shirt, give me a call at 404-688-CLUB.

I seem to remember that while I was writing last week about crazy future mumbo jumbo, that I was listening to the new REM album, and that maybe I was going to mention it from time to time as I wrote. Well, of course I didn’t. I just kind of threw in, at the end, that I liked the record. Sorry. It really deserves more. I really like it.

So we’ll make up for it this go round. First of all, I still like it, which is much more telling, because often I like something for around two seconds and then I don’t anymore. But I have found some lyrical snippets that really hit home for me. To wit . . . I will make it thru the day until the day becomes the night, then I will make it thru the night. A+ for those lyrics.

Now I’ve gotten myself mixed up with these nutty guys who want to make a movie. Wanting to make a movie would describe just about every living human being I have ever met. The only difference is that these guys actually could make a movie. Like, they have experience doing so, and stuff to do it with. Cameras and lighting, and know-how. I would tell you what the movie is about, but I had to sign all this crazy non-disclosure legalese about intellectual property and I don’t want to blow my share of the giant mountain of money this early into the game. I was thinking more along the lines of waiting until I could actually smell the money before I screw myself out of it.

And what does this have to do with the Yacht Club? Well, nothing, as long as anyone who opens there mouth within earshot of me in the next couple of months and tells a quirky or intriguing anecdote, or otherwise does or says anything even remotely funny or interesting has an army of lawyers standing by because I’m going to steal it! Mua ha ha ha ha!

I’m totally not kidding.

Also, this spring, I have discovered a fun new game, which I like to call The Cycle, in which you smoke a cigarette, which makes you tired, so you lay down, and while you’re lying down you don’t sleep. Instead you think of all the things you are going to do when you have enough energy to move! Then, as soon as you have sufficient energy, you smoke a cigarette! To make this game more fun and exciting, you can, after lighting up, throw your pack of cigarettes down the hall, or, even better, if the screens have fallen out of your windows, you can chuck your pack of cigarettes outside into the beautiful day, so that when the crippling, incapacitating effects of a smoke wear off you have to take a walk of sorts and thus get exercise and fresh air. Now, if you live in Venice you can toss them out the window into the bow, stern or prow of a passing gondola so that, in order to have another smoke you have to go on a fun-filled exotic adventure!

NOT AN EXCERPT FROM A FILM

And so I said, “Dr. T.” because his name is Doctor Totrallinarhiarooarhinarhenarhina. “Dr. T I have to have my methadone. If I have to go back to the clinic, I will. This Prednisone and these Percocets are fine to have on hand in case I have a flare up, but I absolutely cannot live without this tiny little 20 mg of methadone in the morning. It may be psychosomatic for all I know. I don’t know, and I don’t care. My symptoms when I don’t take it? Nausea, diarrhea, a general malaise, and the feeling that I am coming out of my skin!”

And he said, “No, Rich. But I can get you heroin if you want.”

“Will I still maintain my desire to automate all minorities, and less educated, and all-around-less- fortunate people out of work?”

“That desire will not be diminished.”

For more on the adventures of Scooter Wreckin’ Hippy go to THE GINO FAN PAGE ON FACEBOOK!

So, anyway, last night there was an ant in my bed.

Not just some little ol’ anty oozer, but a big giant Amazonian Army ant. It was, like, 2 inches long, black as midnight, and had yellow stripes across its thorax, or abdomen, or whatever. YIKES!

OK, BYE

P.S. Hippy’s scooter wreck is no excuse to plunge into an existential despair or suicidal depression.

For more on getting over yourself please goto TGFPOF where there is evidence that Hippy was wearing tights and a T-shirt when he had his incident.

I bet you agree. These speculations about the future and science fiction themes are getting old. Which is why this log entry will be the last of that nature for a while. Starting next week we’ll talk about springtime and all the lovely, fun activities you can plan around your Yacht Club drinking and dining pleasure.

But right now I am still freezing my ass off as I try to sit outside and read the New York Times. The wind is blowing the newspaper around in the most annoying way, there are hardly any articles about baseball yet and football’s been over for months. Ergo it must still be science fiction season. Fortunately it is Tuesday, and so I can go back in the house, make a mug of hot chocolate (with butterscotch liqueur), and get into da bed with the NYT Science Section.

If all this speculating about the future of technology has become too tiresome for you, don’t torture yourself by reading the rest of this log entry. I am just going to get this out of my system once and for all and, for your amusement, if you like this kind of thing, I’ve got some science fun-facts that you can print up and save in your purse or wallet to impress people you are sexually attracted to at parties or at the bar, or wherever!

So, geeks and nerds, read on! Everyone else, I’ll see you next week!

Ooh! I just thought of a way to get rid of a couple more tenacious readers! Since it is, as I said, Tuesday (March 8th,) I started off the day with a visit to my dear, dear friends Harry and Danny at Waxy Slacks where I purchased the new REM album, Collapse into Now, so I will be sharing my thoughts about the music and lyrics as I listen to it for the first time. So far it doesn’t sound at all like Monster, which is the only rumor I heard. Whether that’s good or bad I guess is subjective. There is a song that starts off, “We live and dream about the future.” I think I’ll just leave it at that for now since those lyrics compliment the flavor of my last cold-winter science log-entry. Blast off!

When the space shuttle Atlantis launches in June, the last breath of air will, for all intensive purposes, come roaring out of the United States space program, which began so enthusiastically in the early sixties. Well, we got to the moon. We have a grubby little space station that doesn’t have a bar, much less a holo-deck. But obviously this whole solid-fuel rocket-ship approach isn’t going to cut it in the vastness beyond Earth’s atmosphere. It’s time for the smart people to start pulling their weight and come up with some significantly different new approaches instead of the endless, tedious, slight variations on the old ideas. So, while they are hee-hawing around for the next few years, we here at The Yacht Club will be conducting important experiments on the effects of alcohol, food and socializing on the human mind, since our minds are the only things we’ll be taking along when we finally head out into the wild black & blue yonder.

Judging from everything I’ve read in the past couple years, a depressing pall has descended over the space program as they collate what they wanted to accomplish, what they actually did, the lives that were lost, the money that was spent and the interest that was generated. It must really chafe the jet-propulsion people’s asses to see the microchip people’s progress increasing exponentially year after year. Imagine if it had been the other way around and we had big, slow, clunky computers and spaceships that could go half the speed of light. It’s easy to get discouraged when you’re stuck on a plateau for so long and your objective seems so out of reach. But if you recall the analogy from last week, the one with the computer gamer and his 15th level character who wants to go into a 70th level zone, you will see that it isn’t exactly impossible. You just have to blow a ton of time and resources sorting scraps of theory and data, piece together seemingly unrelated discoveries, and ultimately, oversee the aggregate amalgamation of this hodgepodge in order to produce a key to the forbidden zone (and presumably, in the time it takes you to do all this you will have increased your knowledge and survival skills to where you might actually live if your key works and you get to your elusive destination.).

Now, translating that into the quest to escape our solar system and get out to where there may be (other?) intelligent life and/or super-valuable treasure, let’s make some comparisons. First and foremost it’s impossible to send a human outside of our tiny solar system at speeds we can currently muster because they would simply die of old age before they arrived. Our tiny solar system is just too huge. It’s probably also fortuitous because otherwise some dunderhead would try it, waste a ton of money and resources, and cause everyone to be discouraged when he started sending back whiney messages about how lonely he was. So, one solution is to increase the human life span, which is a project that lots of smart people are supposedly tooling away on. Another solution is sending machines that are not constrained by expensive biological needs like food, air and potty stops, or psychological shortcomings like loneliness, claustrophobia, and horniness. Woohoo! We already have machines that fit that bill!

If we launched something like that in the near future, it would be relatively inexpensive, and give us something to look forward to while we continued the time-sink tasks back here on Earth that will ultimately allow us to explore our galaxy. And then, if we could limit Earth’s population to something sustainable, and not mess up the atmosphere too badly, and not blow ourselves up in a nuclear war, then maybe in a couple generations, the robot ship would be reporting back about whether there are planets out there, and we in the meantime would have increased our longevity, and figured out a way to upload copies of our minds into machines so that they (our uploaded minds in machine bodies) could nip off for other solar systems. And then, what seemed impossible and discouraging to your grandparents, will be an almost certain occurrence in the lives of your children.

Come to think of it, we have a little prototype of what I’m describing, and it’s approaching the heliopause even as you read this. Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 is basically a robot with a camera and a radio antenna for communicating with Earth. It takes awesome pictures of the planets as it meanders toward the edge of the solar system. (Sorry, I shouldn’t act like everyone is an astrophysicist. The heliopause is the point, about twice as far away from the sun as Pluto, where the solar wind pretty much peters out, or at least becomes tough to detect as it mixes with interstellar crap, er, protons and electrons. It is generally considered to be the property line demarcating the solar system.

Voyager 2 has a lot of nothing to adventure through for the next several decades, and its not clear to me whether there are even any plans for once it leaves the solar system. I know it has a solid gold laser disc attached to it. Maybe it’s for aliens to check out. I hope that whoever made the disc wasn’t too needlessly honest about humanity’s history! Anyway, the poor wee robot is almost sure to get lost in all that empty interstellarness. Maybe our grandkids will be around to celebrate the Voyager’s recovery.

I know it sucks to think in such long periods of time. I want it NOW! Actually, I want it yesterday, but the galaxy is just too dad-gum big! And even light, traveling sooo fast on Earth takes forever to get anywhere in the infinity of outer space.

SCIENCE FUN FACTS

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second! On earth, the speed of light is so fast that it might as well be instantaneous. If it can go all the way around the planet 8 times in one second, it can pretty much go from a light bulb to your eyeball in no time.

A light year is a measure of distance (even though it has the word year in it). It is how far light will travel in one year (and don’t forget it’s going 186,000 miles per second). So, a light year is . . . hmm, how many seconds in a year. Hang on . . . 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, that’s 3,600 . . . 24 hours in a day, that’s 86,400 . . . 365 days in a year, that’s 31,536,000. So, there are 31,536,000 seconds in a year, and every second light travels 186,000 miles, so in one year light travels 5,865,696,000,000 miles! Dang, that’s almost six trillion miles! So a light year is really, really far!

We live on a planet called Earth, which is on the outer edge of a galaxy called The Milky Way.

It’s about a hundred thousand light years to the other side of the galaxy! In miles that would be six trillion times a hundred thousand. That number would have so many zeros, it would seem fake. The zeros might look like the porthole windows on a ship. I’m going to write it just for shits n’giggles.

5,865,696,000,000,000,000,000

Woot! That’s how many miles it is across the galaxy.

Again, I want to say that this is just something I want to get out of my system. I know it seems like stoner-babble, but I assure that I’m a sober person relating about mind-blowing phenomena that I find fascinating.

It would take years for us to get to Mars, which is the closest of 9 planets in our solar system. It would take longer than the average human life to get to the next nearest star, which is so far away that we can’t really tell if there are even planets around it. It’s 75 light years away, the closest star is.

There are about 100 Billion stars in our galaxy.

This next one is my favorite. . . .

There are about 100 billion galaxies observable from Earth. Yes, yes, each one has around 100 billion stars.

100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars each is . . . .

100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That’s how many suns there are that might have planets around them. I’ll betcha anything there’s a bunch of cool stuff out there.

There’s this saying that was worked up by smart people who believe that Jesus, dying for man’s sins, was the most important thing in the universe ever. It goes, “The chances of there being life on another planet are about the same as if you put all the little pieces of a complex Swiss watch into a bucket, shook it up, and have it come out a working watch.” I realize I screwed up all the syntaxes and tenses, but I don’t care.) I like this analogy because it emphasizes how complex the evolution of life on Earth was, while at the same time acknowledging that such life did in fact evolve. So if it happened on Earth, what are the chances it could happen elsewhere? A million to one? A billion to one? A trillion to one? Even if it were a hundred trillion to one the universe would still be teeming with life. Look at that freaking number two paragraphs up! There is absolutely no reason to get touchy about Jesus’ sacrifice. The fact that there are billions of other worlds where Jesus sacrificed Himself doesn’t in any way belittle or denigrate His achievement. Frankly, I for one am even more awed than I already was. I think it was very considerate of God to not overwhelm the people of Jesus’ time with stories of the myriad worlds he created!

The temperature at the core of the sun is 27 million degrees! Hot enough to fry an egg on!

I wish I could point out some deep-space asteroid, or some well-digger’s ass on Pluto and say it was 300 billion degrees below zero, but oddly, nothing can ever get colder than negative 459 degrees. It has something to do with the fundamental relationships between space, mass, and time. Like the speed of light.

Which is why it is fun to annoy your physicist friends (and who doesn’t have a couple of those?) by asking, “But what if you were going the speed of light and you went one mile-an-hour faster?” or “What if it was 459 degrees below zero and it got one degree colder?”

It is impossible for them to explain, because evidently you either just get it or you don’t (I don’t). Which is why I like to amuse myself by making up quasi-scientific-sounding explanations in case some punk tries to annoy me. (Always begin fraudulent explanations by clearing your throat.) “When a gas, such as oxygen, cools, it contracts and condenses, taking up less volume and exerting less pressure. At 460 degrees below zero the volume of the gas would become zero, which is impossible, since matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Ergo nothing can ever get colder than negative 459 degrees.”

I also have fun explanations for why things can’t go faster than the speed of light, but they don’t really pass muster written down. They require more of an oral sleight of hand if you see what I mean. But always start off with E=Mc2.

Let’s practice one. “Saaaay Ross, what if I was in a glass sphere observing the Big Bang, and I decided to go back in time a few minutes. . . .”

See how much fun that is?

Now, if I was coaching Ross, I would have him say, “Well, that’s a very interesting question, however, due to the constraints imposed on the time-space medium by E=Mc2, you will find that ipso ergo gargoyle zeno is irreducible once the Galapagos gulag is inebriated by the Herchel harmonic.”

And now you are beginning to realize what a perfect three-way, science, theosophy, and dialectics make. (But if you are not realizing that it’s OK! Do yourself a favor and please, please, please don’t pursue it any farther. And if you think a three-way is a kind of spaghetti, that’s even better!)

Which brings me to the question of the questionable author of this apocryphal piece and to the divestment of his/her inner child. Sigh.

We love science and science fiction. Unfortunately, there aren’t exactly an infinity of people writing quality science fiction. Oh sure, there are tons of folks writing Harlequin romances-in-space (Jack McDevitt, Elizabeth Moon etc), but there are relatively few people writing quality stories with good plots and characters working with the latest real scientific discoveries and theories. In fact, in a conversation I had recently with my editor, Tommy, we pretty much agreed that we had exhausted the genre. Of course we could go back and read some great classic Sci-fi, but, well, talk about a genre that doesn’t age well. And anyway, as far as I know, I’ve already read all the great classic SF. And I am definitely not interested in anything that takes a classic piece of literature and sets it in space. UGGG! Moby Dick in space, Robinson Crusoe in space, Hamlet in space, Lost in Space in space. Not Interested!!!!

To summarize . . . Looking for quality 21st century science fiction. Will gladly trade out from my own library. Since I can’t just stop reading in bed before I go to sleep, I have branched out recently into what is probably a pretty natural transition away from Sci-fi. Bizarre, science-related, true stories. Stuff like Death from the Skies (Ten scenarios of how the planet will ultimately be destroyed) and Toscanini’s Fumble (baffling neurological mysteries that cause unbelievable behavior, in the same vein as The Man who mistook his Wife for a Hat Rack). I even read a pretty decent biography of St. Francis of Assisi, first of all because my confirmation name is Francis, and second because I know Frank was an aesthete, and I feel very strongly that his lifestyle can be attributed to mental illness and in today’s world treatment would have been extended to him alleviating the suffering he experienced from dealing with God and doing all the zany, self-effacing things He enjoined. God was very tricky back then when he used to communicate with people. He would tell them to do things that He knew damn well were symptoms of schizophrenia, like lay on their left side for 49 days, etc. But I think we can all agree that people 2000 years ago who were commanded by God to do whacky things were really communicating with God, and that people today who hear God telling them to do whacky things are just crazy. Some things are just self-evident.

I could have sworn I was talking about science fiction books. Anyway, there’s this 27-yr-old woman who finds it impossible to imagine herself traveling forward in time. I don’t mean she can’t picture herself beaming up to the Starship Enterprise. I mean if you asked her what she was doing tomorrow she would become practically catatonic. Needless to say she’s one of my best customers. What’s really bizarre though is that recent studies have found that we use the same regions of the brain to remember the past as we do to envision the future. This may turn out to be like when they found out the atom wasn’t indivisible after all.

Dr. #1 “This part of Maria’s brain must be damaged because she can not conceive of later today.

Dr. #2 “No. That part of Maria’s brain must be fine because she remembers earlier this morning.

Dr. Gino “OMFG! That part of her brain must have, like two parts! Like Protons and electrons in an atom!”

Dr. #2 “Dude!”

Dr. Gino “There might even be a third thing that that part of the brain does, like some neutron-equivalent function!”

Dr. #1 “Whoa!”

Dr. Gino (somberly, aside, stroking his chin.) “Hmmm . . . maybe there are even antimatter equivalents to those brain parts, like positrons! My God! What have I stumbled onto?! The implications are . . . Aaaargghhh!”

Dr. #2 (wiping the blood from his knife on Dr. #1’s teal scrubs.) “That was a close one.”

Dr. #1 “Make sure you cut his head off and burn his tongue.”

To make a long story short, there will be no more speculating about the future in this log for a while. There’s only one event in everyone’s future which is absolutely certain, and most people, myself included, find it unpleasant to dwell on. And no more musing about California falling into the ocean, or worrying about what music the kids will be listening to in ten years. I urge you to join me in a five-year prognostication hiatus. More on the health benefits of five-year-hiati coming soon!

Oops, and I almost forgot. I’ve listened to that new REM album a few times now and I like it.

-Yours until the rending of the rocks,

Sham

March 4th, 2011

“I’m going to be totally honest with you. I’m a liar.”
-Narcissus Abercrombie (to his pain management team)

What are all the smart people doing? Isn’t there any money in medical research, or what? Where are my $%#^@ neural implants?!
Boy oh boy, when The Pain clamps down around you, there’s simply no help to be found. How trivially easy it would be for Them to make everything OK. If I were shot while committing a robbery . . . if I barely survived a terrible automobile accident, which was my fault because I was drunk, I would be swarmed with relief! Alas, it’s just non-life-threatening, excruciating agony, and doesn’t that just sound like a loser’s sorry excuse for not doing his homework?

“In my time,” says 91-year-old retired nurse, Jane Fuzzywuzzy; “we would just do whatever we could to make people comfortable when their illness flared up. What else could we do?” It turns out they could have done nothing. On top of that they could have shown a complete lack of sympathy and empathy. But who would have ever thought of that sixty years ago? We’ve come a long way, baby!

Space . . . the final frontier. How those words used to thrill me, mostly because I honestly felt they were true. And so, I think, did the people who wrote them, and those who wrote the thought-provoking show that followed. And maybe they are true. It’s just that we’re not anywhere near ready to tackle the final frontier yet. It turns out there are a few frontiers between the-moon-as-frontier and the final one. So fifty years later we realize that traveling between the stars for humans is like entering a zone designed for 70th level characters when you are 15th level. That’s a computer-game analogy, but I have a feeling a whole lot of people didn’t need that explained to them. If you did, don’t feel bad. You see, in computer games, where you start off at first level and work your way up by fighting increasingly tougher monsters, you usually have to complete some sort of complex quest which requires killing fearsome creatures and foraging rare items in order to assemble some sort of key-like device which will enable you to enter the really hard zones. Sometimes you can just blunder into these higher-level zones but you’re almost sure to be instantly killed by something you never even see. That’s no fun.

Nor would teleporting to another solar system be much of a walk in the tundra I’ll betcha. There would almost certainly be something so alien that it would kill you before you had the slightest idea WTF. Luckily, in the computer-game of life, all the other solar systems are way farther away than any human could travel in a lifetime, so we are spared, by the almighty programmer, the humiliation of being eighty-sixed casually. If we ever want to go visit the other plug uglies in our galaxy, we’ll have to shed our inadequate bodies, constrained as we are by the laws of physics and biology. Sadly, it’s just not going to be like 1960s television. BOLDLY GO!

And speaking of bars and the atmosphere, and the government, you may have noticed the Yacht Club hasn’t had the big window open lately, even though the weather has been unseasonably beautiful. Well, it’s almost enough to make you become a tea partier. The Health Department has informed us that if we open the window, a bug might fly in and cause millions of deaths. So, we are overthrowing the government . . . NO! We are complying. Unfortunately the government is ill prepared to accommodate compliance. They just want one to break the law and pay a fine. It’s the parking-people-mindset all over again. But no way are we falling for that sucker move. This open-window situation is a perfect symbol of the narrowness and absurdity upon which so much human energy is wasted.

What do you waste your eensy beensy teeny weeny life doing? Speak up all you cookie cutter cynics with your smug, self-assured smiles. What are you wasting your precious life doing? Fantasizing? Praying? Defend yourselves! I’m attacking you! Can you still write? Do you remember what a stamp is? If this was a blog and you could type something in right away you know you would. But you are incapable of sustaining a thought for thirty seconds! That’s why you still argue about balancing the budget. To prove my devotion to snail mail, any correspondence I get I will reply and include a SASE. Do you remember what that is? 1768 Pennington Place Atlanta GA 30316

Now that we’ve gotten the easy, pain-induced, pessimistic, snide stuff out of the way, it’s time to go to work and look on the bright side of things. Only about three hundred days until my five-year technological hiatus ends! If this is the first you’ve heard of it, you’ll want to know, do I drive a car? Do I have a phone? A Computer? Show off your vocabulary by working the word Luddite into a sentence.

I simply grew weary of the languid creep of progress, and decided I wanted to see a significant advance in performance between products I bought. In much the same way you have to skip a week of reading the newspaper in order to encounter totally fresh information, I skipped five years of buying more RAM. While I was at it I got rid of the Internet and cable television so they would be exciting and new (like each episode of The Love Boat) when I reconnected with them in January, 2011.

That’s not exactly the way it went down. It was more like furiously expelling Comcast from my life because of their overwhelming incompetence, not to mention their devotion to advertising and bill collecting while service was relegated to a back seat on the bus. The hiatus and accompanying philosophies kind of fell into place behind this rebellious act.

Hmm . . . how to talk about Comcast, even obliquely, without being pessimistic and cynical. Impossible. So, back to . . . . Only about three hundred days until my technological hiatus ends! Woot! And a chance for some lucky Yacht Club customer to win cash and prizes! See?! Aren’t you glad you slogged on through all my whining?

In January of 2011 I will be, as Ross puts it, breaking my technological fast. I have a big, glass pickle-jar painted silver and with the lid Super-Glued on. Thru a slit in the lid I have been slipping money so that when the time comes I can smash the jar open and use the contents to buy a cool gadget. Had my technological hiatus ended three years ago when the I-phone first came out (and, believe me, it damn nearly ended prematurely) there’s no doubt what I would have had for breakfast. Thankfully, my poverty and ill health gave me the strength of character to persevere. I wish I could get something as cutting edge as the I-phone was in 2008, but will there be anything like that in 2012? It would be a little disappointing to settle for, like, an I-phone IV. Which brings us to. . . .

HOW TO WIN THE TECHNOLOGICAL HIATUS CONTEST

What do you get for a person who has been on a technological hiatus for five years, especially when that person is you?! Hell, I don’t know, and that’s why I am seeking guidance, either through conversation or magazine clippings. To put it simply, whoever recommends the product I, Gino, end up buying for myself wins the prize. And the prize is . . . to be announced on Saint Patrick’s Day (I have to consult with the Yacht Club legal staff first). However, I can give you the deadline, and that is Noon on January 11th, 2012. Find me something cool!

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I might just continue ahead abstaining until something really different comes out. Lately, with this technological singularity looming, I’ve been looking into developments in biotechnology. Something that was so exclusively science fiction ten years ago really seems to be coming along. I recently signed up for the beta testing of a biotech device. A grain-of-rice-sized sensor is implanted in the tip of the tongue and used to tap out commands on hair-width filaments run along the inside of the teeth enabling commands to be transmitted either to a cursor on a computer screen or to a control box on a wheel chair. The applications for use by people with spinal chord injury are priceless. This “Tongue Drive Study”, developed by engineers at Georgia Tech, and implanted by doctors at the Emory Medical Center is the real deal. Unfortunately I didn’t get selected to participate. Evidently I was too talkative. Just like every K-12 nun said.

I can hear it already. “I’ll never get anything implanted in my body.” Aren’t you the same person who was never going to get a cell phone? Hell, maybe if you all get implants I can go back to looking at a bar full of people talking to each other while they glance frequently at the boob tube, instead of everyone with their heads down, squinting at the miniscule messages on their smart phones. The simplest of neural implants would at least allow for a high-resolution graphic on the retina. They have them in the newest generation of jet fighters, so that pilots can monitor a vast array of gauges while never taking their eyes off the cockpit window. They are called Heads Up Displays or HUDs for short. Obviously the easiest way to navigate around a menu on a HUD would be with the tongue system described above, and I couldn’t help chuckling imagining a Yacht Club full of people with busy tongue. I wouldn’t be able to tell who was geeking on cocaine and who was texting their grandma!

Well, this speculation about the future has been a fun exercise in whiling away the blessedly uneventful month of February, but spring is almost upon us, and with it comes, not only Saint Patrick’s Day, but a handful of festivals about which I shall endeavor to keep you informed should the Yacht Club choose to participate in any. The one that springs to mind, unless I close my eyes and plug my nose, is the Dogwood Festival. As you probably remember, we had a torrential downpour on the last day of February, followed by several days of wonderful, sunny warmth, so of course all the dogwoods instantly sprang into full bloom. Hopefully there will still be a white or pink petal on a tree somewhere in Atlanta by the time the festival rolls around, but I doubt it.

Oh! Oh! Oh! I almost forgot to tell you about what I forgot to do! To pacify my Mars-like rage when they lost my film, Target gave me an underwater disposable camera with zoom and flash and 27 exposures. So when we had a boat race at the Yacht Club on Monday evening (Feb 28th, key word torrential) of course I forgot the camera was on hand and failed to take a single picture. It’s been so long since we’ve had a boat race that I became completely befused and confuddled.

Back in the good old days, before the climate changed, it used to rain hard pretty frequently in Atlanta. One time Euclid Avenue was a literal river, with the water flowing up over the curb, so I took a to-go box, and put a note in it that said, “Come to the Yacht Club, always a floor-show, never a cover”, and set her floating away. She zipped all the way past the Variety Playhouse, and past El Myr before we lost sight. Amazingly, through a series of weird coincidences, Tim Courtier found the note as he was walking to the Yacht Club to work. He was making his way from the Inman Park Marta station because his Candyland van had broken down the night before. And he opened the box because I had written some song lyrics and drawn some Hippy-esque stick-people on the top.

So, anyway, Monday, while watching that monstrous red blob approach on the radar (compliments of Alan Hudson’s laptop and the Yacht Club’s free Wifi), Jim McNamara, Tommy Hoolmes, Laura Nolan, Harry Wax n’ Fax and myself built to-go-box boats. This was the first race in which creative energy and ability were put into boat construction and the resulting armada was truly awesome to behold. Laura’s actually had a poop deck and a triangular sail. Tommy went old-school and rigged a square sail, confident he would have a following wind, and McNamara opted for oar power, although his use of straws made it look as if his ship was bristling with cannons, instigating some interesting discussions about future battles/races. I would describe Harry’s and my own ships, but what’s the point? Our talents lie elsewhere. Suffice to say one looked like a shoe, the other a shoebox. But they made it down the street!

Once the regatta had cleared El Myr Laura took an umbrella and went forth like a CNN correspondent in Libya. She returned a few minutes later to report that the ships had rounded Austin Avenue and were en route to the Albert. But although the Target-repentance camera was right there in the wine rack, and although I left it on hand in case anything worth photographing should occur at the Yacht Club, as was much more likely than anything interesting happening at my house (thank God!) or in my car (doubly thank God!) I forgot about it. DANG!

Which of course means that if it ever rains again, and the rainy season is approaching, we must have another go, and this time we will get some sort of visual record. And then everything will be wonderful, and it will be sunny and warm, and pain will be a thing of distant, unreliable memories. SON!

-Gino 3/4/11

“This quote is unbelievably laden with significance
considering what I’m about to write.”
-Shakespeare and Thoreau, in a rare, heretofore undocumented collaboration

“I no longer have time to rewrite, revise, or edit. There’s just too much to say and too little time.”
-Edgar Allen Poe
(In a fictional, alternate-reality)
CUSTOMER OF THE MONTH
Jim McNamara-For his noble ability to shoulder through the great Schlitz shortage of ‘11’ and his dedication to introducing an exciting new product to the Yacht Club by consuming gallons of Chocolate Milk Stout. Also his explanation of why the bar towels burst into flames, and how to prevent a repeat of said incident.

It’s such unfair bad luck that the first two feral cats I ever was accosted by loved me unconditionally, and felt disinclined to continue being feral.

I only say it’s unfair because it caused me to develop an amazingly incorrect understanding of feral cats. None of the dozen or so that have wandered into my life since the death of year-old Owen Meany last May 4th have had even the slightest shred of intelligence. They are much more like rats, scurrying furtively, hissing and fighting, and not showing the slightest gratitude at being fed. Feral cats have become my new favorite metaphor for the human condition, so if you have any interesting stories, I’d love to hear them.

And speaking of de-tumescing, when’s the last time you read, much less wrote a good book report? Remember what a nightmare assignment that was back in grade school? I dreaded writing book reports and I loved reading (Still love reading!). Well, like many of the tasks I loathed as a young student, such as show-and-tell and spelling bees, writing a book report now has an appeal it lacked back then. Maybe because it was an assignment and I resented it? Who knows? Anyway, they aren’t called book reports when you don’t have to do them. They’re called reviews.

While I was tending bar the other day, one of my finest customers, and a dear, dear friend, Troy (who also, by the way, came up with that crazy novel Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban) produced a book from his giant, omnipresent backpack (he’s some sort of a student so cut him some slack) and handed it to me, saying he would like my opinion on it. Well, my immediate thought (and believe me, I don’t often have immediate thoughts) was that it was stupid and beneath me. It was called Bigfoot in Georgia for God’s sake! Needless to say I assumed he was joking and started to hand it back, but after a few minutes he convinced me that he at least was serious, so I agreed to take it home and read it. I was very disappointed because I was certain that another Yacht Club patron had destroyed his credibility, and Troy’s, up until now, had been rock solid.

So, I toted the offensive little book home and read the first few pages. Two hours later I finished (It’s only 150 pages long, so don’t think I’m some sort of freaky speed-reader). I’ll be danged, beau! This little gem is great. Not only is it non-hokey, but the scholarship is impeccable. The annotations actually hold up under additional research (minimal, granted). If anything, it might be a little too academic for most tastes, but the sections on the various legends of the Coweta, Yamacraw, Cherokee and Creek Indians in Georgia was chilling and really sparked my imagination. And most importantly there are no fuzzy photos of possible Sasquatches. Just pictures of odd markers set up in the woods (Very Blair Witchy) and a few contrasting the Georgia wilderness of a century ago with modern urban blight. Plus, there’s a really great map of all the counties in Georgia which I could look at for hours. The book was small, fun, full of shy, good-natured hairy monsters, and ultimately educational. In short, the book was the Yacht Club.

Everybody thank Troy when you see him, and if you’re interested in checking Bigfoot in Georgia out for yourself, it was written by Jeffery Wells (who looks exactly like Gus the Dart Player). Plus, it was written in 2010, so it’s literally hot off the press (Pine Winds Press). Neoteric esoteria for you crossword puzzle types.

Now, since I laid down the rails, I know where your train of thought is going as it pulls out of Homo-Erectus-Station. “If there is some evolutionary precursor to modern man running around the north Georgia Mountains,” you are undoubtedly asking yourself, “what is the future of our species as the technological singularity approaches?” In essence you need to know. . . .

HOW TO ACT WHEN YOU BECOME IMMORTAL

Whether you thumbed through the February 21st edition of Time magazine while standing in line at the grocery store, or actually read Ray Kurzweiler’s The Singularity is Near back in 2005, you are aware that our technological progress is advancing exponentially any way you want to measure it, and has been for over a century now. And if you are at all familiar with exponential growth, you know it pretty much starts off slow and then goes nuts. Computers aren’t just getting faster; they’re getting faster faster. And they’re getting better faster and littler faster and more diverse and innovative faster. And, gulp, they’re getting smarter faster. At the pace we’re on, there’s no reason to think we won’t be capable of reverse engineering the human brain by 2020 (That’s only nine f*cking years away!).

On top of the bottled-beer cooler, next to the big window-table in the Yacht Club is a white, three-ring binder called The Terry Williams Memorial Science Archive available for anyone to peruse. It is filled with magazine and newspaper clippings about amazing but true biotechnological devices, which have been implemented in the last few years. From prosthetic legs and arms, which can be controlled by thought, to tiny cameras implanted in the eyes of the blind, allowing them some limited sight. (Don’t even get me started on the grain-of-rice sized implants in the tongue that enable paraplegics to move a cursor around on a computer screen and operate radio-controlled wheel chairs.)

So in nine years you add two plus two and voila! You have a device that’s a hundred times faster, a hundred times smaller, and a hundred times smarter that slides into a little slot behind your ear. (You don’t want it implanted too deep as there are sure to be people determined to steal them by any means. But that’s only nine years away, and the age of immortality isn’t due to roll in until 2045 (one year after I die, I guarantee it!).

So, what does this mean to all you cool young cats who were born in 1990 and who are therefore enjoying your first year of legal drinking at the Yacht Club? First of all, it means you’re going to be a customer for a long time. But before you get too excited about that eternity of Yacht time, before you start counting your life rafts before they are launched, let me advise you, my little friends, that if you are old enough to read this you are barely going to be squeaking in to the age of the immortals by the skin of your perfect oyster-grown teeth. You needs must limit your intake of pleasure-inducers to products available over the counter at the Yacht Club and not be caught loitering in the back parking lot, or the alley across the street (Yes, we know why those shoes are hanging from the utility lines). I have a feeling They aren’t going to be handing these powerful implants out to every loser junkie who whines for one.

Another thing I highly recommend you long-living youngsters work on is patience with other people’s philosophies. A lot of time has been invested in people’s thoughts about life and death. I suggest to you that it would be unwise (I know wisdom is abhorrent to you at your age) to dismiss other’s beliefs out of hand until you have died and been resurrected. Otherwise you will be criticizing something you don’t understand which is distasteful and ignorant. This is especially true about religious beliefs. If you candidly search your own mind for the reason you think someone else’s religious faith is misplaced you may be surprised to discover that you “just know” there is no God or that you “can’t believe” any God would do this or that. And if you are honest with yourself you will realize that your belief system is founded on just as rickety a foundation as those you scorn. Unless, of course, you’ve crawled all over both sides of death.

Which brings me to the probability that that is exactly the uncharted wilderness you will be mapping out. I highly recommend not having too many preconceived notions as you set forth.

For decades now the science fiction world has been mired in space-travel analogies between exploring the galaxy and Columbus discovering the new world. Hell, everyone thought space travel was going to come before uploading human minds into computers. Oops! Talk about putting the lander before the booster rocket! But when you think about the distances between the stars and the amount of time it takes to travel between them, it totally had to be this way. It’s 30,000 light years from Earth to the center of our galaxy. Since rocket ship speeds are most emphatically not increasing exponentially, I can assure you that no human will be leaving this solar system any time in the next hundred years, unless something totally drastic and unforeseen happens (and that’s a sad thing to hold out for).

It turns out that the analogy between space exploration and Columbus-era nautical exploration, which seems so perfect when you’re watching Star Trek, is flawed to the point where the two are literally opposite endeavors. Columbus didn’t know how far he was going or how long it would take. For a trip to Mars we would know those quantities down to the millimeter and nano-second. Columbus didn’t know what he would find, but found a perfect, fertile land for humans to thrive. We know exactly what’s on Mars, we’ve prodded and poked it and observed it with all kinds of fancy instruments, and it sucks. No, my dear, dear friends, space travel is out. Uploading the human mind onto computers is in. Once people get used to living for hundreds of years maybe we will reach out beyond our planet again. Almost certainly we will, but until then we will be concentrating on how to assimilate these long-lived little rascals who are just now having their first beers at the Yacht Club into our Earth bound society.

One immediate concern that comes to my mind as the “immortal youth” (let’s call then millennials) start to outnumber us doomed oldies in the next couple decades is that anyone who’s memories and experiences are safely stored in a back-up bank will have a pretty cavalier attitude toward death. We have a couple pretty good rules in the Yacht Club, no physical fighting, and no being an asshole, and I think they will translate into the language of these millenials to a certain extent, but you know how it is when you combine liquor, youth, pretty girls and immortality. Some of us oldies could get hurt, permanently.

And then there’s the inevitability of the current staff of the Yacht Club succumbing to the ravishes of old age and death. It may seem that stalwarts such as Meredith, Doyle, Anna and Faylynn have been at the Yacht Club forever, but there was a whole decade of Yachting prior to their arrival! Though it is unclear through the mists of time, journals (or logs) exist telling of a time dominated by such mythical creatures as Dara, Billy Girl, Matt, Dog Boy, and Oui Oui. Although there are sporadic, unreliable reminiscences occasionally by such ancient patrons as Randal (five-time Customer of the Month winner) how much credence can be given to a man whose Daughter is already old enough to drink in the Yacht Club and who, herself, may be too old to be considered a millennial? Then you’ve got your middle tier of Jen, Laura, Shane, Danni etc, who, maybe if they won the lottery within a year could use their relative youth and new-found wealth to get decent implants maybe in the twenties and thirties (if they keep their physiques tip top and their noses clean) but the point is . . . there is, inevitably, going to be a new, fourth round of hires over the next decade, and those people will be standing behind the bar in the Yacht Club for a long, long, long, long time. I’d be nice to them if I was old, which I am.

-Gino 2/25/11

Holy crap, the Falcons are in the playoffs. This is weirder than the time I was the Best Bartender of the Year in Creative Loafing (along with Anna and Faylynn). Now the falcons are probably going to get all bigheaded and self-important, and get burned out and develop attitudes and be back on the bottom of the pile before you can say “The Seahawks are 7 and 9.”

But . . . surely we can enjoy their blazing glory-ride while it lasts and be dazzled by their magnificence. (Here my analogy completely goes to shit.)

Let us begin again, and then again begin. In my optional opinion the years 2009 and 2010 induced compassion fatigue in many of my clients and patients (my customers were relatively unaffected.). To me it seems like it may be time for you to treat yourselves. Take the teensy-weensy sliver of time called 2011 and have a fucking ball with it. When you come to the Yacht Club this year, there won’t be a jar on the bar whining that Gino’s guts are falling out or that so and so’s cat hurts or that this or horrible little country is underneath a volcano. Go nuts for the Super bowl like it was the World Cup (without the kaga googoos). Let’s pretend that when Jett is Deejaying it’s like Beck was in the house! Maybe the Braves will win the World Series! As a reward for your patience, forbearance and compassion, we, the staff of the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club, will make 2011 the year of your lives!

In case you didn’t notice our signage in all the ice and snow, during any remaining Falcon’s football game, Miller Lite Draft is only $2.25 a pint and Miller Lite Bottles are only $2.50! The bad news is that that special could end as soon as Saturday night when the Falcons play the Green Bay Packers at 8pm. If the Falcons lose, they’re out for the year, and we start counting down the days till baseball season. If they win . . . well, the specials get better and we move one game away from the Superbowl! So, to summarize. . . .

Come to the Yacht Club Saturday Night at 8pm to watch the FALCONS vs. the PACKERS

This ain’t literature, or art or hipster shit. This is the Falcons in the playoffs! ‘Nuff said.