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