cali damage

all these waaay-too-california moments happened right when i got back from Japan  . ..  and reminded me why i am so ashamed to be from here.

 #1

I was in the health food store.  The cashier was eyeing my  tofu and soymilk with distaste, saying that it was kind of a sellout health food, and the real health food was – no kidding – hemp oil.  “There have been studies, man.” At that point, the guy in line before me came back, saying, “Yeah, that’s amazing. Right on.  Hey,  wait — you charged me for the completely wrong stuff.”  Cut to commercial.  

#2

Driving down Lombard street in San Francisco. Even though it is a green light, the guy next to me screeches his brakes.  I stop too, to see what the fuss is about.  Some blonde pony tail woman is so into her cellphone conversation that she walked into a  4 lane road when her light was red.  And  here is the amazing part – her face shows the fear and shock appropriate to someone who just came within a foot of death, but somehow SHE IS STILL TALKING ON HER CELLPHONE.  Like, perhaps she is. ..  NARRARATING  the whole thing to Ashley or Tiffany or whomever??

#3,

 me and my pal go out to dinner.  A few minutes later, a white-guy-asian-lady couple sits down next to us.  A few minutes after THAT, another white-guy-asian-lady couple sits down on the other side of us.  The first guy had his fucking blackberry PDA out on the table all blinking so everyone could see how important he was. The other jive turkey was dating a fine buisnesswoman in dignified black pant-suit, but he was some dungeon-master-looking clown with flip flops.  At least asian women from Thailand  or the philipines have third-world-poverty as an excuse for sleeping with utter tools.  What the hell is going on here?? 

damn. i can’t upload photos.

i just discovered the best Japanese-software! it is called rikaichan !!!!

it is free, and only takes a few minutes to download/setup.

when you turn it on, all you have to do is move your mouse over a japanese word or kanji and it automatically displays a pop-up box containing the definition! for the kanji, it also displays  the radicals, and gives example words containing that kanji!!

(it only works on the mozilla browser, but mozilla is also free)

anyway, it is a miracle! a translation tool that is also a learning tool!  fuck!!!!!!!!!! if i had had this when i first started learning japanese, i would have learned a million times faster.
USE THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

over my stomach flu. 

Had a nightmare last night. 

I was in a big (100 meters square), steamy, low-ceilinged roman bath, with wood walls and an intricately-patterened ceiling of what looked like acoustic tiles from a recording studio. the rear of the  huge room was divided into individual two-meter-wide private units by walls which rose just above the level of the water. Each row of units were just a bit higher than the last row, forming a kind of amphitheater-like structure.   I had been invited by some fat rich man who sat a couple of units over, with a young person — a grandson? or something more sinister? he raised a glass in a toast to me. 

  I got creeped out so i climbed out of my unit and swam towards the front. Then, siezed by sudden inspiration, i dived UNDER the water.  An entire world unfolded before my eyes — the amphitheater CONTINUED underwater, going 100 meters deep at the front!  in fact, 90% of the room was underwater, and it was all packed with celebreties!  not swimming but standing on the bottom, holding drinks and schmoozing.  It was like the Oscars down there. I swam past Gary Shandling and some other talk show hosts.  I was the only one swimming.  I went down the aisle, deeper and deeper, pausing to make way for Dennis Rodman, who, while seeming puzzled by my presence, nodded at me and continued walking up the aisle.  I wanted to get close enough to the front/bottom to see what the celeberities were all looking at.  Instead of a movie screen, the stage had a huge, 40-foot-tall light-bulb-shaped metal cage suspended by a ginormous chain from the ceiling.  there was an albino octopus inside writhing.  The whole ceremony started to seem less like the Underwater Oscars and more like some kind of Call of Cthluhlu shit, as the celebrities started to  chant to it. 

In the end, though, there were just too many tentacles.  The octopus had 8 big ones, then 16 small ones, then seemed to just fall to pieces as the 200 tentacles broke free of the body and slipped through the bars of the cage. . . and they were not tentacles anymore. they were 15 foot long sperm cells, swimming towards us.  Apparently, they (the sperms) had merely clumped themselves together in THE SHAPE OF THE CELEBRITIES’ ALBINO OCTOPUS GOD,  in order to infiltrate the ceremony, trojan-horse-style.  As they descended on the rioting, panic-stricken talk show hosts, I got scared and woke up.

remember when you were a kid, and on long car trips your Dad would give you one of those moving-square puzzles?  it’s a sort of 2-dimensional rubik’s cube. . . 14 tiles and one open space. and the goal is to use the one open space to shuffle the rest of the tiles around and get them to make a picture?   and you had to move all 14 around one at a time, just to move the one tile you WANTED, just one space closer to where it’s supposed to be? and even when you get that tile in sequence (finally) you invariably end up moving it OUT of order, in the process of shuffling some NEW tile into place?

that is what is happening in my intestines right now.

by some metabolic quirk, i have arrived at a point in my life where i can eat one raisin and instead of breaking that raisin down into carbohydrates, proteins, and other ‘building blocks of life,’ my stomach turns it into basically 5 cubic meters of highly compressed methane.

i got so much gas, i am thinking that, armed with only a speculum, a windmill, and a generator, i could solve america’s dependence on foreign oil.   plus, you know, more raisins.

but, like all brilliant schemes, there is a hitch.  my guts are all kinked up like a old hose, so that gas has nowhere to go.  the process of getting the gas pockets to one end or the other requires a moving-square-puzzle amount of time and effort, plus a bewildering variety of analog bleeps and blorps for which analogy fails me.  maybe an extended dennis-hopper-as-Frank-from-Blue-Velvet-sodomizng-R2D2-underwater?  if i might be permitted to return from the heady realm of abstraction, it hurts like fuck.

but, when the gas pocket DOES finally reach its destination the results are a spectacular natural phenomena on the order of the auroura borealis or . . . well, actually, auroura borealis is all it is like.  plus i am so agonized by that time, that the breaking of wind to me sounds like the angelic choir that accompanied  charlton heston when he got the tablets form Yahweh.  but louder.  in fact you probably heard it if you were awake at 7 pm, pacific coast time.  for those of you accross the ocean, that would be high noon, sunday march 26th.  as a matter of fact, i just got a call from Slayer, saying  could i please turn it down, because they were trying to practice in los angeles and they couldn’t hear themselves. why did i ever tive tom arraya my phone number, the whiney little girl?

 i am trying to think of  a way to solve this dillemma.  i think where i went wrong is, i did not eat ENOUGH food; If i ate a whole bean burrito instead of a lousy raisin, i would have so much gas that the pressure would get so high it would have to transform into plasma, the fourth state of matter.  i could then finally realize my dreams of cheap-affordable fusion power.  In my ass.  next step: joining the fucking X-men.

if one has bad-enough diarrhoea, at some point the poo is under so much gas-pressure that it stops coming out like cheap curry and starts coming out like frappuchino, all carbonated tiny bubbles.  that’s right:  crappuchino.

 remember, i am not doing this for me; i am not doing this for you. 

i am doing this for SCIENCE.

ok, i got a lot of reports about vending machines, gay sex, rap, and california culture shock, but first. . . . .

MY COLLECTED FATWAS.

pro-dancing like a pirate, anti-bouncer

pro-david foster wallace, anti- dudes-who-think-he-is-too-whacked-out-i-mean-come-on-he-is-obviously-doing-that-on-purpose-dude

pro-freestyle, anti-rapping because you want to sell shoes

anti-burning-man, pro-burning-hippies

pro-opeth, nomeansno, burzum, hello kitty, jalapenos, katatonia, and missy elliot, anti-people-who-are-not-them-or-in-the-case-of-jalapenos-do-not-eat-them

anti-girls-who-front-like-they-don’t-belch-or-fart. pro girls-who-can-do-math

anti-sunglasses, tattoos, or anything that suggests you are ‘edgy’ and ‘have an attitude’

anti-2live-crew, pro-2live Jews

anti-having-a-sense-of-entitlement, pro-worrying

pro-fessor Griff

Anti-christ. Pro The Jesus. You got a date Wednesday, baby!

anti-thong, pro-hygiene

anti-yelling WHOOOOOOOOooo-to-indicate-one’s-enjoyment. Pro-screaming-incoherently

anti-having-a-baby, pro-you-being-anti-having-a-baby-too.  those things are loud and smell.

 anti-trance,dance,house, anything that is supposedly dance but has no synchopation.

actually, anti-DJ’s-being-allowed-to-live

anti-religion, meter-maids, authority, the cop who told me i had to put my shoes on in the library AND HE FELT LIKE HE HAD TO BRING A BACKUP.  what the hell?  that is just sad.

pro love and rockets-the-comic !!!VIVA LA HOPEY!!!- anti love-and-rockets-the-band

anti-french-philosophy. pro-ice cube’s philosophy:  “fuck a punk cause i ain’t him.”

pro-hater, anti-bling

anti-asian-american-guys-can’t-get-a-fucking-book-deal-in-this-damn-country-even-though-AA women-can.  what is up?

pro-being-anti

pro-burritos, chana masala, dahl makhni, injira, mom’s pesto, honey-roasted-peanuts, anti-seafood-mayonaise-burgers, that-shit-smells-nasty.

pro-feeling-persecuted-and-just-fuming-all-the-fucking-time

pro-vodka-sake-whiskey, anti-opaque-drinks-in-general-and-fancy-ones-in-particular

pro-donny, anti-walter

Pro-Frink, anti- Sideshow Bob

anti-category, pro-ecclectic.

anti-spelling-ecclectic correctly. 

anti-graphic-designers-architechts-and-’content producers’-or-any-other-boxy-glasses-and-goatee-nerd-who-thinks-he-is-avant-garde-even-though-he-is-just-a-advertising-prostitute. pro-hack.

anti-free-will, pro-sociobiology

pro-gauze, quill, DSB, sweef, Su19B, boob$hit, 4spikes, anti-your-band-you-lazy-american

pro-Hello, anti-Charmy

Actually, anti-any-sanrio-after-2003. 

Pro-those-crazy-chinese-motherfuckers-who-not-only-climbed-everest-but-sawed-the-fucking-top-off-and-brought-it-back. anti-dudes-who-only-have-3-or-fewer-testicles.

pro-keeping-promises-keeping-secrets-showing-up-on-time, anti-anti-motherfuckers-who-act-all-like-their-life-is-a-movie-and-you-are-just-a-supporting-actor

pro-super-repressed-24-hours-a-day-practising-teenage-professional-golf-girls-with-exploitive-overbearing-fathers.  god DAMN that gets me really hot.

pro-connie-anti-maury

ESPECIALLY anti-her-adopting-a-baby-who-is-not-me

anti-hipster. pro-people-who-stand-for-something

anti-The-Man, pro-the-mango-lassi

anti-that-last-entry-which-in-retrospect-was-not-very-you-know-good

anti-having-a-band-or-webpage, pro-having-your-article-published-in-a-science journal

anti-myspace, AIM, or any other place where capital letters occur randomly.  anti-political-blogs-that-only-reprint-other-blogs’-rants. pro-The Jesus.

anti-linking-to-motherfuckers-just-to-be-popular. pro-linking-to-people-i-respect-even-if-they-will-never-know-my-name.

pro-getting-off-my-ass-and-hiking

Since I am no longer in Tizzokyo, i decided to get a new webpage. from now on, all my new posts - japanese and otherwise - are going to be on cali damage! I will be keeping my old pages online as an archive. the new page will be mostly about music, rants, and ‘here is a strange thing i did today’ kind of bullshit. 

I tried to fix most of the old site’s problems when i configured the new site — It’s got an easy-to-search archive, RSS, easy-to-read colors, and is generally a fucking sellout.  On the other hand, I collected all the best links from TOKYO DAMAGE REPORT, and put them in one place. .  . so even if ‘My Life Is So Fucking Interesting’ - type blogs are not your thing, you can still find lots of links to Tokyo artists, Japanese-language tools, and tour guides at CALI DAMAGE. 

best of all, I will actually be updating it all the fucking time!!

Please tell your friend. Friends, if you have them. 

send them a link to http://www.hellodamage.com/

now, let’s try to pick up where the last page left off. . . . .