the wind the wind , it wont… shut up

alex you are going to hate the weather when you get here.

it wont stop being cold and it hailed so much last night. snow. wind. wet.

harmful weather.

i am drinking polish beer. i am sending photos of myself to people who want to show them to clients; and then, more photos will be taken of me.

i saw the bob dylan film last night. i did not like it, much, but, it did make me want to BE A PART of a movement. as always.

oh oh as always always.

maybe we can just run off for the summer. mexico was great and made me want to live like hemingway: just run away, and let the life happen, as it wants to, as it should.

alex / and dear world, i think you will like this docu

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. And I don’t just mean the arrival here in the Far Northern Hinterlands of the season’s first big snow. I mean the scene out at the mall and inside the SuperMegaMonsterMart, where our great nation is currently engaged in the fine art of spending an estimated $474 billion holiday bucks on, well… just stuff.

It’s a weird phenomenon, this shopping thing. I never did quite get it. Though I confess I can browse a good book store or record shop for days, I can’t see the appeal of general shopping as entertainment. I like to know what I need, make sure I really do need it, then go in, get it, and get out fast. I cringe every time I hear an economist talk about how consumer spending is the lynchpin of the American economy. We’re all depending on shopping?! That’s the gas in our collective economic engine? That’s a little weird. Because all the stuff people are buying has to come from somewhere, be made of something, and go some place when it dies.

There’s an excellent new film premiering online today that looks at all this. It’s a 20-minute documentary from activist Annie Leonard called the Story of Stuff that examines the real costs of consumption and the sort of big giant hamster wheel that we’ve become trapped on.

Check it out, pass it along, take it viral. (The website also has some good resources and other ideas to explore.) There’s a lot more people could be doing than shopping and they’d be a lot happier doing it. (What say we build our economy on environmental restoration, for example?) Sure we need some stuff. But we’re way overdoing it and paying for all the things we buy in a lot more ways than one.

A Small Christmas Rant  /  Alexander LaVake

Not to flash all Buh Humbug on everyone’s ass but I’m sorry, I really do not care for Christmas and the whole series of events that pile up this time of the year.  I mean, I do like fun, but where is the Holiday fun – or is fun to do all that shopping?  Or maybe it’s the wack-job family you get to visit with?  Those ten pounds you gain?

I don’t think I always felt this way and sometimes it seems the dislike grows just a little more each year.  Not to mention, the Christmas themed consumerism starts to trickle into our lives just a little sooner each year.  This past summer I saw some red and green in late August.

I grew up around a pretty traditional Catholic-Italian family and this time of year my interesting experiences were always exponential.  But it wasn’t all bad – being a little gay-boy, I sure did love decorating.  I started as early as Macy’s with the chachkas and twinkle lights. I had my own special box of “bedroom” decorations that was stored in the attic. I would change my screensaver.  Plus I was in charge of the whole outside situation – so I was lucky enough to spend a cold Sunday afternoon alone on the porch with strings of lights and extension cords and the 3-foot tall Santa and elves.  And, of course, I surely wasn’t opposed to making that “Wish List”.

But there was always something strange in the air – an extra level of stress or worry that seemed to come in with the cold weather.  All that planning and decorating and cooking and shopping seemed to fry everyone long before the big day.  The day the stress set in was always when my mother and I would decorate the tree.  As many times as I can remember, my step-father would get the tree cut and back to the house, the rest up to us.  My grandmother would be constantly interrupting and trying to feed us.

We would get a real tree every year, at my request – fake trees were the seed that planted my now growing plastic-Holiday distaste.  Every year my mother insisted that we would get a fake tree the following year.  She still hasn’t

My mother and I kept a very elaborate collection of ornaments and lights and always managed to create the most cluttered, clashing and oversized tree.  Some ornaments were my ugly preschool projects she refused to retire among other things dating back to Christmas’s she spent with my father before I was even born.

But it was the lights that brought an onset of anxiety each year.  We had a system of twinkle lights that didn’t require rocket science but somehow the two of us just couldn’t manage.  To get the lights around the tree all the way, we’d take turns feeding the lights with a yard stick to the other one who would be up on a step stool and usually smashed between the wall and the tree, being poked with needles in the face and neck.  Even younger, I knew this event would get a guaranteed “Fuck!” out of my mother.

After what would amount to a pretty lame yelling match and a couple more “fucks”, someone would walk off, sometimes crying and within a half hour, we would apologize and hug.  The routine got better when I was past the high school years and could yell “fuck” along with mom.  Not to mention, once I was of age, we could share a cigarette along with the Holiday cheer!

I suppose when I was younger that stressful air of Christmas didn’t faze me so much.  I got time off school and presents.  And to decorate!   So when did I notice that the whole thing is really a festival of Made In China crap?  My lack of religious interests doesn’t seem to be the problem – the whole ordeal pretty much lacks any religious interest in itself, unless your in the fraction of folks who go to church that one day a year. But, really, the whole birth of Jesus thing is mixed up with Santa Clause and candy canes and Hanukkah and the creation of “The Holidays” took over for Jesus a long time ago.

Maybe I do suffer from some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder that acts up when the whole country converts itself into a plastic-electric-moving-North Pole.  It’s even worse in L.A., where fake snowman sit beneath palm trees.  Walgreens is full of those fuzzy, battery-operated bears, monkeys, and Santas – definitely made in China.  And oh boy is that some technology, getting those bears to wiggle and move their arms up and down while a synthesized Jingle Bell Rock blows out of their ass holes.

And this is nothing new.  My mom has a hand-me-down Mr. And Mrs. Clause and being probably 30 years old, I’m positive that they are the last of the American-made Christmas decorations.  They are big enough to resemble dressed up little-people and they do a very slow twist to the left, stop, then a slower twist to the right, raising the candle in their hand when somewhere in the middle.  Even though they plug into the wall they act as if their batteries are dying as they do their turn very slowly making a sad machine noise the entire time.  Eeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrr.  Click.  Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.  Click.

There is just too much of this shit.  So much that I’m still force feeding myself red and green M & M’s in March and before I know it it’s August and its happening all over again.  Once I heard about some awful thing called “Christmas in July” and I almost shit myself.  Lucky for me it never caught on.

And in December I deal pretty well by avoiding most malls and shopping centers, by skimping on the gift-giving (bless the internet!) and, though a struggle, just accepting the fact that I get to drink and eat more than usual.  Especially drink.  I can deal with that.

Perhaps it isn’t Christmas or The Holidays or even Jesus that bother me so much, perhaps it’s all the decorated-made-by-children-for-children-plastic-glowing-wiggling-singing-red-and-green-things that make me nuts, well stressed enough to need a cigarette after buying toothpaste at Walgreens this time of year.  I think next year I will be sure to have a good stock of hygiene products before the Holidays set in.  Also, soon, maybe I’ll buy my mom the fake tree.  Pre-lit.

i am going to mexico tomorrow

i hope it is fun and amazing. in the least it wont be cold. i want you to come live w ben for awhile alex- on the east east coast. yes please

my new scarf, guacamole

I’M HERE I’M HERE!!!!   … always sorry for my delays.  OY.

I have this really nice and probably expensive dark green scarf that came from some family member I think for for some Holiday thing many years back.  I’ve had it for what feels like forever but I never wear it.  I live in California and usually include scarves with winter clothing, not fashion,  so it remained closeted.  Before Thanksgiving and going to the 20 degree town of my Dads, I packed it up.  When I was there I asked my much more homely step-mom about washing it and she told me too “Woolite It”.  I didn’t really know what this was, because I never owned or used Woolite.  So I read the bottle and hand scrubbed the scarf in the sink with cold water and Woolite then dried it in the sun and then by the fire.  The scarf is like new and smells good and is a brighter color and I can’t take it off.  Even back in LA I want it on all the time, luckily it is cold and rainy here and the scarf is suiting.  I think keeping my neck warm all day does wonders for my body.

Yes, there is still a big strike in LA and the “bis” and so I’m not working.  Other than some side jobs for my boss and collecting unemployment, I’m back to the usual Alexander that schleps around the house and neighborhood all day, doing yoga then getting drunk and sleeping strange hours.  Usually a drunken nap from 7pm until 2am, then lots of reading and writing in the dark morning hours.  Quietly diggin all night in the kitchen and other corners of the house.  I don’t look at clocks, but when the sun cracks out, I go back to sleep, and skip out on morning, getting back up just in time for lunch!

Yes, I was on a long car trip.  LA to SF for a long weekend that included nothing but friends, laughter, some crying and some vodka.  More vodka than crying.  So much laughter.  AND SEX!   I then drove from SF to my Dad’s, Virginia City NV.. 4 hours away, over Donner pass… at 7500 ft, no wonder a whole crew of folks ate each other there not more than a century ago.    and Yes, I didn’t ever call you or many people on my long-car-ride-phone-list.  The ride to Tahoe was so rainy and foggy and dangerous.  No calls.  The longest alone car ride I have ever done was from Reno back to LA.  7.5 hours flat.  And NO reception, EVER… it was all mountains and the most beautiful ride of my life.  395-South is not an interstate, so no trucks or traffic.  Your going 90MPH then have to quick slow  down to 25MPH to go through the smallest mountain town with one light and a bar and a barber shop.  I wanted to live in all of these towns.  In the apartment above the bar.  Or something.

So I’m back in LA and I’m very neutral.  I saw Ben, it was love.  I see my cat, thats not all love.  I play in the kitchen and long hours at coffee shops.  Remember my rant about coffee shops and when I used to work in them I couldn’t get understand those all-dayers that sat there with one mug and something to read.  I KNOW NOW.. they didn’t have jobs!!!!!   I’m one now and I love it.  If it wasn’t for money, I would gladly sit most the day in my living room, then shift out of the house to the cafe.  Maybe go there on two occasions in the day, I remember old guys that used to do that.

I’ll be “back east” in a few weeks…. depending on Strike news and what the next few weeks turn into, I will probably still try to make a good couple weeks with that part of town.  Can we spend New Years together?  Have we ever S?  I think we crossed paths in Philly once, but never a full night.  I’m sure you know I have a large obsession with that Holiday.  Of all the arbitrary Holidays between October and January, this one is my favorite.  Why?  Because New Years is all about time, and its ironic that I would like a night BASED on time.  Time that we dumb animals invented.  Also, in America, it is the most accepting time for drunkeness… its like a Holiday thats ALL ABOUT getting wasted.. not only wasted, but wasted for a specific minute in time.   This I like.  It’s a night for Alcoholics!  Also, I hate and therefore love the whole expectation thing that comes about.  “What are you doing for New Years?”  “I don’t know, what should we do.”  Everyone, even those people who don’t drink-  sans a glass of champagne on NYE, makes a point to make plans.  I hate plans, so I love pretending to be someone unlike me for a night.  Make big plans, get real drunk (well that’s like me) and do it all because its midnight of a New Year!  Awesome.

I think I invented the greatest recipe today sorta by accident, I call it Guacamole Salad:   You take the most perfect Avacados and slice them into squares.  Chop cherry tomatoes, onion and garlic, all chunky.  Put it all on a small bed of mixed greens or spinach and dress it with a splash of good olive oil, splash of rice vinegar, splash of Amino Acids or soy and big splash of lemon/lime.  Toss all that goos news together with some salt, pepper and chile powder and you have a fucking feast of all the guacamole ingredients as a big meal!  Who could ask for anything better.  Fuck the chips, get a fork and eat guac salad today!

Good nite!