Oddities

Black People Love Us!

From the Valley People column of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Jan. 29 2002:

As I stood in line to pay, an emblematic urban event occurred. A very chic-looking blonde woman of 30, I supposed, was paying her bill to the matronly cashier, a woman of 45 or so. The blonde had a uniquely flat nose which I would recognize if I saw it again. I was kind of studying her nose, frankly, because it didn't fit with the rest of the package. It was the kind of nose that chic blonde women who can afford expensive clothes and fancy haircuts would certainly spend a lot of money getting a plastic surgeon to elongate, to un-Jake Lamotta, you might say. Suddenly, the matronly cashier waved her arms in front of her face and said, calmly, "I can't see." She didn't seem particularly upset but she was squinting and flailing as if fending off something unseen. I thought maybe tiny flying city bugs had attacked her. I couldn't see the cause of her obvious distress. The cashier called a kid from another counter to replace her at the register, as another kid worker lead the cashier off to the rear of the store. The chic blonde turned to me and the other guy standing there, both of us clueless, and said, "My pepper spray accidentally went off." Good thing it wasn't a gun, I said. She stared back at me like she wanted to give me a spray. Then, looking towards the rear of the store where the cashier was last seen, said to no one at all, "I hope she'll be alright" and with that walked rapidly out onto Mission Street. It finally occured to me that I ought to do something, so I stuck my head out the door and called out after the blonde sociopath, now moving so fast she was almost running, "Hey! You should at least stick around," immediately denouncing myself to myself as an ineffectual, moralistic lunk head. For all I knew, though, the blonde spent her days walking around the city pepper spraying cashiers--weirdos come in all kinds of deceptive packages these days. But I could hardly run her down on the sidewalk becaue I, a scruffy rural beatnik seen grappling with a respectible woman of means, would be certain to be pummeled to my knees by passersby as a street molesto. Well, I'd tried to be a responsible citizen, I consoled myself. Back inside, the young guys were debating whether or not they should have detained the blonde. A city emergency services crew had appeared and were helping her wash her eyes out. Two said yes, two said no, rationalizing their no's [sic] with versions of, "Molly says she'll be fine in a little while," which they hadn't known when blinded Molly stumbled from her work station. Apparently the cashier had said she was going to be okay, and apparently she wasn't angry about getting a face full of pepper spray or angry that the unfeeling mini-monster who'd done it hadn't bothered to stay to make sure she was going to be okay. I left my name and address and trudged up to Market, turned west, and made my way to my daughter's house where a sink hole had materialized in the street at her front door. A policeman had just lit several flares to warn drivers around it, and a street person had paused to sing him an ironic happy birthday.

According to this story on Salon, the newly crowned Miss America, a Harvard Law student, is doing a sort of bait-and-switch issue change from educating people about youth violence to abstinence before marriage. I couldn't care less about the Miss America pageant, really, but like a lot of other aspects of American culture (television shows, jokes, human interest news stories, commercials, mass market books) it's a great way to get a feel for how a certain kind of American thinks. The Miss America pageant has always had a sort of weirdly virginal aura about it, and the fact that this years incarnation is beating the drum for abstinence-only sex education, and that she is somehow connecting it with youth violence, is a fascinating peek in to the minds of conservative social warriors.

I wonder what the percentage of people who have sex before marriage is in this country? It's like at least 60-70%, and probably closer to 80%. Today's adolescents are entering puberty earlier, and young people are marrying later, than previous generations. I have no hard data to back this up, but it seems reasonable that your average young American gets married at 27 nowadays. If the average age of the onset of puberty is 12, that's an average of 15 years of being sexually aware before you're supposed to actually act on your sexual impulses. Now granted, if suddenly everyone stopped having premarital sex, the marriage age would drop, and I guess that would acceptable to your conservative abstinence advocate.

I think there's another dimension to this debate that's hardly ever discussed when talking about sex. It's emotional maturity. Relationships are complicated, and when you start dating in junior high or high school, you don't really have the tools to deal with the complexities of mature relationships. Teen dating is sort of the testing grounds by which you learn about how to have mature relationships, usually by learning things about yourself and the other person, and making a lot of mistakes. It's like the minor leagues.

Erika Harold, Miss America 2002, is 22 years old. She's probably smart, as few dummies get in to Harvard Law, and she's probably very attractive (I've never seen her), but I'd be willing to bet money that she's got some serious baggage based on what she's advocating. The sort of world she proposes is pretty strange: don't learn about the sexual part of yourself until you make a lifelong commitment to somebody. Of course, the disconnect in that message is that you're probably not ready to commit to someone for the rest of your life if you're not mature enough to deal with sex and physical attraction.

Or, to put it another way, if you're in a relationship where you don't fight at all, it's actually not a good thing, because you're probably willfully keeping the relationship shallow and not dealing with the sort of give-and-take that mature, long lasting relationships require.

That Miss America, supposedly the female embodiment of what we value in our society, is basically standing up and declaring that she's emotionally retarded is metaphorically pretty rich, and speaks volumes about American's lack of maturity when it comes to sexual matters.

Greg and I wanted to do a little fishing, so we headed down to Rhett's place to try to catch some runners in the Wharf To Wharf. Greg bought some donuts, and we tied donuts to the end of his fishing pole. From Rhett's balcony he waved them in front of the runners as they ran by. We had some nibbles, but couldn't land the big one. This one that got away, though, was HUGE, but it grabbed the bait and took off.

My friend Jay just bought a new mountain bike last week. A couple days after he bought it, he left town for the weekend, an opportunity too ripe with possibilities for my housemate Greg and I to pass up.

We made a few enhancements to the stock parts of the bike. Check out the damage.

Ghetto masterpiece is a dish of macaroni and cheese covered with tater tots and topped with grated cheese, and baked. I learned it from my friend Jacob, who learned it from another friend Chia-hua. To put a dent in the massive amount of Pabst that we bought for my housemate Greg in Portland, we decided to live the low life and make ghetto masterpiece and drink Pabst, and then watch a couple of movies: Victory (a horrible movie about a WWII P.O.W. camp and--no joke--soccer, staring Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, and...Pele, the Brazilian soccer hero of the '70s), and Caddyshack. There's a few pictures from the festivities.