Occasionally when I approach a stranger they will ask me “How are you doing?”
I’ll then say something like “I’m good how are you?”
What I find bothersome is sometimes people will answer this by saying “Fantastic!” As if there is some sense of one-ups-manship involved in asking people how they are doing.

I’ve thought before that I could write for an in-flight magazine.

I have a joke that I tell when I’m on an airline and the plane is taxing to prepare for takeoff. After the plane taxis awhile I’ll say to the person seated next to me, “Does the pilot plan on driving us to our destination!”  Usually they’ll laugh. You’re welcome to use that joke.

I think in the future we’ll be able to attach the brain of a dolphin to a computer via a bunch of wires so that scientists can then create a dolphin philosophy of life for people to follow. People would love shit like that.

I remember reading once that the perfect chair has never been designed.

I’ll bet there’s not a scientific analysis that determines how many parking lots should be put in front of a shopping plaza. It’s probably something contractors and builders thank about a little bit before deciding to wing it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an escalator inside a private home. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a good idea.

I was never a fan of Funyuns, that snack product.

Being a stunt man looks like a dangerous job.

In the future we will be able to control matter with our minds. What this means is that if you are watching TV and get a toothache you could think “Dentist” and a dentist would appear right there to help you. Of course the tools he brings would depend on the size of your room.

I wonder if the homeless man who takes my aluminum recycling gets excited around Halloween because there are more parties and more beer drinking and so hence more beer cans for him.

I really don’t ever need to see little kids rapping.

I once thought that the pen I owned and used was important. I would seek out those Uni-ball pens in office supply stores and buy boxes of them at a time. I felt as though their smooth flowing ink and dark black color were the perfect combination I needed to appropriately capture my thoughts on paper. Other pens were inferior to the Uni-ball. The Uni-ball was a technological achievement. It separated those with a frontal lobe from those with mere spinal cord. There was also a social component to my desire to exclusively purchase and use Uni-ball pens; I wanted to be the kind of person that thought pens were an important purchase and everyday item of personal use. People would think I was consistent, solid, a thoughtful consumer, intellectual, focused, worldly and confident. These ideas are not quite madness. Do the things we own have special powers to imbue our being with meaning? I’m guessing this just depends upon the social context. If I was on a desert island by myself with my Uni-ball, the pen wouldn’t mean anything really; but if there were a couple of people there they might think, “Hmm, that guy’s got a Uni-ball pen, what a sophisticated young man he must be!”

The building supplied to the army to implement their new intelligence information strategy was a 45 year old rotting structure bursting from the inside with ancient green and brown cubicles stuffed with reports, notebooks, training manuals, inventories, checklists, 4” floppy disks, photos of families, inspirational posters, knickknacks, trinkets, football pennants, clocks, radios, forgotten sandwiches, rifles, broken computers, old science experiments, football uniforms, whiskeys, the ashes of Stonewall Jackson.

In the corner now where our meeting was being held a fire burned leisurely fueled by strategic plans, password scrolls, civil war uniforms and the rusty shell of an IBM 7090. Above the fire was a chart mapping out the details of the army’s intelligence plan. It was titled “Evolutionary Communication Acquisition Strategy” and displayed numerous green arrows flowing into and away from other colored arrows. The text next to these arrows was provided to explain the chart:  “Information Vlynor B28: An informational Vision Implementation Strategy.” Also on the chart were lists and time lines (1963-2024) and small photos of Reagan, both Bushes and Clinton. At random locations on the chart were quotes designed to provide the motivational zing for the charts contents: “Information, tomorrow and today- The Future’s Communication!”, “Connect intelligence with Ideas- Make Tomorrow Work!” Exclamation points were always used to make up for shoddy work, that was one of the initial decisions that was made which the project was initially implemented in 1963.

Here are some photos of the New South Tour Summer 2008.

In Wal Mart Little girls wear light blue eye liner and short shorts they keep pulling out of their cracks. Fat tan and grey party men with mullets buy beer and barbecue supplies. All men and little boys wear baseball caps and glasses to emulate racecar drivers. The men seem uptight, wrapped around a world of hard work, paying bills and being a Man. A slightly retarded man sings and arranges canned vegetables in his shopping cart, he’s out of place. Boxes with a cartoon that I’ve seen somewhere before are stacked next to children’s clothing sections. The sheer mass quantities of consumable goods is amazing. Will there be 75 little girls in the Roanoke valley with the big plastic toy with the cartoon smiling girl on it? The workers are hard to find and it takes me 10 minutes to find the canned tomatoes. They’re not in the canned vegetable section but in the tomato sauce area. Walt Mart is strange, a little world plays it self out in the enormous cheap consumables sarcophagus.

Feast your eyeballs on a video collage of footage and sounds of the New South Tour:

This is the Revolutionary Suicide Jazz Band, Idi Amin’s personal personal party jazz band.
Evidently Amin would also play an accordion at parties while his guests would awkwardly dance. This image is from Barbet Schroeder’s documentary about Amin. Footage of the Revolutionary Suicide Jazz Band can be found in this You Tube video at the 4:50 mark.

Here’s a video about the Starlite Drive In I put together in the spring of ‘08: