B-Line All Stars

For the Coming Tomorrow

2008-11-14T10:51:00.005-05:00

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, 1993

The suffocating power of this book isn’t just it’s total command of what our present was in the past, nor is it the harrowing and compassionate and gripping journey out of right-now. It isn’t that Butler will not let you forget how horrible humans can be to each other, or how quickly we accept becoming animals. Butler has mastered every detail and breath of surviving in a world not that far away from ours, but so much worse.

America two-steps into a reality of slavery, prostitution, rape and murder as a daily backdrop to the walled in cul-de-sacs left over and surrounded by the chaos of the majority poor. Every face is a thieves, but a thieves driven by desperation and unending hunger. But the most dangerous are the addicts killing for a narcotic which transmutes fire into an experience better than sex. And, so, they burn everything. All while wholesale and unpoliced murder rampages through the last illusions of civilization.

What makes this book so eviscerating is the Balanok, the much older lover to Lauren Olamida the protagonist and leader of a survivors colony as they daily escape robbery or carnivorous rape from fellow escapees heading north out of California to a larger disaster. It is a world plagued by climate change; it hasn’t rained in Los Angeles in six years. It is one where community is the sole means of survival, even if everyone you know is burned to death. We may pray that Ms. Butler’s vision is never realized, because she has put before us something terrible and perfect. And even on her last page’s salvation, you cut your finger on the inexorable finality

Prix Renaudot

2008-09-09T19:16:00.007-05:00

Leaden penetrations, as when a hard and horrible truth finally bashes its way in front of your attention, are the most burdensome but blessedly, the most rapid to pass. The big stuff; getting shitcanned over a ludicrous idea; the death of a pet; a compound- fracture car accident; being foreclosed. Or an insidious thin noise, everpresent, heard just behind every word being spoken to you, as what happens during a slow and maschocistic break-up. This is how Separation, by Dan Franck, makes every page ring in sadness and anger, but all the more so, by making his essential truths draw out in cathartic strokes.

The breakup realizes immediately on the first page, and as you look through the smoke of the bomb that just blew up in your hands you spend the next two hundred pages trying to fathom the casualties. Not one thing ends happily, and Franck makes it detestably good. Each page squeezes the heart a little tighter, as the narrator and his wife of seven years separate. The one-up-manship thrilled and disgusted; the couple break-up all over Paris and the melancholy rollick which by the end has your lungs as wet as the slaughtered couple.

The book was found for me at the library, when we were looking for books set in France ahead of an upcoming trip. Franck scores wonders. Each savory place and setting was kept crisp and inspired, and it kept me awash in memory. The narrator's battlegrounds with his wife are made just the more evocative. I finished the book with scortched hands.

Johnnyweed

2008-06-11T08:26:00.005-05:00

Michael Pollan's excellent "Botany of Desire", a Christmas gift that I am only now getting a chance to enjoy, is a work that immediately leaves you wet in the mouth and burning to start-up a garden. However doomed that latter enterprise would be, for me personally, it does not distract for what is ultimately Pollan's thesis, that humans are much more domesticated by the plants we enjoy than the other way around. Pollan gives us an eye-opening reductionist survey of illusion of human control, and begs essential questions about our own adaptability and coevolutionary fitness.

Up against the apple, a being of wonderful genetic diversity, our own germline makes all of us look like inbred jackasses. That every conserved variety of apple can trace it's lineage back to a single tree that had the luck of making itself delicious to humans speaks to the inexorable way in which specie interdependence plays out. Otherwise, apples would proliferate in varieties that we would find alien - it is only the varieties that we desire that make it to cultivation.

Pollan then examines the tulip and how a fairly ordinary flower brought the 17th Century global economy to its knees. His full account of the cultivation and speculation into the flower are masterful, from it's diversity of bright and hardy colors to the inflationary froth that halted global commerce once the tulip-bubble collapsed.

Likewise, with the cultivation of marijuana, and Pollan's own white-knuckled gardening adventure with the weed, we see how a hemp regulation and the constant desire for altered states has consumed thousands of man-hours in regulation and lost time over what was once considered a miracle fiber.

But Pollan's opus concludes on a high note when he looks at the humble potato. Well, humble might not fit - glorious, rainbow shades of potato, home grown with nutty and explosive flavors that most Americans will never taste. Instead, we eat a genetically modified potato that holds several patents and is grown exclusively for mass consumption in fried form, devoid of all the properties that make potatoes so nutritious. They stand as witness to the mass cultivation and marketing that goes into so much of the food we eat every day. With the potato as microcosm, we get a larger look into how we eat everyday.

This is a splendid book, and I've now picked up The Omnivore's Dilemma which I am really looking forward to. Without writers like Pollan, we risk losing the last remaining threads to the earth that tolerates us, and to not read him is to further our species peril.

I piss here too!

2008-03-25T20:35:00.002-05:00

Fuck me if it isn't tough finding a proper toilet at 5:30 on a Monday evening. I know, I know, Nate you say, I've been drinking all afternoon to forget my problems and I forgot to go behind the dumpster where I stash my fifths of Barcardi. Drunk friend, I dig! You have nothing to explain to me!

The cops however, will want an explanation. Especially after you shed your clothes, whip out your dong and write your name on the disabled passenger seats. I know! If they're disabled they have their own seats, the ones with wheels, so by all means, dump your pisser there. So what if the police don't understand. So what if they make you put on your clothes and a pair of handcuffs. You went out of your way to show us working tool-bags that we too could be wrecked at 5:30 and naked down to our socks if we wanted to. Friend. America and I salute you.

Red State Hangover

2008-01-30T18:41:00.000-05:00

Oh man, awesome. The canker sore that's blown up in my mouth is truly a sight to see, so calloused from rubbing up against my rotting molars that it looks like the bottom of my worn-out foot. When it comes up for air, it bears a striking resemblance to Rudy "noun, verb, 9/11" Guilianni, who yesterday had a bad day to end all bad days.

Also, go read History of Love, and if you can ignore the fact that Krause is married to Jonathan Safran Foer, you'll really enjoy it.

Oops, I moved

2008-01-28T13:03:00.000-05:00

Wound up in Brooklyn, Park Slope neighborhood where I come to find that YES! The MTA B Line is my closest subway stop. Huzzah. The cat and the missus survived the journey. For the record, the move to New York was the right decision. The sushi alone is worth the trip, no matter if you turn into a mercurial tunnel beast from over-eating the yellow-fin.

Read a book about a president.

8 Degrees

2007-01-26T10:18:00.000-05:00

That's the high today in Boston, MA. I had to take the T this morning, against all my better wishes, as there was almost no physical way I was going to be able to make the 6 mile walk to Chinatown this morning, where I had to go to get my license renewed (away on business next week).

8:00 am and all of 6, count 'em, 6 degrees outside the coldest day of winter so far. I knew this was going to be the walking test, whether or not I could really balls up and walk in the New England cold, and sure enough, with my long-john suit on and some good layering, I was pretty warm.

Only, I would be warm if I was moving - no, instead, I got the pleasure of waiting 15 minutes for an inbound Greenline; those of you who don't know Boston, the MBTA above-ground trolleys have a maximum of two cars per train service. Imagine being in NYC where each subway car was only an eighth to a quarter as long as it needed to be for efficient service. Now take away one of those cars, for, due to some unimaginable reason, the second car sat in the dark, not accepting passengers. Why even have a second car?

In such, the first car was so packed that no one could get on, and the OrangeJacket trying to maintain order shrugged with sheepish impotence as he collected the recently increased T fare.

I'm not getting on, as I see another T cresting the hill behind it. By the next stop (and I live pretty far out along the subway lines), the train was overfull and remained that way until I completed my grim commute the DMV - like out of the frying pan and into the fire right?

I would be remiss though if I didn't compliment the Mass DMV - they are actually, and efficiently run, pleasant group of people, willing to make strange exceptions for idiots like myself who let their license expire and need something to pick up a rental car.

Oh, and the ride back involved 7 D-line trains in a row. How many people are headed out to Riverside?

I don't even know what to say about this

2007-01-25T09:49:00.000-05:00

Here's today's must read.

I mean, holy Christ, this is a major metropolitain transit system and we are relying on fucking BLACKSMITHS? After we get done turning the Wayback Machine to 1910, perhaps we can all mount our trusty steeds and see if, on horseback, we can beat the B Line from Packard's Corner to Kenmore.

...Blacksmiths.

Ain't Working

2007-01-24T09:19:00.000-05:00

This goddamn job. A man with a shopping cart full of yellow books rattling past two pro-lifers who were genuflecting in front of planned parenthood just about made my morning.

First Snow

2007-01-23T10:10:00.000-05:00

It should snow on Allston all the time, as it looks way less shitty when covered over. Even the seemingly free-for all trash heaps along Harvard Ave appear as innocent fixtures on a long city scape.

The view from Summit Ave had downtown looking like Beirut, steam belching up from every car and building, and there I was, ready to run from the zombies.

Everyone should go here.

I've lost about 7 pounds, just by not taking the fucking T.

10 Foot Effluvia

2007-01-08T12:41:00.000-05:00

I can't wait until the really foul weather starts up, so that during my work day I can be even more smug and self-righteous about my walk to work.

Like today for instance - pouring down rain all morning long, and like an idiot, I can't find an umbrella. The Boston Sewer and Water commish needs to get its act together as well, because it wasn't the rain that had soaked me through by the time I got to my desk, but the goddamn rivers of filth built up from clogged as storm drains. When I say that they are impassable, I mean that they are at least half-a-foot deep at nearly every intersection. It makes for happy when a delivery truck tries to break its own record for wave splash all over your humble narrator.

Money that the T has not received from me, to date: $6.00.

Footy

2007-01-04T14:35:00.000-05:00

Went out for a long session of belated birthday drinks with ThePrince at the best bar in Kenmore, and after hearing about his past weekend spent walking amongst gentiles at Christmas, and Drunk Santa Neighbor, we discuss the brutal reality of the situation:

THE MBTA IS ALL-POWERFUL. PESKY MORTALS WILL NEVER CHANGE THE T, FOR THE T IS INFALLIBLE.

But, though THE T is like "Fuck poor people," ThePrince did come up with a ringer of an idea - that I should simply walk to work.

Rollicking fuck Jesus, yes! Walk to work! I've been looking for a cheap way to motivate my lazy-goddamn ass, and this is an awesome opportunity to do just that. Fuck the fucking T. Hear that, bitch? I'll walk the same route your tracks go, and I'll save myself four fucking dollars a day, which, with proper investments, can turn into packs of cigarettes and whiskey.

Do you accept bits of string?

2007-01-04T14:09:00.000-05:00

January 2nd brought some changes to my life, some resolutions: namely, stay on top of my finances, cut down on the constant alcohol-fueled benders that are my evenings, make regular dental check-ups, switch cigarette brands, be a better correspondent, the usual.

A late paycheck had just arrived to soak up the holiday overdraft fees, and, though I knew that my beloved MBTA would be raising its fares in the New Year, I figured my entry-level salary would be able to absorb the blow.

Nope.

Where my entire commute had been a measly $1.25 (when you ride the B-Line, they only bleed you going inbound, that is, into downtown. They had the goddamn human decency to let you ride outbound to Allston Rock City), I was delighted to discover that not only had they raised the fare, but that they would now be charging for a previously free service.

Listen, I know this sounds like proletariat bitching, I know New York and Philadelphia and London and Paris all have public transit that is hugely expensive by comparision, but really, that's the whole point:

See, Massachusetts in general, and Boston specifically, is so hopelessly expensive that
one of it's few saving graces was the relative inexpense of the trolleys. Yes, I have put up with a half-decade of appalling service, never getting a seat, up to my tits in unwashed undergraduates, been spat at by a conductor for having the audacity to try and pay the once 85 cent fare with a dollar, watched in hopelessness as yet another train refused to stop as it hauled itself express into the pitiless cold of a New England February morning, when all we want is to get to work on time. Unless you're coming home in the evening, at which point, no matter how early you think you get out, the trains run so infrequently that you get the privilege of watching no less than 3 trains go by, as they are too full to let even another quanta on board.

But at least that indignity didn't cost me anything. Until yesterday.

You can imagine how happy I was to have a fixed expense in my very fixed income explode to 320% of what I was paying. That's right - was $1.25 for a roundtrip journey (free outbound, buck and a quarter for the morning ride in). Now it's $2.00 inbound. And $2.00 outbound. And all the fucking attitude you can handle.