beware of giant crab!!! and fare well to lost architecture

oh alrighty, so Friday was "pay the bills day" (muttttter) and i filled out all the things that needed to be filled out and headed over to the post office. fed the meter, waited in line, played zaxxon on my gameboy advance whilei waited for the x-mas crowd to get their shit sent in line ahead of me. Among the things i was mailing was a money order for a speeding ticket incurred in Indiana recently, more money than would be required to buy an Xbox 360 or a Nintendo Wii (I love bringing up videogames for no reason at all, and it'll be a theme of this entry on purpoise) and yet, not quite as fun as those. I begrudingly sent the shit out, only to find a $40 parking ticket J-U-S-T slapped on my windshield outside, fo rthe luvva pete. Ironically, I turned down a bid for a Sega CD Model One on ebay earlier this week for the same amount of money (for obvious reasons) - later last night I folded my pants to put away on the shelf, and the other time which iw as too stingy to feed the meter earlier fell out.

I hate you, world.

So, so so so, working on an art test for a game job. A good job, dunno if I am at all in the running, but regardless I should try. My efforts have been hampered by crashy shitty software, which seems to have laid off on irritating me a but finally, so I plod on. Meanwhile, I take a break to eat reheated Barbeque Wings and Ice Cream, and surf the net - as is my wont - and read all manner of random things. And I happen upon some articles about traveling, and seeing weird different strange things in other countries, and my memories whisk back to when I had a glimpse of such things. In my 32 years almost, and I notice that I live in a place and time where travel (or relocation) is not such a huge pain in the ass (well.. as it COULD be). But for a number of reasons, it's just never been a huge important thing in my life. Ironically, then, that I always intend to alter my lifestyle and get a more "worldly" view of things, as opposed to limiting myself to the culture and circumstances from which I've originated..

and yet.. yeah, I'm a pussy. Well, I'm programmed, and I've done well to follow through (nearly to a Tee, in some ways) in keeping up my end of that bargain. Sure, I have moved away from my family and all the things of my adolescence, but to what? There's plenty of Blockbuster Videos, Staples and Wal-Marts and Applebee's on this side of the coast as there are in New England. (yes, it is THIS rant again). Same TV shows, same movies, same school curriculum, religions, Time Magazines, etc etc. You can buy the same brands of cars, dishwasher detergents. I guess we have our own unique newscasters in different areas and television call-letters. So yeah, I am not getting any ya-ya-younger, and I look down the road at what's to come and it's feeling a little bleah, at times. I mean, it would be one thing if the world at large was boring and stupid, but it's rich and full and, well, exploding with interesting things! The tiny bit of traveling I have done was enough to open my eyes to that fact.

Problems - again, I am from a heavily conservative background, in spite of everyone telling me I am nuts, and all my crazy partying or whatever. Picking it all up and moving to California is certainly nothing to balk at (nearly 7 years later, mind you!) but it's pretty "safe," and though the local culture has certainly influenced and changed me, it feels a bit worn by now. The point I was making - my conservatism, plus the fact that I am a workaholic (yeah, again for good reason - in my field it's fucking tough to get or keep a good job!) and with that, when I work it feels like my ultimate goal is to eventually build UP, save up, buy a house, the American Dream of Domestication and all of that. Why change it up when you can settle down, eh? And moreover, something i have bitched about in this forum time and again, we live in this crazy-overboard consumer culture. Materialistic. Get money, buy things, things you need, things that end up owning you. Yeah, so, I have a car, TV, bed, nice apartment, all of those hard-won things make it hard to want to jettison my worldy belongings inexchange for searching for the greater truth. The more you accumulate, the more you need to accumulate. Did I mention an ebay auction earlier in here?

A little more to complain - continuing on with the thought above - we are a society which has got a HUGE focus on leisure. All that stuff we buy, we use it to lock down into our homes, safe and sound, to experience the world safely thru a glass tube (or, lately, Plasma or LCD screen). Broadcast and transmitted and edited and sanitized for mass consumption. Just raunchy enough to keep it interesting, but bite-sized enough not to tense our increasing Collective Attention Deficit Disorder. Clean, concise, content. Congratulations.

You know, I had some hope to see some weirdness during my cross country trip back to Los Angeles, and I did see a bit of a cross section, but mostly what I saw was.. nothing. Mesas, man, mesas. IHOPs and Arby's. No, I am not dissing Arby's - but even during the odd chances that I do return home to boston, I see a lot of the familiar mom-n-pop places I remembered from growing up, steamrolled and replaced with generic corporate-owned updates. Nah, I can't diss the corporations, much as it's trendy to - I am looking for my piece 'o the pie as much as the next guy.

So, yeah, what now. Usual whining, i have got it out of my system. I can return to doing my art test and hope it will help me find my hole to comfortably return to, a perfect fit, just another cog in the huge machine. Making money for some rich guys who don't even know me (or need to), vying for my own chance to be a somewhat rich guy as well, so that I can amass some wealth and trivialize further the fact that I'm just another boring useless shithead with a webpage who will die someday without ever having experienced even a fraction of the great grandness of it all even though he got a whiff of the fact that it was oozing out from every corner. Maybe I will still send my shit out to Shanghai.. just to see...