fri 27 jul 2001 12:00:00 — allston, ma
misc
rob p told me about how he once wanted to do a paper about the dead-followers as a nomadic subculture in america. rob used to travel following the tour. just last week he had an old friend drive all the way from alaska to visit him and see the dead show in hartford meadows? the guy had to drive about 900 miles a day to make it in time. he was a bit changed by the time he got here.
rob says the mobile deadfollowing economy is at least semi viable. if you have a ride, somebody might trade you some food. somebody might have amazing weed. or clothes, crafts. the other thing is the tour picks up a lot of runaways who are escaping from bad situations, and might have ended up in worse situations had it not been for the culture they stumbled into. and you can be driving down the road anywhere, even the jersey turnpike, and look around you and sense that you're not away from home, because all the people on the road are from your tribe.
we are also scheming about ways to make lots of money in vladivostok, a place where he says nobody has any money. is this what they mean by kafkaesque?
andrews sisters "hold tight, hold tight, hold tight hold tight brrr-ackysacky want some seafood mama. shrimps and rice, they're very nice. … i get my favorite dish. fish!" (what in godsnaam were they smoking?)
jump cut to the psychedelic furs. love my way.
the guy in thirteen wants to buy into the dotcom miracle. it's a new economy, the old rules of actually providing something worth anything no longer apply. but his ideas for internet domain names are a little too far flung. iamnotaterrorist.com. heavendotwhat.com. valueneutralcrazy.com.
the solid since-childhood friendship that finally hits the rocks when the two of you go on a low budget european holiday together. the sudden whiner, insecure in a foreign land. complaining about the food, the drinks, the people. they promised you they were great travellers, go with the flow types, but turn out to be grumpy whiners.
the teletubby tale heart, by edgar allen po. little charming creatures with videoconferencing screens in their tummies. they run away when the windmill starts making that sparky noise. lie down on a hill and squirm in a reverie. the first time you see the show, you think you're dreaming.
at the time of the oklahoma city bombing, tim mcveigh was a salesman for a _____ company in buffalo new york. sales weren't that good anyway, and then the chief suspect in the bombing was a guy with tim's name. tim mcveigh was suddenly big news for a while. when he called his prospects and introduced himself, there would be an awkward pause. "no not that one," he'd hear himself saying — often enough that he was thinking of having that disclaimer added to the little six-point text on his business card. it was a very strange thing.
the strangest part was one day when he was walking down delaware avenue on the way to city hall for some reason, and passed by the federal building in buffalo. it was one of those really ugly federal buildings like you see almost in every city, huge slab with molded concrete windowshapes forming a pattern as endless as it was inscrutable. the earliest buildings of the US govt had something heroic and noble about them, they were monuments to beliefs perhaps. these, of the sixties and seventies, are monuments to obfuscation. so he walks past the building, looks up, and briefly thinks, ya know, demolishing these things isn't really a bad idea. his undesirable namesake merely went about it the wrong way, for the wrong reasons. but no sooner does he have this thought than he's gripped in a paralyzing fear that someone is somehow listening.
pretty soon he gets cut loose from his job as a salesman, being the least performing of them all. and he's having trouble finding a new job. it seems like a good time to legally change his name. it's complicated and costs money. and you have to fetch some old documents in faraway places.
dick jane & hitler