Motorcycle Moments

I was riding on California Street on the hills above the Financial District. I crested the hill at the same time that a cable car made it to the top. There was a group of kids on the back, all around ten years or so. They saw me coming up from behind and they all got excited and were shouting amongst each other and at me. I realized that I was the source of their excitement so I threw a fist up for their benefit as I came up fast from behind and overtook the car on the right. I had a pair of dirt biking gloves on that were given to me by my brother and were rather rock starish in appearance. The kids went nuts and one kid screamed “YOU RULE!” as I passed. That was good fun.

comin' thru

Lock Set

Hated Phrases

Look at these babies.
Take a look at these bad boys.
Check out these puppies.

(im)pure love

Clearwater Thoughts

my Heart of HEARTS

I have a deep seated, unwavering disgust for the phrase “Heart of Hearts”. When someone says “I know in my heart of hearts that…”, this is a red flag waving in attempt to clue you into the fact that they are full of desperate bullshit. In addition, you can be sure that some aspect of their personhood is hinging on their ability to convince others into buying what they are trying to say.

Tortillas and Gorillas

The teacher handed a lesson down to us in reading class that still burns my ass to think about. This was seventh grade at Fairmont Junior High School in Boise Idaho. I can’t seem to remember the name of the teacher, but I couldn’t lose her visage from my memory bank if I wanted to.
The reason that she is still so memorable can all be traced back to one poorly conceived lesson on pronunciation. One morning she got it into her head that since the double L’s at the end of the word ‘tortilla’ are pronounced with a Y sound rather than a hard L sound, the word ‘gorilla’ should be uttered the same way. I knew immediately and without question that she was wrong, yet she moved passed her hesitation and had the class sounding it out and comparing the two words. GO-REE-YA. TOR-TEE-YA.
The bizarre thing was the way that she brought the concept up to herself more than anyone else, even though she was standing in front of a class and had been giving a lesson up until that point. It was like she put herself on the spot and I could see heavy confusion register in her face as she attempted to sort out the incongruence. But she was able to talk herself through it and convince herself that the commonality in spelling meant that they MUST be rule bound to sound the same. The unmistakable look of skepticism in respect to her own flawed theory never left her face, however. Once she had cast herself in the spotlight of doubt, she felt compelled to move on quickly to give herself and the class the impression that she knew what she was talking about. I was sitting towards the front, so I could even hear her mutter, “Yeah, I think that’s what it is… yeah, that’s what it is.”
When you run up against a situation where you are not sure of something, it is perfectly fine to say so in the humble opinion of the Left Hand. What the hell is wrong with admittance of the possibility that you may not know EVERYTHING? How hard is it to qualify an assumption? If you don’t know something, I won’t hold it against you, but if you go and present your half cocked conjecture as fact, then forget it.

Drop the Container

There is a hospital administrative building behind our apartment building that has a trash pickup everyday at 5 am. The daily drill that gets run goes like this; the driver puts the truck into reverse and enters the lot with the annoying reverse safety mechanism shredding the near silence as he backs the distance till he finally reaches the trash container. Then he exits the truck and attaches the container to a mechanism on the truck and gets back inside. Then he activates the hydraulics, lifts the container up a foot and a half and drops the fuckin’ thing to the concrete and ruptures the peace of 5 a.m. with a loud ass bang. Once is not usually enough, so another 2 or 3 impacts follow the first one. By then he can count it as a job well done if his intention is to wake me up, which it surely must be.

I woke up one morning under the described circumstances with a surge of annoyance because it was, no lie, the fourth day in a row that it happened. I raised up and grabbed two bottles off of the counter. I opened the back door quietly and slipped onto the fire escape. I threw both bottles one after the other and got back inside before I heard them hit with a double smash. I just threw towards the parking lot, I didn’t try to hit the poor bastard or his truck. I felt a little bad, I mean the guy is probably just doing his job, but hell, I don’t know how many times I had been jolted awake, thinking about how to deliver the message. This just sort of happened without a whole lot of thinking, I had just woken up seconds ago. From a window I saw him jump out of the truck to see what happened, and no doubt he saw the broken glass on the ground. It must have had the desired effect because after that it stopped happening.

Hitching Post Manipulation