El Lay

Chillin in El Lay and I must say the women here are so fly and so cute and wearing clothes that i got to get for my hipster women pals up in portland. i saw a blonde girl today fellaz. lord have mercy. and there are more asians than you can gawk at (if you, like me, love them asian women) and i saw two black women that made me collapse into convulsions.

what a great city.

its winter and the temperature is around 70F and i am walking around in my underpants. I got my hair all slicked back cuz it just feels like the right thing to do. I was at LULUs the past couple of days for breakfast and just ate and stared at all of the beautiful people. Everyone is an actor and yeah you might say they are superficial, but what i have noticed is that the majority of cats are real and trying and doing their best and actually go out of their way to prove that they ARE NOT the fake posers that everyone in LA is supposedly known for.

I am headed to the beach tomorrow to kick it with my parents and nephew. I got him a Marvel super hero poster and a Pirates of the Caribbean lunch box. what else should i get him?

this here is a story about WEED that everybody's yellin about. peep it and be cool like us.

My EL LAY style:

PEEP THIS!!

Julia Zimmermann came to Chengdu and stayed with me for several days chronicling the earthquake there for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung -- my favorite German-language newspaper.

Here is her finished work, in German. The photos speak for themselves and if you click on the slideshow to your right, you will see more of the same pics.

Peep This

Here are a couple stories I have been writing for Matador.com:

This is my list of cities for singles and here is the "companion piece" about making love to natives in order to learn their language.

Here's what I have to say about late night food out there. Feel free to drop comments and enlarge my list of pimpin ass cities to be gremlins in ... you can't write them all down ...

to the twang of a slow guitar

Chillin with my main men
we found some new friends
a million voices to hear
a million lips to read
a million eyes to look into

me and my main men
we get tribal
sometimes we get devilish
we're all looking for the same thing

feel free to join us
you might get rescued
feel free to join us
maybe you'll get rescued

Pirates with no Boat

I hereby claim "Pirates with no Boat" as my intellectual property. It does not matter if you read this post or not, the title now belongs to me. If i find it anywhere else, I will have my lawyer, my brother, sue you. That's right.

Go Bills.

its my birfday

and me and sammy have just taken our sweet time dealing with a heaping plate of biscuits and gravy at this spot down the road called the Arlita Library ... now i have had some real good biscuits and gravy and i always love em. i have had some bad ones too and there is nothing more annoying. i mean all i dig on in terms of going out is a fine jack and coke, good gravy and such and maybe a good plate of nachos. thats it. i am pretty easy.

so these biscuits that arlita serves up are unbelievable. so far, it is truly the best i have had.

my family called in the middle of my meal and i talked to my dad and mom and such. its all good. now its time for me and sam to enjoy this "sunbreak" (period of time between rain in northwest USA) and maybe put on some Clint Eastwood.

Mad love atcha.

We love the Bills

Here are some pics and a video from the last week. We had a Halloween Party and went to watch the Bills get beaten by that pill poppin cracker Brett Favre. I picked my brother up from the hospital and drove straight to Claudia's on Hawthorne to watch the Bills game. You know how we do ...

Universal Health Care?

So my wounded brother is home in Minneapolis now and my living room has never smelled better. Love the kid, but when he spends a week on your coach, you will understand the mixture of sadness and relief I feel. He is now dealing with insurance issues and paying for his substantial medical bills. It looks like he might be able to get by with a few things, but the eye opener for me was the incredible cost for health care in the US.

My friend once told me a story about rolling his car a dozen times and finally coming to a rude stop at the base of a giant tree. His hound, uninjured, slowly licked him back to life and he staggered away to the street. Several passers-by stopped and asked him if he needed help -- as in 911 -- and he refused all of them. At the time, he was uninsured and he realized that if he took an ambulance to the ER and got stitched all over his beaten ass he would be a broken man financially with debts for the rest of his life. So instead, he hiked to his buddies house, passed out on the couch and slowly mended the old fashioned way. His girl kept him propped up with luvin and soup and he passed the time watching the Lord of the Rings and smoking Buddha. He is alive and well and has back issues.

My brother put his hand through a window in a freak accident that left his tendons and arteries severed. An ambulance was the only option. After two surgeries and a week drugged up on my couch, he can now go back home and get that old fashioned TLC from one of his girlfriends in the Twin Cities.

His bill will be around $30,000. He sought out a lawyer here to take care of the insurance claims. While talking, the lawyer revealed that his father had to sell his home to pay for medical bills.

In the US, we have probably the best trauma care in the world, but you best be insured. I didn't realize how nasty this problem is while I was away in China, but now that I am home, I see that health care is one of the biggest shadows upon our land. The richest most powerful nation in the world has people dying in the ER room because they can't pay. It has people hiking home instead of going to the hospital because surviving with some cash is better than surviving without cash.

I will be doing more research into this matter. What kind of coverage is offered in Oregon to people with no insurance? Who stands in the way of universal health care? Is there a middle ground between high quality care and affordable care? I remember hearing these terms thrown about the last eight years, but now they are much more salient to me.

Wassup, any of you have stories to tell or links to share?

Crossroads of health care and immigration. (Update 11/08 4:14pm)

What is this really about

Now that Obama has won, the focus shifts to expectations for dramatic change and improvement across the board and the historic importance of the first black president.

For me, both of these lines of thought are foolish and irrelevant. Obama himself can do little to stem the tide of bankruptcies and layoffs that are yet to come. He can't single-handedly end war in Afghanistan or Iraq and there is no way he can make the nation's industries stop what they are doing and go Green. Health care reform is a long way off. Prisons will continue to fill.

What we need now is to recognize the symbolic power of a victory of the reasonable middle class that believes in positive Progress. The same day Obama was elected, three states banned gay marriage. For those who voted to deny gays the right to marry, the Bible still determines for them who can and cannot love each other. How absurd that in the 21stcentury USA homosexuality still instills fear.

Today at Dante's Inferno in downtown Portland, Isaac the crippled "owner" of the club told us how he was rolling down the Sellwood Bridge on his wheelchair when someone hit him and busted him up real good. It was a hit and run, but Isaac ain't trippin. He has waited 55 years to see a black man in the White House and he's still smilin'. I always am skeptical of a bum's story, but what the hell. Its the symbolism that counts. When a lady next to us at the bar said that Obama will only prove that a black man in office is just as corrupt as a white man, Isaac said Shit! and my brother was like, take that Haterade somewhere else. hahahahaha ...

I guess my point is that expectations for Obama misses the whole point of this thing and glorifying his blackness does too. The two topics seek to divided us from our victory:

by expecting more from him, we are preparing for disappointment and absolving ourselves from responsibility.
by making him black, we strip him of his leadership qualities and black people of their humanity.

Best way to handle all of this is to ride the wave and expect more from government in general and ourselves specifically. It should be easy now to understand that anything can happen if people are united and organized. We should feel like part of a community and safe enough to walk any street, sit down at any bar, ask directions from any man.

Tips: Hold a garage sale and BBQ if weather allows. Organize a soccer league with your local strip joint as the sponsor. Kick it downtown and say hello to strangers, so we can feel safe again. Sign up for a Greenpeace newsletter and then roll to the coast to save something. Go to the hot springs and invite strangers in to chill with you.

Forget blackness and whiteness. (This is really how we change things, by making symbols reality through small deeds, done daily.) Be nice for no reason.

otherwise you watch TV waiting to see the miracle be wrought and end up bitter and shaking your head at the futility of it all.

If you a man, buy a girl a drink or a candy bar and demand nothing but the memory of her smile in return.

If you a girl, feel free to post a comment on this super dope blog.

God Bless America

finally. we have a leader we can be proud of and a country we can believe in. It is now time to get up in the morning and begin executing the plans and promises that we have been hearing over the past two years.

John McCain's speech in defeat is a fine one and it is the first time I have felt proud of him. He really is trying to tell his supporters (booing crackers though they may be) to understand that the fight is over and now is the time to build.

I feel good. I feel proud, but most of all i feel anticipation for the days to come. Obama has the House, the Senate and the people behind him. With such power and support he can accomplish many things. We shall see.

But for now, its a celebration ya'll.