Just because I don’t write Introspection anymore doesn’t mean that I don’t often think in terms of quick updates. This blog format affords the luxury of doing both short blippy quips about my life like the old days, as well as the longer, more thoughtful pieces…

One of the grand ironies of the American experience is that some of our greatest themes and anthems for revered concepts are actually songs lambasting said concept.

The least subtle example of this may be Peter, Paul & Mary’s “I Dig Rock-n-Roll Music”. This is a more obscure case, but it remains PPM’s only really fully legitimate radio song. With lines like “But if I really say it, the radio won’t play it, unless I lay it, between the liiines,” it’s not really hard to see exactly where this song’s loyalty lies. And yet it made the radio and remains there to date as a sincere tribute to rock-n-roll (as opposed to folk music, which PPM were actually advocating). I’m sure the even crueler irony of this being their one radio hit when it complains that the radio won’t play folk music… yeah.

The most damning example may be Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”. This tune has become third only to “Proud to Be an American” (a song guaranteed to induce vomiting within 30 seconds) and the national anthem itself as the theme music to flag-waving jingoistic American patriotism. And yet the song was written as an indictment of American hypocrisy and the Vietnam War. The non-refrain lyrics are just hard enough to understand and the chorus is just loud and brash enough to ensure that this song will always bring a smile to the face and a cheer to the voice of those who are unaware they are celebrating an anti-American tune. “So they put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land, to go and kill the yellow man.”

But the song that’s stuck in my head from this category today is “Takin’ Care of Business”. Office Depot or a related office store has become the latest in an unending string of businesses using this anthem to explain how productive you’ll be when using their products. “It’s the work that we avoid and we’re all self-employed, we love to work at nothing all day.” Yeah. This song is about quitting your job and starting a rock band, which is explicitly stated to be a lazy sort of scam on those who actually slog away at day jobs. Business indeed.

The song is stuck in my head because it’s one of the rotating theme songs for my baseball video game of choice these days, the 2007 mod of the greatest baseball game of all time, MVP Baseball 2005. My Mariners are getting massacred in this game on a regular basis, but any time I win makes it all worthwhile.

And speaking of the Mariners and winning, last night offered a glimpse at the best inning of the year for the (real-life) Seattle Mariners. Raul Ibanez had 6 RBI in a 10-run seventh inning that catapulted the M’s from a 6-1 deficit to an 11-6 win. When I tuned in around the fourth or fifth inning, it was 6-0, Twins. I wasn’t even sure why I tuned in when the score was already that lopsided. The M’s haven’t exactly been specializing in comebacks this year. But Ibanez hit a grand slam that made it 6-5 and the M’s proceeded to tack on and on and on, all the way to bringing up Ibanez again in the inning as the 14th man to come to the plate, and again with the bases loaded!! He only smacked a single up the middle to plate two and the inning only ended because Willie Bloomquist tried to score too on a throwing error and got barely tagged out.

It’s funny how just an inning like that can redeem a mood and a perspective for a day or so. Even in a hopelessly lost season.

It’s the sun that’s hopelessly lost here in San Francisco, and it’s looking like my trip to Las Vegas (Thursday evening departure) couldn’t be coming at a better time. The 10-day forecast in San Francisco does not get above 65 degrees (high temperature). The same 10-day forecast in Las Vegas does not get below 81 degrees (low temperature). I am a little nervous about “Florida Syndrome” in LV, wherein people will air-condition casino interiors to the point of being as cold as August highs in San Francisco, but then I may just cancel half the poker to go sit outside on the Strip and bake. I desperately need to feel the illusion of some sort of summer.

Meanwhile, my job continues to be my job. Slightly more livable than two weeks ago, ebbing and flowing, constantly leading me on only to crush my spirit. If nothing else, it’s giving me great fodder for future books and stories, future tales of how the American work model fails its people on all levels. And I know that where I’m working is better than 95% of what else is out there. We’re not even driven by a profit motive.

And speaking of profit (and even prophet), is it too early to declare the End of Capitalism? Today, Wall Street wants to think so. It’s just so exciting to have a negative net interest rate! To just feel that money devaluing in your pocket. I mean, how often does your pocket burn a hole in your money? That’s just nifty. Let’s buy financial stocks before they fail.

What surprises me is not that people are revealed to lie, cheat, steal, cut corners, and fabricate in pursuit of almighty profit. What surprises me is that people are surprised by the revelations.

Work out.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Last night I fell asleep early and slept a hard, lousy sleep. The kind of sleep of the half-dead wandering in the wilderness forty years, finally felled to respite on a stone tablet of some sort. Sleep that in some ways may be the best after forty waking years, but is colored by resting one’s temple directly on unforgiving rock.

As one might expect from such sleep (or from me, at least), there were dreams. Several of them were far-ranging colorful swirls of mayhem, but the last two were calmer, more sober, and vividly memorable.

The first was set in an igloo, starring documentarian Morgan Spurlock and his wife, who were presumably spending the next thirty days living there. I got inside the igloo and immediately realized how enclosing the space felt, how solid and impenetrable the iceblock walls. It immediately occurred to me: “If someone wanted to kill you, all they’d have to do is block up the entrance with snow, right?”

Morgan and Alex laughed and shrugged this off, and I pointed out something about having a backup ventilation system, like a chimney. They mentioned that the howling winds of the Arctic (we’re in the Arctic, interesting) make the cross-flow of air from two openings unbearably cold. They seemed really nervous when I went out to go to the bathroom and I assume got more so (I guess I sort of somehow knew they were getting more nervous in the dream, even though I couldn’t see them) when I took my time getting back. They were worried I was thinking about blocking up the igloo once they fell asleep, but really I was just afraid of going back in and making myself vulnerable to someone else doing the same.

The second dream was more concretely explicable and pretty much impossible to misinterpret. I was at a fair or festival of some kind with friends who felt vaguely close and comfortable, but who I could never quite identify or see. There was a handmade sign for horse-riding and people asked if I wanted to go. Why not? How hard could it be?

So we clamored up on horses, but one of my friends wanted to walk alongside me rather than board a horse himself (I could somehow detect his gender). He expressed concern for my safety. I got some aerial views of the parade ground for the horses as we were all marching in a line, feeling vaguely reminiscent of mules in the Grand Canyon (without the precipitous drops or elevation changes of any sort). Then back to first-person, whereon I was having a great time, but kept sliding forward in my saddle. Which somehow moved me not towards the mane of the beast, but toward the tail. I was facing the wrong way on the horse, but it was still moving in the direction I was facing. And this didn’t yet occur to me as the slightest bit odd, it was just frustrating that I kept getting jostled forward (backward on the horse that was walking backward), almost thrown over its rear.

Finally we came to some sort of traffic jam, wherein horses all held up and whinnied a bit at the sudden stoppage. My horse reared up on its forelegs, almost pitching me backwards and off, then did the opposite and almost ditched me the other way. I was clinging to nothing (there had never been any reigns) but somehow holding on while my friend insistently urged me to dismount before I got hurt. It occurred to me that people could be seriously injured or even killed by getting thrown from a horse and I had never once really internalized the danger of this process, especially since my horse now seemed to be utterly out of control. This feeling felt exactly like realizing I could be blocked up and asphyxiated in an igloo, and I woke up having somehow tied these twin realizations in a knot of new fear of the world around me.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.