Yesterday was a good day to get shredded in the corporate thresher that is contemporary America. Mmmm lightly shredded people.

It all started when I had this crazy idea that not only would I head to LA for DK’s wedding and see some friends while there, but that I would rent a car in LA to help shuttle Pandora to her summer home in Altadena, as well as seamlessly move myself and some friends between Santa Barbara, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, and Marina del Rey. If you don’t know the LA area, just imagine a couple East Coast states and picture yourself driving from the corner of one to the far corner of the other and most everywhere in between. Got it? Good.

So night before last, I was staying in Philadelphia with my friends Ariel & Micheal who’d generously offered to put me up and drive me to the airport in the early morning for my flight to rent a car at LAX. And while an alarm didn’t go off, I was awoken by the sun in plenty of time to pack up, get bitten by Pandora, get her into the carrier all the same, and prepare to embark for strangely less sunny climes. I was offloaded at the airport gate with about 45 minutes to flight time – cutting it as close as I’d like to, but certainly shouldn’t be a problem for a domestic Sunday-morning flight on the world’s most easygoing airline (Southwest). So far so good.

Then I got in line for the Southwest counter. It seemed absurdly long for a Sunday morning, but I quickly realized that they had shut down half their check-in kiosks to compensate for it being Sunday morning. No matter, I thought, for surely the friendly SWA attendants will soon be coming down the line asking if anyone is about to leave on the next few flights and allow those people to skip ahead in the line lest they miss their flights and cause trouble for everyone. This is what happens in most SWA airports in my experience.

But no one came and the line dragged and people cooed at Pandora in her carrier as she mewled for release instead of moving up in the line. It was nice and social and while I was getting a little concerned, I realized that the security line would surely be a breeze and we still had time to make it. So I got up to the kiosk, took the requisite beratement from the guy behind the counter that I hadn’t left 372 hours to make my flight and stand in lines, was told to hurry to the gate and that my luggage might trail me by a flight or two. All fine, I thought, for I was renting a car! The power to return to airports for late baggage and such would be mine.

Then the security line was a monument to inefficiency. They had all of four of their fifteen scanners open, funneling people as slowly as possible through them, all while a propaganda video that attempted to explain arbitrary rules about liquids and shoes blared in the background. I wish George Orwell could have stood in that line with me. Except that if he’d been ahead of me, I would have been even later than I already was.

Needless to say, we didn’t make it. Not by half. I even had to fight with the security guards over my attempt to transfer Pandora from her carrier to one of those ubiquitous gray plastic buckets to walk her through the body scanner. I understand why they have to scan her carrier in case I’ve lined it with plastic explosives, but do they really think I’ve had time to line their own gray bucket with same?! No, they insisted on me carrying the cat by hand while her sensual perception of the world atrophied amidst the beeping, pinging, and clicking of the modern airport threshold experience.

So I made it to the departure boards at 8:48 for my 8:35 flight. Apparently, as Russ told me later when I (spoiler alert!) did in fact make it to LA alive and in one piece, the expectation was that someone in my situation would start elbowing people out of the way under the gruffly enunciated claim that my flight was leaving soon and I had a right to go before they did. I’m just not one of those people though, so Pandora and I moseyed up to the Southwest gate counter around 8:52.

“I take it I missed this one?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Well, what are my options?”
“Let me check that out for you.”
“Thanks.”
[Pause]
[Pause]
[Pause]
[Pause]
“Looks like we can do 3:20.”
“3:20?”
“3:20. To Phoenix. Though you might not be able to make it out of there.”
“It’s 8:55.”
“Yeah. Sorry. That’s the best shot we have. It’s not looking good.”

So Pandora and I settled in for six and a half hours of unfettered bliss in the Philadelphia International Airport. We visited five of their six terminals, sampled many of the foods, spilled many attempts to put in a little water cup in her carrier so she didn’t dehydrate after hours of plaintive crying. I did get to watch almost all of Germany’s thrashing of England in the World Cup, plus a little bit of Argentina:Mexico before finally boarding the plane, well after sending e-mails to those who were expecting me soon to expect me much later. At least I’d traded a long layover in Chicago for a quick stop in Phoenix, a city that is unequivocally on the way from Philadelphia to LA.

Finally, LAX, with Pandora still breathing and even sipping a bit from the clear plastic Southwest cup I’d offered her. I kept waiting for her to be unable to hold it, desperately hoping it would be in the airplane or the rental car shuttle, not the rental car itself. But I finally got to the desk of the rental car company, looking to pick up what Priceline had promised me would be a Chevy Aveo or similar. You know, a car with four seats and a trunk.

“Are you planning on taking anyone else with you on your stay here?”
“Well I’ll be the only one driving.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. Are you planning on having anyone else in the car with you?”
“Well maybe. I was going to pick a couple friends up at the airport.”
“Not in this car.”
“I can’t let other people ride in my car?”
“Well I see you have some luggage. This is an economy car.”
“Yeah… so?”
“It’s very small.”
“Well it has four seats, right?”
“No. This is what I’m trying to tell you. Why I want to talk to you about it now before you get out there.”
“It doesn’t have four seats? I’ve rented economy cars before. They have four seats.”
“Not this car.”

At this point, my mind is racing to what could possibly be going on with my vehicle. I am entertaining the idea they have somehow classified a Corvette convertible as an “economy” car. I can’t even picture what could possibly be going on. I think back to my contract with Priceline and the diligent research to make sure that golf-carts or Hot Wheels could not be considered economy cars by mainstream rental companies (in this case, Hertz).

“It doesn’t have four seats?”
“No, honey, that’s what I’m trying to say. Now we can upgrade you to something with four seats.”
“For how much?”
“Just $10 a day.”

I was only paying $17 a day to begin with. This was not happening, the classic upsell. I was sure she was bluffing at this point, just trying to scare me like the dings and the dents and the insurance and the everything else that corporate America uses to try to bludgeon one sale into an all-expenses paid four-star cruise to luxury for their profit margin.

“No thanks, I’ll take my chances with this car.”
“Okay, but can I offer you insurance for only $12 a day?”
“No thanks, I’m good with the basic.”
“How about gas? We’ll refill your tank for $2.92 a gallon and it costs $3.07 a gallon out there.”
“Really? So however many gallons I’m short of a full tank, you’ll refill for $2.92?”
“Well, honey, not exactly.”

Here I immediately remembered Hertz’ old OJ Simpson slogan: There’s Hertz and there’s not exactly; make sure you choose the right one.

“Oh?”
“You see, your tank holds $25.98 worth of gas at $2.92 a gallon. So if you don’t bring it back full, we can take care of that for $25.98.”
“Oh, I get it, so even if it’s a dot down from full, you charge me $25.98.”
“Well. Yeah.”
“Yeah, I’ll bring it back full.”
“Now if you change your mind when you bring it back, we can do the $2.92 a gallon thing.”
“I’ll bring it back full.”

Full proved to be a relative term for this car. I’m not entirely convinced it has a gas tank. As I approached the spot, 397, I was pretty sure there was no car actually parked there until I found the half-car actually crammed in the front third of the space.

It looked like this:

A Smart car. They had given me a Smart car. A car that looks like someone took my Prius and lopped it cleanly in half, then painted it red. A car that had two seats and a foot-wide bench in the back for anything else one might want to carry. A car that, upon getting in and driving it to the check-out gate, felt like someone had built a small car-like shell around my person.

Being the stubborn opponent of corporate America that I am, I refused to balk and return to the counter, but instead went on my merry way, trying to picture how I could get Fish and Madeleine, to whom I’d pledged an aiport pickup three days hence, to share the other seat in the car with minimum consternation and illegality. I quickly also became convinced that (A) the only reason corporate America had allowed such small efficient vehicles to come to market was so that rental car companies could redefine the economy class into something no one could possibly picture when signing up to rent a car and (B) Hertz kept exactly one Smart car on the lot as a bluff to customers who would all go traipsing back into the desk to get a reasonably sized vehicle for whatever upgrade price they wanted to extort. If nothing else, I was driving away their bluff and the next person like me would have to be given a Chevy Aveo or similar.

I soon, however, dispelled a myth I’d heard that Smart cars literally could not drive on freeways. My little personal red pod had no trouble getting up to 65, though every ten-mph jump felt like I was whipping a horse into gear or perhaps shifting a standard transmission with my foot. The car actually rocked back and forth every time it went from 15 to 25 or 45 to 55. The trouble soon proved that, as irate as I was about the whole scam, I actually really enjoyed driving the little glorified golf cart. Parking is a dream, as are lane changes, and the turning radius would make it possible to do a U-turn in a one-way half-lane Boston back alley. It’s really quite fun.

So I may keep my absurd little half-car, depending on how game Fish and friends are to share seats or maybe even grab a spot of bench in the tiny tiny back. The car feels like it would crumble in a strong rain storm, but is about three times harder to hit than the standard vehicle, given that it’s probably smaller all told than most motorcycles. So we’ll see. Much of last night’s rage has subsided into mild enjoyment of the novelty of being tailgated by cars that are literally a couple feet from my back.

The moral of the story, I think, is that the distinction between capitalism and extortion has completely evaporated. And yet, you may still enjoy the ride.

When Emily was here as an undergrad, she had unlimited printing of whatever she wanted at local computer clusters. This year, for the first time, they implemented limits on printing, which is a big part of why my distribution of American Dream On to friends was electronic, not paper.

Nevertheless, the limit is still sky-high and so she had a few hundred sheets left that expire on 1 July of this year. Today, I decided to use up as many of those as possible, printing a clean single-spaced copy of the most up-to-date versions of ADO and The Best of All Possible Worlds for posterity in case something happens, plus fifty sheets of Duck and Cover blanks in case something doesn’t. It’s always good to be prepared for all foreseeable possibilities.

I am heading to Philadelphia any minute now, then on to the greater LA area to see a bevy of friends and the wedding celebration of David Kunkel. Then finally a week in Albuquerque before returning here briefly only to set out again across the East Coast and then on to Africa. Quite a bit going on in the next few weeks and months, hopefully.

For reference, here’s the Tour image again, still accurate to date:

Feeling generally pretty good. Looking forward to editing TBoAPW, to spending some serious quality time with a lot of friends and family who I don’t see that often. Looking forward to the relaxing, renewing feelings of summer. Looking forward to lots of things.

But as I held the near-ream of paper in my hand, the more than 230,000 words worth of novels I’ve written in the last nine months, I was also looking at now. And for the first time in a long time, feeling good about right now. About the recent past. This feels as much like an arrival as it does a departure.

See you soon.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Today, after watching some thrilling but ultimately disappointing World Cup matches, I wanted to start editing my book and I was also hungry. I considered walking in to town, but a thunderstorm was predicted for the afternoon and my hunger was threatening to derail me on the roadside en route to food. I decided to drive to Zorba’s, a falafel place (I’m sure they have other food, but it’s a falafel place to me) and then take that food to the Princeton Campus Club, a repossessed former eating club just off the Princeton campus.

Zorba’s was doing its usual middling business, but the PCC was a ghost town. The three floors of gigantic rooms were completely empty, though the building had been unlocked. And blasting away throughout was the air conditioning, cooling the outside humid 85 degrees to something more like 70 amid much noisemaking. At least the lights were off for the most part.

I ate my falafel in silence while reading a bit of Madness and Civilization, then threw away the bag it had come in and the wrapper and the chip bag, able to recycle the class bottle of Orangina I’d had. Then I went upstairs to the PCC Library, which was just as cool, and cracked into editing The Best of All Possible Worlds for the first time, completing 5% of it while there.

I spent maybe an hour and a half in the building all told. No one came, no one left. The air conditioning persisted through every room of the gargantuan club, a place that may sit idle for days at a time, though they’re keeping it open till midnight or two in the morning apparently. Just trying to make it comfortable in case someone comes in to enjoy the hallowed halls of what someone built as an alternative to eating with the proletarian Princeton students in the regular dining halls.

There are times when I think that I might be a bit too cynical about the hope for change on this planet. When I might underestimate what one single individual without power or fame or voice can do to stem the tide of immense corporate waste and collective mismanagement. Then there are days like today, when I find myself to be a bit naive, all told, in comparison to the real depth of the state of things.

On my way home, I drove by a dying squirrel, flattened and twitching on its back in the roadway.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

If you haven’t seen it already, please immediately proceed to your local video/DVD rental dispensary, be it brick-and-mortar or online, and watch “The Corporation”. If you have to, download it from somewhere. I’m sure the movie’s creators wouldn’t mind.

It apparently came out in 2003, but it looks like it was just produced yesterday. If anything, its being seven years old justifies a little bit of its naivete in places, though it usually counterbalances this with an appropriate amount of cynicism. It prominently features Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, and Naomi Klein. It has probably never been more relevant than it is right now, in the wake of the BP spill, at a time when it seems like many are starting to understand the depths of the problems innate to capitalism.

Unless, you know, it gets more relevant in 2011 and 2012. Which I’m afraid it will.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Thursday night.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Well, it wasn’t three books a year. But two outta three ain’t bad.

Just minutes ago, I completed my third novel lifetime and second in nine months, The Best of All Possible Worlds. It weighs in at 96,070 words (~384 pages), just a bit longer than Loosely Based and well short of American Dream On.

It took me three months and eleven days to write. Like every novel I’ve written on a deadline so far, I finished it about a week ahead of deadline (in this case, 21 June).

The last 142 pages of the book (37% of the total) were written this month, June, the last fifteen days, during which I wrote on every single day except 5 June.

Now, of course, begins what will probably be 2-4 weeks of editing, depending on how intensely I can work on it and how much work it ends up needing. It could actually be longer than that if my concerns from about a month ago persist about some of the book fundamentally not working. I really think I’ve wriggled away from those concerns, however, and feel very good about what I wrote in June rendering those prior concerns moot. It will take at least a full detailed reading to be sure, though.

If you’re interested, drop me a line. I think it should be available for distribution sometime in the last week of July, shortly before I depart for Africa.

I’ve been close enough to the finish of this one for a while that I don’t feel quite the incredible euphoric elation I normally do. I’m sure once I go a couple days without writing, I’ll become a little more convinced that I’ve actually done it. And when I’m convinced it works. But maybe I’m just getting accustomed to this feeling, to this sense that my plan for my life is actually working, or starting to. Maybe the euphoria had built up for seven years and now it’s only had a little time to build up in the six months since I last finished a first draft.

In any event, I’m at least very very satisfied. Happy. Feeling, dare I say it, hopeful.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I first discovered the game of soccer when I discovered most of my other contact with sports – in third grade in Oregon. Soccer was the recess game of choice and almost everyone played it. I really loved it for some reason, all of the excitement and passion of the World Cup (which I didn’t know about) seemed relived in every goal and run across the field. I would come home from school and draw up little box scores for the games we’d played, some of which I’m sure I still have somewhere. It wasn’t baseball, which I’d fully embrace later, or basketball, which was particularly handy when it started raining in earnest, but I really liked it for that year of recess.

It was perhaps with this in mind that I decided to try out for the Albuquerque Academy soccer team upon arrival in New Mexico in the fall of 1993. My Mom played a big role in this also, encouraging me to play sports and especially soccer because she’d read that such were a big part of life at the Academy and she envisioned me as athletic because I liked sports. And while I had just gone through a growth spurt that brought me to just about my current full height (5′10″ or so) at age 13, I was about as thin and fragile as possible. I still naively clung to the idea I had a shot at the team up until one of the most farcical exercises I can remember enduring, wherein we paired into partnerships and were asked to lift our counterparts on our shoulders and carry them around the field. It was like asking me to teleport to Saturn. I was appalled, and cut shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, I joined intramural soccer along with most of the other kids cut, certain that it would be better than regular PE. If one of my main 8th grade antagonists hadn’t also joined, it probably would’ve been.

I didn’t really have contact with other people playing soccer until 1994, when I was peripherally aware that there was a “World Cup” going on in the US, but didn’t think it mattered that much. Until, of course, I got to CTY, my second summer going. I’d spent the first summer living with my parents in Baltimore and “commuting” to the JHU campus, but the second summer, in ‘94, I was on my own and boarding in Carlisle, PA at Dickinson College. I flew into Harrisburg, one of the only Westerners going to a place where everyone drove, got picked up by one of the RA’s, and looked around the dorms for everyone I was going to be living with for two weeks. I couldn’t find them.

Suddenly, I heard a great cry go up from a room across the hall. I went to investigate and found twenty or thirty boys laying around in front of a television, rapt. I looked on the screen, awash with the colors of what proved to be the World Cup Final. And so I sat down to watch Brazil and Italy eke out an interminable 0-0 draw and eventually resort to penalty kicks, wherein Brazil triumphed. I wasn’t sure about the whole game, but those penalty kicks sure were exciting. Based largely on this experience, I would spend a long time making fun of world-class soccer as a place where no scoring took place. I remember telling Jake and Kunkel and other friends who liked soccer elaborate stories about epic triumph that ended with the first goal in twelve years of competition finally being scored. They were not amused.

In truth, though, there had been something about that gang of boys huddled around the pomp and pageantry of a game between two utterly foreign countries. Sure, there had been an Italian kid in the mix, a short guy who I went on to overthrow a baseball to and famously shatter a glass emergency exit door. He wound up mostly being a jerk, but maybe it was just because he spent that whole summer with people reminding him that “Baggio choked” on his last penalty kick. But I liked the experience, I liked the game, it was like the Olympics without the American jingoism. Even if the game itself was rather dull.

I had a lot going on in the summer of 1998 and so I sort of casually followed the World Cup in the paper. I remember thinking how crazy it was that France of all countries could win and really coming to understand what an advantage home field was, underscoring what a poor squad the USA really had. I had also discovered at some point that Ireland had a team and that, as my randomly chosen nationality (I’m a European mutt without a culture, so I latched onto Ireland at some point because of my love for the color green and their history of writers and mysticism), this would give me a reason to take special interest in the proceedings. Of course, Ireland failed to qualify for ‘98, so I didn’t pursue my interest too closely.

In 2002, though, Ireland made it and a lot of my friends were following it. This was underscored by the fact that my Mep House roommates, Greg and especially Russ, and I had spent a great deal of the 2001-02 academic school year playing FIFA on the PlayStation hooked up to the TV downstairs. We had randomly adopted Denmark as our team and played on the same squad, trying to navigate the Danes to world-class glory. To this day, I can probably name most everyone on the early 2000’s Danish squad, and “Sand. Sand!” is a universal joke in the Mep language, along with countless other jokes about the wry British and Scottish commentators who make FIFA video games all the more worthwhile.

I wound up watching a lot of World Cup 2002. I stayed with Jake for part of that early summer, and he and everyone in his apartment complex were Cup crazy. I remember the heartbreak of Ireland’s penalty kicks loss to Spain, how well they’d fought for that game. The surprise runs of Korea (homefield again) and Turkey. The inevitability of the Brazilian title again. I went back to Waltham and played a lot more FIFA. I was more or less hooked.

In 2006, I was newly ensconced in my job at Glide, getting the feel for the Tenderloin and my co-workers, many of whom were proclaimed Cup addicts. I was wildly excited for this Cup, even without Ireland in the fold, deciding to root for Sweden, Russia, and anyone playing the United States. I remember the elation of Ghana edging the States and knocking them out in the first round. It was nice to have the games in a time zone where it was not impossible to watch matches live (Korea had been a bit of a challenge). Most of the matches came right in the lunch hour, and I would eat with the other Gliders who were Cup fans in front of a big TV in one of the upstairs offices, or go out to the Thai restaurant that was in a converted bar with the big TV hanging over the bar, always tuned to the current game. It wasn’t watching whole games, which I still found a bit challenging unless I had a clear rooting interest, but it was the perfect slice of action to break up the work day. Sweden, Russia, and Ghana all broke my heart, and we were left to watch the Zenadine Zidane incident in horror and Mep about it later.

Today, I am again saddened by the absence of Ireland, but excited to root for Denmark, for Cote d’Ivoire, which neighbors Em’s locale of Liberia (and has the Irish flag reversed, after all), for Mexico (feeling a slight tug of loyalty there for some reason), for any country playing the United States. Which, today, means England. Now it’s hard for me to root for England, even though I probably have as much English in me as Irish. But them playing the US is enough for me to do it.

It’s interesting, in reflection, to see what a cross-section of my life the World Cup has been. Every four years, I’m somewhere radically different. We could measure out our lives in Cups. I suppose one could do it in any quadrennial event – elections, Olympics, etc. But World Cups seem less arbitrary, more universal. Even than the Olympics.

Anyone’s guess about where I’ll be in 2014 is as good as mine. Probably better.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I wrote twenty-two pages today (or on 9 June, the day just ended), completing exactly a third of what remained to be done on the book at this time yesterday.

For the first time in an extremely long time, I have more days till the deadline than sections of the book left to write. The book has eighty sections, which are not quite long enough to be considered chapters. By comparison to American Dream On, that book holds sixty chapters in 135,000 words. This will have eighty sections in about 100,000 words. So you get the distinction.

I was reading a little about the torrid end to my writing of ADO, largely to see if June was surpassing December of last year in productivity. It’s not, though it must be said that it’s getting competitive. I’ve written 24,288 words in the 9 days of June so far, which equates to 97 pages by the conventional rubric and is nearly 11 pages a day on average. Now of course I was just posting about being elated to average nearly 6 pages a day over 40 days, so you can see how much of that average is getting its steam from just the last week and change. Given that I took nearly two full days off this month, the average for productive days is arguably closer to 14 pages a day. Suddenly my 22-page day isn’t seeming so special.

As far as parsing the reasons for these spurts, it’s hard to discern between deadline motivation and the natural energy that comes from the converging end of a book. At this point, I’m trying not to analyze it too heavily because it just works for me. I’m not going to argue with the results. And my doubts about the quality that can be maintained at this pace have been allayed by the fact that most everyone felt the December-written chapters of ADO were the best therein.

I guess the only question, going into my fourth book when the time comes this fall, is how to maintain this kind of frenzy throughout writing a book. Is it even possible? If it were, I could write maybe five books a year and they’d all be spectacular. But I bet there’s something unique about the close of the tomes that makes this an unsustainable state of mind and work.

It’s amazing to realize that one really is capable of the things one thinks one is capable of.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

With the session just finished, I am officially eighty percent done with The Best of All Possible Worlds. I have but two weeks to finish it, with the 21 June deadline and the first day of summer looming large in my vision. However, I have almost no distractions or outside obligations to worry about as I approach the deadline and have been writing at a faster clip than perhaps even I realize.

For example, I just realized that I have written 233 pages of the book (it is 305 total at present) in the last 40 days, or just shy of 6 pages a day every single day for forty days. Of course, these days have been punctuated with two- or three-day spells of writing nothing at all, including weekends like the last weekend Em was in town before Africa, the last weekend Greg was hosting people at his late mother’s place, and the last weekend Stina & Dav would be in town before Stina goes to England (two, one, and zero weekends ago, respectively). So even though the average is just shy of six/day, that includes many zeroes, meaning that when I’ve set down to work, I’ve been as productive on this work as anything I’ve ever done in my entire life.

Which is exciting.

Despite a lot of early doubts about whether this book even really “works” in some sense (it’s by far my most experimental effort to date), this last third of the book is convincing me that I have little to worry about in that department. I still think a full reading is necessary to be sure, but maybe not the two I initially budgeted before I’d know. In any case, that euphoric excitement about finishing the project and then being able to actually realize that people will be reading it soon is setting in. Oh baby so tasty.

I’ve been living life too, though sparely, mostly through the aforementioned weekends. I’m going to sum up some of my personal, non-political encounters below in a sort of good-bad dichotomy as follows:

• Recommended: The yellow fever vaccine, which I got a week ago, the first shot I can ever remember having with absolutely zero side effects.
• Not Recommended: The typhoid fever vaccine, which I got yesterday, which has brought me the most intense pain I can remember having in this lifetime.

• Recommended: The movie Following, which I watched via Netflix in a pain-induced stupor from said vaccine above.
• Not Recommended: The movie Please Give, which I watched in a nearly empty theater on Friday and enjoyed before it devolved into a ringing endorsement of capitalist superficiality.

• Recommended: Wise and Otherwise, which we played with Fish, Madeleine, Ariel, and Michael at the latter’s place on Saturday night to endless aching of stomachs from too much laughter.
• Not Recommended: Dungeons and Dragons, which was played most of the weekend in Connecticut, which I found to be a slow analog way of playing about ten minutes’ worth of Dark Age of Camelot or World of Warcraft. The company and enthusiasm therein helped mitigate this, but the game itself was disappointing.

• Recommended: Being able to Skype with one’s wife across the Atlantic Ocean, enabling both talking and a small grainy amount of seeing despite the vast distances between.
• Not Recommended: Still having two months to go before one sees one’s wife in person.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Something snapped when I saw that bird picture. It looks like my Dad had a similar experience. I bet you did too. The series of heartbreaking photos capturing a generation of pelicans whose deaths are just the opening salvo in a slaughter of untold proportions unfolding on the Gulf Coast.

It’s of little significance when compared to the American slaughter of Afghans and Iraqis, but it’s still something. It’s something to consider that if the oil keeps gushing till August or December, as they’re saying now, that maybe every single beach in the world will somehow be impacted by the endless stream of our greed for petroleum. This isn’t something esoteric about the future, ten, twenty years. Not even as debatable as global warming or the extinction of species. It’s the end of beaches, coastlines, oceans. For as long as the potential for something like this exists, unchecked, it has every reason to happen repeatedly in the future, until we’ve nothing left to show our children but the few sickly animals we’ve salvaged for zoos, or perhaps the handful of species considered lucky enough to save for ritual slaughter and consumption.

It’s to this end that I’ve made manifest the first thing that struck me when I saw the outstretch-winged pelican, how closely it resembled the flag of its home state. And so I am presenting five new designs of Blue Pyramid Merchandise, not as opportunism so much as an outlet for outrage. I feel better knowing that I’ve been able to convey what I feel in something simple, and that someone else might take small solace in the power of this harnessed anger.

For as has been clear from Duck and Cover lately, clear from anyone thinking carefully about this issue, it’s not about BP. It’s not about the particular company or group of individuals who made this one incident happen. It’s about a system, a way of life, an approach to the Earth and its contents that is innately unsustainable and always has been. The sooner we realize that all drilling is wrong, that all oil companies are doing ill, the sooner we can stop the nonsense of trying to ream one scapegoat while we sow the seeds of tomorrow’s disaster.