The Today Show: Now on Facebook

I'd touch your boobs, but we're on TV!

Someday in the future, when our entire lives are on the internet, the great grandchildren of the idiots who comment on the Today Show Facebook page will look back at the record and say to themselves:

Thank fucking God that piss for brains great grandparent of mine is dead and buried. I'm sure the stinking pile of dirt and worm gravy has more intelligence than that thing that walked around and thought to leave comments on this waste of pixels.

I did briefly experiment with a commenting strategy aimed at gaining a little attention from all the 1.2 million "life forms" that share their "intelligence" on the Today Show Facebook page.

It failed.

It failed primarily because sometimes I accidentally read some of the comments I was "liking" and responding to.

Question: Not all of USA is trapped in the permanent pathetic adolescence of Today Show's middle school mentality, but can any culture really hope to survive when this kind of ribald childishness and ignorance (illiteracy) is allowed to establish a standard?

Laying Low

I won't be coming out today. And I'm not sorry.

I was trying to explain to my friend, in Spanish, just how pleased I will be to be laying low this weekend.

To me "Laying Low" means:

• Willingly keeping a low profile
• Avoiding unnecessary attention
• Avoiding any stimulation at all
• Remaining non-committal
• Joyfully refusing invitations
• Accepting boredom as a pleasant alternative to inconvenience
• Planning only convenience store trips and dog walks
• Sleeping at 11 PM or thereabouts
• Not answering phone calls
• Peering out into the hallway of my building

The expectation that someone will be there is usually met by the understanding that it is always the same people out there. A cleaning lady, the old man upstairs who takes 45 minutes to climb the stairs, or any of the other odd lot of neighbors.

List of things I thought about before drinking coffee today

Admittedly, I drank Nescafe.

I am not sure when it happened but my patience for making real coffee went right into the toilet. Now I seem to be drinking this stuff.

It wasn't today, but I thought that I bet they modify the smell of this stuff so that it smells like it is going to be good.

It isn't really. 

This is what I was thinking about when I made it.

• I used to live in Florence with a psychotic Kung-Fu instructor who would get very angry if I threw the spoon into the sink. I did that every morning.
• The guy had enormous kung fu swords and axes in his apartment. 
• One of my cats will always strategically vomit the day after I have my apartment cleaned. 
• Cockroaches
• I would rather use slivers of good soap than this giant, inviting bar of Dove that has too much of something perfumey in it. 
• I think being a coffee snob is optional. Real coffee snobs will drink any brown water because we are actually just coffee dependent.
• We should be held to a higher standard than the merely Coffee Pretentious.
• Some times these cheap curtains I bought at the supermarket remind me of my grandmother's kitchen. I only saw them drawn on a few rare occasions when I slept there, and she fed me Kellogg's Product 19 with warm milk. 

Welcome

My morning was spent like this:

Where I cross the Street at Balderas (from StreetView)

• I woke up at 7:45
• Stuffed Nicorette in my mouth
• I drank Nescafe
• I took a shower
• I took the dog to the corner and said hi to the guard who stands by the side door of the building
• Picked up dog-shit with old pages from a copy of the Economist I bought in the airport 5 months ago.
• Wondered about leaving English magazine pages smeared with dog shit in a Spanish language bag of garbage.
• Took dog back, emptied envelope of soupy dog chunks in her bowl. 
• Ducked back out of building.
• People on my side were scrubbing the sidewalk with soapy water and brooms so I crossed - between stopped cars - to the other "sunny" side.
• Observed that the sun in this country is too harsh in winter. Best to avoid it unless one is actually cold, which, in winter, can happen.
• On this side, again, they were scrubbing the sidewalk
• I waited at the edge of Balderas, the main north south avenue in the neighborhood. It's got this busline where these enormous double articulated buses hog the middle two lanes, and for that, it's a little difficult to cross sometimes. There are also frequent passing street "diablitos" that pass on their way to setting up a street stand for a day hawking cell-phone covers and huaraches and similar fare. Some of them approach just stacked with sheet upon creased sheet of cardboard, enourmous flattened boxes that wave like sails above the head of the hurrying driver.   
• I've never understood what they do with all the cardboard.
• I avoid the smell of anything cooking on the street unless I'm planning to eat it.
• I wondered at the sections of concrete missing on the far side of Balderas.
• A woman was standing patiently enough, literally on dirt, in one of these gaps in the sidewalk that had never been filled back in. I don't want to say her shoes were cheap, but I did notice them, out of place above that packed orange dirt, and they seemed cheapened at least. She was just a lady going off to some normal job.    
• I got to the metro well enough late.