Battle of the Garrish Christmas Displays

A few houses down the street, the neighbors have an unattractively decorated house that blares synthesized Christmas music, seemingly out of sync with the blinking lights that hang from the house in a sparse and disorderly fashion. Directly across from them, another family has decorated their house with some positively bizarre light-up aluminum pole Christmas trees and more blaring Christmas music. When you stand in between them, you get to experience the spirit of Christmas, channeled through a surround-sound cacophony of seasonal joy. I wasn't here on Christmas Eve, but my room mate tells me that they engaged in a kind of passive-aggressive volume war with each other that resulted in both houses turning their music up to the point where you could hear them from anywhere on the street.

Republican Baiting

I disagree with John McCain on many issues, but I don't think that he'd be a fundamentally terrible president. John McCain is a politician, and like any other politician, he's doing what he thinks he needs to do to get elected. Sure, he's compromised his values in an effort to appeal to the lunatic right-wing base, but a small part of me still wonders if he were elected, might he drop this charade of deference to the lowest common denominators of the republican party?

We'll probably never know for sure, and this is a good thing because there are far better reasons to not vote for John McCain than the few minor policy quibbles that he holds with Obama—namely, Sarah Palin. Most people attack her on the grounds that she is unqualified for the position. This is probably true, though not my biggest concern with her. The real problem with Palin is that she personifies everything that has gone wrong with the republican party.

In recent years, the republicans have very effectively appealed to their base by painting democrats as out-of-touch elitists, in contrast to the average “joe six-packs” that supposedly inhabit the ranks of the republican party. They have somehow rendered higher education a liability; they've managed to equate intellectualism of any sort with elitism; mediocrity has come to trump excellence. The party has convinced the small town America—that no longer even really exists—that they are in the midst of a cultural war with this nation's urban centers.

Palin is the poster child for this effort. She makes ignorance looks cute. She lends credence to the notion that “folksy know-how” beats out logic and education. She appeals to the worst tendencies in this country—and boy, have the worst tendencies been rising to the surface lately. John McCain's campaign rallies have grown increasingly bizarre with supporters shouting incitements to violence when Obama's name is mentioned (“traitor! Kill him!”) or making confused claims like "I don't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's an Arab." McCain supporters throughout the country have attempted to portray Obama as a Muslim, often pictorially (as if Islam is an instant political disqualifier.)

I'm fantasizing that these are the last gasping breaths of a dying philosophy; they certainly smack of desperation. And were Palin and McCain not stirring up a dangerous mob mentality that might ultimately erupt in acts of violence, I'd probably be enjoying this. Nothing would delight me more than seeing these people discredited. And eight years with an educated, articulate man leading this country might start to chip away at some of the more irrational thinking in this country. When the world fails to end because we elected a black liberal, some people might start to question their convictions.

Truthfully, I think that the country needs to swing sharply to the left for the next decade or so. Not because I agree with a lot of leftist philosophy, but because I'm fantasizing that the republican party will revert to a more libertarian position, perhaps one day offering an interesting alternative to the democratic party. In the meantime, social conservatives need to be shocked back into reality. To paraphrase something my room mate said in anger about the situation,“I want abortions for everyone! I want to see gay pride parades every day at noon! I want to see huge, polygamous marriages where fifty men marry fifty women at a time, followed by a mass orgy.” I completely understand the sentiment.

But if McCain/Palin is elected, the backwardness that has come to characterize the prevailing social thought in this country will be legitimized, potentially setting back progress by years.

The Hissing Beetle

The other night I was picking up around the bathroom, which unfortunately doubles as a hallway into the backyard and is thus a local favorite with any of the numerous nasty flying things that are attracted to light, when I discovered a curiously large, greenish beetle hiding beneath some dirty clothing. Gingerly, I approached it with some scraps of cardboard, intending to release it back into the wild when it reared back on its hind legs and emitted a hissing sound "Kee! Kee! Kee!" (you can make this sound by touching your tongue to the bottom of your mouth and forcing air through it). With each hiss ("Kee! Kee! Kee!"), it rocked its body menacingly. Holy fuck! Needless to say, I jumped up and apparently made enough noise to send my room mate running towards the bathroom, fully expecting to have to pull a steak knife out of my body me or face some other similarly tragic ordeal. Thankfully, she captured and released the demon-bug while I cowered in another room. Alas, I have no photos, so identifying the vile pest has been challenging.

The Erotic Dragon Poster Table

When I first moved to LA I stayed with a high school friend who, at the time, was living in Burbank. I'll call him Greg, since that's his name. One day Greg comes home and tells me about this bizarre table he saw lying by the curb a little ways down the street. There was, apparently, a dragon painted on its surface. We go to inspect it and as promised, there is some elaborate dragon artwork on the table, though it turns out that it's little more than a large poster that had been affixed to its surface and then coated in some sort of finish to disguise this fact. No matter, the table itself was pretty cool: the legs and edges had been carved out in such a way as to suggest that it had been forged by the hands of fantastical creatures with wood from the ancient growth of an enchanted forest. Some nerd had probably spent most of the 80's playing Dungeons and Dragons on this thing's sacred surface.

But then I saw the nipple. It's difficult to explain why this is so, but it's not immediately obvious to onlookers that the dragon depicted on the table is in the process of engaging in some sort of sexual activity with another creature that looks not unlike a venus fly trap with breasts. If you've read this far you'll probably understand why I say that at this point we couldn't have not taken it home with us.

Fast forward several months and I'm living elsewhere and Greg is preparing to leave Southern California. Naturally, he bequeaths the Erotic Dragon Poster Table (as it has since become known) to myself and my room mates. We live in a crowded abode in North Hollywood: three humans and three dogs. And so, the table, being far too amazing to discard, was earmarked for storage in the garage behind the house--except that there was no storage space available--and the table languished for months and months in the sun out in the backyard while we promised ourselves repeatedly that we'd clear space for it soon.

Needless to say, the table's ancient magic was no defense against SoCal's cruel sun. The imagery rapidly faded to the point where it was hardly recognizable. At some point, two of the legs, which were already in need of repair, gave way. Eventually, my room mate decided to use its sad remains as a surface for painting.

I am not a religious man, but if there is one thing that I'm going to hell for, it's allowing the destruction of this thing of beauty. The Erotic Dragon Table sits there still, a miserable carcass and a testament to my inaction. It screams "please let me die," but neither my room mates nor I have the heart.

Is it just me or...

I confess that I had been drinking when I came upon this display in a Mrs. Fields at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, but the association that formed in my mind that night has persisted. Think of it as a sort of Rorschach inkblot test made out of cookie dough and icing. Do you see a delicious, over-sized confection or something far more sinister? In essence, how immature are you?

Almost Famous

This has been going on for some time now, but thanks to a recent haircut, the number of people who approach me to tell me that I look like "that guy from Grey's Anatomy" has increased dramatically. They're referring to actor T.R. Knight, who plays Dr. George O'Malley on the show, but not once have I gotten anything more specific than "that guy." On one particularly amusing occasion, a fully grown man accosted me in a Ralph's parking lot and then paraded me in front of his disinterested wife. More recently, I overheard a duo of gabbing girls at the gym in North Hollywood where I work out: "Hey, he looks like that guy from Grey's anatomy. Wait, is he that guy from Grey's Anatomy?!"

I can only assume that there are untold masses who say nothing and silently believe that I actually am that guy and take my general, unfriendly demeanor--or possibly my presumed status as B-list celebrity whose name no one can ever recall--as a sign that they shouldn't approach me.

In actuality, T.R. Knight is pudgier, less attractive, and 10 years older than me.