Anyone who heard the last episode of The B&J Podcast knows that I’ve become inundated with bullshit that’s left me paralyzed by incoherent burning rage. My solution is to avoid all of the bullshit, but I have to admit I’m not doing a very good job of it.

Nothing that happened last night surprised me. A white prosecutor who loves himself some police folks and who could really care less about the plight of the black folks was going to do as little as possible to get an indictment on Darren Wilson. I’m guessing the most work he had done in the 108 days since Wilson killed Mike Brown was last night when he announced to the world that he wouldn’t, as a prosecutor, prosecute the officer.

I was also not surprised that Ferguson and St. Louis erupted like it did, and I wasn’t surprised that white people didn’t get why people would loot and set shit on fire.

I really tried to avoid all of this, but I’m weak. When a friend remarked about the fires and looting and wondering why they would do that, and I replied with something like, “they must have been very desperate and angry to be reacting like this,” it took about 10 minutes to realize I made a mistake. Another one of his friends didn’t get it and thought the black folks in a former slave state should temper their reactions through a white-person’s prism. As if being told over and over again that it’s okay for white people to kill you without impunity should get a reaction of “meh”.

I knew I had to really stop. So on came Netflix and on came Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Advanced Style.

The last time I saw Planes was when I was in fifth grade. I remembered loving it and thinking how badly I felt for Steve Martin’s character. After all, he’s just trying to get home to his family for Thanksgiving, and having to make the trip with someone as insufferable as John Candy’s character must have been really trying.

Fast forward 25 years, and man I have done a 180. Neal was a complete dick who had his head stuck up his own ass, and Del seemed like a nice enough fellow just trying to avoid life. The overall movie holds up pretty well, although now with cell phones there is no way it could happen.

Then I watched Advanced Style, a documentary about a bunch of stylish old broads in New York City. J’adore! J’adore! J’adore! Part of it is being my grandmother’s caretaker. No matter how much in pain she’s in, she gets her hair permed and dyed quarterly because it makes her feel pretty. And it does make her feel better. As heavy as her steps are normally because of her back and knee pain, for a day or two after she gets her did did her steps are noticeably lighter.

Also, some of these women wear the most avant-garde things, it’s truly inspirational. I don’t know what it says about me that the only things that light a fire under my ass is when I watch something about Riot Grrls and old broads with style. But there it is, I suppose.

I think I need to go shopping…

Rankings rankings rankings. I don’t get it.

In soccer, a team gets three points for a win, one point for a draw and no points for a loss. The season plays out, and the team with the most points is crowned a champion.

In college football, a panel of people decide who they like. It’s all very arbitrary and, let’s be frank, retarded. Is Alabama the best team? Should TCU be ranked ahead of Baylor?

So I started these Napkin Rankings this year. Actually ESPN Radio’s Bob Valvano created this concept several years ago. It’s very simple. Teams get and lose points throughout the season. The best teams will have the most points, and the worst ones will have the least. Teams get:

+1 point for a Division I FBS win.
+1 point for a Power-Five conference win (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, SEC).
+1 point for playing on the road.
-1 point for losing.
+1 point for a “dominant” win. A dominant win is usually a 30-point win against a Power-Five team that is not winless in its conference.

This means that Auburn got no points for beating Samford, an FCS team. Also, Mississippi State didn’t get a “dominant” win extra point for trouncing Vanderbilt. So below are the updated rankings:

Now to get rid of playoffs.

Dallas Aunt was in town this past week to visit her ailing mother, which meant I got a few sweet days off from Grandmother Duty. In other words, I had the option of going out barhopping into all hours of the night.

Of course years of near isolation combined with getting older has cut down on my pool of people I can go out with. Casual acquaintances from years ago have dropped off. Now as my friends and I are deep in our 30s and older, coupling and children have come into play. What happened to my carefree 20s?

Thankfully Daniel (Yobo) was willing to go out with me to a scuzzy gay bar. After deliberation we decided to go to Faultline for their monthly party Brutus hosted by the amazingly still alive Mario Diaz. Earlier this year Frontiers LA named Brutus as the best gay party in LA.

I’ve been to some great parties in my life. There was Cherry in the late 90s and early 00s which was completely glam until 9/11 killed it. There was Bricktops, a 20s Weimar Republic themed night hosted by Vaginal Creme Davis. There was Makeup, another shot of glam and decadence hosted by Alexis Arquette.

Brutus didn’t come close to any of those parties. DJ Mark spun what amounted to Nu-disco, house with a huge disco sentiment that was quite annoying since it didn’t know whether it wanted to be disco or house. I guess since it was the Faultline I expected a little more rock schlock, but maybe since I’ve been away the clientele had changed.

I looked around and the crowd reminded me a lot of the old Akbar/MJs crowd of the mid 00s — the not-quite-so-polished WeHo rejects but nothing near what could be considered menacing as I remembered Faultline being. There was a guy who looked like an old-timey French strongman complete with a handlebar mustache — looking at the veins of his biceps he clearly had physical gifts, but when he danced it was clear that physical aptitude didn’t translate to finding a beat. There was a guy who wore a midriff cutoff shirt and short-shorts who I thought was hot in a trashy let’s piss on each other and lick each other’s pits — it was unfortunate he probably wouldn’t be allowed to ride on Viper at Magic Mountain. There was a guy who had really tall anime-type hair.

But it was amazing how in a room of guys there was a lot of nondescript. “See anything you like,” Yobo asked me at one point. I told him about how unfortunate Little Person wasn’t taller, but that was it.

Last call was signaled, and we high-tailed it out of there en route to Astros. As we headed out, it didn’t matter that there was no nookie-nookie, that my ass was unmolested, that the toons were meh, that I reeked of cigarettes, that there wasn’t a whole lot of eye candy, that I was hoarse from having to yell over the top of the music. I realized that I was over the fucking moon that I was out hanging with one of my favoritest people in this pitiful world. I gpt the sniff of freedom for one night! I got back home at 3:30 am with no hint of remorse or guilt.

Saturday night, I was an actual human being!

Now back to what my life has become. (Mental note: buy rope for the noose.)

I’m torn about this novel. Despite my last post about it, I did enjoy reading it. Nothing about it is too difficult to get through. There is enough intrigue to hold one’s attention. But I’m telling you the last third of the book was underwhelming.

Here is a story about Tengo and Aomame, a math teacher who wants to be a writer and a personal trainer and sometime assassin. The novel is divided into three books, and each chapter alternates with their narrative. I spent Book 1 wondering how the two related to one another and whether the two stories were taking place at the same time. In drips and drabs those answers were revealed, and the rest of the novel was spent wondering how they would eventually reunite.

The big problem came towards the end of Book 2 when Aomame is sent to kill the head of a cult. The subtlety of the story was dispensed, and we were given a lot of information at once. In a ten-page span all the answers were given, and the joy and thrill of discovering these little bits of plot vanished. Just like that.

The last book was spent wondering how Aomame and Tengo were eventually going to reunite, and that was interesting in and of itself, but that big deluge in Book 2 made everything that came after it so unfulfilling.

It was lazy, plain and simple.

Another problem that kept nagging at me throughout the novel is one that often tugs at me when reading a translation. Early on my acupuncturist asked me how I was enjoying the book, and I told her that I really liked it. She said that she loved the way Murakami wrote, and that gave me pause. Since I’m reading a translation, how much of Murakami was I actually reading? The subtlety of the language, was that Murakami’s doing or the translator? How well can we trust the translators?

Those are questions I can’t answer definitively without reading the novel in its original Japanese form.

Despite this, I really did like the book.

I am in Book 3 of the novel, and it has gotten less enjoyable.

The exact moment this story lost me was in Book 2 as Aomame (and hence the rest of us) are told essentially how every thread of this story ties together by an omniscient one. Everything up to that point had been very enjoyable. Now? I feel a bit cheated. Hence, the progress I’m making has been slowed down a bit.

I’m hoping there’s a curve in the plot, something that will shock the hell out of me. But in this beginning stages of Book 3, everything seems to be in a holding pattern.

I would say that it’s like Twin Peaks, where we learn who Laura’s killer is by the seventh episode of the second season. I thoroughly enjoyed the show afterwards when it explored more of the dark side of Twin Peaks and Agt. Dale Cooper. But because in this book I’m reading a translation, I don’t know how much of Murakami’s nuance is coming through.

Anyhow, that was my quick gripe about this novel.

I have two aunts, and they are both warring with my mother. All three are essentially the same person: they are self-serving, they lie and they love to argue. Old Aunt is, obviously from the moniker I gave her, is the eldest. My mom is two years younger. Dallas Aunt who, obviously lives in Dallas, is ten years younger than my mom.

Case in point: I had to take my grandmother to her knee doctor on Monday. Dallas Aunt calls me Sunday night to tell me to my medical masks for my grandmother because she has the cold. I told her pointedly that I thought it was a pointless exercise, that most of those so-called medical masks were ineffective and that it would dehumanize my grandmother. She instantly pounced calling me lazy, that both her and my grandmother thought it was a concern. I relented and said that if both of them thought it was important, I would do so.

She spent the next 10 minutes grilling me why I didn’t think it was important. I repeatedly told her that what I thought was irrelevant, that I agreed to do this, that she had won. But it wasn’t enough for her. She had to convert me to her way of thinking.

Then, she had the audacity to accuse me of being argumentative. Sure, I disagreed with her. But I RELENTED. I thought that was the end of it, but apparently I was wrong.

I knew I wasn’t going to go anywhere with this bitch, so I just kept laughing figuring that it would diffuse things. It did.

Before I take my grandmother to the doctor, I start driving to CVS. My grandmother told me not to bother, that she thought it was stupid. See what Dallas Aunt did just there? She lied to get her way. So I told my grandmother that I agreed with her and just drove to the doctor.

Anyhow, the two aunts have been in a war with my mother for over a year now. They think she’s a slut, a whore and selfish. Well selfish I get, but it’s not like they have any ground to stand on there. I am resentful towards my mom for a lot of things, and if it gets to be too much I’ll have my own fight with her. But right now, I can’t have those fights.

As for being a slut, I don’t think my mom is promiscuous by any stretch of the imagination. Besides that’s such a sex negative way of looking at things. If anything, I’m sex positive (even though I don’t get nearly enough.) As for being a whore, I don’t remember my mom getting paid for specific sex acts.

Last night Old Aunt stopped by for a visit. I was a bit nervous because it was just about time when my mom normally comes home. After she left, they did cross paths. They started yelling at each other, and I went out to tell them to quit it. That’s when Old Aunt knocked the coffee mug away from my mom’s hands, and it was going to get physical. I yelled at my mom to get into the apartment and yelled at my aunt to go home, that the fight was over and to just shut the fuck up.

I now realize that even though both of them are well into their 60s, they were acting like a bunch of teenage girls. I see my grandmother, start laughing and tell her three daughters are going to kill me prematurely. She laughed. I really fucking hate my family sometimes.

Madison Bumgarner pitched the final five innings of this game on two days rest. He pitched a complete game shutout in Game 5 in San Francisco. Tonight he made 68 pitches, 50 for strikes. He faced 17 batters gave up 2 hits and struck out 4. That was a performance for the ages.

So here is the scorecard I kept for this final game of the baseball season.

Edit: There was a scoring change. Jeremy Affeldt now gets the win and Madison Bumgarner gets the five-inning save. You can get the full pdf of the scorecard plus pages and pages of stats here.

I wish I could meet Aomame right now, Tengo started thinking again. Even if she turned out to be disappointed in him or he was a little disappointed in her, he didn’t care. He wanted to see her in any case. All he wanted was to find out what kind of life she had led since then, what kind of place she was in now, what kinds of things gave her joy, and what kinds of things made her sad. No matter how much the two of them had changed, or whether all possibility of their getting together had already been lost this in no way altered the fact that they had exchanged something important in that empty elementary school classroom so long ago. (363)

“I did have one person I fell in love with,” Aomame said. “It happened when I was ten. I held his hand.” (190)

“What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.” (190)

For years I haven’t thought of Bill. I fell in love with him when I was 17 in my senior year of high school. One day he showed up at Yesterday’s, the coffee shop in Redondo Beach I hung out at. There he was a skinny proto Burning Man electro hippie queer who loved wearing glitter. He had the svelte skinny almost heroin chic body that got me hard back then, which still does to some extent.

Being an asshole, I couldn’t say anything to him. He was in love with this straight raver boy Carlos anyhow. I was just a nerd goth geek whose only vices were cigarettes and coffee at that point. I didn’t party, haven’t done any drugs at that point. Hell, I still had a 10 p.m. curfew for another few months until I turned 18. Even worse I was a queerby having just come out a year before. I didn’t know what I was into sexually.

We became friends. He confided in me how at a rave in a warehouse in Compton while both were on E, he and Carlos spent what seemed like hours huddled by the speakers as they were making out. I felt the stabs of millions of razor blades repeatedly puncturing my heart each time he professed his love for Carlos. So I kept my mouth shut.

I left for UC Santa Barbara in 1997 and didn’t see him again until 2000. I had a bad night at the James Joyce on State Street. I didn’t really want to be there, but the thought of being alone was even more horrifying. For several years I was afraid to be by myself. We got back to our home base at Java Jones in Isla Vista, and this backpacker who had clearly hitchhiked walked towards us as we tried to stay warm under the heaters.

The hitchhiker looked familiar. He asked me for a light, and I realized it was Bill. We went back to my place and made out on the couch where I told him I had a crush on him back at Yesterday’s. My hands groped his body as we listened to Bjork’s Selmasongs tongues intertwining. He felt perfect right there, and I wanted it to last forever. Unfortunately fatigue set in, and we called it a night.

He crashed the weekend before he headed back to Redondo. I chose to believe he was a nomad, that he was his own man, that in him not laughing at me when I told him I loved him that the feeling was reciprocated just a little.

But I know that he probably made out with me as a means of survival, just a place to crash until he can recover from whatever it was he just left from and plan his next move. I haven’t seen or heard of him since.

I haven’t thought about Bill for years until reading this book. There.

Aomame stared at the two moons with narrowed eyes. Then she closed her eyes, let a moment pass, took a deep breath, and opened her eyes again, expecting to find that everything had returned to normal and there was only one moon. But nothing had changed. The light was not playing tricks on her, nor had her eyesight gone strange. There could be no doubt that two moons were clearly floating in the sky side by side — a yellow one and a green one. (196)

Early in the novel, a cab driver tells Aomame that remember that things are not what they seem, that there is only one reality. One of the first things I try and focus on when reading a book is what are the rules for this particular world? I’m over 200 pages into this one, and I’m not quite sure what they are.

I’ve read some of the bad reviews of this book on GoodReads, and it sounds like most people like the general plot but hate that it took over 900 pages to unfold. I can see how most people are impatient and wants things to go go go. But I’m loving the subtlely Haruki Murakami uses, how deliberate things are.

One thing that is bothering me is how difficult it is to read Aomame. I don’t know whether she likes having a new girl friend or whether she finds her completely annoying.

I don’t know. Just some thoughts as I’m getting through this.

I have to apologize for yesterday’s little bit about Dead Man. That one was a bit longer than I anticipated. But most of yall know my rambling ways.

The first I heard of this movie was earlier this year. On the website They Shoot Pictures Don’t They, they have a list of the 21st century’s most acclaimed films so far as culled from year-end lists by film critics. Yi Yi (literally translated as One One) came just behind In the Mood for Love and Mulholland Drive. Much to my surprise I found that the San Pedro branch of the LA Public Library had the DVD. Sweet!

I had no idea what to expect from this movie. Unlike most films where I read about the plot, read reviews and what not, I didn’t do that for this one. All I knew what that it was supposed to be very long (almost 3 hours!!!) and very good.

And it didn’t disappoint.

At three hours it is an epic, but not in a Gone with the Wind or Godfather way. Yi Yi is an intricate tapestry of everything that tugs at us in our battles with the modern world. Director Edward Yang takes a portrait of an upper class Taipei family over the course of several months. It begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral. In between there’s a midlife crisis that sends the mother to the mountains to meditate with the Buddhists, the father exploring what would have happened if he didn’t dump the love of his life, the teenage daughter caught in a love triangle that ends in murder and the little son who is trying to figure out what the fuck life is about all the while being terrorized by an army of girls and the headmaster of his school.

There’s a lot of empathy in this movie which is really touching. By the end, I was amazed at how great it was all done. Not once did anything feel too hokey or too sentimental. Everything was balanced.

This is one of the best movies I’ve ever watched, and I do put it up there since 2000 with In the Mood for Love and Mulholland Drive both of which I love.