Pizza... with style.

Sometimes weird stuff of note happens way, WAY off the rails. Like last night for instance.

I was innocently taking out the recycling, when I overheard the nice lesbian couple in our place having problems with the Pizza Hut guy. It seems this guy didn't realize that they had wanted to pay with plastic. Addie and I can relate. We don't order from our local Pizza hut, because they are certifiably deficient in a several areas of requisite human interaction. We order from Papa John's. They can read as well as walk five steps to their left and walk up the stairs rather than stare blankly at a locked gate until the pizza is cold. Long, irritating story.

So it turned out that the nice lesbians ordered from Papa John's in addition to Pizza Hut. While I was wondering to myself what circumstances of pizza desire would require this, I noticed something incongruous: the Papa John's guy had pulled up in a Mercedes M-class (SUV). Now I don't know a lot about money, but I do know that if you can even afford to borrow a Mercedes, you probably don't need that job delivering pizza. Perhaps his really rich father had given him the car for his birthday before cutting him off and telling him to get a job. Perhaps he stole the car and was hiding it in plain sight. Or maybe he was a government agent sent to infiltrate our building. (That can't be right, though. The car was white not black.) Or perhaps he was delivering more than just pizza. Was he selling drugs? Himself? Who knows...

What I do know is this: if I had a car that nice, I too might find a job that let me tootle around in it for profit. But I'd find one that didn't require a tacky, lighty-up pizza place marquee to be suction-cupped to the top.

A Marie Antoinette Sighting on the BL

It's been a little bit since the last post, because every time I come with an idea lately, I've wanted to save it for a book. Ideas are precious, and I'm no Neal Stephenson.

But as you can see, I've got another couple of pictures. Several young ladies got on the BL at Grand Station with fake severed heads. Halloween? Most of them are wearing black... And retail definitely thinks it's Halloween, but the rest of us are still bemoaning Labor Day's inadequate recuperative powers and haven't moved on to candy and goth. So it took me a moment to realize that they were students at LA Trade/Tech's cosmetology school. (That's hair and makeup, not stars and galaxies.) For a moment I thought I had discovered a roving pack of smock-wearing, urban head-hunter/fetishists. It was certainly creepy.

So let's try captions. I'll go first. Here's a pair:

Pic 1: "I asked for fries, but this was all they had."

Pic 2: "Beauty knows no pain."

This post is not funny. You have been warned.

It's been some time since I was interested in ruminating on the events of five years ago yesterday. But 9/11 went by again, and I work in a skyscraper and travel by the second most used light rail system in the country. I realized quickly that the chances of avoiding unhappy thoughts was slim yesterday morning and then as I rode home, slim dwindled well past sickly.

You simply don't work where I work and travel the way I travel and not get visions of off-course jetliners piloted by men of suicidal conviction who know of nowhere to land other than the 40th floor of my building. And don't forget that God is their co-pilot. On the train it's the specter of the proverbial 'unattended package' placed by men and/or women who look strangely like everyone else. It's hard not to feel like a target, except that these people seem to lack that personal specificity that one typically finds in something like a serial killer. Most mass-murder/suicides aim for quantity over quality. On 9/11/01, they got both.

I heard only one 9/11 reference at work yesterday. My colleagues were far more concerned about timely and tasty catering orders, quasi-functional printers and strict budget lines. The train was full of seemingly unconcerned commuters and if there's a bit of extra tension, it is far more likely to be my hyperactive imagination at work than any nervousness brought on by the ghosts of New York, Madrid and London. But what wasn't said was louder than words. And no one was sleeping on the train yesterday.

It was hard to check headlines today during my lunch break. I just wanted to find some last-minute dirt on today's iPod announcement, but the mainstream media and even the usually saner alternative news outlets were screeching resolved stoicism and lessons learned to the masses while reserving prideful protectionism for those that suffered real losses. I cringe at the falseness of the former but can hardly begrudge the latter their real pain. I wish them peace and speed in their healing processes.

I often reflect on the varying rations of rationality that have been allotted to the cultures of the world and wonder how much longer we will willingly suffer murderous irrationality to remain among us. But I fear that now - five years on - we are no closer to real answers about how to affect change. Pathological irrationality is hard to combat; it sows confusion among its enemies and makes it hard to find an entry point to rational discourse. Many feel we should fight this new totalitarian fascism that extreme Islam represents on a literal battleground. Last I checked it wasn't really working out that well for anyone involved. A try at diplomacy would represent that rational discourse I mentioned earlier and that's not really working out either. How does one begin a level-headed, worldwide conversation when people on all sides of the argument are often guided by books that essentially tell them to give no quarter to the enemy because their ideas are false and so they are 'enemies of the faith'?

Maybe militaristic metaphors are clouding the issue. Maybe a softer ideological approach is better. But it's too optimistic to think that we can simply boil away the vitriol and render a new world from the remaining soup of surviving ideas.

This diatribe is in danger of becoming circular like a round trip on the Blue Line. So for now, I'm getting off.