Sanuk D

I don't know what I'm doing here, I should be someplace else.

Part of the gift of living here in the land of the Suwaree is the opportunity to get to know people who are smarter, nicer, and better behaved than me.  Mallory McDuff is one of those people.  She is smart enough to have just written a book, Natural Saints: How People of Faith are Working to Save God’s Earth.  She is nice enough to spend time talking with me about it, despite the fact that she has better things to do on a beautiful Friday afternoon at the start of Labor Day weekend.  She is so well behaved that she did not even balk at my attempts to record our conversation.

And this attempt is better than some previous, although I am aware that an investment in actual recording technology may be in order at some point.  The good news is that Mallory sounds good, and she is the one you want to listen to anyway.  The good sounding music is called “Freight Train” and it is by the Maybe Sometimes.  Check out the podcast and check out the book.  If so inspired, try becoming a natural saint.  We are in need.

Boy howdy, this has been a week, has it not kiddos?  Rosanne Cash tweeted earlier in the week that she believes the moon is in the house of feces.  Yes, Rosanne Cash tweets at @rosannecash, and she is a darn interesting twitterer if you ask me.  It doesn’t hurt that I have heard her music before.  Of course, she is not playing Moogfest.  Well, she hasn’t announced that she is playing Moogfest yet.  The moral of the digression is that you should follow Rosanne Cash.

Because she knows a crazy week when she sees one.  And this is one.  If I may be so bold, I have been kicking ass this week.  Getting lots of stuff done that needed doing, but whether I am delivering or receiving the kicking of the ass, it seems to take a toll these days.  It feels good to have gotten so much done, but it feels even better that I don’t have to do any more for a couple of days.

So what to do but geek out?  I had been shopping netbooks for some time and had decided on a price that would represent “cheap” and a brand that would, well, represent.  That would be ASUS.  So there was an “Asus” for “cheep” on “Woot” last “Sunday” and I “went for it.”  My Sweet Lady took it well.  She even nods her head and smiles when I say that this is a critical piece of what we will need for our trip to Israel.  ”Yeah, right, whatever” she thinks.  But she does not insist that I send it back.  She loves me.

So far I like the netbook.  It has Windows 7 which I could care less about.  I’d go straight to a Linux installation but I want to make sure the touchpad and webcam work.  Perhaps I am being a sissy.  Doesn’t matter because so far everything works pretty well.  The screen is very clear and the keyboard is nicely sized.  I figured out how to make the screen scroll using the touchpad.  That’s all in one night.

Plus I started to edit my conversation with GrimeDog Mallory McDuff.  (Get it? McGruff, the Crime Dog fought crime.  McDuff the Grime Dog fights environmental degredation.  Get it?)  It was a great conversation and a fabulous way to start the weekend. I hope that will come through on the podcast, which should be up tomorrow or maybe Sunday.  We had a lovely run after as well.  Stay tuned.

Did you know that before la Face there was this thing called “MySpace”?  Even before that there was “Friendster” but nobody uses that thing anymore.  Nowadays only musicians and pedophiles use MySpace, which makes me very nervous to go there and listen to music.  But what are you going to do?  All the cool kids are putting their music on the SpaceBook thing.  So off I go to hear what the kids are listening to too.

And even just listening to music makes me feel a little weird on the MySpace.  Let’s be honest here.  I drive a station wagon.  No amount of stickers and bike racks will hide the fact that it’s      a       station        wagon.  I’m ok with that because I like the cargo room, but “cargo room” as a criterium for liking a vehicle is wack old guy stuff.  It is also a fact that I can legitimately be termed as “pushing 40.”  Corollary to that is that I have a sibling who could legitimately be termed as “pushing 50.”  No, not you.  The old one.

So anyway, I’m very excited about the ole Moogfest and what it means for Asheville, but let’s face it, The Silos are not playing.  The Silos might possibly represent my coolest point in music being on the cuspness.  They are, I think, still driving around Indiana in a van playing college towns.  I’m sure they sound great when they play.  I still like that album with the bird on the front.  But that does not make me a music maven.  I don’t know who most of these people are who are performing at the Moogfest, but I’m glad they are coming.  Getting us on the Moogle Map, as it twere.  Plus it gives me a reason to go surf around the SpacePlaceFace or whatever that thing is called.

Why is today unlike other days?  It is, in fact, not.  Pretty busy for sure, but not terribly different.  Except my email got hacked, so that is a little different.  Oh, and the fundamentalists up the street accused my daughter of worshiping idols.  That doesn’t happen every day.  Other than that, though, the situation was pretty normal.  Like when I got caught behind a line of buses on the way to work.  There is a school right down the street so it is not uncommon that I get stuck behind a crapload of buses.

And I don’t know if the hippie dippie mechanics over at the Asheville City Schools bus garage really have the things running on biodiesel or not, but those things sure do smell like hamburgers to me.  McDonald’s hamburgers, to be exact, with the pickle.  I don’t mind the smell; kind of like it actually.  It sends me back to trips to the McDonald’s in the town where I grew up.  Those were exciting trips, because we only went there once a week.  Or twice, maybe, if Mama was not into cooking.

The McDonald’s we went to had a playground, I think.  Definitely outdoor tables.  And this was back in the day when the McDonald’ses tried to pick up a little local color.  Our town was named for Benjamin Franklin, so there was all this Benjamin Franklin stuff like that wack musical instrument with the glass bowls and a replica of his glasses.  I don’t really get why the glasses because they were not that special, but I liked them because I wore glasses before anyone else I knew.  So glasses were my thing.

Scotch tape was Auntie Kate’s thing, especially at Brumalia when she would tape a crapload of Hubba Bubba to the outside of our gifts.  That was awesome.  I got a little Christmas thrill the other day when I smelled some Scotch tape.  Didn’t know what it was until I started in on the Hubba Bubba.  Then I figured it out.

The weirdest smell thing I have going on is with money.  Cash money.  Mama used to give me cash money to buy lunch at school.  One time the money must have been pretty new because the ink still smell pretty strong.  I thought that was Mama’s perfume, and I went around all day taking little whiffs of the money.  Somewhere along the line I realized that all money smells like that and it is unlikely that everyone is using Mama’s perfume.  Still though, the smell of money reminds me of Mama, which could be good or bad depending on how you look at it.  Either I get to remember her pretty much anytime I want or I’m constantly reminded of her absence by money.  Given my relative lack of money, it’s not really all the constant.

The Woot is now in Irving.  Irving is not a person, of course, Irving is a town.  Maybe a city even.  All I know about Irving is that it was the location of Texas Stadium where the Dallas Cowboys played.  Texas Stadium was on the opening credits of Dallas, the TV Show.  Dallas came on after the Dukes of Hazzard, and it’s theme song signaled a great time to go cook up a frozen pizza or velveeta sandwich.  Two slices of white bread, velveeta, and two minutes in a microwave give you a velveeta sandwich.  I would not feed that crap to Tallulah if her belly were distended with malnourishment.

Ok, maybe I would if that was all we had but I’d like to think that I could use my Woot to find something more nutritious than a velveeta sandwich.  The Woot has a 10.1 inch screen, 250gb of storage, 802.11 wireless connectivity, a webcam, and a card reader slot.  That’s all I need really.  Just a solid, reliable, portable way to travel down the information super whatever.  Like a Tony Dorsett of the digital age.