Goodbye Columbus

"donnyb! donnyb! why dont you write about ohio."

read on , you philistines.. drink the nectar of my pen sword!
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columbus ohio is a simple place but i am struggling to adequately portray it here. think Paris, France, then pretend it is opposite day -- and then add 20,000 Big Ten sluts. voila! so ok, maybe this is a bit presumptuous, but i spent four years in champaign illinois, so i know these people. they are people of the earth. 30% are sexy-as-hell god fearing christians while a good 70% are sexy-as-hell, binge-drinking sluts.

this town has many uninteresting facets, none of which seem worth mentioning, but what the hell, i consider this a good education for the non-midwesterners. for example, every cop car you see has at least one black person in the back seat. i'm not sure if they are paid members of the OSU police department or what, but the message is loud and clear: if you're black and even slightly shady, you best watch your ass, or we'll drive you around town for hours. also, a non-distinct concrete downtown is punctuated, quite phallicly, by a giant concrete slabbed exclamation point which rises thousands of feet in the air. inside, natives shuffle about, dealing with matters of insurance and electric power. then they go home, watch TV, have sex with their wives, and do it all over again. in other words: they are just like you.

when i travel domestically, all of my foreign excitements go away. there is no fear for my life, no worries of mistaken identity which inevitably lead to unhappy relations with a prison guard named julio or hans. instead, i wind up in columbus or topeka and i wonder: why the hell would anyone live here? and then i am slightly jealous.

i admit i am feeling more rural recently... the throngs of SF (not to mention the thongs of SF -- like the one i saw on a dude in chaps on a WEDNESDAY down my street) are slowly wearing on me. i pine for open spaces, backyards and streams. kids and dogs running around naked, playing in sprinklers. fishing boats and john deere tractors. but i am quickly reminded of fishing trips with my father. between awkward conversations and his occasional threat to throw me off of a 14ft rowboat, we would look around and admire the idyllic serenities of lake and forest... only to hear him proclaim this place unlivable for the dearth of the two big J's: Jews and Jobs.

thats right, well placed paternal semitism creeps back into the subconscience and i realize that my musings of fireflies flickering around my west virginia spread are just a poorly thought out pipe dream. as much as i like the country, i couldnt imagine settling in a place where i would be given delicious hams on easter. the wierd thing is that i love hams. it's like my judaism is just a front for a broader anti-social behavior that gets tripped when gentiles offer me hams on the day their boy comes back from his jewly imposed death. or maybe its a deep seeded anxiety for what the anthropologist would call "the other", and "the other's pork products". Unclear.

and let's not kid ourselves in believing my neurosis is solely jewy by nature. how would i afford myself a living? sure i could make $6/hour shoveling shit at the local manure farm, but let's face it, manual labor is not for me. would i have to start a business, whatever that means? i could 'work for myself'. The economists and anthropologists are both shaking their heads. not only do they pity me, they worry too.

so in the end, columbus is no different than sao paulo is no different from San Francisco is no different from the Moon and Antarctica... geography wracks me with open questions, which lead to drinking, which leads to blogging, which leads to dorkism, which i suppose is fitting. dorks buy these tickets for me to tour the world -- now they are getting big dork dividends.

i told you there was nothing to say.

sootblower's lament

man ... i need to stop hanging out with power guys.

SootBlower's Lament

The boiler needs work
The temperature's risin'.
We blow soot past lines ragin' yella,
And our faces reign black
Our shoulders shlumped shale,
Our hearts: NO DATA.