Nate Beaty's Brainfag

Cars, cars, cars, America loves cars

posted in Home Jabber on August 24, 2005

For all you podcast nerds out there, those who enjoy this cavalcade of pseudo-pirate-radio swarming the digital earth, if you'd like a sampling of my real, live, phlegm-gurgled voice -- my friend Ray has incorporated me into his latest Noboto electro-interview machination. I'm jazzed on the idea of doing a podcast, but like most fads, I'll wait until it's totally passé and then do something nobody will listen to! Haha!

Random sidenote: for some reason, technorati.com was titling my site "brain faggot," which I can't even remember how I found, but I had to login and "claim my blog" to change the title. I don't get it. Where did they get "brain faggot" from??

Soon Bok has been in Korea for a week today. I've been getting roughly one email and a phone call a day, though, so we've been able to stay in touch. She's having a great time, and has discovered the joys of Korean pizza, called "peegha". I missed her as soon as I walked away from the airport security, and I've been becoming more and more weirded out by not having her here every day. It's odd how accustomed you get to someone's presence after nearly a year of dating. It's like you're not sure what to do with yourself -- my work schedule, eating and bathing habits, etc -- everything is disjointed and it's hard to get back in the mode of bachelorhood. Plus I don't have anyone to share a whole damn bag of edamame with while I watch movies at night.

You may have noticed I uploaded a slew of photos of Orcas and ye olde flophouse. Yea, the nostalgia has washed over me, as I'm all lonely and sad and finding myself computing 900 hours a day while Soon Bok is in Korea. Wee-hoo.

The astute may have also noticed a Live Search in the writing section. Those even more nerdy and astute may notice the code borrowed from (the incredible) Dunstan Orchard's now (sadly) defunct blog. I still haven't had a chance to customize it more, and it looks a little haywire on IE, but fuck IE, I say. All webdesigners together now: "FUCK IE!" (I'm thinking of starting a coding/geek blog on Clixel so y'all don't have to suffer this jibber jabber, and so I can geek out even MORE and let loose with the PHP, Javascript, SQL, Rails, Unix, AJAX, CSS, etc etc.)

I finally got my nephew Aaron his birthday gifts -- a handmade Sketchbook with a bunch of color illos glued throughout, a gaggle of fauncy colored markers (he'll be the only 9-year-old with Prisma markers on the block), 2 studded bracelets made by my roommate Cliff, a Ramones CD and ten clams. My brother had a studded bracelet a lot like the one I got him, and I was so jealous as a breakdancing Overdrive -- I only got the single-rowed studded bracelet. But even then, I remember feeling self-conscious about it, like I was obviously trying to "decorate myself with doodads". I'm just not ornamental. I am simple honkey: no facial hair, no studs on muh belt, no flair to muh pants, and no tats on muh skin.

I've been taking long walks at night, and my brain has been on a whirring what-do-I-need-to-code cycle, which is not only fucking irritating, it's like white noise clouding out any other thoughts. But when I HAVE broken out of worrying about my HUGE stack of sites to work on, I have been thinking about family in the states, in comparison to what I'm hearing from Soon Bok about her Korean family. And as I sit eating some crunchy bread that's hurting my rotting teeth, I return to wondering about the social structures we have built as humans, including families, communities, and government -- and how in the states, these groups rarely tend to be focused on supporting the basic needs of members of this group. We are definitely a capitalistic, self-centered culture (and we are spreading this virus to other cultures like wildfire).

But WHY do we have kids? And what is our relation to our kids as they turn 20, 30, 40? I am constantly dumbfounded at how my dad so rarely has interest in what I'm doing.. in my comics, my writing, my website.. if I had a son who was actively creative, I would be totally fascinated by that. I would be eating that shit up. What is this creature I spawn doing?? How did he get those ideas? Granted, by the time you've been supporting the smartass child for 18 years, perhaps you're so burnt out on the abominable output that you don't want to hear another peep. The sense of relief that you don't have to feed, clothe and shelter the beast may be an immense relief, who knows.

Soon Bok is telling me that her family is all about supporting her (granted, we must take into account they relinquished her for adoption to begin with). Conceptually, I see families as an ever-growing support base for the humans born INTO that group. You would think not only emotional but financial support would grow with each member. Perhaps this is an outdated model of the family. Now that we've "evolved" to our modern 21st century Jetson-esque life, the lack of a survival need for familial support has caused us to stray from our animal roots.

I think this each-for-his-own mode of thought that we've fostered for years has extended past our blood-related groups into the structures we have instituted, namely government. It seems every year our government becomes less and less about providing for the general population, and more and more about becoming a world power and stuffing the coffers of the 1% in charge.

A scatter-brained and half-finished theory, but something that's been rattling around my rotting-tooth head.

As a final sidenote, I'm beginning to go crazy riding my bike around as I realize more and more that I FUCKING HATE CARS. Today I kept yelling at cars "GASOLINE! GASOLINE! HOW'S IT FEEL TO GET AROUND WITH GASOLINE?!" among other ditties. I also find myself riding in front of cars, ignoring their obvious size advantage, just to exercise and illustrate my LAWFUL RIGHT to be an element of traffic, as opposed to "some little annoying thing that must be swerved around as quick as possible, no matter what traffic or sign lies ahead." Yesterday on 33rd street a lady sped in front of me to immediately begin turning her overpriced yuppie Subaru RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME, then slowed to a STOP (??), so I had to yank on my front brakes (which is all I have) so hard I did a reverse wheelie inches from her bumper. To top it off she had the fucking GALL to give me a look insinuating that I had done something wrong! It was obvious she knew I was there, but she just had this brain freeze confusion as to what to do about me. Well, lady, you STAY BEHIND ME UNTIL I PASS THE STREET YOU WANT TO TURN ONTO, AS IF I WAS A BIG CAR BLOCKING YOUR TURN, and THEN you turn, OK? Pretty fucking simple.

Maybe I should start walking more.