my socialist pipedream

Hit the local hardware megastore on the way home from dinner with friends to pick up a new solenoid for a sprinkler valve that’s been acting up. I’d thought I ID’d the issue down to a faulty solenoid, but it turns out the whole valve is bad. Other than that a pretty ho-hum Tuesday… with work and some more work and then some food and maybe a little TV. On the plus side, I did listen to Tommy today, an album that sounds amazing to me every time I put the proverbial needle to the proverbial record. And Tommy doesn’t know what day it is. He doesn’t know who Jesus was or what prayin’ is; How can he be saved, from the eternal grave? Damn, that’s some good stuff…

My vintage 2nd series Garbage Pail Kids arrived from some other Ebayer today – I was ecstatic. Strange how just thumbing through a stack of those stupid little bubblegum cards can evoke such memories of youth. I can remember going through the yellow pages and calling gas stations and comic shops around town asking them if they had Garbage Pail Kids in stock. They were extremely hot when I got into them, which wasn’t until around the 3rd series. I used to have my dad drive me all around town looking for the things. He’d park and I’d run in to check the register displays for those precious wax packs. I was completely fanatic about collecting those cards, and at 25¢ a pop I could afford a whopping twelve packs a week with my $3 allowance, that’s 60 cards! ‘Round about 6th grade, I decided I’d grown tired of Garbage Pail Kids… they’d had a good run, from 2nd grade to 6th. I think I stopped collecting around series 14, and I still rue the day I took thousands of cards up to the local comic book store (after making my parents haul them across the country) and sold them for pennies. Now I’m spending money to regain those tangible memories… a luxury available to us drowning-in-cash Gen-Y kids.

A perennial joke I have with my close friends is the one about how Dave want to drop out and start a “co-op.” I like to call it a “co-op” as opposed to a “commune” because I think it has a positive connotation, evoking a feeling of people working together to support the whole rather than one of David Koresh burning babies. I joke, but I swear I’m really half-serious. Something about dropping out of society, becoming self-reliant (you know, that theme-of-themes that dominates nearly all my writing). We could do it. Leverage our group assets, purchase some land and basic starters, and proceed to setup a self-reliant, off-grid life. Nothing too avant-garde, mind you, I’d still want to send my kids to school, still want them to have friends; I’d still want the internet, still enjoy modern media. It’d be a triumph over the fetters of modern man’s reliance on luxury and convenience. Instead, we’d be enjoying the hard-won fruits of our own sweat and toil, working together to provide for us all. Oh boy… this is getting a little too Shangri-La, so I’m gonna cut it off now.

Goodnight.

Also written on this day...

• good, but needs red wine and cannabis - 2007
• on my own - 2005
• tethered to their haggard bodies - 2004