"Awesome!" A Blog.

Friday, September 30, 2005

People are telling me where to move.

Well, many postcards have come in! Thank you for those. As it stands now, I am either moving to Boston or Austin. Or this one place in New York that is purportedly quite great. Additionally, I may move to my own house, as I took out a bit of insurance and sent myself a hundred postcards with my own ZIP code on them. (moving can be quite expensive)

On a weekend diversion we took a tour of local open houses and there is a fantastic parcel for sale just one mile from here, in Redwood City. It's a cozy old joint, with nooks and crannies, built in the 1930s. It's got all the bathrooms and bedrooms you could ever simultaneously make use of, but the real sparkler is the half-acre lot. I'd get out the old checkbook but the place is listed at $1.6M, and it needs about a hundred grand in upgrades before it qualifies as "inhabitable." Is this the price one must pay in order to have one's children ride bikes among the children of those who thought up the colors in the Google logo? Apparently.

I sure hope that the people who dreamed up red, yellow and blue are sleeping well tonight. And I hope that the guy who chose "serif" is sleepily enjoying the idea that I cannot afford to be his neighbor. Because I would sure as shit throw a hard, spoiled salami through his window as soon as I closed escrow. I hate computer people, and I will hit them with my inexpensive car, .

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

I'm thinking about moving.

There comes a time in a man's life when he doesn't want to live on a noisy street with creepy neighbors who he has never seen in four years except for the time a drunk driver launched a car into his front yard. A time when a person doesn't want to live next to an idiot who leaves for work on his dirtbike at 3am. A time when just for once you'd like to be able to run next door to borrow a cup of sugar without having to fear that the sugar was masturbated near. It's starting to feel like that time, around this place.

The following is a list of qualities I think an ideal town would have. If your town has three or more of these qualities, please write the zip code of the town on an index card and mail it to: Chris Onstad, PO Box 7182, San Carlos, CA 94070. I will put the card into a spinny wire-type lottery cage, and then immediately move to the town I randomly select. (Card to be picked on November 1, 2005)


List:

1. A free school, K-12, founded by wealthy Internet luminaries who stress the importance of never playing rap music around one's father.

2. A wooden store with a small happy man who sells handmade cheeses and cured meats. He usually has a bottle of Sambuca open to enjoy with the meats, and when your wife isn't looking he winks and uses that fine Italian hand to suggest that you take one more nip while he shows her the latest pictures of his grandchildren.

3. A post office clerk who is constantly dropping the "F-bomb." Extra consideration if the clerk has a metal plate in his head from a gun accident. Extra-extra consideration if the clerk's nametag reads "Johnny Fuck."

4. An overzealous Truant Officer who is routinely outwitted by a small boy and his Bull Terrier (black ring drawn around its eye).

5. A town festival every Friday wherein fresh cold beer, hot baked potatoes with salt and butter, and grilled sausages are offered free-of-charge (paid for by the Police). A man performs amplified skiffle on a small platform while a dunk tank featuring local stray dogs raises money for the Police. (see John Rawls' "Consider An Economy Such As This," 1973, Harvard Press.)

6. If a person has a faded inkjet printout of a passage of Scripture taped up in the rear window of their car, the town agrees that sufficiently addled citizens, when found placing refrigerator items (e.g. lunchmeats, spoiled novelty mustards) over the Scripture, will not be subjected to punishment or even scrutiny.

7. "I Don't Want Your Soap." A free small vinyl sticker that applies to one's front door, at eye level, which indicates involvement in a community program that forbids high school-age kids from selling detergent products door-to-door as a means of raising funds for "college scholarship." Everyone knows that the kid just gets into a white pickup truck at the end of the block and lights up a Marlboro.

8. Old Folks-Based Racism! Or, actually, the absence of that sort of thing. The other day in our grocery store a salty old Sinatra-era bluehair said some really nasty stuff to some Polynesian kids who were playing around in their mom's shopping cart, and there was a big to-do involving the store manager taking away the lady's free sample of Meatless Meatballs and escorting her to the door. The whole thing just seemed unnecessary, if you ask me. The ideal town would not have Old Folks-Based Racism.

Friday, September 02, 2005

Whoops! "Facto."

Apparently my friend is going to wear Achewood apparel on his Bravo TV show on the 9th, and not this evening (the 2nd). If you did watch the show this evening, you at least got a chance to see a candid shot of George Wendt sitting on a park bench holding what looked like a bottle of booze in one of those four-dollar grocery store "wine gift bags." You know the dude has more class than to swill from brown paper. He dropped $29 on a bottle of Rombauer Cabernet, and another $4 to keep the police off he azz.

This could very well be the early markings of a celebrity trend: publicly swilling top-shelf booze out of overpriced "wine gift bags" instead of paper bags. If, in the early hours of some coming weekday morning, you see news footage of Matthew McConaughey slugging Tanqueray Ten out of a shiny velvet-handled bag that says "Jazz!" and has pictures of champagne bottles popping their corks, you know that either (a) he reads this page, or (b) the complex permutations of celebrity pastimes have simply made it seem as such.