Hits and misses (3/16/99)
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Personally I find my knowledge of Oriental languages thus far confined to the Cantonese you pick up from Jackie Chan movies: useful colloquial phrases like “whiskey”, “cash”, “hard disk”, and “dickhead”. — I fully expect we’ll soon discover they really do speak English on other planets, just like in the
Doctor Who reruns.
I’m not sure what computers are actually good for, besides leaving my personal preferences among megabimbos permanent prey for data mining. [What have things come to when you have to lie to your own software?] The things I always thought they would be good for turn out to be so easy they’re hardly worth doing: a couple of hours fucking around with a Scheme interpreter usually suffice to generate enough conjectures about the distribution of the primes to defy proof until the millenium after next.
As for the grand tabloid scandal, it’s nothing other than what you would expect. Boulder, like the other great Boomer magnets, is a place where people live only because they want to be able to say that they live there. This entails an economy and a culture predicated upon narcissism. Above and beyond the obvious corollaries, e.g. a health club on every corner, whole housing developments comprised of fake Victorian mansions, traffic accidents involving multiple Range Rovers, and a recent City Council election in which every candidate claimed to be employed as a consultant [though only one, as it turned out, had any measurable noninvestment income], there are strange and eccentric consequences, e.g. a daily newspaper that at least once during the Nineties ran a front-page human interest photograph showing a grieving couple standing by their Jaguar, from which some kids had removed the hood ornament, with an accompanying story about the grave threat to the civic order represented by such irresponsible vandalism. [I am not making this up.] — Obviously in such an environment it cannot strain credulity that one should discover a former beauty queen reliving her pageant career through the vehicle of her daughter married to a [quote/unquote] computer executive who seems to have been dicking said sixyearold in his [abundant] spare time; that they should have broken the kid while they were playing with her; that they should have improvised a cover story based transparently on the plot of a recent motion picture; that the local police [motto: “To Serve And Protect The Wealthy From The Lower Classes”] should have swallowed this story unquestioningly and let the perpetrators clean up the evidence before their very eyes; that the city bureaucracy, once the truth became apparent, should have made every effort to obscure it; that the district attorney in particular, not simply by virtue of a reluctance to appear on The Celebrity Murder Channel in the role of the next Marcia Clark but also because the Ramseys’ lawyers [naturally] are personal friends who belong to the same ruling clique he does, should have ignored the case in the hope that it would go away; that, accordingly, to date the only person to have been prosecuted in connection with the case was the poor dolt who leaked photographs to the
Globe [they found him instantly and came down on him like the wrath of God]; and that anyone who wanted to piece together these particulars would have to read them in the
New York Times, since the local newspaper [see above] has been consistently reluctant to cover the story for fear that it might affect property values. — In the selfstyled Athens of the Rockies [Is Fort Collins the Thebes or the Corinth? Is Paul Danish the Sophocles or the Thucydides? Is the County Courthouse the Temple of Olympian Zeus or the Temple of Pythian Apollo?], a city where the single most common sexual practice is probably masturbation in front of a mirror, none of this should surprise you.
I heard it once that Martin Mull was asked by one of his friends after he made it temporarily big just what Hollywood was like, and he said “High school with money.” — A thrill of recognition ran through me when I heard this. But now the thrill is gone.
And, of course: I never get married. I just get divorced.
Later.
____________Voodoo child (3/2/99)
