Yeah, that's all.

[via fffound, of course.]

waterline

I'm always looking through this glowing periscope, looking out at things that don't have to worry about being watertight. I'm looking through a fog of disinformation, finding a little patch of clarity here or there that reads "the ocean is dark for a reason." It says, "don't forget how to breathe." Somebody scribbled "we love you more than you hate yourself," drew stick figures of open arms, drew a toothy smile.

I could build this periscope long enough to hit the bottom of the Mariana Trench, thirty six thousand feet of mirrors and steel, but I'm just thinking about going for a swim up there at the surface instead, leaving the questions for God and following these air bubbles right through the waterline, right into that sky I was born to breathe.

Smile, Nod, and Juxtapose

Some things are beautiful, some moments are genius. For whatever's left over, there's probably a pretty decent inferno spiraling out of a broken down Toyota somewhere.

Just toss in what you don't want and smile like a tourist.

1964

Lyndon Johnson orders custom pants from Haggar, in an overly descriptive conversation where he demands a little more crotch area, you know, "down where your nuts hung." He also says "bunghole."

"Dammit Joe Haggar, these pleated khakis are riding up the most important bunghole on Earth! If we can get a man on the moon, by God we ought to be able to break some fabric up and give my nuts some breathing room!"

-Lyndon Baines Johnson

He did not actually say that, but it's not far off.

Check out the transcribed phone conversation though, it's interesting to hear presidents do what every normal American does order pants:

http://www.whitehousetapes.net/clips/1964_0809_lbj_haggar/

This site has archived a lot of other presidential conversations, most of them dealing with issues infinitely more important than pants, so check those too. It's pretty interesting stuff.

http://www.whitehousetapes.net/

A Mighty Fair Trade: My Monetary Earnings for the Blueprint III Compact Disc!

1.20

I bought Jay-Z's Blueprint III today.

Because I'm hip and know a lot about rap music.

Like a chump though, I went out to Best Buy and picked up the CD, actually paid money in exchange for entertainment if you can believe that garbage! I wrestled myself into laying down the ten bucks, but once I plopped it into my truck's CD player, I felt like I would have paid a good twenty.

Not just because the album is that good (it is!), but buying an album is part of the whole music experience that I've been missing out on lately -the ten minutes trying to remove that stupid saran wrap and adhesive cover they melt onto the case, the flipping of the album ten times, the reading of the insert, the inevitable destruction of the original CD due to scratching when you inadvertently try to clean it with your floorboard. As an added bonus though, I get a nice little souvenir of a jewel case that sits on my shelf and says, "Hey, Brice has culture. Check out his rap collection."

This album pretty much is my rap collection, but I feel like I got a good start. The whole album flows from the concept of "Death of Auto-Tune" and pushes for a return to authenticity. That's what got my attention on the album. So yeah,

I'll pay money for that.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the hip-hop scene. All I know is that I hear a lot of robot voices sneaking through my air waves, and that is totally not cool, robot voices! Get off the

mic and figure out how to solve the recession of something you silly little robots...

Anyway, I've decided that Jay-Z is a real artist and he deserves that bit of money I spent. I hope he uses part of it to take Beyonce out to a Grizzly Bear concert or whatever it is the cool progressive rap artists do these days:

Weekend Shift

Five forty-five, I scan my ID to get into the building. I dump my plastic bag into the refrigerator in the TV studio. It's ham and cheese, always ham and cheese. Small talk with the other worker and I frown at the computer, checking it for errors and filling out some paperwork. It takes three minutes tops.

Then it's six hours I spend, hunched over, jittery and restless in a room walled with sound absorbing foam from the 70s. It's dirty, yellow, and flaking. I like to pretend it's asbestos. I even daydream I'm sitting on a pile of cash breathing out of an oxygen mask listening to NPR from a Houston station.

I slip out of the dream, toss aside a folder of useless forms and pull myself up to the computer in the studio, clicking unconsciously on Firefox.

The internet makes me nervous. I click and click and click and end up marooned on some God forsaken archipelago of knowledge through Wikipedia. Irish Potato Famine. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Ferris Bueller. Butters from South Park.

This chaotic tumble lasts for two to four hours.

For twenty minutes I read a book I brought, glancing up distracted by the radio volume lights every two minutes. With the door shut in the studio, I can't hear the ear splitting opera we're broadcasting world wide to the fourteen soon to be dead bodies sitting on piles of cash breathing out of oxygen masks. I've got to make sure I see those lights, rising and falling, a good combination of light green and bright red. If that's not happening, that mesothelioma crowd will be a hard sell come pledge time.

I black out.

It's midnight and I'm scanning my card again to get out. Security is tight here because everybody wants to be in that back room with the foam walls. Everybody wants a stack of money and an oxygen mask.

The air is fresh outside, cold and clear right after a front, clean and free, and I go home with my windows down.