Bloggy Mountin' Breakdown, Part 2

Ya know, you gotta love the internet. That vast galaxy of humanity, marked by speckled patterns of light--sometimes brilliant, sometimes faint. These constellations are made not of stars, but rather of myriad expressions of life. Our collected wisdom, drawn from millennia of thought, passion, courage and folly. Our feelings. Our experiences. Our desire to connect with one another. Oh yeah, and our porn. Musn't forget that.

Wow! There's a lotta porn out there! In't there?! Y'know what I mean. You look at it too. Don't know why I'm even bothering to ask. It is inspiring and comforting to know that if you wanna watch, say, for example, old people fuckin or bein' fucked, you have available to you in this fantastic, heretofore unimaginable age more porn than you can shake your stick at.

Somewhere out there was a living, electric euphoria. Except for that when I hit all my old fave websites, I hadda problem.


See, my computer's about a year old. The processor was still fairly adequate, but the amount of memory I had available to me was a little lacking, 'least, in terms of highly sophisticated artistic media like internet porn. Mind you, I'm not saying I couldn't see anything at all. It's just, when a video keeps freezing and moving ahead a few choppy steps before freezing again, it becomes difficult to really settle in and appreciate the subtle shifting of liver spots and wrinkles. Just when you're starting to feel titillated, you find yerself stuck looking at some blurry freeze frame.

I'm sure you can imagine how frustrating this situation was for me. There I was at the threshold, ready to re-enter the world of living, breathing, feeling creatures such as yerself. I was ready to slough off my feeling of terminal burnout as though 'twere moltin' season n' I was a big ol' crawlin' kingsnake. But I couldn't do it becuzza my goddamn computer!!!!!!! How absurd is that????

Don't even get me started on Big Bizness's commitment to the principle of built-in obsolescence!!! I'm from Flint, Michigan!!! Still, you can't fight city hall, nor esp. the home computin' industry. I couldn't afford a new machine, so I was gonna have to trundle over to the Apple store on Mich. Ave. & buy me a stick o' RAM. (As one might’ve sought a stick o’ butter from his/her grocer inna good ol’ days.)


I hate walking up Mich. Ave. Nike Town and Nieman Marcus & all that other hackshit gets really pretty old really pretty fast if you live here. Plus I've never been much of a shopper in the first place, and the whole idea of shopping as entertainment gives me the creeps, which I'm sure is atavistic, paranoid and or superior, depending on how you look at it, but it's the way I feel. I know, who am I to judge someone else's empty materialism when my own is so undeniably present? But it all seems so dehumanizing to me somehow. Esp. down there where you're part of this hundred-headed mass—toe to toe & shoulder to shoulder w/ alla the tourists. Including yourself. Everyone’s a tourist along the Magnificent Mile, even the Chicagoans.

So. I arrived at the Apple Store, which is done all up in slick whites and silvers and glass. 'Tis 'tho you were frolicking around the surface of a gargantuan Apple issued mouse. The double doors—glass w/ shiny silver handles, natch, and embedded in a solid glass storefront that stretches for half a city block. (Upon which cavort those shadowy iPod-humpin' specters we've all come to be really bored and annoyed with.)

You walk into a wide open square room, which is bleepin' n' bloopin' n' mosta all piping an ear-rending selection of the hippest music to be conglomersumated. (I must be hip! They were playin’ Ladytron once!) In the middle of the room, an enormous set of stairs ascends to the 2nd floor. So these stairs, right, are formed of translucent glass strips, which not only makes 'em eye-poppingly spectacular, but leads to some pretty goddamn funny scenes in which various customers succumb to vertigo and go bouncin' back down toward the first floor--one chunk of glass at a time. Alla which lead me to think that the Apple Store must have liability insurance that is hewn from stone, like the 10 Commandments.

I cannot begin to list the many other peculiarities of this place. (E.g., given the innumerable display areas, the place feels a lot more like a convention center trade show than it does like a store.) For the most part, it's a tourist attraction--a place where all the outta town rubes can go to gawk at lotsa techno-fetishistic snake oil whilst the minions of latter day Barnum Steve Jobs make clear to them how cool alla it is and how they (the rubes like me) gotta have it. Like Niketown.


Another one of the Apple store’s peculiarities is the Genius Bar™. I mentioned the Geniuses themselves above. You are maybe, (very astutely, I might add,) picturing a place where everyone knows these poor souls’ names & is always glad they came, and at which they seek dipsomaniacal oblivion due to the fact that they hafta work in such a godawful place being assaulted by the understandably irate and/or deeply confused owners of various iPods, PowerBooks & C.

But no. The nominal area is shaped like a bar, down to the stools that begirdle it. The customers park themselves here, while behind the bar, one finds not yr. friendly neighborhood tavern keeper, but rather these poor Genius slobs. (Sadly underpaid, I was to discover.)

And while I did feel sorry for them, I felt even sorrier for myself—as usual. It’s a rotten system, and it served me badly: When you show up, you gotta sign in—at a handy Powerbook, of course. And then after a wait that, in my experience ranged from about 20 min. to 2 hours, depending on customer volume, the time of day, the number of Geniuses at hand, possibly, the weather or economic trends or a butterfly flappin' its wings upon the downy-haired nose of Lindsey Lohan, and certainly upon the alignment of the stars vis-vis the Great Old Ones and other affiliated dark gods n' spirits n' demons.

The Genius who services you ranges in general eptitude from dewy -eyed greenhorn to hoary (and perhaps whory, hyuk hyuk) grandam at play w/ his or her wispy beard. (Shot through w/ tendrils of yellow--like ivory, or well-worn boxer shorts. Where's my goddamn video camera and Vaseline? But then this hankerin' after withered flesh is what got me into this sitch inna 1st place, am I right???)

What’s more, your attendant Genius's attitude ranges from two-year-old-pissy to beatific saintly. And that there is just dumb luck, I think. ('Tho 1 should never downplay larger Lovecraftian or Lohaninan influences.)


I gotta give it to the Apple Store!!! I know I've been hard (haha) on 'em—and all just becuz they thoroughly busted my balls when my $2k machine melted down. But they embody ethnic diversity like Little League World Series. I met Geniuses of all races, classes, creeds and colors. (Well, I'm not sure about classes and creeds, and you can be pretty sure none of 'em were white supremacists—nor rich.) Oh yeah, of various apparent sexualities too. I saw head scarves n' dredlocks n' tattoos n' braids n' goatees n' various examples of body piercing.

One thing I did not see 'tho was anyone over the apparent age of 29, which, whilst it might keep the 60s counter cultural ideal of trusting no one over 30 alive, is a situation that also kinda qualifies all that open mindedness in hiring shit.

Cuz when I spoke of the Genius’s epitude or lack thereof, please understand that I was not speaking of their actual age. Even with the ever-widening technological gulf between youth and experience, I find it hard to believe that there is no one out there who is available and competent enuff to man (or woman) the Genius bar. Nope. I just think that a pre-op transsexual of Mayan descent who practices druidism and has a cleft palate is way more hip n' interesting than some 51 year old white gentile agnostic guy named Bert who is geek enuff to know what a kernel panic is (and therefore also geek enuff to still live over his mom's garage). That's what I think. I mean, when was the last time you saw an iPod-hawkin' silhouette that looked like, if you turned the lights on, it might've been cast by Michael McDonald?


And y'know what??? I know alla this because I prob. met every single Genius at the cockknocking Apple store on Mich. Ave. Twice!

And y'know why??? Chicken thigh! No really cuz everytime I left the store—including the first Genius-free visit I’d made when I bought the RAM, I’d go home, and insteada my computer surging forth like it had a Tiger in its tank, (haha sorry--now that's clever,) it would putter like a toy train with a bad transformer. And it would be like, slower than ever and keep crashing, and after a while, the disk wouldn't even, uh, mount.


When things are really hopeless for your Macintosh computer, a rather funerary black n' gray message (not at all like the silver and white and translucent stuff that coats its flesh) flashes on the screen which sez something along the lines of: "You must restart yr. computer. A critical something other has something somethinged, etc. HAHAHAHAHA! You paid a lotta money for this thing & now yer fuckt!!!" Or something like that. I may not have the words exactly right.

I later learned that this less than subtle panic signal was a manifestation of something called a "kernel panic." (As mentioned above.) At first I thought it was "Colonel Panic," a sinister feller, whom I paradoxically pictured as a Capt. Crunchesque cartoon figure, complete w/ handlebar mustache, knee high jackboots and Luftwaffe helmet. (My imagination being obviously circumscribed by all those Hogan's Hero's episodes I ingested as a child. And a teen. And an adult. In reality, he’d prob. look like smelly old novelist Gunther Grass dressed up in military drag.) But obviously it's spelled like one of those fragments of popcorn you eat, unless they didn't pop right. (Which is always a real pisser, isn't it?)

And maybe that's appropriate phrasing, cuz as I understand it, yr. computer's operating system is apparently exploding like Jiffy Pop in a blast furnace.



Anyway, to make a long story short again... I do not recall how many times I went to the Apple store, was relieved of my computer for a few days so that it might be inspected and theoretically repaired, only to be greeted by that asswipe Cnl. Panic. Then after many, many weeks, the sadists at top of the Apple store chain deigned to give me a new machine. And then only becuz it was determined that my old one was utterly irreparable and, fortunately, still under warranty. The good news is they gave me the new MacBook Pro, which is an update and maybe a slight upgrade of my Power Book. The bad news is that a year was shaved off my Apple Care protection thingy, endless hours were lost, work was set back and worst of all, my blog updates were put on hold!!! Oh the horror! Oh the humanity!

The last time I took it in, they assured me that I’d hear from them once they’d looked the thing over. By this time it appeared that both the RAM slots and the processor had been fucked up since Day 1 and that my machine had been performing significantly below par w/o my knowledge. (I had no idea what I was missing.) After several replacements ‘tho, the parts still didn’t work and so they decided it’d be cheaper and easier to just replace the fucking thing.


Not, BTW, that I woulda known, Apple was gonna replace my fucking computer. I hadda call the store to find that out. Since this whole thing started, I’d had to call them more than once, so I knew that a robotic operator would answer my call and tell me it was transferring me to the “next available Apple representative.”

“Apple representative.” Kinda a weird way to put things, being as I was just calling my local store, right? Ha! Well get this brilliant trick: Everytime I called, some squeaky clean youngster w/ a prim Canadian accent—sounding so cute that I just wanted to pinch their cherubic little Maple leaf cheeks. I pictured ingenuous virginal glee club members. (When the person on the other end of the phone was prob. just a hairy-moled 50-year-old American voice actor name Frieda or Gus. Which would mean that Apple actually does hire older people after all! Whatta bastard I’ve been…)

So friendly. So eager to please. No matter how enraged I was, I just never could bring myself to yell at ‘em.

And here’s the funny part: These fey little teddy bears apparently operate outta some conglomerated telemarketing hell that is decidedly not on Michigan Avenue. What’s more, they don’t even have immediate access to information about your repair. Nope. Anytime you have a specific question, they very politely ask you if you’d mind waiting on hold whilst they confer with the technician who is repairing your machine. On Michigan Avenue.

You’re never allowed to speak to this fucker. One lil’ Canuck tole me he didn’t even have the equipment necessary to connect us. He was so sincere that I didn’t even question how an enormous corporation like Apple couldn’t even supply him with the hardware needed to make a freakin’ conference call!

So you can see how it’s a great system, designed by a real genius—and I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout Val Kilmer…

And I know what you’re thinking. You would’ve cursed ‘em up n’ down like a truck driver mainlining human adrenaline. They would’ve dribbled away from the phone in a liquescent pool of flesh n’ tears. Bullshit! Email me after you’ve performed such a feat of prickishness and then we’ll talk…


Anyway, in the end they replaced my computer w/ a slightly better one, as I said. I have almost undone the damage that this meltdown caused. (I lost at least one good missing persons deal in this shit.) I have not yet had a chance to restore all my pornographic bookmarks, and so I am still aching for some creased geriatric skin here, but that anticipation will just make the eventual release that much sweeter.


To anyone reading this, I hope everything is OK where you are. I've had at least one or two pains in the ass while all this is going on that I may or may not get around to writing about. I'm sure you've had your own pains as well.

Next come the Floggers(tm) a.k.a. the Forceman Blog Awards, celebrating two years (now actually pushing 2 1/2, but who's counting?) of well, um, something or other. Memories? Mammaries? Ida know. Sorry for the delays on that one--aside from the technological issues already mentioned, I've had to count and recount the votes, because Harold Washington insists that he must've won Best Guest Star even though it looks like maintenance guy Titus won by a long shot. Whatever. As in every other such situation in life, you voted. Or you didn't. Either way we've gotta live w/ the results. And we'll see what those are next time.


See ya!


(P.S. I have not forgotten about Hawaii/Thing-Fish I even have some stuff on paper—well, in my hard drive anyway—but it’s a damn mess and prob. incomprehensible to anyone but me. But it’ll be up pretty quick here. Really.)