feather2pixels

People seem to be much more interested in my studio when I am working on t-shirts.   So maybe out of the goodness of my heart or maybe out of a pitiful need to be noticed, I printed a few tops for friends and family.

My secret weapon: H&M.  How are they able to manufacture garments in Bangladesh, ship them eight thousand miles to the West Coast of the U.S., and sell them at profit for $5.95?  Just a little thing called supply side economics you dumbass liberal apologists.  You jerks are so in love with regulation that if you had your way this rampant federal government would probably be trying to take over the delivery of everyone’s goddamned mail (and taxing me for it).

Anyway the series depicts three figures selected the from the city’s history.  I already executed a second printing, mostly because I carelessly failed to buy any large shirts the first time.

It’s a series of, I don’t know, twenty? Anyone want one? If so, I will heat set and drop in the mysterious blue container outside. It seems to seems to receive, sort, handle, and promptly deliver anything I place in it.

How much has this man aged in the last seven years?

And now it Raviv is in San Francisco. Raviv is my Israeli cousin who’s come on his first trip to the United States with a special diplomatic visa for the purposes of teaching the U.S. military how to train bomb sniffing dogs. Yeah. I’m not entirely sure what he’s been doing with himself while I’ve been at work, but at night I’ve tried to counteract three months of Marines with immersion in the full Bay Area experience in all its precious glory. So we hit The Parkway theater for sing-a-long Popeye, ate a Sushi Zone feast (complete with an epic two hour wait), and, last night with Freckles, joined a well-timed Critical Mass. At this point, he probably misses the Marines.

My roomates three want to hire a maid. A maid! Don’t they understand that I already work a semi-professional job, commute to work, and have a retirement account–any closer to the precipice of middle class hypocrisy and I’ll fall right in.

But there is dust in the corners and I’ve been the least active member of the autonomous cleaning plan. I am not in a position to make a big fuss. To be fair, though, I always clean up after myself and there’s been no formal system for anything beyond that. So we are getting maid.

On the plus side, this will double the number of Latino people I interact with in the Mission since right now it’s just the guy that rolls my burrito at El Farolito. True, this could start to get weird. Luckily, there is plenty of Noam Chomsky in the living room bookshelf. If I start feeling like the politics of my own life are a little off, it will be easy to remind myself where the real problems are situated: with those individuals not associated with the American progressive movement. Can’t do shit about that, can I?

Today at the academy I watched formation. That’s when the corps of cadets (i.e. all the students) assembles by unit in the promenade and subjects itself to inspection and random drug tests. That’s right, drug tests. This has got to be one of the only colleges in the country where the rate of drug use is higher among the faculty than the students (except perhaps Humboldt State, where it’s probably 100% across the board). But drug testing is a requirement to work on board a United States ship so nobody really has a choice in the matter.

Another strange maritime fact, this one a cold war relic of Nixonian-sounding origins, is that to this day the United States neither admits or denys that it carries nuclear warheads on any of her ships. That is to say the U.S. government will not officially deny that our training ship, which was originally commissioned as one of three special oceanographic vessels for the Navy, is not armed with nukes as it sails around the world every summer. Because of this, the country of New Zealand has declined to let our ship–or any ship affiliated with the U.S. government–call in their ports. We did stop there a few years ago, when a more sympathetic Kiwi administration was experimenting with a rollback in that policy. Then 9/11 happened and stuff.

Anyways formation is cute. There is some yelling and the kids stand at attention. If they look really bad they may get demerits.