Thursday, January 15, 2009

Shakespearian Car Assaulter Insults – or – I Know How To Make Upside Down Question Marks Because My YouTube Dream Girl Dumped Me

It's a sign¿


Yesterday, I woke up and it was snowing. I had to take my car into the shop for a 5K mile tune up. It has taken me a year and a half to rack up five thousand miles on my car; according to AAA, the national average annual mileage is 12K – 15K, it jumps to 22K for people in Los Angeles. I am riding my bike in the wintertime, I am walking to the grocery store, I am recycling everything, I am wearing a mask, I am saving the world, I am a fucking superhero.

My car doesn’t need a tune up, it needs a force field. Over the year and a half I’ve owned it, some ugly and venomous toad (As You Like It) has keyed it 360°, some other deformed, crooked, old and sere, ill faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere, vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind, stigmatical in making, worse in mind fool (The Comedy of Errors) smashed my front window, yet another heedless jolthead (The Taming of the Shrew) has booted it and towed it away, and, most recently, a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood (King Lear) disguised as a valet attendant smashed in my front bumper and caused $1302.78 worth of body damage. All these villains, they are a disease that must be cut away (Coriolanus). My car needs to learn to stand up for it’s self and fight back against this blatant aggression. I need to buy my car some Tae Bo videos.

I went for a walk because it was going to take over an hour to get my car unnecessarily tuned up, and the coffee in the waiting room was lake water boiled to a thick, brown mud. There was no creamer either. So I left and noticed just how many people despise the weather where they live. It is Chicago. Chicago might be on the same latitude as Vatican City, but we all know that it is closer to Siberia than it is to the Mediterranean in January. The blatant rudeness of the Chicago cold isn’t a detail that one could possibly forget; it gets damn cold here and everyone knows it. Leg hair frozen to your jeans cold. Frozen boogers in my beard cold. “I didn’t think that is a real temperature” cold. “Hey! Where the fuck did my balls go?” cold. It wasn’t that cold out yesterday, only 9°F, but people were huddled over themselves like there was a city-wide scoliosis epidemic. I was wearing my boots, like I do when I go outside in winter, and felt rather weather proof, so I walked to the lake.

I brought my camera because I was going to compare my current life with King Midas if he were a scatologist, but when I got my camera set up on a small lighthouse, on a jetty, surrounded by slowly colliding icebergs and more tones of gray than I’ve ever seen at one time, I didn’t say anything besides, “I like it out here.” I guess that makes more sense.



You can watch a higher quality version of all of my videos via my YouTube account, Obsquatch. There is a "watch in high quality" button at the bottom right of the video screen. If you do that, you can see the bird I was watching as it flies by.

Music - Ten-Day Interval by Tortoise, ©1998 Thrill Jockey Records

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:45 AM

    dude, i loved this video. I like it here, too. Something about the weather right now makes me feel more alive than most other times. The slap in the face of the cold air says to me, "Wake Up! Be happy! You are here today. So enjoy it, embrace it."

    God, that is a sentimental comment. Winter, come an smack me.

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  2. Anonymous1:07 PM

    Roger - great video! It makes me want to run out and enjoy the -12 weather! Then again, I do hate being cold....damn...guess I'll just stay in, drink some hot chocolate and watch your video again :-D

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  3. Bring on the cold! Bring on the snow!

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  4. Hi Obsquatch, it's like cold is a character, a villain. We can't defeat him, that's for sure. And in Chicago (where I went to school) the wind cuts through you.

    But it is beautiful. Thanks for leaving your comment in the hubbub at synchronizing.

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  5. allright buddy, loving those midwestern winters is a gas.

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