Required Reading

Patio Man and the Sprawl People
America's newest suburbs.
by David Brooks
08/12/2002, Volume 007, Issue 46

I DON'T KNOW if you've ever noticed the expression of a man who is about to buy a first-class barbecue grill. He walks into a Home Depot or Lowe's or one of the other mega hardware complexes and his eyes are glistening with a faraway visionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the promised land. His lips are parted and twitching slightly. Inside the megastore, the grills are just past the racks of affordable- house plan books, in the yard-machinery section. They are arrayed magnificently next to the vehicles that used to be known as rider mowers but are now known as lawn tractors, because to call them rider mowers doesn't really convey the steroid-enhanced M-1 tank power of the things.

The man approaches the barbecue grills and his face bears a trance-like expression, suggesting that he has cast aside all the pains and imperfections of this world and is approaching the gateway to a higher dimension. In front of him are a number of massive steel-coated reactors with names like Broilmaster P3, The Thermidor, and the Weber Genesis, because in America it seems perfectly normal to name a backyard barbecue grill after a book of the Bible.

The items in this cooking arsenal flaunt enough metal to suggest they have been hardened to survive a direct nuclear assault, and Patio Man goes from machine to machine comparing their features--the cast iron/porcelain coated cooking surfaces, the 328,000-Btu heat-generating capacities, the 1,600-degree-tolerance linings, the multiple warming racks, the lava rock containment dishes, the built-in electrical meat thermometers, and so on. Certain profound questions flow through his mind. Is a 542-square-inch grilling surface really enough, considering that he might someday get the urge to roast an uncut buffalo steak? Though the matte steel overcoat resists scratching, doesn't he want a polished steel surface on his grill so he can glance down and admire his reflection as he is performing the suburban manliness rituals, such as brushing tangy sauce on meat slabs with his right hand while clutching a beer can in an NFL foam insulator ring in his left?

Pretty soon a large salesman in an orange vest who looks like a human SUV comes up to him and says, "Howyadoin'," which is, "May I help you?" in Home Depot talk. Patio Man, who has so much lust in his heart it is all he can do to keep from climbing up on one of these machines and whooping rodeo-style with joy, manages to respond appropriately. He grunts inarticulately and nods toward the machines. Careful not to make eye contact at any point, the two manly suburban men have a brief exchange of pseudo-scientific grill argot that neither of them understands, and pretty soon Patio Man has come to the reasoned conclusion that it really does make sense to pay a little extra for a grill with V-shaped metal baffles, ceramic rods, and a side-mounted smoker box. Plus the grill he selects has four insulated drink holders. All major choices of consumer durables these days ultimately come down to which model has the most impressive cup holders.

Patio Man pays for the grill with his credit card, and is told that some minion will forklift his machine over to the loading dock around back. It is yet another triumph in a lifetime of conquest shopping, and as Patio Man heads toward the parking lot he is glad once again that he's driving that Yukon XL so that he can approach the loading dock guys as a co-equal in the manly fraternity of Those Who Haul Things.

He steps out into the parking lot and is momentarily blinded by sun bouncing off the hardtop. The parking lot is so massive that he can barely see the Wal-Mart, the Bed Bath & Beyond, or the area-code-sized Old Navy glistening through the heat there on the other side. This mall is in fact big enough to qualify for membership in the United Nations, and is so vast that shoppers have to drive from store to store, cutting diagonally through the infinity of empty parking spaces in between.



AS PATIO MAN walks past the empty handicapped and expectant-mother parking spots toward his own vehicle, wonderful grill fantasies dance in his imagination: There he is atop the uppermost tier of his multi-level backyard patio/outdoor recreation area posed like an admiral on the deck of his destroyer. In his mind's eye he can see himself coolly flipping the garlic and pepper T-bones on the front acreage of his new grill while carefully testing the citrus-tarragon trout filets that sizzle fragrantly in the rear. On the lawn below he can see his kids, Haley and Cody, frolicking on the weedless community lawn that is mowed twice weekly by the people who run Monument Crowne Preserve, his townhome community.

Haley, 12, is a Travel Team Girl, who spends her weekends playing midfield against similarly pony-tailed, strongly calved soccer marvels. Cody, 10, is a Buzz Cut Boy, whose naturally blond hair has been cut to a lawn-like stubble and dyed an almost phosphorescent white. Cody's wardrobe is entirely derivative of fashions he has seen watching the X-Games.

In his vision, Patio Man can see the kids enjoying their child-safe lawn darts with a gaggle of their cul de sac friends, a happy gathering of Haleys and Codys and Corys and Britneys. It's a brightly colored scene: Abercrombie & Fitch pink spaghetti-strap tops on the girls and ankle length canvas shorts and laceless Nikes on the boys. Patio Man notes somewhat uncomfortably that in America today the average square yardage of boys' fashion grows and grows while the square inches in the girls' outfits shrink and shrink, so that while the boys look like tent-wearing skateboarders, the girls look like preppy prostitutes.

Nonetheless, Patio Man envisions his own adult softball team buddies lounging on his immaculate deck furniture watching him with a certain moist envy in their eyes as he mans the grill. They are fit, sockless men in dock siders, chinos, and Tommy Bahama muted Hawaiian shirts. Their wives, trim Jennifer Aniston women, wear capris and sleeveless tops that look great owing to their many hours of sweat and exercise at Spa Lady. These men and women may not be Greatest Generation heroes, or earthshaking inventors like Thomas Edison, but if Thomas Edison had had a Human Resources Department, and that Human Resources Department had organized annual enrichment and motivational conferences for mid-level management, then these people would have been the marketing executives for the back office outsourcing companies to the meeting-planning firms that hooked up the HR executives with the conference facilities.

They are wonderful people. And Patio Man can envision his own wife, Cindy, a Realtor Mom, circulating amongst them serving drinks, telling parent-teacher conference stories and generally spreading conviviality while he, Patio Man, masterfully runs the grill--again, to the silent admiration of all. The sun is shining. The people are friendly. The men are no more than 25 pounds overweight, which is the socially acceptable male paunch level in upwardly mobile America, and the children are well adjusted. It is a vision of the sort of domestic bliss that Patio Man has been shooting for all his life.

And it's plausible now because two years ago Patio Man made the big move. He pulled up stakes and he moved his family to a Sprinkler City.

Sprinkler Cities are the fast-growing suburbs mostly in the South and West that are the homes of the new style American Dream, the epicenters of Patio Man fantasies. Douglas County, Colorado, which is the fastest-growing county in America and is located between Denver and Colorado Springs, is a Sprinkler City. So is Henderson, Nevada, just outside of Las Vegas. So is Loudoun County, Virginia, near Dulles Airport. So are Scottsdale and Gilbert, Arizona, and Union County, North Carolina.

The growth in these places is astronomical, as Patio Men and their families--and Patio retirees, yuppie geezers who still like to grill, swim, and water ski--flock to them from all over. Douglas County grew 13.6 percent from April 2000 to July 2001, while Loudoun County grew 12.6 percent in that 16-month period. Henderson, Nevada, has tripled in size over the past 10 years and now has over 175,000 people. Over the past 50 years, Irving, Texas, grew by 7,211 percent, from about 2,600 people to 200,000 people.

The biggest of these boom suburbs are huge. With almost 400,000 people, Mesa, Arizona, has a larger population than Minneapolis, Cincinnati, or St. Louis. And this sort of growth is expected to continue. Goodyear, Arizona, on the western edge of the Phoenix area, now has about 20,000 people, but is projected to have 320,000 in 50 years' time. By then, Greater Phoenix could have a population of over 6 million and cover over 10,000 square miles.

Sprinkler Cities are also generally the most Republican areas of the country. In some of the Sprinkler City congressional districts, Republicans have a 2 or 3 or 4 to 1 registration advantage over Democrats. As cultural centers, they represent the beau ideal of Republican selfhood, and are becoming the new base--the brains, heart, guts, and soul of the emerging Republican party. Their values are not the same as those found in either old-line suburbs like Greenwich, Connecticut, where a certain sort of Republican used to dominate, or traditional conservative bastions, such as the old South. This isn't even the more modest conservatism found in the midwestern farm belt. In fact, the rising prominence of these places heralds a new style of suburb vs. suburb politics, with the explosively growing Republican outer suburbs vying with the slower-growing and increasingly Democratic inner suburbs for control of the center of American political gravity.

If you stand on a hilltop overlooking a Sprinkler City, you see, stretched across the landscape, little brown puffs here and there where bulldozers are kicking up dirt while building new townhomes, office parks, shopping malls, AmeriSuites guest hotels, and golf courses. Everything in a Sprinkler City is new. The highways are so clean and freshly paved you can eat off them. The elementary schools have spic and span playgrounds, unscuffed walls, and immaculate mini-observatories for just-forming science classes.

The lawns in these places are perfect. It doesn't matter how arid the local landscape used to be, the developers come in and lay miles of irrigation tubing, and the sprinklers pop up each evening, making life and civilization possible.

The roads are huge. The main ones, where the office parks are, have been given names like Innovation Boulevard and Entrepreneur Avenue, and they've been built for the population levels that will exist a decade from now, so that today you can cruise down these flawless six lane thoroughfares in traffic-less nirvana, and if you get a cell phone call you can just stop in the right lane and take the call because there's no one behind you. The smaller roads in the residential neighborhoods have pretentious names--in Loudoun County I drove down Trajan's Column Terrace--but they too are just as smooth and immaculate as a blacktop bowling alley. There's no use relying on a map to get around these places, because there's no way map publishers can keep up with the construction.

The town fathers try halfheartedly to control sprawl, and as you look over the landscape you can see the results of their ambivalent zoning regulations. The homes aren't spread out with quarter-acre yards, as in the older, close-in suburbs. Instead they are clustered into pseudo-urban pods. As you scan the horizon you'll see a densely packed pod of townhouses, then a stretch of a half mile of investor grass (fields that will someday contain 35,000-square-foot Fresh-Mex restaurants but for now are being kept fallow by investors until the prices rise), and then another pod of slightly more expensive detached homes just as densely packed.

The developments in the southeastern Sprinkler Cities tend to have Mini-McMansion Gable-gable houses. That is to say, these are 3,200-square-foot middle-class homes built to look like 7,000-square-foot starter palaces for the nouveau riche. And on the front at the top, each one has a big gable, and then right in front of it, for visual relief, a little gable jutting forward so that it looks like a baby gable leaning against a mommy gable.

These homes have all the same features as the authentic McMansions of the mid-'90s (as history flows on, McMansions come to seem authentic), but significantly smaller. There are the same vaulted atriums behind the front doors that never get used, and the same open kitchen/two-story great rooms with soaring palladian windows. But in the middle-class knockoffs, the rooms are so small, especially upstairs, that a bedroom or a master-bath suite would fit inside one of the walk-in closets of a real McMansion.

In the Southwest the homes tend to be tile and stucco jobs, with tiny mousepad lawns out front, blue backyard spas in the back, and so much white furniture inside that you have to wear sunglasses indoors. As you fly over the Sprinkler Cities you begin to see the rough pattern--a little pseudo-urbanist plop of development, a blank field, a plop, a field, a plop. You also notice that the developers build the roads and sewage lines first and then fill in the houses later, so from the sky you can see cul de sacs stretching off into the distance with no houses around them.

Then, cutting through the landscape are broad commercial thoroughfares with two-tier, big-box malls on either side. In the front tier is a line of highly themed chain restaurants that all fuse into the same Macaroni Grill Olive Outback Cantina Charlie Chiang's Dave & Buster's Cheesecake Factory m lange of peppy servers, superfluous ceiling fans, free bread with olive oil, and taco salad entrees. In the 21st-century migration of peoples, the food courts come first and the huddled masses follow.

Then in the back row are all the huge, exposed-air-duct architectural behemoths, which are the big-box stores.

Shopping experiences are now segregated by mood. If you are in the mood for some titillating browsing, you can head over to a Lifestyle Center, which is one of those instant urban streetscapes that developers put up in suburbia as entertainment/retail/community complexes, complete with pedestrian zones, outdoor caf s, roller rinks, multiplexes, and high-attitude retail concepts such as CP Shades, a chain store that masquerades as a locally owned boutique.

If you are buying necessities, really shopping, there are Power Malls. These are the big-box expanses with Wal-marts, K-Marts, Targets, price clubs, and all the various Depots (Home, Office, Furniture, etc.). In Sprinkler Cities there are archipelagoes of them--one massive parking lot after another surrounded by huge boxes that often have racing stripes around the middle to break the monotony of the windowless exterior walls.

If one superstore is in one mall, then its competitor is probably in the next one in the archipelago. There's a Petsmart just down from a Petco, a Borders nearby a Barnes & Noble, a Linens 'n' Things within sight of a Bed Bath & Beyond, a Best Buy cheek by jowl with a Circuit City. In Henderson, there's a Wal-Mart superstore that spreads over 220,000 square feet, with all those happy greeters in blue vests to make you feel small-town.

There are also smaller stores jammed in between the mega-outlets like little feeder fish swimming around the big boys. On one strip, there might be the ostentatiously unpretentious Total Wine & More, selling a galaxy of casual Merlots. Nearby there might be a Michaels discount women's clothing, a bobo bazaar such as World Market that sells raffia fiber from Madagascar, Rajasthani patchwork coverlets from India, and vermouth-flavored martini onions from Israel, and finally a string of storefront mortgage bankers and realtors serving all the new arrivals. In Sprinkler Cities, there are more realtors than people.



PEOPLE MOVE TO Sprinkler Cities for the same reasons people came to America or headed out West. They want to leave behind the dirt and toxins of their former existence--the crowding and inconvenience, the precedents, and the oldness of what suddenly seems to them a settled and unpromising world. They want to move to some place that seems fresh and new and filled with possibility.

Sprinkler City immigrants are not leaving cities to head out to suburbia. They are leaving older suburbs--which have come to seem as crowded, expensive, and stratified as cities--and heading for newer suburbs, for the suburbia of suburbia.

One of the problems we have in thinking about the suburbs is that when it comes to suburbia the American imagination is motionless. Many people still have in their heads the stereotype of suburban life that the critics of suburbia established in the 1950s. They see suburbia as a sterile, dull, Ozzie and Harriet retreat from the creative dynamism of city life, and the people who live in the suburbs as either hopelessly shallow or quietly and neurotically desperate. (There is no group in America more conformist than the people who rail against suburbanites for being conformist--they always make the same critiques, decade after decade.)

The truth, of course, is that suburbia is not a retreat from gritty American life, it is American life. Already, suburbanites make up about half of the country's population (while city people make up 28 percent and rural folk make up the rest), and America gets more suburban every year.

According to the census data, the suburbs of America's 100 largest metro areas grew twice as fast as their central cities in the 1990s, and that was a decade in which many cities actually reversed their long population slides. Atlanta, for example, gained 23,000 people in the '90s, but its suburbs grew by 1.1 million people.

Moreover, newer suburbs no longer really feed off cities. In 1979, 74 percent of American office space was located in cities, according to the Brookings Institution's Robert Puentes. But now, after two decades in which the biggest job growth has been in suburban office parks, the suburbs' share of total office space has risen to 42 percent. In other words, we are fast approaching a time when the majority of all office space will be in the suburbs, and most Americans not only will not live in cities, they won't even commute to cities or have any regular contact with city life.

Encompassing such a broad swath of national existence, suburbs obviously cannot possibly be the white-bread places of myth and literature. In reality, as the most recent census shows, suburbs contain more non-family houses--young singles and elderly couples--than family households, married couples with children. Nor are they overwhelmingly white. The majority of Asian Americans, half of Hispanics, and 40 percent of American blacks live in suburbia.

And so now there are crucial fault lines not just between city and suburb but between one kind of suburb and another. Say you grew up in some southern California suburb in the 1970s. You graduated from the University of Oregon and now you are a systems analyst with a spouse and two young kids. You're making $65,000 a year, far more than you ever thought you would, but back in Orange County you find you can't afford to live anywhere near your Newport Beach company headquarters. So your commute is 55 minutes each way. Then there's your house itself. You paid $356,000 for a 1962 four-bedroom split level with a drab kitchen, low ceilings, and walls that are chipped and peeling. Your mortgage--that $1,800 a month--is like a tapeworm that devours the family budget.

And then you visit a Sprinkler City in Arizona or Nevada or Colorado--far from the coast and deep into exurbia--and what do you see? Bounteous roads! Free traffic lanes! If you lived here you'd be in commuter bliss--15 minutes from home on Trajan's Column Terrace to the office park on Innovation Boulevard! If you lived here you'd have an extra hour and a half each day for yourself.

And those real estate prices! In, say, Henderson, Nevada, you wouldn't have to spend over $400,000 for a home and carry that murderous mortgage. You could get a home that's brand new, twice the size of your old one, with an attached garage (no flimsy carport), and three times as beautiful for $299,000. The average price of a single-family home in Loudoun County, one of the pricier of the Sprinkler Cities, was $166,824 in 2001, which was an 11 percent increase over the year before. Imagine that! A mortgage under 200 grand! A great anvil would be lifted from your shoulders. More free money for you to spend on yourself. More free time to enjoy. More Freedom!

Plus, if you moved to a Sprinkler City there would be liberation of a subtler kind. The old suburbs have become socially urbanized. They've become stratified. Two sorts of people have begun to move in and ruin the middle-class equality of the development you grew up in: the rich and the poor.

There are, first, the poor immigrants, from Mexico, Vietnam, and the Philippines. They come in, a dozen to a house, and they introduce an element of unpredictability to what was a comforting milieu. They shout. They're less tidy. Their teenage boys seem to get involved with gangs and cars. Suddenly you feel you will lose control of your children. You begin to feel a new level of anxiety in the neighborhood. It is exactly the level of anxiety--sometimes intermingled with racism--your parents felt when they moved from their old neighborhood to the suburbs in the first place.

And then there are the rich. Suddenly many of the old ramblers are being knocked down by lawyers who proceed to erect 4,000-square-foot arts and crafts bungalows with two-car garages for their Volvos. Suddenly cars in the neighborhoods have window and bumper stickers that never used to be there in the past: "Yale," "The Friends School," "Million Mom March." The local stores are changing too. Gone are the hardware stores and barber shops. Now there are Afghan restaurants, Marin County bistros, and environmentally sensitive and extremely expensive bakeries.

And these new people, while successful and upstanding, are also . . . snobs. They're doctors and lawyers and journalists and media consultants. They went to fancy colleges and they consider themselves superior to you if you sell home-security systems or if you are a mechanical engineer, and in subtle yet patronizing ways they let you knowit.

I recently interviewed a woman in Loudoun County who said she had grown up and lived most of her life in Bethesda, Maryland, which is an upscale suburb close to Washington. When I asked why she left Bethesda, she hissed "I hate it there now" with a fervor that took me by surprise. And as we spoke, it became clear that it was precisely the "improvements" she hated: the new movie theater that shows only foreign films, the explosion of French, Turkish, and new wave restaurants, the streets choked with German cars and Lexus SUVs, the doctors and lawyers and journalists with their educated-class one-upmanship.

These new people may live in the old suburbs but they hate suburbanites. They hate sprawl, big-box stores, automobile culture. The words they use about suburbanites are: synthetic, bland, sterile, self-absorbed, disengaged. They look down on people who like suburbs. They don't like their lawn statuary, their Hallmark greeting cards, their Ethan Allen furniture, their megachurches, the seasonal banners the old residents hang out in front of their houses, their untroubled attitude toward McDonald's and Dairy Queen, their Thomas Kinkade fantasy paintings. And all the original suburbanites who were peacefully enjoying their suburb until the anti-suburban suburbanites moved in notice the condescension, and they do what Americans have always done when faced with disapproval, anxiety, and potential conflict. They move away. The pincer movements get them: the rich and the poor, the commutes and the mortgages, the prices and the alienation. And pretty soon it's Henderson, Nevada, here we come.

Patio Man and the Sprawl People, Part 2
by David Brooks
08/03/2002 12:00:00 AM

GEORGE SANTAYANA once observed that Americans don't solve problems, they just leave them behind. They take advantage of all that space and move. If there's an idea they don't like, they don't bother refuting it, they just go somewhere else, and if they can't go somewhere else, they just leave it in the past, where it dies from inattention.

And so Patio Man is not inclined to stay and defend himself against the condescending French-film goers and their Volvos. He's not going to mount a political campaign to fix the educational, economic, and social woes that beset him in his old neighborhood. He won't waste his time fighting a culture war. It's not worth the trouble. He just bolts. He heads for the exurbs and the desert. He goes to the new place where the future is still open and promising. He goes to fresh ground where his dreams might more plausibly come true.

The power of this urge to leave and create new places is really awesome to behold. Migration is not an easy thing, yet every year 43 million Americans get up and move. And it sets off a chain reaction. The migrants who move into one area push out another set of people, who then migrate to another and push out another set of people, and so on and so on in one vast cycle of creative destruction. Ten years ago these Sprinkler Cities didn't really exist. Fifteen years ago the institutions that dot them hadn't been invented. There weren't book superstores or sporting goods superstores or Petsmart or Petco, and Target was just something you shot arrows at. And yet suddenly metropolises with all these new stores and institutions have materialized out of emptiness. It's as if some Zeus-like figure had appeared out of the ether and slammed down a million-square-foot mall on the desert floor, then a second later he'd slammed down a 5,000-person townhome community, then a second later an ice rink and a rec center and soccer fields and schools and community colleges. How many times in human history have 200,000-person cities just materialized almost instantaneously out of nowhere?

The people who used to live in these empty places don't like it; they've had to move further out in search of valleys still pristine. But the sprawl people just love it. They talk to you like born-again evangelists, as if their life had undergone some magical transformation when they made the big move. They talk as if they'd thrown off some set of horrendous weights, banished some class of unpleasant experiences, and magically floated up into the realm of good climate, fine people, job opportunities, and transcendent convenience. In 2001, Loudoun County did a survey of its residents. Ninety-eight percent felt safe in their neighborhoods. Ninety-three percent rated their county's quality of life excellent or good. Only a third of the county's residents, by the way, have lived there for more than 10 years.

These people are so happy because they have achieved something that human beings are actually quite good at achieving. Through all the complex diversity of society, they have managed to find people who want pretty much the same things they want.

This is not to say they want white Ozzie and Harriet nirvana. The past 40 years happened. It never occurs to them to go back before rock, rap, women working, and massive immigration. They don't mind any of these things, so long as they complement the core Sprinkler City missions of orderly living, high achievement, and the bright seeking of a better future.

Recently three teams from the Seneca Ridge Middle School in Loudoun County competed in the National Social Studies Olympiad. The fifth grade team finished fifth out of 242 teams, while the eighth grade team finished twenty-third out of 210. Here are some of the names of the students competing for Loudoun: Amy Kuo, Arshad Ali, Samanth Chao, Katie Hempenius, Ronnel Espino, Obinna Onwuka, Earnst Ilang-Ilang, Ashley Shiraishi, and Alberto Pareja-Lecaros. At the local high school, 99 percent of seniors graduate and 87 percent go on to higher education.

When you get right down to it, Sprinkler Cities are united around five main goals:

--THE GOAL OF THE TOGETHER LIFE. When you've got your life together, you have mastered the complexities of the modern world so thoroughly that you can glide through your days without unpleasant distractions or tawdry failures. Instead, your hours are filled with self-affirming reminders of the control you have achieved over the elements. Your lawn is immaculate. Your DVD library is organized, and so is your walk-in closet. Your car is clean and vacuumed, your frequently dialed numbers are programmed into your cell phone, your telephone plan is suited to your needs, and your various gizmos interface without conflict. Your wife is effortlessly slender, your kids are unnaturally bright, your job is rewarding, your promotions are inevitable, and you look great in casual slacks.

You can thus spend your days in perfect equanimity, the Sprinkler City ideal. You radiate confidence, like a professional golfer striding up the 18th fairway after a particularly masterful round. Compared with you, Dick Cheney looks like a disorganized hothead. George W. Bush looks like a self-lacerating neurotic. Professionally, socially, parentally, you have your life together. You may not be the most intellectual or philosophical person on the planet, but you are honest and straightforward. You may not be flamboyant, but you are friendly, good-hearted, and considerate. You have achieved the level of calm mastery of life that is the personality equivalent of the clean and fresh suburban landscape.

--THE GOAL OF TECHNOLOGICAL HEROISM. They may not be stereotypical rebels, and nobody would call them avant-garde, but in one respect many Sprinkler City dwellers have the souls of revolutionaries. When Patio Man gets out of his Yukon, lowers his employee-badge necklace around his neck, and walks into his generic office building, he becomes a technological radical. He spends his long workdays striving to create some technological innovation, management solution, or organizing system breakthroughs that will alter the world. Maybe the company he works for has one of those indecipherable three-initial names, like DRG Technologies or SER Solutions, or maybe it's got one of those jammed together compound names that were all the rage in the 1990s until WorldCom and MicroStrategy went belly up.

Either way, Patio Man is working on, or longs to be working on, a project that is new and revolutionary. And all around him there are men and women who are actually achieving that goal, who are making that leap into the future. The biotech revolution is being conducted in bland suburban office parks by seemingly unremarkable polo-shirt-and-chino people at firms like Celera and Human Genome Sciences. Silicon Valley is just one long string of suburban office parks jutting out from San Jose. AOL is headquartered in Loudoun County. You walk down a path in a Sprinkler City corporate center and it leads you to a company frantically chasing some market-niche innovation in robotics, agricultural engineering, microtechnology, or hardware and software applications.

There are retail-concept revolutionaries, delivery-system radicals, market-research innovators, data-collection pioneers, computer-game Rembrandts, and weapons-systems analysts. They look like bland members of some interchangeable research team, but many of them are deeply engrossed in what they consider a visionary project, which if completed will help hurtle us all further into the Knowledge Revolution, the Information Millennium, the Age of MicroTechnology, the Biotech Century, or whatever transplendent future it is you want to imagine. They have broken the monopoly that cities used to have, and they have made themselves the new centers of creativity.

--THE GOAL OF RELAXED CAMARADERIE. The critics of suburbia believe that single-family homeowners with their trimmed yards and matching pansies are trying to keep up with the Joneses. But like most of what the critics assert, that's completely wrong. Sprinkler City people are competitive in the marketplace and on the sports field, but they detest social competition. That's part of why these people left inner-ring suburbs in the first place.

They are not emulating the rich; they are happy to blend in with each other. One of the comforts of these places is that almost nobody is far above you socially and almost nobody is far below. You're all just swimming in a pond of understated success.

So manners are almost aggressively relaxed. Everybody strives overtime to not put on airs or create friction. In style, demeanor, and mood, people reveal the language and values they have in common. They are good team members and demonstrate from the first meeting that they are team-able. You could go your entire life, from home to church to work to school, wearing nothing but Lands' End--comfortable, conservative, non-threatening activewear for people with a special fondness for navy blue. The dominant conversational tone is upbeat and friendly, like banter between Katie Couric and Matt Lauer on the "Today" show. The prevailing style of humor is ironic but not biting and owes a lot to ESPN's "SportsCenter."

--THE GOAL OF THE ACTIVE-LEISURE LIFESTYLE. Your self-esteem is based on your success at work, but since half the time it's hard to explain to people what the hell it is you do, your public identity is defined by your leisure activities. You are the soccer family, engrossed by the politics and melodrama of your local league, or you are the T-ball coach and spend your barbecue conversations comparing notes on new $200 titanium bat designs (there's a new bat called The Power Elite--even C. Wright Mills has been domesticated for the Little League set). You are Scuba Woman and you converse about various cruises you have taken. You are Mountain Bike Man and you make vague references to your high altitude injuries and spills. Or you are a golfer, in which case nobody even thinks of engaging you in conversation on any topic other than golf.

Religion is too hot a subject and politics is irrelevant, so if you are not discussing transportation issues--how to get from here to there, whether the new highway exit is good or bad--you are probably talking about sports. You're talking about your kids' ice hockey leagues, NBA salary levels, or the competition in your over-70 softball league--the one in which everybody wears a knee brace and it takes about six minutes for a good hitter to beat out a double. Sports sets the emotional climate of your life. Sports provides the language of easy camaraderie, self-deprecating humor, and (mostly) controlled competition.

--THE GOAL OF THE TRADITIONAL, BUT COMPETITIVE, CHILDHOOD. Most everything in Sprinkler Cities is new, but much of the newness is in the service of tradition. The families that move here are trying to give their children as clean and upright and traditional a childhood as they can imagine. They're trying to move away from parents who smoke and slap their kids, away from families where people watch daytime TV shows about transvestite betrayals and "My Daughter is a Slut" confessions, away from broken homes and, most of all, away from the company of children who are not being raised to achieve and succeed.

They are trying to move instead to a realm of clean neighborhoods, safe streets, competitive cheerleading, spirit squads, soccer tots academies, accelerated-reader programs, and adult-chaperoned drug-free/alcohol-free graduation celebrations.

For the fifth consecutive year, the Henderson, Nevada, high school Marine Corps Junior ROTC squad has won the National Male Armed Drill Team championship. The Female Unarmed Drill Team has come in first six out of the past eight years. In Loudoun County the local newspaper runs notices for various travel team tryouts. In one recent edition, I counted 55 teams announcing their tryouts, with names like The Loudoun Cyclones, the Herndon Surge, the Loudoun Volcanoes. (It's not socially acceptable to name your team after a group of people anymore, so most of the teams have nature names.) As you drive around a Sprinkler City you see SUVs everywhere with cheers scrawled in washable marker on the back windows: "Go Heat!" "#24 Kelly Jones!" "Regional Champs!"

The kids spend their days being chaperoned from one adult-supervised activity to another, and from one achievement activity to the next. They are well tested, well trophied, and well appreciated. They are not only carefully reared and nurtured, they are launched into a life of high expectations and presumed accomplishment.



THE DOMINANT IDEOLOGY OF Sprinkler Cities is a sort of utopian conservatism. On the one hand, the people who live here have made a startling leap into the unknown. They have, in great numbers and with great speed, moved from their old homes in California, Florida, Illinois, and elsewhere, to these brand new places that didn't really exist 10 years ago. These places have no pasts, no precedents, no settled institutions, very few longstanding groups you can join and settle into.

Their inhabitants have moved to towns where they have no family connections, no ethnic enclaves, and no friends. They are using their imaginations to draw pictures for themselves of what their lives will be like. They are imagining their golf club buddies even though the course they are moving near is only just being carved out of the desert. They are imagining their successful children's graduation from high school, even though the ground around the new school building is still rutted with the tracks of construction equipment. They are imagining outings with friends at restaurants that are now only investor grass, waiting to be built.

And when they do join groups, often the groups turn out to be still in the process of building themselves. The migrants join congregations that meet in school basements while raising the money to construct churches. They go to office parks at biotech companies that are still waiting to put a product on the market. They may vote, or episodically pay attention to national politics, but they don't get drawn into strong local party organizations because the local organizations haven't been built.

But the odd thing is that all this imaginative daring, these leaps into the future, are all in the service of an extremely conservative ideal. You get the impression that these people have fled their crowded and stratified old suburbs because they really want to live in Mayberry. They have this image of what home should be, a historical myth or memory, and they are going to build it, even if it means constructing an old fashioned place out of modern materials.

It's going to be morally upstanding. It's going to be relaxed and neighborly. It's going to be neat and orderly. Sprinkler City people seem to have almost a moral revulsion at disorder or anything that threatens to bring chaos, including out-of-control immigration and terrorist attacks. They don't think about the war on terror much, let alone some alleged invasion of Iraq, but if it could be shown that Saddam Hussein presented a threat to the good order of the American homeland, then these people would support his ouster with a fervor that would take your breath away. "They have strong emotions when dealing with security," says Tom Tancredo, a congressman from suburban Denver. "Border security, the security of their families, the security of their neighborhoods."

Of course, from the moment they move in, they begin soiling their own nest. They move in order to get away from crowding, but as they and the tens of thousands like them move in, they bring crowding with them. They move to get away from stratification, snobbery, and inequality, but as the new towns grow they get more stratified. In Henderson, the $200,000 ranch homes are now being supplemented by gated $500,000-a-home golf communities. People move for stability and old fashioned values, but they are unwilling to accept limits to opportunity. They are achievement oriented. They are inherently dynamic.

For a time they do a dance about preserving the places they are changing by their presence. As soon as people move into a Sprinkler City, they start lobbying to control further growth. As Tancredo says, they have absolutely no shame about it. They want more roads built, but fewer houses. They want to freeze the peaceful hominess of the town that was growing when they moved there five minutes before.

But soon, one senses, they will get the urge to move again. The Hendersons and the Douglas Counties will be tomorrow what the Newport Beaches and the Los Altoses and the White Plainses are today, places where Patio Man no longer feels quite at home. And the suburban middle-class folks in these places will again strike out as the avant-garde toward new places, with new sorts of stores and a new vision of the innocent hometown.

So the dynamism and volatility will continue--always moving aggressively toward a daring future that looks like an imagined picture of the wholesome past, striving and charging toward that dream of the peaceful patio, the happy kids, the slender friends, and, towering over it all, the massive barbecue grill.


David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

some bits

I swear i'm working on my 2008 recap and it will be both witty and insightful. I just seem to have found myself on the demand side of free time. In the mean time, read up on what's important.



New years was spent in Vermont, which was great until this guy showed up:





This amuses me and i don't even feel bad about it,





Finally, a rebuttal to any reference to the movie "The Sweetest Thing:"

time

I feel like time was jerking me around in 2008 since I seemed to pass randomly from extreme excesses to severe shortages. A productive hobby, i decided, is the key to managing the nights when there simply ain't shit to do. I have chosen "Modern implementations of 1940's Russian Vacuum display technology." (don't google it kids, i just made that shit up). Enter, the Nixie Tube.

Though appropriate to the inconsistencies in free time, i didn't realize until now how fitting it was to build a clock.


I've been rolling the idea around in my head for about 12 months: It should be wooden to look "classic" with a dark, well-varnished finish. The more imperfect, the better. The tubes would be IN-12s (because that's what i had easy access to). 4 digit instead of 6, because it's more symmetrical and less linear. The colon would be assembled from independent fluorescent lamps because they would glow randomly with a warm flicker that an LED cannot reproduce. And finally, though it could be built with all the miniaturization 2009 has to offer, the body would have mass and space to give it substance. In my mind's eye, i could already see it perfectly: a wooden box with a recessed section. The darkness would shield the tubes and the glowing numbers would seem almost to float.




(Above) Step one is to prototype. My deepest regret is buying a ready-made clock driver chip. I would have preferred to write the code myself, but i was anxious to get one of these bastards put together and with the first burning somewhere between 40 and 60hrs of build time, i had to take a short cut here.




(Above) Luckily, whilst cruising the craft store for supplies and lonely old cat women, i happened upon a small, wooden, three-drawer dresser-esq design of about 10 inches high. Three sections... PERFECT! I grabbed two. Here we see one of the drawer faces being converted to a nixie socket face.




(Above) The wood is stained but not varnished. Lack of supplies (board-edge connectors, terminals, etc) during the prototype version dictates that all wires are soldered. Furthermore, lack of clairvoyance on my part required soldering the sockets to the decoder board whilst IN the case. This proved painful. High (180VDC) and low (5VDC) power supplies, sockets and decoder boards are in place. CPU, control switch panel, Blue LED back lights and a butt-load of wires are not.




(Above) Assembled and ready to rock. Back panel, made of matching finished wood, removed (note magnets in corners for retaining cover). Blue LED back lights visible in the nixie sockets. (not sure what i'm going to do if the tubes need to be removed). Burn-in was a solid week of observed operation, hopefully meaning that it won't bust into flames later.




(Above) Back lighting turned off, finalizing the finish. Picture taken at a moment in between colon flashes. Full functionality enabled.





Now that the first example is complete, I think it shall make a fine gift for some spectacular stranger. And now that i have a hobby to fill down time, i'll start working on the phenomenon of never having enough time to do the stuff i want to do. Perhaps a time stop-u-lator of sorts. I'll see what the Russians were working on in vacuum tube form cir. 1950...

Loggins is my wing man

it's Xmas time and that can mean only one thing: Christmas songs.

But i know what you're Saying... You're asking how the fuck am i gonna combine my love for smooth 80's jams while simultaneously embrace the season? With just three simple letters my mostly honky friends:

Kenny. Fucking. Loggins.




Loggins and I are keepin' it smooth this Xmas. Then later we might get all fucked up on tequila-nog and cruise for some Mrs. Clauses, ain't that right, Loggins? Those chicks LOVE the beard.


{high fives Loggins}

See, Loggins here knows that this time of year a bearded mutherfucker like him can get some MAD action. C'mon Loggins, let's go hit the food court and mess with the Cinnabun girls...











(**this post inspired by an awkward combination of Clerks 2 and a secret desire for Kenny Loggins to be my Silent Bob)

on running (in the snow)

If i could say just one thing about running 4 miles through a freshly fallen 10 inches of snow, it would be "don't."

Of course i wouldn't listen to me either. So i sauntered into my boots and sweats (yes, for the first time in years, i forwent the token B-ball shorts. Me. The person who NEVER runs in full length pants, no matter the temperature, had to sport the sweats.)

Mile one, westward, was fine. Fun even. I felt like Rocky in Rocky IV. I was probably moving a pace too fast to sustain, but then again i don't get a lot of opportunities to snow-train.




Mile two, southward, times are getting tough. The hills of this route seem to be of no consequence, be them up or down, when you're trudging through this madness. There's definitely 10 inches of snow on the ground but the wind has distributed it such that 25% of the surface is closer to 4 inches deep while another 25% is closer to 18 inches.

Mile three, eastward, and the cold, hard reality sets in: I will die out here. Okay, probably not, but i finally break down and walk sections of this mile. And by "walk" i mean continue my tedious high-step, forward-stumble, but at a slower cadence. It's become important that i stay in the fresh stuff because the few areas that have been disturbed by people have more a packed substance that only has interest in snapping my ankles. Also, mile three has more side streets, meaning more 4ft-tall plow-derived mounds of snow at each intersection. I don't remember most of this mile.

Mile four, northward, turning into the wind. At this point i'm requesting assistance from which ever one of your gods happens to be in the office this afternoon. In return he/she grants me a second and final wind. Every kick into the snow creates a plume of flakes that the wind puts back in my face. Mile four is on a busy, semi-major road, meaning LOTs of driveways and LOTs of snow banks to be climbed. When i AM running i'm pumping my arms so hard and far that it's approaching cartoonish, in a failing attempt to supplement my oh so weary calves, which don't seem to have the will left to keep me bounding out of these drifts. Passing cars appear to be slowing down, either to offer assistance or make a grab for my wallet when i go down... hard to say which but i try to stay moving to detour both.

At some point i round the end of mile four and sprint the short distance back to the cave. I celebrate the success my throwing myself into snow and seriously consider staying there for the night.


I am hurt from running like i haven't been hurt (from running) in a long time. I can't wait for the next time.

Snowed in

It seems the snow-pocalypse is upon us. I shall use this time off work combined with the inability to leave my cave as an opportunity to drop knowledge:

It seems the Sophist will continue to make batteries next year. Although bush is still a dick, he does seem to have settled down in the last few months of his reign. I've seen this exact same thing in a-hole co-workers that are getting ready to leave for a new job. Interesting.

Regardless, things are still looking dicey. Anyone else notice that Chrysler shut down all production with no solid timing for coming back on line?


hmmph


In other news: Scientists read your brain's images. Scientists: Stay away if you know what's good for you


Which leads us to...


Angry three-way sex you never knew you wanted to have:




It's almost time to compile my 2008 year in review. This one's been a little dicier than years past. (Much was learned; many miles accumulated.) Let me see if i can summarize...

Hot tubs, motorcycles and tattoos: Good
Theoretical money, the PO-lice and human emotions: Bad


I'll now spend the day working on my projects. I can't reveal the nature of the work yet, but it involves high voltage and 1940's Russian technology.



(fuck it's snowy out there... might be time for a run)

haikus

--as inspired by Hank Williams songs--




Fetch me the bar keep
Tell him two shots of happy
Two more of sad

Good times and music
Open eyes for a women
Who i never had

My friends too rowdy,
Saturday night drink too hard.
I was born too boogie.


Thank you, Hank, that'll be all.

Still Strugglin'

Today i had drinks with four people whose common career, though technical in nature, could not be any farther than my own; They might as well have been rocket scientist. New to the group and content to drink my beer, i listened as they lamented over the latest work strife. It would seem the biggest grief lay in the lack of attendance at this year's Christmas party, which the leader of the conversation would chalk up to the social problems of the time.

To be fair, it's not those people's fault that their very existance made me want to flip the table. How could they know that i justed watched a union slow-down exeucted in the midst of economic face-punch? (How can you file grievences against a company that doesn't exist, you short-sited fucks!)

Instead i thought back on the six years since college. I thought about the year of unemployment the four of us shared after returning to our parent's spare bedrooms and the resulting ability to recite the drink specials for every night at every bar within a 10 mile radius. I remembered the 72 hour weeks at the factory in Warren and the 20 hour weeks at the golf course in Taylor. ("really? an electrical engineering degree? what are you doing working at a golf course?") And i thought about how happy i was when i finally dug my to this job.

But mostly, while drinking my beer, i thought about the lay-offs; How many coworkers has it been? Could i remember all their names? (no) Not all of their faces were as vivid as Joe's, who, after all had a family. It wouldn't have been so bad if the boss hadn't TOLD me he layed off Joe so i could stay. I mean, three rounds of lay-offs this year/job alone... they start to all blurr together.

From Ohio... I thought about Chicago



Fuck it. Here's to Detroit; my unemployed and underemplyed co-horts. Teachers and engineers, public relationists and electricians:



Here's to a LOT of Labatt Blue after another day at a shitty job:



Here. Is to the struggle:

--A. Sophist


(Update: if you're not drunk yet, read this. It is perfect.)

"i see a tit tat on the gold digger"

Step one: Read this article (tip of the hat to hollysaurus)

let it *really* sink in there.

ah yes.

It's hard pin point my favorite part of this article on lottery winning... is it the "tit tat" reader comment after the article or actualy seeing the tattoo-adorned boob? Is it the way god filled the multi-million-dollar shaped hole in his soul?

Or maybe it's the way he still spends those 10 dollars a day on the lottery that makes me want to laugh/cry.

He is an inspriation to us all!

Note to self:
1) win lottery (one time equivalent to $82k/yr for 60 yrs)
2) (does more math) Marry 16.1 yr old single mother
3) profit

good times/bad times

i'm a little excited that next year could see interesting approaches to problem solving.

of course things in the middle are getting pretty tight.

JS

ftw

"Once you leave the edge, you're happy"

"...the stress comes while you're waiting, before you go. Once you start to act, it all happens by itself."



(If embedded video is missing, go here)

Can you imagine feeling more alive?


************


Unrelated news: I recommend the Trick Trick Album.

illin'

i will defeat the sickness with my robot choke slam

in the mean time, here are some clips of the animation, circa 2004, Ann Arbor.

ABIDE!

ABIDE!

Okay look

Three things you need to realize about this video:

1) this guy is a genius
2) this is what the internal dialog voice in my head sounds like
3) the audio is NOT safe for the typical work environment



(want more and more?)

I'm back

back in the high five state and i see the rioting hasn't started yet.

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

who can save us?

The air around Detroit is tasting sour and i can feel it 300 miles from the south.

6.5 JOBS FOR EVERY OEM EMPLOYEE. How many OEM employees? My random guess is about 200k between design and manufacturing.

GM fail.
GM fail.
Ford fail.
Chrysler fail.

Epic. Fail.



..if only there was a savior. A great (not white) hope...

roll the dice

In field report

From Ohio:

Readership numbers are way up over the last two months so i figure i better get the content flowing. Gotta keep up those numbers! Anyway, if Ohio is the fulcrum of this whole political shooting match, why not hang out here for a couple weeks and see if i can't assert my own brand of justice on the system. And by that, i mean ensuring as many people as possible are too drunk or sexually confused to make a rational decision at that key moment.

no, but seriously, i'm a slave to corporate america.

the result: I didn't even have a chance to provide my own insights into my weekend in Mad-town, WI.

Yes, pins were offed, Z'eds were thwarted and philosophy philosohized... But there was also me waking up on a stranger's (well, okay, friend of friend's) couch for the second weekend in a row, dozens of hours driving the mid-west highways, my new fascination with folk music and Target Women!



(love it? taste the pain!)

Later Chesto and I flexed it madcore. It looked like this



Then the zombies came and it looked like this



Then we were all like this



They say life is strange, but compared to what?

As true now...

"...millions of our fellow Americans are out of work... millions more work harder for lower pay. The incumbent President Bush says unemployment always goes up a little before a recovery begins, but unemployment only has to go up by one more person before a real recovery can begin. And Mr. President, you are that man."
-Clinton '92

October Highway Men

moments ago in my bed...

11:45Am, Monday. I wake up, having called off work just a few hours ago. Finally, i feel like i actually slept. Let's start at the beginning:

------------------

11:00pm Friday: After leaving the bar, i go home, pack a sack, hit Meijer for some last minute cold weather gear and head to Jay-Fry's. We exchange mental high-fives and depart for the Detroit/Canada tunnel. Temperature: 50 degrees F.

11:45pm Friday: Fuck all this noise: Apparently motorcycles are forbid in the tunnel and because Detroit is a big face-punch full of highway closures and construction, no one (including the tunnel guy) knows exactly how to get to the bridge. We head south along the river knowing "it's down there somewhere."

2:30Am Saturday: London, Ontario. We're in a road-side trucker dinner and gas station. We are not, what you would call "comfortable" with the temperature. I'm using the exhaust headers to warm my legs and hands. A side effect is the smell of burning cow (gloves) coming from my bike every time i stop. Jay-Fry is burdened with protective and aerodynamic cowls that keep icy hands away from warm engine parts. He is left with the slightly less dignified option of urinating on his gloved hands.

At the dinner we drink hot chocolate, hot tea, hot coffee and think about warm places. Jay-Fry shares a moment outside with the waitress while they smoke some cigs. I suspect she's ready to warm him up the old fashioned way, but he seems oblivious to this. Plus, we're on a mission.

Note: I have no idea what the temperature is because the locals use an unbreakable cryptology to encode their temperature units. In an attempt to crow-bar the code, i make the general association that 5C = 5 layers of torso coverings.


View Larger Map

4:30Am Saturday: Hamilton, Ontario. We can go no further: the weather has won. We pull off on the first exit outside town that features a hotel. The simple physical reward of NOT travel 90mph against a frozen atmosphere is now more gratifying as any drug, woman or feeling i can imagine. Possessing all that we carry, we park the bikes on the room's porch.

I take a moment to grab a photo after parking the bikes:


5:00Am Saturday: Room temp set to 75 (why is it back to F here?) I crawl into bed. We briefly discuss the fact that we could have just as easily driven south been warmer... This notion is so profound that i refuse to incorporate it as truth and instead use the I-pod to drown the buzz of the engine in my head. I sleep.

11:00Am Saturday: Up by 9, showered, eaten, packed and ready to rock. Unfortunately the W is low on oil (half a quart after 4k miles? not bad...)



2:00Pm Saturday: Niagara, Ontario. The sun it out and we are happy. We drive by the falls, stop, and have a serious conversation about jumping the gap as a sure-fire way to avoid customs and lines. Niagara proves difficult to navigate when you're looking for a) the entrance to a USA-bound bridge or b) a gas station. We give up on b and focus on a, which will later prove problematic. I decide to stick to the now-proven portrait equation of holding the camera myself while Jay-Fry wanders oblivious in the background.









4:00Pm Saturday: Grand Island, NY. Fuck this island. I have traveled 40 miles since switching to the reserve tank and as far as we can tell there are no gas stations in New York. The toll taker gives us errant directions to one location and we extrapolate the location of a second. The first is never found and the second is closed. Things are desperate; we find ANOTHER closed (as in, out of business) gas station. (For some reason forget about having google maps on our phones as this point, probably because it would just point us to another empty building anyway) We rely on "ground intel" (read: local slack-jaws) to point us to a functioning pump, but even they seems little unsure of their directions. Eventually we find food and gas. I take the opportunity to get site-seeing recommendations from my NY people.


6:00Pm, Saturday: Rochester, NY. We have just arrived at the house of a woman neither of us knows. Surprisingly there was no welcoming committee awaiting our arrival in Rochester, probably because i forgot to call a head. We rode around downtown looking for a hotel and signs of life, but downtown proper was dead. And ghetto-y. We resorted to the "friends of friends" technique to ultimately hook up with the sister of Jay-fry's brother's ex-girlfriend. (yeah, awesome, i know) The photographer (as she is one) amazingly agreed to show us around town tonight, for she is hip to the hang outs.



View Larger Map

8:00Pm Saturday: Rochester, NY, "The South Wedge District." After food and beers at the first bar, we're sitting in a coffee shop that also sells the liquor. The shop features works of local artists, one of which i recognize as this guy's work. is that him...? in the corner? I'm having an Irish coffee with a Redbull chaser. The caffeine and alcohol are slugging it out in my system. As it is early, we discuss the possibility of a pre-party nap, as most of the bars won't be in effect for another couple hours. This idea is quickly dismissed as "tasting like quitter."

note: this is where things get fuzzy. We'll file it under the hours between 9pm and 3-ish am. There is no possible way i can logically retell the events in a linear and coherent manner; not because i don't remember any of it, just because science does not allow it. But i can tell you this: It involved Whiskey. (it's an ideas drink, after all) It also involved folk music, 80's punk and Christian Ska. There was a banjo demonstration that led to several hours of banjo jokes. (if you don't know, the banjo features a "G-string" and is also a slang word for girl parts). There was an attempt to recall the name Cat Stevens adopted when he converted religions, more booze, more jokes, a dissertation on why Neil Diamond is the world's greatest singer song writer, making fun of social networking sites, complaints about the opposite sex and at some point everything just reset back to zero. I sleep.

At some point in the night, Rochester claims ownership of this button:



8:00Am Sunday: I wake up on a stranger's couch in a strange city. There are house guests. The world is foggy and i'm cold AGAIN. I relocate somewhere more peaceful.

10:00Am Sunday: I wake again. (There's a cat here. Hello cat.) I remember the mission and try to throw myself into at day but my body resists. I muster a shower but decline the delicious smelling breakfast the photographer has cooked for us and her roommates. (Her hospitality seems to know no bounds) Some friends are at the house and they're discussing possible routes we should take home to maximize the nature exposure. I make my way to the front porch where things always make sense:



From the porch i see this and old OAR songs start to play in my head:



At that sight the fog lifts and mission becomes clear again: we ride. It's decided that we B-line for home. Jay-fry needs to be at work Monday and given the near state of hypothermia we find ourselves when arriving at a destination, it is better perhaps if we stay away from the lakes and seclusion... for this trip.

11:45Am Sunday: Rochester, NY. We re-tell the adventures of the night and say our goodbyes. For reasons i cannot fully understand it feels AMAZING to be back on the bike; the sun is shining and the weather is fair. I've hardly slept and my body is choking on caffeine, b-12 and alcohol but I feel awake, alive and healthy. The first 30 or so minutes on the road are the best of the weekend and i'm feeling on top of the world. We ride fast.



The trip home: Amazing; NY is fast and Canada is slow. We fill up in Niagara and decide to run the tanks dry before we stop, putting us right back on London, ON again, where we see the friendly waitresses. We enjoy the weekend's first healthy meal (soup and salad) while the sun and the temperature both drop faster than we'd like. The last 100 miles are hard. Its cold. Real cold. Plus there's construction and i'm sore. But somehow that all melts away when you see the bridge to America. Waiting in customs, we discuss the magic feeling when you're getting close to home after a long road trip.


The tally: Rochester, MI to Rochester, NY and back: 700+ miles
The time: 47hours from idea conception to arriving home
Song during final credits: OAR "Revolution"
Special thanks: Here's to the photographer; the hero of the story and our new digital-internet friend

moments ago in bar...

Around 9pm

"Sure it'd be a great motorcycle trip and the colors would be amazing but you're running short on time. I mean, shit, you'd have to do it like... this weekend. Heh, that's pretty funny because i have NO plans for this weekend."

{ominous music}

9:30

{i finish my guiness}

"Bar tender- bring me a Jameson on the rocks... I need to stay warm"

"I'm not sure we could even make it through Canada tonight, but i suppose we could stop when our fingers go numb... We doing this?"

"alright, you're riding the Duc? We ride light; leave from your place at 11:00."

Sub 10 minute miles

i am the champion. (of putting blisters on my feet)


in other news:



I'm gonna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench!
(pipe wrench fight!)

Well fuck

Here comes Halloween: The weekend full of techno and booze, ridiculous outfits, and every girl you know is dressed like a. total. slut. (mom? what are you doing in that maid outfit?)


Yes,
Sexy cops
Sexy witches
Sexy devils
Sexy angels
Sexy meter Maids
Sexy scientists (a close second)
Sexy prostitutes
Sexy cartoon characters
Sexy dead people
Sexy people having sex
And of course, my personal favorite, Sexy nurses. (head explodes)



Yes Halloween, it is truly a love/hate scenario to be tempted with so much fruit. Remember boys and girls: Most of that fruit requires too much effort to harvest (wait- i have to become Christian to pick these apples?) some of it's rotten, and you'll probably just order too aggressively and fall asleep before you finish the cup cakes.

(What the fuck were we talking about?)

Right: Sex. And Halloween. The two are like peanut butter and genitals. In case you run out of ideas, you can find here links to the map of fetishes and map of sex which both should provide a wealth of costume ideas that would get you arrested on any other night of the week. (According to the authors, one begot the other, but i think they're both god damn liars if they weren't inspired by the map of the internet by XKCD.) Anyway, point is, if you don't learn something new from each of those maps, i want to party with you this weekend. And seriously, why the fuck is anal bead corner surrounded on two sides by body modification?? SOMEBODY is bring SOMEBODY's property value down!!


Whatever. I may have begun this work with a point in mind. That point has been filed to a dull nub by images of the weekends to come. Looks like i need to stock up on orange juice and power bars!

(Moe is hooked up to a lie detector)
Eddie: Did you hold a grudge against Mr. Burns?
Moe: no. (false)
Moe: Aright! Maybe I did, but I didn't shoot him. (true)
Eddie: Checks out. Okay, sir, your free to go.
Moe: Good, cause I have a hot date tonight. (false)
Moe: a date. (false)
Moe: Dinner with friends. (false)
Moe: Dinner alone. (false)
Moe: Watching TV alone. (false)
Moe: Aright. I'm going to sit at home and ogle the girls
in the Victorian Secret Catalogue. (false)
Moe: Sears Catalogue. (true)
Moe: Now would you unhook this already, please? I don't
deserve this kind of shabby treatment! (false)

update: it's funnier if i just include a damn clip of what i'm talking about!



FALSE!

see, it's imaginary, so it can involve ANYthing...

XKCD for the WIN:



I'm a little disappointed he didn't address the square root of (-1) because it's imaginary and there's a lot of potential there. But whatever.



Few quick points:

This is bad, mmm-kay? The problem is, when you're on the terrorist watch list (other than, you now, being on it for life) is that you would never know you were on it, unless, you know, you got lucky and someone told you.

Second, it seems Twisted Sister is now willing to take it. This is bad news for 80s hair rock enthusiasts everywhere.

Finally, clean coal: It comes up a lot. There is no such thing. It's like the fucking easter bunny, okay? Coal is dirty. There's dirty coal and dirty coal that has had it's dirtiness collected and distributed somewhere else.

That is all. Remember you're training and you will survive.

a round up

The weekend: beers, dance clubs, girly cigars, observing from above failed attempts at the human mating ritual, Jameson on the ice, bar bands and feats of strength. I trumped a week of hard times with 48 action packed hours of country-home/punk-rock lifestyle. I'm glad i didn't sleep through it.




Economy: shat upon

I tried to explain what it was like to be from south east Michigan, the collective area that we'll call Detroit. The motorcity. I think i was drunk and they may have been as well, but the points were valid: unity through despair. An entire metropolis that's spent the last 20... fuck 40 years being beat down. Constantly ranked last in quality of life poles, Detroit has made it every list from most overweight to most STDS per capita. My generation has never known a "good time" in the auto industry. Crime, unemployment, destitution and racism are the standard.

And yet, it seems to breed a heartiness that i couldn't quite explain when drunk at a noisy festival and can't quite explain here. Its a blue-collar fortitude that always manages to carry on and i think it's at the heart of my love/hate relationship with this place. Or it could just be Stockholm syndrome. Whatever. The point is, the people i work with and I are all on the brink of unemployment and no one seems to really care. It's more like a joke as the weaker of the herd is slowly eliminated via termination or relocation. So it goes.





I lean to the left but in a "meh" kind of way. It's fine. It's feels better over here, but just a little bit. But i will confess: i am hyped up the the Barack-Star. It's not even that i think he's going to make MY life better. It just, he HAS to be better than the alternative... right?

(if only the election was in March...)


Conclusion: I've had a solid month to consider the lay of the land, you know, with the metaphysical and the retrospective kind of what nots. And what I figure is, baring an uncharacteristically bad roll of the dice, everyone gets about 50 good, free independent years. It's not a particularly earth-shattering revelation, just a nice way of boxing up what it is we're all working with.

Well, that, and those 50 years are mostly like assembling a puzzle. Except you don't start with any pieces but instead collect them as you go. Oh, and there's no corner pieces; Just beers and bears and caves, shaky jobs and ladders, Ducatis and strangers that become un-strangers and then go back to being strangers. Yup. A September of collecting my thoughts and that's what i came up with.


Here's to the pieces that fit and the pieces that don't: Knowing the score and rolling the dice. {Insert bumper-sticker catchphrase here}


Speaking of which, mark your calenders:
Oct 23: Chesto and I vs. Madison the Wisconsin
¡Tag team battle royal!™
The search for puzzle pieces goes on forever!


T.I. it would seem, subscribes to traditional sociological and economic gender roles. Does that mean every mare in the stable gets a Bentley convt.?




Life is complicated and confusing.

blog EXPLOSION! (am i drunk?)

"The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual."
--Mikhail Bakunin


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JON STEWART: I was convinced an Obama/McCain campaign would be measurably different on almost all standards. And to watch it become Bush/Kerry, Bush/Gore, has been one of the most dissatisfying experiences.

STEPHEN COLBERT: That means it's not an Obama/McCain campaign. It's a Guys Who Work for Bush/Guys Who Work for Kerry campaign. Both sides have people who are just smart enough to know "We need to tweak this dial right here," so of course voters are divided 50/50 between the parties. When the 2000 election was down to 14 voters in Boca deciding the whole thing, I thought, "'Wow, that's great! It really is a political science! They've found a way to put electrodes in people's hands, and a probe up their butt, show them images, and say 'See how they respond!'"

STEWART: That's why you think to yourself, "Hey, couldn't you guys tie for $10 million, instead of a trillion? Does it really cost that much money to tie?"

Good stuff from the comedy central

COLBERT: The idea that Lehman Brothers doesn't get any money and AIG does reminds me very much of ''Iran is a mortal enemy because they have not achieved a nuclear weapon. But North Korea is a country we can work with, because they have a nuclear weapon.'' The idea is, Get big or go home. How big can you f--- up? Can you f--- up so bad that you would ruin the world economy? If it's just 15,000 who are out of jobs, no. You have to actually be a global f---up to get any help.

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It's becoming pretty obvious that i need to find a new job.




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Science:

The kids are using the the Hulu I assure you.

This seems... Dubious. I can give you 5 reasons.

But if it's true.. you can sign me up.

(not for this reason... well, not ONLY that reason.)

The Chinese: Not fucking around.

The Japanese: Not fucking around.


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Not science

best mix up ever

Well, kind of science... but also sex. But then again, it's kind of the same thing, right?



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Finally, i will mention that i am two tattoos richer but will not sully their awesomeness by spewing their picture all over the internet where any peter picture picker or harry hacker can copy paster and distribute at his/her will. Instead i will insist that you appear in person and convince me to de-shirt if you want to bask in their wicked awesomeness. That is all.



-------------------------------

Guess what: The H is O.

Come tomorrow morning i'm gonna have Glen Fry Stank all over me.

(Why would you SHOW me that?!)

Dallas Texas

(who are you?)


Seriously Dallas Texas, how can you hit this blog so much? I've put a bit of thought into this and come up with some theories:


1) You're a robot. If this is the case I'll see you in robot hell (well, not exactly. I'll be in person hell, which has more fire but no electro-static discharge machines or high powered magnets.) Regardless, lets not forget that this whole deal started as a robot extermination service several years ago when i was getting in on the ground floor of what will obviously be a key future service. This scenario is moderately likely.

2) You're a friend of one of my friends, probably one of which also has a blog and/or webpage that i have referenced here before or in turn has linked back to me. You're not particularilly interested in "knowing" me per say, but you've decided to read up on the last 4 years of my ramblings. You probably like the pretty pictures. This scenario is almost impossible.

3) You are the government/CIA/FBI/BLT/NSA/ELF/ATF/QWERTY/etc. This scenario is likely unlikely... unless it's not.

4) You're not actually a single person but the shared I.P. address of an entire house/sorority that has fallen deeply in lust with my witty verse and complete disregard for "falling in line" with the "the Man's agenda." You probably attend an small, private, over-bearing, all female school and you're likely rich and wearing skimpy uniforms. This is obviously the most plausible scenario.

Whatever the case, you obviously didn't have a lot going on Sunday night. (of course, well, neither did I)



But lets be serious. We all know that you are obviously an extremely attractive female that either wants to sleep with me or harvest my kidneys and various other organs. This is actually perfect because I'm highly interested in meeting anyone with either of those agendas. I figure at the end of the night, whether the objective (which every one it is) is met or not, I'm gonna have a hell of a story. This is probably why I'm so partial to Russian Strippers; They have nearly a 70% chance of wanting to sleep with you, harvest your organs, or both.

Think about how much fun THAT blind would be: You'd have to be SUPER on your toes!


...


Wait... What were we talking about?

No Rain

1) Michigan

It has not stopped raining for the last 3 days. The rain fall has simply varied from steady to down pour, back to steady. This has severely limited my ability to enjoy recent motorcycle upgrades or continue working on the small details (clutch adjustment, headlight aim, decal removal, etc). I did take the opportunity to enjoy a spectacular 8 mile run in the rain, but the wet shoes/socks led to some monster blisters that have left me couch-ridden and cursing the weather gods and organizing digital music into playlists.

2) Recent Addictions



A recent XKCD comic and a little bird together inspired me to write Haiku's about the women of science. I think i could have worked in some pretty words had i not been at work. Things are strange there now.


Bring me a woman
Speaking with a learned tongue
I will bring the beer


I'm also solidly addicted to Post Secret. Solidly.




Woman of science
Confident understanding
A challenge I seek


To note:
I think we all knew that guys have no sense of their league but it's good to see science catching up to bar logic.


Best you stand back
My science is conducted
With women of wit


3) A Story

Somewhere around 1997/1998 i was looking for an email address that would be anonymous and free. Hotmail was free and by not using some form of my own name (as most people were doing those days) i could cover the anonymous part. As it were i was in the midst of a ideologies class and had taken a shining to Mikhail Bakunin as a pretty forward thinking guy. Such became mikhailbakunin(at)hotmail(dot)com, an email address that i've carried with me for the last 10 years. (Keep in mind that by telling this story here i realize I'm killing the anonymous part. Whatever.)

Anyway, when teh Myspace became popular, i was never much interested in taking part, but i did need to occasionally check out what other people were up to, which was only possible if you had a Myspace account. Thus was born (circa 2005ish) Mikhail Bakunin on Myspace, again, as far as i could tell anonymous. As chance would have it, i noticed i was getting a LOT of friend requests the last couple months. I mean, i always got random spammer friend requests, but this seemed like an over the top amount. I logged into teh Myspace for the first time in, maybe, 18 to 24 months, to find this:

http://www.myspace.com/mikhailbakunin

Wat was once a mostly blank page featuring just a few of my more choice photographs, is now a full-blown dedication to the 18th century Russian Anarchist that couldn't be more complete if the man himself had made it. And i own it. Well, kinda. Who ever put this up never took the time to change the password.

So here's the rub, as soon as I realized what had happened, i changed the Myspace password as well as my email account password because they were the same. I feel a little bad because i basically jacked some one else's work, but well, they did it first. Besides, who ever set this up hadn't logged in for some 12 months before i realized what was going on.

So there you have it. I am Mikhailbakunin on Myspace and I didn't even have to do any of the leg work. The only problem is I seem to get a lot of friend requests from dudes like this. Yeah.




I ended the debate by moving my army across the Rubican
"Bartender, get me a shot"
And then burned the bridges behind me
"Make it cheap Tequila with a beer back"
--Tucker Maxx

Time to work on my No-Rain Dance moves. (You know why rain dances work? because they keep dancing until it rains. A lot of tings are like that.)

Motorcycle

updates.



(if only i'd known)

holy double fuck-stuffed oreos*

I have returned from my adventures in Ohio, which were mostly adventures of the low key variety.



(thank you i heart chaos)


My return home, via motorcycle, went something like this:

--Cruising through Ohio fast, it was warm, i was happy.

--Cruising through Ohio fast, it was cold, i had on extra layers and i was happy.

--Crossing over into Michigan, storm front, HUGE FUCKING RAIN, fuck me, i'm so very wet, I can't see, OH GOD HUGE TRUCKS...

--40 miles of wet and then suddenly 1 mile from home, some dude pull sup next to me on a motorcycle as well and he's wearing less water repellent clothing than I am. I look at him, he looks at me and we know that we're the only bad muther (shut your mouth!) in this town.

--Arrive home, dump water out of boots, invent phrase "holy double fuck-stuffed Oreos" to describe what just happened to me, sleep.

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This is the greatest music video that has ever existed:


GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO - BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

"In this awesome video for the song “Gorbachov” by Russian metal band ANJ, former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev is an axe-wielding barbarian, destroying zombies who attack the hard working big breasted women of Mother Russia"


I don't know how to explain this to all of you, but Bill Oriely really is fair and balanced. Watch him. I don't know if it was always this way and I don't know if it will always be so, but dammit, he asks the right questions and criticizes EVERYONE. Fuck. Now everything is complicated.

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Remember: A Floozy will do something with anyone. A Freak will do anything with someone. It's important to know.


*Yes I had to invent a new phrase to show my exclamation. Use it at your will, i guarantee is new to this world

Killing time while a test runs:

Yes, fine, I agree i am highly susceptible to your American viral marketing campaign. (also, yes, I looked up the definition of Viral Marketing to ensure I was using it correctly). I award this advertisement 25 bonus points for referencing "The Conquistador."



In other news, I clearly should NOT have sold the Fiat-dang-dizzle. It doesn't say anything about motorcycles, either. Perhaps a nice Alfa is in order? What about Italian motorcycles? Clearly more science is needed. Either way, i know that look on that chick's face; It's the same look I get when I sit in those cars.

(Stupid non-convertible, fwd, reliable American Grand Am)


Time to make the donuts. And by "donuts," I mean "high voltage automotive battery packs."

four: where's my helmet?

one:

I AM NOT THESE PEOPLE


two:

Remember when the republicans were funny because they were so old and crotchety and evil but just ha-ha evil? Circa 2003:



Who's laughing now? Circa today: (your press pass god can't save you now)




three:

I gotta live: See you next week.

(see you in hell kwame)

Ahem

Dallas, Texas: who are you?