National Pastime

Ahh, baseball. America’s national pastime that hasn’t been taken seriously for at least two decades now. The playoffs haven’t even started yet and I already don’t see any suitable outcomes; as today marked both the Cardinals (whom I abhor) and the Yankees (who use the playoffs like cheap prostitutes just about every season) clinching playoff spots, while the Cubs are 8.5 games back in the NL central, and the Brewers are another 4.5 games behind that. Even the Giants, who I started rooting for because I live in the bay area and certainly can’t root for the A’s, did a great job of blowing a wildcard chance, and now have a great chance of ending their season in predictable, mediocre fashion. Really the only high points for me this season are that the White Sox almost certainly won’t make the playoffs, while the Red Sox almost certainly will (unless they keep playing like they did this weekend). Baseball makes me sad.

Berkeley Is Weird

I would have to take off my shoes to count the number of times in the past few weeks that I have been completely dumbfounded by shit that has happened in this city. I feel like almost once a day I am either stopped dead in my tracks or made to literally laugh out loud by something that I overheard or oversaw completely in passing. The other night, I went to the bodega down the street from my house, and upon entering, found that a borderline drunken woman was cursing out the clerk, saying some shit that would have made Mamet blush. The coup de grace of the tirade was, "You better put a skirt on 'cause you actin' like a bitch. Go put some pumps on, ho, and suck my dick motherfucker." I can’t make this shit up – nobody can really – and that’s the beauty of it. It’s raw, unrestricted human interaction in it’s truest form.

The problem is, I don’t even know where to begin in describing some of this stuff – I can only tell the same “I heard/saw a homeless man/woman say/do something really funny/sad” so many times. But that’s only the beginning. A lot of people will tell you that New York City is the place where you can do anything and not stand out, but I’ve been to New York, and that claim is false. There is a lot of crazy shit going on in NYC, and to be fair, their bars are (sadly) open much later than ours, but Berkeley is really the place to come for balls to the walls, unencumbered weirdness.

For example, the other night, as I was waiting downtown for the late Fremont train after seeing a movie with a friend, I happened to stumble into a conversation (I use “conversation” in it’s loosest sense) with a few girls from St. Mary’s college. The conversation started by virtue of the fact that they were drunk and had no idea how to get back to their school by train, and then centered on (drunkenly swerved around) how one of the girls was from Chicago and I was from Milwaukee (tri-staters have a bond in California), and we both like the Deftones. As a side note, apparently I don’t look like I just moved here because everyone asks me directions to places. Almost every time I take the train, someone asks me how to get to San Francisco. It’s unreal, because I don’t really live here, but I know the transit system better than people who do.

Regardless, midway through this conversation we were approached by a woman who, in addition to having the physical appearance of someone on the tail end of a weeks long meth binge, was clearly either blazed out of her mind or wasted on acid. Now, if you’ve ever been to NYC, you know that getting approached by anyone at a subway station let alone someone looking like the physical embodiment of slow death wearing a bed sheet for a skirt and hand painted sneakers would, at best, be received with a “go fuck yourself” and a halfhearted wave. But no. One of these girls actually summoned her over to ask about her shoes. When I used the words “hand painted,” I of course meant that they were splotched with fabric paint in a drug-addled haze, not actually painted with any semblance of clarity or meaning, but she asked nonetheless. The woman came over and talked for a minute – I don’t really remember what she said; I was too busy being stunned at how high she must have been – and after she left, the girl who started talking to her in the first place simply said, “Damn, she must’ve been smoking those trees. Like four or five of them.” I was laughing for days, and she just shrugged it off like that kind of shit happens every day. Which it basically does.

Moral? I don’t really know how to respond to Northern California. People have asked how I like it here and I never quite know how to respond. It can be such an all-encompassing question; I don’t really feel like I can address it in passing. “The weather’s gorgeous all the time, but everybody’s fucking psychotic” is usually what I end up saying, but that’s not necessarily all the way true. The best way of articulating this is that Berkeley – much more so than many other places I’ve lived – is a state of mind, rather than just simply a location. I just haven’t quite got the mindset down all the way yet…

An Open Letter

Dear Hipsters who live in my apartment building:

Do you think it is cool to throw parties on two consecutive WEEK NIGHTS? Do you think it’s cool to ride your fixie to a party in south Berkeley and then stand around outside on the sidewalk drinking 40s out of paper bags and listening to Massive Attack with the system on blast? It’s not. It makes you look like douche bags. You’re making everything smell like pot and sound like angst. I’m sorry your parents didn’t love you enough, but seriously cut it out. Some people actually have the wherewithal to hold down steady jobs, and those same people have to be at work at nine o’clock in the fucking morning tomorrow. Knock it the fuck off.

Sincerely,
Your hate filled, job holding, upstairs neighbor.

***

Note 1: Karma, bitch that she is, is apparently paying me back for all the times I partied recklessly on weeknights during college.

Note 2: I seriously just looked out my window, and I have a laundry list of stereotypes:

3 fixies
2 girls wearing flannel shirts, knit hats, and horn rimmed glasses
3 guys wearing skinny jeans
4 40s of steel reserve
1 douchebag moustache

I’ve never even met these people, and yet I hate them with the burning fury of a million fiery suns.

Summer '09: What a Letdown

Dude. What a shitty summer. As far as I can tell, the people who received the most publicity this summer can be grouped into three categories. And those are:
1. Saying stupid shit at bad times (See also: Gates, Obama, Williams, Wilson, West).
2. Good tennis players sucking at the US Open (See also: Roddick, Murray, Federer, Nadal, Williams).
3. Dying: (See also: Jackson, Mays, Kennedy, Fawcett, Swayze).

Yup.

Green Day’s American Idiot World Premire: A Comprehensive Analysis

REDACTED.

Front office at BRT has specifically asked the entire staff, due to the number of premiers and works in progress, to refrain from disseminating information regarding American Idiot, or any other shows in the upcoming season. This is - to say the least - understandable, and because I like my job, I've decided to comply. Until further notice, all information regarding this and all other shows can be found at berkeleyrep.org. This original post may be back once American Idiot has opened, but for now, I have never seen the show, nor do I know anything about it.

Apologies...

-MPA

I Have A Love-Hate Relationship With The Bay Fair Target

Today, I went to the Target in Bay Fair for the first time. Much like the Target off the Stadium Spur in Milwaukee (for those of you who are familiar with my homeland), this Target is bi-lingual due to the high percentage of the population demographic that is Hispanic. I had a blast laughing to myself at the sub-par English-Spanish translations. There’s something about seeing a vernacular phrase you see every day in another language that makes it seem utterly ridiculous. However, this fact also means that many of the employees are not familiar with my mother tongue. Which also happens to be the official language of this country.

In any event, I decided to start an herb garden on my fire escape (oregano and basil, not the California herb), so seeing as how this Target had a garden center, I was firmly in business. I first picked up some groceries, and a few things for my apartment (did you know ice cube trays are considered home storage? I didn’t.) and then headed to the garden center. Here’s the funny thing about me: while I’m shopping, I have a tendency to forget that I don’t have a car, a fact that is only remembered once I have passed the checkout. This means that I either have to get home on my bike, or on the train, both of which are almost equally daunting propositions when you are carrying enough groceries and/or housewares to outfit a small Mexican village. This lapse in memory and judgment has lead me to ride my bike home to South Berkeley from the Safeway in Oakland with six full bags of groceries on the handlebars. But I digress.

I walked around the store, picked up my plants, then realized that I needed pots for all of them. Then I realized that I needed dirt to fill the pots. Then I realized that I needed a cart because all this stuff sure as shit wasn’t going to fit in the tiny basket I was carrying. But at no point during all of these realizations did I think about having to carry several hundred pounds of garden supplies to the Bay Fair train station, then onto the train, then home from the Ashby station. I did realize this after I left the Target Store and saw the yawning expanse of parking lot that separated me from my train. So, being the resourceful person I am, I figured I could carry all my stuff across the parking lot in my cart, and then ditch the cart once I got to the edge of the lot. What I did not take into account was that the sneaky target bastards had a trap set for people like me. Turns out at this Target, if you take your cart beyond a certain point, the wheels lock up. Irreversibly. And that point happens to be the middle of the main road connecting all the stores in the shopping center. Which is where my cart still is. I figure if they want to put the electric fence there, they can fetch my cart back from the middle of the intersection with no working wheels. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to do them the courtesy. So I loaded all my bags into my arms, hiked to the Bart station, and waited for my train.

***

My central concern about this whole endeavor is the seemingly frivolous use of technology. Doesn’t it seem as though all the research that went into developing shopping carts whose wheels lock up could have been used for a better purpose? Like seriously is there a huge black market for stolen shopping carts? Because the last I checked, most people want shopping carts in the store, not outside of it. I would be really fucking pissed off about all this, except for the fact that my grand total for like eight bags worth of stuff was $44. Damn you, Target, and your incredibly inexpensive merchandise, making me forget that I was mad at you in the first place…

I Saw It On The Bart

So the other day when I was waiting (a fucking eternity) at the Ashby bart (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station for the Richmond train, I had an awesome idea. I said to myself, “self, you should make a segment on your blog dedicated to stupid shit that people do on the bart. You could call it ‘I saw it on the bart’ and it would be really funny and people would like you because of it. You could even have other people submit stories and then you could write a book based on stories other people have submitted to your blog just like ‘texts from last night’ and ‘fuck my life.’ Then you could get illegitimately wealthy by taking the work of others and claiming it as your own.” And then I looked at the scrolling marquee, which besides telling me that I still had 13 minutes until my train arrived said “Seen and heard on bart! www.bart.gov.” (People in the bay area have a really annoying habit to which I refuse to succumb, which is dropping the article in front of bart. So instead of saying, “I took the bart,” they just say, “I took bart.” Which, because bart sounds like a proper name, makes it seem like they are discussing an actual person in train form. Which is weird. But I digress.) So anyway, I got really fucking pissed that the bart website had taken my idea and I resolved to put plan “I saw it on the bart” into action anyway. So without further ado, here is the first installment.

I saw it on the bart Vol. 1 Ed. 1

Guy at the Ashby station full on sprinting down the up escalator with his bike to make the Freemont train. And then getting yelled at by the train driver for trying to take his bike in the front car. Saw that shit on the bart.

Guy getting real confused by the fact that you have to scan your ticket on the way out of the station as well as on the way in. OK, that was me. That’s not how trains work on the east coast…

Ok, I didn’t really see this on the bart, but outside the downtown Berkeley station some dude was smoking a joint. At 8:30 on a Sunday morning. In public. What was even funnier was the black woman who walked by and said, aloud: “damn somebody be smokin’ them grapes.” Awesome.

Two homeless dudes fighting over a boom box at the top of the escalator of the 16th Street Mission station. This was at once hilarious, and terribly sad.

Two teenage girls getting stuck between two train cars of a moving train because they let the door close behind them before they opened the one in front of them. It made me chuckle.

Hippie man who clearly got dressed in 1969 (sporting flowered shirt, headband, full beard, etc) sitting on a woven blanket playing a sitar. Dude. It’s the year of our lord jesus christ two thousand and nine. This means three things: 1) Playing a sitar hasn’t been cool in approx. 30 years. 2) Lighting a candle and sitting on a blanket outside the Powell bart station has never been cool. 3) You should go to the barber and tell him you’re sick of looking like an asshole. I wanted to hit him upside the head with a fashion magazine. Although it was a pretty interesting dichotomy: him sitting there sporting his 1960s gear with Barney's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Louis Vuitton not half a block away. Funny.

***

So here’s the funny thing about “I saw it on the bart”: it looks as though it’s going to end even before it really gets on it’s feet, due to the bart worker’s strike that will be going into effect on Monday. I was mad enough about this strike when it just prevented me from getting to San Francisco in under five hours, now I can also be mad about the fact that it is ruining my ability to find wonderful unintended humor at the expense of others. Hell.