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beneath a faint brownish cloud
Tuesday, September 25 2001
I love the new mandatory car-pooling rules for people who want to drive their cars into Manhattan. These rules should have been put into place years ago. In fact, all cities should have a rule like this, especially Los Angeles. I think the highest use of government regulation is to coerce conservation and community, and this hits both birds with one stone. Furthermore, I think it should be illegal to drive SUVs on the interstate system without at least three passengers in addition to the driver. Ah, the pleasant thought of soccer moms rounding up strangers in a shopping mall.
On a somewhat related note, the one advertisement that seems to be running on CNN these days is the one that features bratty teenagers fussing over fast food so much that they nearly rear-end an SUV. After this narrow brush with death, we're told how to write for a free book on how to avoid driving while distracted "by food, friends, or a phone call." What I want to know is this: why does this commercial have to have a happy ending, with the bumpers stopped millimeters apart? I'm in a mood to see the brains of spoiled white kids splattered all over late-model steel, especially after watching a PBS documentary about class distinctions in America that aired recently. In this documentary, I got to see what it's like to be a dork in Texas or a West Virginia hick or a Abercrombie-only jock in the Hamptons. All the teenage girls seated at this one picnic table drove SUVs that their parents had bought for them, although they did have a responsibility: they had to pay for their own gas.
I stayed home again and worked over the virtual private network. This time I made an effort to keep CNN off and play music instead. It's much easier to focus on the task at hand beneath the tapestry of Bob Mould guitars than before the repetitive yammering of deliberately stupid CNN anchors.
In the evening, Gretchen and I went to La Taqueria on 7th Avenue for burritos, one of my most insatiable cravings. Is there any work as hard as that of the burrito maker? I find myself waiting in line impatiently for my burrito while the Mexican burrito guys maintain their controlled frenzy. They lean over the counter, the burrito seeming to assemble itself beneath a faint brownish cloud as if in a stop-action claymation movie. I blink my eyes, trying to make the cloud clear away, and then I realize that it's not a cloud at all but the furious movement of hands dishing out beans, onions, guacamole, and other delicious constituents. Gretchen is very particular about her burritos and is especially insistent that they not contain guacamole. If she tells the burrito guy to hold the guacamole after he's already thrown it in, with a deft flick of the wrist he'll somehow manage to accurately excise all of it and send it flying into another burrito not quite as far along the assembly line.
Gretchen and I went to the Brooklyn Public Library and rented East is East, which, to look at the box it came in, seemed like a zany high school comedy, possibly one featuring a loud laugh track. But Gretchen had heard good things about it.
Far from being a "barrel of laughs" or whatever Siskel and Ebert were said to have said about it, the movie was a dark and somewhat disturbing comedy about the travails of a half-Pakistani family living in England and suffering under the rule of its thoroughly unsympathetic, pockmarked Pakistani father. Gretchen was especially disturbed by the supposedly uplifting scene of reconciliation at the end.
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