My grandfather.

My grandfather, Warren Zimmerman, passed away today. It caught me unexpectedly - a phone call from my dad early this afternoon. I miss him. Still a bit in shock.

I'm also relieved that he is no longer confined to his electric wheelchair, stuck in a body that didn't reflect his character. He didn't like it. It wasn't the kind of living he wanted. He's past it.

Grampa, I love you and cannot begin to express how lucky I am to have you as one of the defining role models in my life. You were one of my best friends in my childhood, and in growing up, you've help me stay grounded in knowing what it means to be a good man. I'm sorry I didn't make more of an effort to express that to you these last few years. It's something I'm going to have to come to terms with. I still want to let you know though - what you mean to me. It's important. I know you checked this blog probably more than anyone else, so it seems fitting.

You anchored a strong family. Who we are - something that made you happy - is a reflection of who you are.

I love you.

Wow.

If even half of what this article is bringing to light is true, heads on Wall Street & Washington need to roll, and we American citizens are getting royally f**cked at a level I find hard to comprehend.

Warning - long piece, and I couldn't stop once I started.

Rolling Stone - The Big Takeover

Big surprise here...

Guess what?

The Pope is a fucking moron. Who would have guessed it? How can any world leader be so ignorant? Actually, scratch that. The US circa 2000 - 20008 is proof positive that ignorance doesn't necessarily disqualify someone from being put in a position of major power.

But really - condoms HURT the fight against AIDS in Africa? Give me a fucking break.

Religion is an outdated crutch that humanity needs to evolve out of. Yea, sure, it has aspects that preach some good principles, but the reality is religion causes more problems than any other human institution, and yet too many of us still fight and defend it tooth and nail, at the cost of our own progress as a species, and millions of human lives.

En route.

Sold my Dell XPS 630i yesterday. Kinda of a piece of shit really - Dell did some incredibly idiotic modifications to the motherboard and severely crippled it. Ended up just building my own new computer, which is awesome. And with the money made from selling my old rig, I bought this:

That would be the Epiphone G 400 electric guitar. Funny enough, Yelp HQ here in NYC kicked ass last month (as we have every month) and our reward was getting an office Rock Band setup, which inspired this purchase. I've been geeking out on Rock Band, playing the fake guitar, and having a blast. Given I also really enjoyed, and occasionally still do enjoy playing my classical guitar to strum out some extremely basic flamenco, or "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" by Zeppelin, I decided to go ahead and buy a real electric. Sometimes you just want to be able to turn up the volume, kick the distortion into gear and rock out to some Muse or Tool. Decided to get myself what I need to do that.

Spent four days in Guitar Center playing a bunch of guitars. Came down to the G 400 or the Epiphone Les Paul Studio:

The Les Paul had a warmer tone, which I preferred, but it was much less fun to play. Much fatter neck, weighs twice as much, and when I strapped it on to play standing, it felt all wrong. The G 400 on the other hand is much lighter and the fretboard is much faster. It has a punchier tone than the Les Paul, which had a deeper, richer tone that I liked more, but the nice thing about tone is it can be sculpted a bunch of different ways - the pickups, the amp settings, etc. The feel of a guitar, however, isn't open to being changed much. So I opted for the G 400 and am waiting for it to arrive next week. Already scouring the internet for good tablature for the songs I want to learn. After flamenco, rock guitar is comparatively really easy, so I don't think I'm going to take lessons, and if I did they'd be for flamenco. I'll just teach myself the rock stuff. That's how I learned "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" and that doesn't sound half bad.

Oh yea, and one other little tiny detail about my life - Arianna moves to New York this Friday (two days!) and we kick off our life together. She's never lived with a man before, and we're starting very modestly in my little tiny studio in Alphabet City, but we both share a sense of excitement at seeing what we can put together. I don't like to write too much about my relationship on this blog, so I'll leave it at that, but suffice to say, I feel incredibly lucky for having her in my life.

Oh REALLY?

So Arianna, being a bit older than me, decided she wanted to try and put the smack down with one of those chain emails that occasionally circulates around these here Interwebs. This one went after the under-30 crowd, which includes your's truly. Here's the email, which she forwarded to me with an enthusiastic, "SO TRUE!!!":

- - - - -

THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were.
When they were growing up; what with walking
Twenty-five miles to school every morningUphill... barefoot...

BOTH ways
Yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up,
there was no way in hell I was going to lay

a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it

and how easy they've got it!
But now that... I'm over the ripe old age of
thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my
childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!

And I hate to say it but you kids today you
don't know how good you've got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, We had to go to the damn library and
look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!
There was no email!! We had to actually write
somebody a letter, with a pen!

Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! No where was safe!

There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted tosteal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished and the tape would come undone cause that's how we rolled, dig?


We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If youwere on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either!
When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school,
your mom, your boss, your Bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you
just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video
games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games
like 'Space Invaders' and 'asteroids'. Your guy was a little square! You
actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or
screens, it was just one screen forever!

And you could never win. The game just kept getting
harder and harder and
faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was
on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off
your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel! There was no
Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons
on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK
for cartoons, you spoiled
little rat-bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat
something up we had to use the stove ... Imagine that!

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids
today have got it too easy.
You're spoiled. You guys wouldn't have lasted
five minutes back in 1980 or before!
Regards,
The over 30 Crowd

(Send this to someone you'd like to make smile,
Whether they are under 30 or not.)

- - - - -

Well now, wasn't that fun? Are we all laughing yet? Aren't these relics hilarious?

Or not.

The first thing that becomes readily apparent, to me anyway, is the over-30 folks, clever as they may think themselves to be, clearly still have serious issues with even the most simple of computer skills, like, oh, basic text formating, which makes absolutely no sense to me given the fundamentals were just as applicable back in the day of the typewriter. You know - sentences, paragraphs, commas, periods. Ringing a bell?

I can only come to one conclusion: the over-30 crowd must be dense. The fact that the simple act of being able to color their text red & blue has clearly captivated them only supports my theory (ooooooh! colors! can we do more than one?!! coooool! is there an 80s neon option!?!? coooooooool!!!!) but I'll let that slide. I'll even let slide the fact that they felt what they had to say was so important that it was essential to bold the entire damn thing and blow up the font size, you know, for impact!!!

What I won't let slide, however, are all those shots they're taking across my bow, because these fossils clearly forgot something (hey, aging does take a toll...) - I WAS BORN AND RAISED IN MEXICO.

That taken into account, my counter-volley:

- - - - -

Ah woman, how you forget - I GREW UP IN MEXICO. That set me back about 20 years. So in reality, YOU had it easy punkass.

Did you have to go jumping around on the back of moving cars and hold on for dear life if you wanted to go anywhere? Huh? I'm sorry, I didn't hear you... Oh that's right. NO! And if we didn't want to do that, let me assure you darlin', other methods of typical kid transport (skateboards, rollerblades, scooters) don't exactly work on COBBLESTONE streets. Only a bike could half-handle that, and even then our pre-pubescent cojones got jostled around like kittens in a commercial dryer.

Did you amuse yourself by playing with fire ants and trying not to get stung? Catching spiders and wasps in jars and watching them battle it out? Tempting fate with cheap ass Mexican fireworks that were prone to blowing up in your hand? Did you have to worry about older Mexican kids fucking with you out of sheer racial tension when you were out away from your house playing? Did you have to dodge slingshot rocks? Didn't think so.

Did someone poison your dog for no reason, and you just so happened to find his dead body on one of the ant hills we used to frequent to catch those afforementioned ants? Yea, that was all sorts of happy.

How about having to take showers at your nanny's house, where the shower was literally a gray concrete box with one faucet and zero hot water? Shampoo? Yea right, we washed our hair with the same soap they used to wash clothes, and I'm talking the powder version young lady, not the fancy liquid stuff.

How about school? I'm guessing you had a school bus. Well, we had that too, but being the little rugrats that we were, we preferred riding our bikes. Only, our school was way the fuck out in no man's land, and we'd always get espinas (that's thorns for you, honky) in our tires and have to stop and patch them ourselves.

And you want to talk cartoons? Oh, only cartoons on the weekends. Cry me a river. We had the same damn situation, only the TVs were so old the colors bled together (if they weren't black and white), they didn't have remotes, AND THE DAMN CARTOONS WERE IN SPANISH. He-Man loses some of his badassness when you have a high-pitched Mexican guy overdubbing his battle cry, which was not "By the power of Gray Skull!" but rather "Poder, poder de Gray Skull!".

So take your attempt at being hard somewhere else little missy. You targeted the wrong badass Mexican-born mo'fucka.

- - - - -

I rest my case. Thank you over-30s. Come again.

Confused about the Economic Meltdown?

So was I. Still am, to some degree, but This American Life, a great weekly radio show that I am subscribed to via iTunes Podcasts, has done a three part series that is a must-listen for anyone that wants a better understanding of the economic crisis in layman's terms.

Here are the links:

1. The Giant Pool of Money

2. Another Frightening Show About the Economy

3. Bad Bank

The guys who put those shows together also run Planet Money, another radio show that goes over all this financial madness. I haven't listened to any of that yet, but definitely plan to given how helpful the three podcasts I linked above were.

Enough.

NY Times - U.S. Is Pressed to Add Billions to Bailouts

Seriously, why in the hell am I having to bail out these idiots? Why are you? And why are they asking for more and more of our money when they've shown no capability in how to correctly use it? These corporations got fat and happy at our expense. In the case of the banks and insurance behemoths, they tried to turn a quick buck by lending to people whom they never should have lent to. In the case of the Detroit auto clowns, they repeatedly pushed back against progress by spending huge amounts of money on DC lobbyists so they could keep building piece of shit cars, rather than channel that lobbyist money into Research & Development to keep our auto industry competitive.

Again, why the hell do I have to bail them out? Let them fail. Yes, if they fail, it is going to affect a lot of the country, and the American work force. I get that. But in my mind, it is akin to resetting a broken bone - it hurts like hell to do it, but it heals much better in the long run. I have faith in the ingenuity of this administration, and in the new breed of American entrepreneurs (mostly because of my exposure to Silicon Valley culture) and I really do believe that if we stop funneling these parasitic companies money, they'll either HAVE to fundamentally change to survive, or they'll die and something better will replace them. Either is better than throwing money at the same people who created the problems to begin with.

Things are already rough here in the States. I don't mind having to wait through it getting a bit worse if it, in a sense, allows us to hit the reset button and do things much better the next time around. I wish we could take all that bailout money and funnel it toward things that are important and are not necessarily mismanaged, but historically underfunded, hence the lackluster performance - our education sector, health care (although the health insurance companies could use reviewing), our infrastructure (roads, broadband capabilities, green energy, clean water, etc.). I know some of our bailout money is going there, but comparatively, from what I understand, it is a small amount in relation to what is going to AIG, Citi, etc. Seeing hundreds of billions that could make a huge impact in those sectors instead go to Wall Street & Detroit morons who still feel entitled enough to grant themselves billions of dollars in year end bonuses after causing the largest economic collapse in recent history is a fucking joke.

Choose.

Mom was an easy choice. It was the "moral" thing to do. Go be with her. Take care of her. Help her. You're her son Quinn. How could you live with yourself if you didn't? I was in a pretty rough place in my life when I made that choice, but I never second-guessed it, and now that my time with mom is over, I would never change having done it.

That was the easy one. There are harder ones.

I'm blessed in some regards for having had a lot of exposure in my 27 years. I don't profess to know it all, and inherently distrust anyone who claims they do, but I am aware of the bigness of life. The options available to someone with the desire, intent and will to make it. What I've lacked is direction. I haven't made my true choices. I haven't put a necessary, fundamental drive in motion.

My life has been a life of chapters. Mexico. Dad. Mom. Independence. England. Morgan. Cancer. Arianna. Yelp. The only constant in any of those chapters was and is Cort. I suppose it is no surprise then that all decisions made about the "big picture" in my life - not the chapters but the book itself - have always had only one permanent inclusion. Cort. It is natural. I just assume and plan on having him there with me always. That was never debated. The rest, however, is choice. Endless choice. And I've been standing in the middle of my life, in the middle of my head and my knowledge, and I've not moved. It is that place where all choices lead somewhere, but no destination can be reached without giving up the origin - sacrificing the option of all options. My frustration for the majority of my young adulthood has been that conflict - the desire to go and have that big life, and the fear of making my choices and leaving others behind. It isn't natural for me to know. It is natural for me to be curious.

But I'm changing. New York, my move out here, was largely on a whim. In my own mind it didn't change any of the fundamentals. I still have my job. I still have my relationships. But I was wrong. It does change some of the fundamentals, and the majority of my non-work time here in this new city is spent alone in my studio apartment, frustrated. Distracting myself. Restless. Feeling like I've done this before.

I'm ready to choose. I'm ready to move forward with some things, and let others go. I'm ready to walk. I'm sore from standing still. I am beginning to trust that I will be happier in choosing. Happier than when I'm alone pondering. Happier than when I'm harboring my young man fantasies.

There is a choice to be made.