Chevron with Techron

I got gas today at a gas station brandishing the name, “Chevron with Techron.” It’s not the gas station I usually go to, but my parents used to go to it all the time. So I was surprised by how easily the phrase “Chevron with Techron” jumped into my mind, like something quoted so often that you’ve forgotten the source. And suddenly I asked myself the question: what is Techron?

It’s so indivisibly part of that phrase, but it doesn’t mean anything. Like, why is Chevron always offered with Techron? Has anyone ever walked in to pay at the cash register and been like “Hi, I’d like my Chevron without Techron, thank you.”

I have never seen Techron with my own two eyes. My first thought is that it’s some secret formula, some chemical they put in the gas to make it extra-effective. So saying “Chevron with Techron” is like labelling a food item, like, “Orange Juice with Vitamin C” or “Brownies with Pot”. I’m pretty sure that’s what I passively believed Techron to be when I was a kid. But that doesn’t make much sense. So then I thought, maybe Techron is a mascot. Like Tony the Tiger. There are, after all, a lot of drawings of animated cars in Chevron propaganda. Maybe one of them is Techron, so when you get gas there it’s like, “Get Chevron with Techron! [TECHRON smiles and winks a windshield wiper at the camera. Cut to black.]“

I think that idea is my personal favorite for Techron, even though there are other possibilities (insurance policy? special automated pumping system?). If I ever get a dog I might name it Techron, so that I can bring him in the car and say I’m going to get Chevron with Techron.

Well… maybe it would be too dorky to say. But I’ll think it.

Techron would be a good name for a dog, actually. You could call him Tech for short, which I think has a nice ring to it. It sounds like one of those douchey 50s names, like Skip and Rush and… I dunno, Mitt. (Why do Republicans always have douchey names?)

The gas was so that I could drive to Santa Cruz and tie up a few loose ends with the registrar and my rock climbing membership and so forth before I leave for the Amazon in two days. I know that where I’m going is a place of sweltering tropical languor and heat, but for me driving over the summit of Highway 17 is driving into endless summer. It was a clear day in Santa Cruz; the green was starting to creep back into the meadows; the sun was crisp and bright; and from the linguistics offices in Stevenson I could see down the green sweep of the town all the way over the blue, blue waters of the Monterey Bay to the land on the other side. The Moss Landing smokestacks 40 or 50 miles away, usually a hazy silhouette of a thing, were in sharp relief. I don’t know when I last saw such a clear day. And it was… well, I’m going to miss it. I went to Bry and Annaïs’ place in the Porter apartments and they were there along with a bunch more of my friends, and we had salad with blueberries and pot stickers for lunch, and hung out. Everything was all clean and bright from people having moved out and then moved back in. And… I’m just going to miss it a lot. Going to miss them  a lot.

On my way back I was listening to a mix CD I just made. Now, before I tell the rest of this slightly embarrassing story, I need to say that songs almost never make me cry. Maybe I’ll be listening to a sad song for a specific reason which is making me cry, but for a song to emotionally create something out of nothing? It doesn’t happen to me. Maybe this wasn’t “something out of nothing” because it had to do with the trip I’m about to take, but the song “3×5″ by John Mayer came on, and to my own bewilderment I started to tear up. I have to stress that I’m honestly not mentioning the I-never-cry thing to be all macho, it’s just that the first reaction I felt was “Wha–?!?! whoa.” When you think about it, 2 minutes really should not be time enough for you to build up enough emotion to cry. It’s weird and abrupt. That’s how it felt: abrupt.

But anyway. This song, this song is so perfect, and something about it caught me by surprise. Part of the reason I’m so excited to go to Peru is because lately I’m feeling dizzied by the crush of technology and staying connected, and the pace of life when some important news about my 992 friends on Facebook breaks every twenty minutes. Five different passwords. Three different e-mail accounts. Keep in touch via Skype with your friends from this class, and that class, and that summer…. I just want to get off the map and really live. And this song, the title is after a common print size for photographs – 3×5 – and it goes, “Didn’t have a camera by my side this time/ Hoping I would see the world through both my eyes.”

Yeah, I’m bringing a camera to Peru, but the camera isn’t the point. Some combination of the experience I’m looking for and what I know I have in Santa Cruz – friends that are always there to share food with you when you show up at their door; something that can’t be photographed or quantified in Facebook posts – really hit me. The friends that are really worth something have a connection with you deeper than what you can share and describe. Just as I know that my time in the jungle will mean more to me than any blog or photo could ever share or describe. The magic is in realizing that, and not trying too hard to share and describe it anyway. As the song goes, “You should have seen that sunrise with your own eyes/ it brought me back to life…” The idea that stopping to really see something, even something ordinary, can save you. I heard it as if for the first time. And I… well… sort of…. um. cried.

Yup, that was embarrassing. I’ll be going into hiding in Peru now. Be back in 2 months.

(P.S. John Mayer is hot, isn’t he? That’s not a rhetorical question; i’m staring at him and I honestly can’t decide… but. don’t look at the video while you listen to the song. Hot or no, John Mayer’s smoldering Zoolander lips will not reduce you to tears. but this song might.)

Did you know…

…that apparently every animal, including humans, has a psychology based on the same 4 basic instincts?

I don’t have a bibliography or a source for this. My dad told it to me; he said he read it in the book Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin, which he picked up after seeing the movie “Temple Grandin.” Temple Grandin was an autistic woman who felt an instinctive emotional connection with animals and so made a niche for herself in the world revolutionizing the farm industry.

Apparently all emotions felt by all animals are based on a mix of the following 4 instincts: fear, curiosity, sexuality and pursuit of prey. The interesting part is, I think human emotions fit under that umbrella as well, and I started thinking about how.

FEAR: Self-explanatory. I imagine we feel fear much the same way animals do.

CURIOSITY: This was the one my dad brought up, because he was commenting on my insane thirst for travel – you know, the burning passion of the young. It makes a lot of sense then, why young people have such weird and consistent desires. Wanderlust. The desire to see the world. Experimentation. The desire to know what’s beyond the horizon, turns out, is a basic evolutionary need.

SEXUALITY: I kind of like thinking of this one when I’m incredibly horny or sexually frustrated or whatever, to put things in perspective. Society tends to look down on people who let their sex drives get the best of them. Feeling obsessed with your sexual pursuits is a little less embarrassing when you think of it as simply one of four, a thirst as basic and pressing as curiosity, fear, and ambition.

PURSUIT OF PREY: Which brings me to this last one. At first it gave me trouble, because humans certainly don’t pursue prey anymore; economics has done away with that. We just show up at In’n'Out or whatever, and the prey comes to us. Not much predator cred to be had there, even if you did order it animal style. But think about what basic part of psychology is missing from the other three, and the answer sort of writes itself. Ambition. Competition. Any sort of will to achieve is, I think, a human manifestation of the pursuit-of-prey instinct. Nowadays our prey is money and acclaim, but we’re still fighting for it, much as we’d like to pretend we’re not. And in fact money is what we used to feed ourselves, so no surprise that the predator instinct translates over.

The whole thing makes me dream about an incredibly simple, straightforward perspective on living life : live with the four instincts perfectly in balance. And why shouldn’t it work? Have adventures, stay safe, get laid and be successful. But never let one compromise the other three. They’re all there for a reason. (except for sexuality. in my case, cause i’m gay. I went there.)

The Devil’s in the details

There’s a Kabbalistic idea that God has both a male essence and a female essence. The female essence is called “Shechina”. Near the back of some Reform prayerbook or another in the “Prayers and Psalms for Other Occasions That You’ll Probably Need” section, I once came across a silent prayer which was all about Her. Shechina. It was a spinoff of the “Avinu Malkeinu” where instead of beginning Avinu, Malkeinu, “our Father, our King,” every line began with “Our Mother, Our Protector” or something like that. Each line had been rewritten from a female lens, so that the prayer was sort of a female mirror, a yin-and-yang companion to the “Avinu Malkeinu” – instead of “Our Father, Our King, give us strength and deliver us,” it was like “Our Mother, Our Protector, bring us inner peace and teach us how to choose the right path.” Stuff like that.

I thought that was a really cool idea when I saw it, but I’ve never been able to picture God as a girl, just because of simple lack of imagination. We are made in God’s image. I am a boy, so I see myself in God’s image. Kind of like how as a boy, most of my stuffed animals as a kid tended to get dude names as well. Make sense? Maybe it doesn’t.

But the point is, just now I had an interesting thought that challenged my way of imagining God as a male. This is sort of how it happened.

I’m reading The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and they make a foreshadowy joke about some chick (a mistress of Alexandre Dumas’) being really good in bed while she’s possessed by the Devil. I say foreshadowy because I’ve seen the movie based on the book, “The Ninth Gate” directed by Roman Polanski, and there’s a really memorable scene near the end of the movie (and presumably the book too) where the main character, played by Johnny Depp, has sex with his creepy protectress/demonic guardian angel, a blonde femme fatale with dragon-like green eyes that glow maniacally as she fucks him in front of a burning castle. Hottest straight sex scene ever. But I digress. Near the end of the movie (and this is why I’m stoked to read the book) the narrative dissolves into weird, unclear, very speculatable twists and turns that dump you out to the denouement a little too fast and leave a lot of things unexplained. One of these unexplained things is the sex scene, and when I got to that line in the book I was like “Oh. So she was possessed by the Devil.” After which, being about as mature as a 15-year-old boy, I immediately thought, “Hah. It’s like he had sex with the Devil. Kind of gay.”

Except is the Devil male?

This instantly (and I mean instantly) bloomed into a full-on pro-and-con list in my mind. What is feminine about the master of all evil, and what is masculine? You can start with symbolism, a list which looks something like this.

FEMININE: Eve. Temptress. Garden of Eden. Delilah. Femme fatale.

MASCULINE: Fallen angel. Lucifer. King of Hell. Red man with horns.

But the lists quickly got longer and more complicated. I thought to myself: could the source of all evil be masculine or feminine? The answer, of course, is no. Women, with their backstabbing and judgments and passive-agression and cunning and command of lies and mind tricks, have such style that a male Lord of the Flies could never truly be said to know everything about evil. But women are also life-givers, evil though they may sometimes be. War, maybe the ultimate evil, is inherently male. There is a certain brand of cruelty – the cruelty of dominance-asserting torture, of beating people up and stealing their lunch money and faking the basketball at them so that they flinch – that is 100% male. The Whore of Babylon may have been a home-wrecker, and she may have murdered an ex-husband here or there. But Attila she wasn’t.

So, I suddenly saw with blatant clarity how an embodiment of all evil, the “Devil”, could be a sort of two-faced being, a male avatar and a female avatar both at once. And suddenly it made sense that God could be the same way.

And my mind jumped to how these two images of God could be constructed. But where my mind had fountained with examples of male evil and female evil, I started to think about quintessential male goodness and quintessential female goodness and…

FEMININE:

MASCULINE:

Maybe thinking about evil makes it hard for a moment to switch tack. Because given a moment I could of course come up with a list: mother and care-giver as opposed to righteous and honest, et cetera. But the hesitation to me was just as interesting the answers, and I wanted to end this thought by mentioning it.

Why is it so much easier to define people in terms of the bad than the good? Why are bad things just more memorable? Maybe it’s because a character is defined by flaws. Funny, isn’t it. God protects and nourishes us all that, but it’s in terms of the Devil that we are… us. The Devil is in the details.

Saperlipopette!

Dear Tintin,

I think I might actually be in love with you. I know it’s wrong, you being computer-animated and all, but I just can’t help myself. In my defense, the animation in your world is pretty realistic. Except for the noses, but those were mostly weird on the supporting characters. In fact you look even more ridiculously charming and handsome next to all the other funny-looking folks, like Captain Haddock with his bulbous nose and cartoonishly chubby body.

I have to thank Steven Spielberg for introducing me to you in person, because I have to admit, when I saw you drawn on paper I didn’t think of Hergé’s button-eyed little dude with the baby-like tuft of yellow hair as attractive. In fact when I first saw the trailer for your movie I scoffed, because I thought, “Tintin can’t be that realistic!” What I must have really subconsciously been thinking was “Tintin can’t be hot!” Because real talk, you are hot. I’ll confess, I spent most of the movie staring at you. I don’t know what it is. You just have such a boyish charm. I love the flush to your skin, like a white boy who’s outside having adventures a bit too often. I love your little gash of a mouth and its crooked smile. I love your suave mystery-solving trenchcoat. I love your gingery-blond hair, and I even love your signature tuft. Out here in the non-animated world, I have a thing for guys with fauxhawks. True story.

(c) 2011 Paramount Pictures

I think, though, this crush goes way beyond looks. You travel the world having adventures and fearlessly chasing mysteries like a badass. I’m not sure whether I want to be you or date you. The fact that you’re so young and innocent-looking only makes your antics more adorable. When your eyebrows furrow together and your piercing blue eyes narrow because you’re thinking about a clue, I almost swoon. And damn, you can throw a punch.

Besides, I have a thing for French-speaking guys. (Not French, because I know that you’re Belgian!) See, I get you. When you and Haddock were escaping from the ship, the friend I was sitting next to griped, “Why didn’t he grab the machine gun?!?” I knew why – because you’re just a revolver kind of guy. Now don’t get me wrong, I definitely dug your English accent, but rest assured that I’m used to following your adventures in your native tongue. I know that his name is Milou, not Snowy. I think “Rackham le Rouge” sounds more epic than “Red Rackham”. And I get why Dupont & Dupond is funnier than Thompson & Thomson. (In fact I get it more than most, since as a native English speaker who was torturously introduced to French spelling, I have a special soft spot for humor about dumb silent letters.)

Tintin, let’s keep it real here: if you existed I might even have a chance with you, because it’s very possible you’re gay. Why are there never any girlfriend subplots in any of your comic strips? Not even any sexualized girls – no femme fatales, no cute love interests, no nothing? In your adventures there’s no time for girls, and even though I spent most of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” wishing for Marion and Indy to realize they’re meant for each other, I totally respect that.

So the point is: I could be that girl. Well, boy. I could be a totally awesome sidekick/buttbuddy. Together we could forge a new hegemonic standard for the romance dynamic of an adventure-solving group of main characters.

I want to be clear, this is not lust, this is a crush. Activities I want to do with you include cuddling, solving mysteries, hugging, co-authoring newspaper articles, going on walks, flying kites, and maybe hitting up the shooting range so you could teach me some of your crack shooting skillz. Kissing is near the top of a fairly long list, but I won’t even mention anything more sexual until I get a glimpse of you shirtless. Not that I’m pulling for that, or anything. I could follow you through ten more cinematic adventures clad in your usual polo/sweater vest (no offense, but further proof that you’re gay), and my crush on you would stay strong.

I know you’re not real, but I’ll keep you alive in my heart. If you’re ever in my neighborhood, look me up – I wrote for a newspaper once; I could be useful on your adventures! Until then, stay awesome.

And if you’re sleeping with Captain Haddock, don’t tell me. Yeauch. May as well just break my heart into a million pieces like the wreck of the Unicorn.

Sincerely,

An Admirer

(c) 2011 Paramount Pictures

“Let’s find some beautiful place to get lost…”

The title of this post is a line from an Elliott Smith song. I am currently lost, but not in some beautiful place. I am lost in Orange County.

I think writing blog entries from strange places (and thus, having a laptop) is pretty much the coolest thing ever, because so many of my thoughts have a sense of place. This is one such entry.

I’m on my way back to L.A. after a crazy whirlwind two days crashing at my friend Sean’s timeshare in Palm Desert. One of my favorite things about the drive to Palm Desert was how on the way you pass a freeway sign that says “Indio – other desert cities – right lane.” Desert cities! Cities in the desert! It’s so… I don’t know, it just grounds you as to where you are in the world. Not where you are like, take exit 91a and then exit 46b and get off on the 405. That’s how people travel nowadays; using an iPhone with Mapquest you can circle the world and never know the name of a single town through which you passed. For some reason being more vague helps to be more descriptive. On the way back we passed under a sign pointing towards “Newport Beach – other beach cities.” If I ran the world all signs would be like that.

One thing I noticed about Orange was how there are no such geographic landmarks. I get that to an outsider most suburbs look like a blank slate, but even then I find you can get the hang of a place by thinking of it terms of landmarks that are, you know, not manmade. A lookout point on a hill. The county park. The edge of town. Orange County doesn’t have any of that stuff. It’s just a flatland that goes and goes, strip malls and strip malls with orangey stucco and lines of rustling palm trees between the stores and the parking lot. Each of the towns have names and little slogans. We dropped Sean off in 70-degree weather in Yorba Linda, “Home of Gracious Living”. Then we passed through Plascentia, “All-American City”, as proclaimed by a red, white & blue sign along the wide parkway we were driving on.

Here are the few observations I made for myself about the O.C.:

1. They don’t say “hella”. (let’s start with the basics)

2. Unlike in L.A., there are protected lefts.

3. Part of what makes these SoCal freeways such a hot mess is that exits branch off to the left and right. For my first few hours on Mapquest duty I was confused when my friend Sierra kept asking of a freeway merge, “Which side will it be on?” Even if you’re staying on one freeway you have to be in the middle lane just to hedge your bets, because at every merge there’s a riot of lanes going different directions, like fraying ends of a string.

4. All of the street names are in Spanish – usually precious developed-community names like “Calle de las Penumbras” – which casts a funny light on the “All-American” thing.

5. At the same time, everything is so American. We passed by Valencia High School, its baseball diamond shimmering with heat, fronted by a sward of manicured lawn and elegant monterey pines, and I couldn’t help but imagine a bunch of attractive people from a 90’s chick flick hanging out on the grass talking about where the big party is on Friday night.

Everything is just so pretty. It’s like Dulock from “Shrek.” I think the only thing that really irks me about the place is (was? We’re now safely on the freeway passing downtown LA) how green and perfect everything is, in light of one very specific thing about this weekend: the views of the OC kids toward water. They would tend to leave faucets on while washing dishes, turn on the shower and go fold their clothes while it got hot, that sort of thing. And when I called them out about it, they’d be like, “Oh, you Santa Cruz hippies. Bitching us out for squandering the gifts of Mother Earth or whatever.”

Those words echoed through my head as we passed by the green, green lawn in front of every house. I imagined the people in the houses turning on their sprinklers every morning, letting them go and go until the grass runs with mud and the extra water gurgles bleeding out onto the sparkling pavement, and not thinking twice about it because if you want your front yard to be pretty, that’s just what you do. It’s just so… bubble-brained. As my English teacher from high school would say, they live in Fantasyland. Like, these people have all the money in the world and all the prestige in the world, and they just don’t get why they’re lucky. They don’t get who pays for Orange County to be beautiful.

This traffic is ridiculous. I can’t believe I have to spend six hours driving home on Highway 5 tomorrow after this weekend’s GPS-failure shenanigans. I’m hella ready to get back to NorCal, brah.