De Brug

I would have left some time ago, but the music is too good. The beers here cost damn near a buck fifty, and the gulash I had, which was excellent, was also on the spendy side. But the tunes are good. Johnny Cash, Lou Reed. The woman next to me here at the bar, who is probably from Jamaica or environs, requested Beatles, and right now “Something” is playing.

There’s a good vibe here. The language in this bar is English, which means I can talk to people, and they can distract me while I write. Jamaica woman is a terrible singer, but that’s not what matters. She’s singing. I’m singing along as well. Other patrons are singing. It’s the vibe.

Danielle just arrived. The bartender asked, “do you want a coffee or a beer?”

“Beer.”

“So you’re having a good day.”

“You bet.” Danielle is American. She rolls her own. Squeeze is playing now, at the request of the Brit sitting next to me. Lots of people are following along. and that’s all right.

So there’s this World cup thing going on. It’s only football (soccer to those where football means Sunday), but people still get pretty worked up about it. The Czechs lost a game they really should have won a few days ago, and now they’re pretty much out. I had a discussion with the dutch bartender that went –

J: The czechs look good on paper but they lost the critical games.

DBT: They’re still the best team in the world.

J: If you can’t win the games that matter, you’re not the best team.

DBT: That’s not the way to think about it.

There were a couple more rounds of that. Apparently I’m awfully damn American to think that the measure of a team is whether it wins the big games, but I’ve met a couple of Atlanta Braves fans who think the “European way”.

But that’s not important. What is important is that the woman who was next to me is not Jamaican. Even that’s not important. What is really is important is that I know she’s not Jamaican. I know this because I talked to her. Yes, you read that right. I talked to a woman in a bar. I didn’t mention this before, but she has long, straight hair that hangs to her waist, enormous walnut eyes, and rich, full lips. The process that led to conversation was a gradual one, stretched over an hour, and was based mostly on both of us knowing the lyrics to certain songs.

She’s not from Jamaica. Man, was I off with that guess. There’s a musicality to her speech that I attributed to the islands, but I was plain and completely wrong. She’s your typical Korean-French-American-Swiss-andsoforth kind of girl. If she is the physical representation of globalization then all I can say is bring it on. I didn’t mention it before, but she is beautiful.

I told her I was a writer. Her vision of me instantly became misty and irrational. There’s something she wants to write. She asked me to read the first paragraph, but I stopped at the second sentence. The first was golden, Five words. A question. A damn good question. The second sentence was a train wreck. I skimmed the rest of the brief text and found muddled ramblings punctuated with really good questions. She looked at me hopefully. “You have a story to tell,” I said, “You have the questions. You don’t have to have the answers, but when you speak of cruelty, you have to be specific. You have to show the cruelty. If it’s your life, you have to show your life.”

More conversation ensued, and I promised to edit her work. That will be a major undertaking, certainly frustrating, possibly embarrassing, if she follows through. But she has a story, and I will do what I must to see a good story told. So we talked for a bit, and just before Skippy arrived she said, “If you read this I will never be able to talk to you again. We can only talk through email.”

And then, as foreshadowed, Skippy showed up. In fact, Skippy is sitting next to me now. Cleopatra is long gone, but Skippy is pounding away on her laptop.

His name is not really Skippy, but it should be. As I post this, he is wondering why I’m smiling at him.

Releasing Your Inner Google

The gnomes at Google understood better than anyone else that the Internet was more than just a big pile of information. It is a big, loosely structured pile of information where connections are based on association, rather than categorization. In that way, I believe, it models human memory more than other repositories. But while surfing the net, hopping from link to link, is much like daydreaming, what was missing was a way move to a specific piece of information. There was no way to concentrate. In that giant ad-hoc pile of info is the answer to your question, but where? Google and the other search engines provided that critical capability, and without them the Web would be damn near worthless.

So, hooray for the search engines!

As a side effect, the search engines also give us a snapshot of the cosmic unconscious. We can see what it is that people are looking for out there. From here, it looks like a hell of a lot of people want to know how to fry eggs, and to read about Japanese g i r l s who wear short s k i r t s in the winter. They want pitchers of the oddest things, and they want to know the ins and outs of X-ray g o g s. Then there are the strange ones.

I occasionally chronicle some of the searches that brought people here to MR&HBI. Because this episode will also be cataloged by Google and the others, phrases I do not want to distract the engines from the original quarry I obfuscate with spaces.

  • s w e a t y ass problem
  • stories on how the language moves on the Ladder of Abstraction – actually some of the other links were very interesting.
  • “crosses by the road” – linked to this. I think I finally have a story working that captures some of this feeling.
  • do you lose if you scratch on the eight ball – it depends on where you live.
  • tree in the forest does it make a sound – yes, I am now widely recognized as an expert on the deeper philosophical issues. We need to have more nobody’s in forests so we can figure this one out. Linked to another episode like this one
  • driving time between calgary and edmonton – linked here, but this is also interesting.
  • a r r o g a n t assholes – Second on Yahoo for my description of New Yorkers
  • why sneezes in threes – I don’t have the answer to that, but it did connect to a mediocre Chapter One
  • forced to smell stepmother’s feet – linked to the stories page, attracted to the frequent use of stepmother in the drivelicious The Quest for the Important Thing to Defeat the Evil Guy.
  • p i c t h e r s of dogs – this search is now more common than “p i t c h e r s of haircuts”, but neither sounds too appealing.
  • big b a z o o k a s – in this case, the b a z o o k a s were full of beer.
  • “Oscar Peterson” “hockey fan” – I like both those things. Linked to the Idle Chit-Chat page.
  • E l k poop pictures – I saw e l k poop in Y e l l o w s t o n , but I didn’t take pictures.
  • free x-ray pictures beach girls – because you want to look at them from inside as well
  • Building an Elevated to the moon – I’d settle for being elevated the first few thousand miles.
  • D a r t h V a d e r Bowling Ball – linked to an episode about the travails of Travis
  • cerrillios road, nm – a soulless stretch of misspelled commerce in Santa Fe, but a good place for breakfast
  • z e p t e r bullshit – was attracted to my Writing category page where I say some unflattering things about the company, but stay neutral on their products.
  • The retro into the b l a c k h o l ehere
  • diaper-explosion photo – ewww
  • Beer Piss Tour linked to the bars of the world category page
  • lyrics “we’re not abba” – linked to the Observations category page, attracted to an episode in which I complain about bands doing covers that sound just like the original.
  • what would it take to be a rock n’ roll celebtrity top hit, baby! I tell you, I know all about celebrity! Linked to the Stories category page.
  • “anatomy of a face” book – not a wacky search string at all, but it reminded me of a chance encounter with a truly beautiful woman, who is gone now. And I got the title of her book wrong. But I miss her, the woman I drank with for a couple of hours in an airport bar.
  • sublime “locked up” – linked to a road episode
  • g i r a f f e m y t h stories – I’ve written one, sort of, but it’s not here
  • sex sparking my mocking pics – wow. Searches for lists of random words that include “sex” often end up on the stories category page.
  • toaster cooks eggs heats meat – now there’s a toaster I could endorse!
  • j o j o and the slave
  • curse words in pig latin – linked to an oddamgay episode like this one
  • tweaker chick pictures – at least they weren’t pitchers
  • what would go wrong with a blimp – linked to my sure-fire idea for a new sport. Higher on the list was an interview with Bob Denver. It seems he had a fondness for wacky blimp-based ideas. I knew there was a reason I liked him.
  • toasty tent – linked to an idea that almost doesn’t qualify as a get-poor-quick scheme. The cold winter nights of the toasty tent are coming soon.
  • half baked, ive killed and watched killed – linked to the main page here
  • towns from Reno, Nevada to Weed, CA – if you follow the route I took (via Prince George, Canada and Durham, North Carolina) there are lots of towns between those two places.
  • “how to make an electric spark” – I had the only hit, for a ramble about my special effects work on Pirates.

Perhaps it is a sign of the changing times, but while eggs queries are still the most common, queries about my little writing app are on the rise. Queries about particular bars are on the decline. Perhaps that means I need to write about more of them.