The Weepies, Shots, and the War on Plastic.

Waiting in line outside The Great American Music Hall to see The Weepies last weekend, my friend Rachel found ourselves standing behind a boisterous aging hippy and her teenage brood who were having a spirited conversation ranging from the pros and cons of glitter based makeup to the popularity of the fedora in Brazil.

Once inside the hall we ending up occupying the same space to the left of the stage by a row of tables that I decided was both a makeshift seating area and the perfect place to set a jack and coke along side a delicious plate of garlic fries. The hippy woman, tall with long blonde hair that was just beginning to turn grey, almost regal in her loosely wrapped red velvet dress, slowly sipped on a neat golden brown double while the teens lay in a random pile on the ground taking turns giving each other massages and sitting back against a faux marble pillar.

At first I thought, I wish I was on drugs too, but the more I observed this unlikely crew the more I thought they were just naturally unconcerned with what people thought about them. That's a real gift these days, especially in this country, and even more so in San Francisco where the legacy of personal expression for the sake of freedom from decades past has, in this era of tweets and hits, desolved in to something that feels more contrived and calculated.

I like weirdos though. I wish I was weirder. I wish that part of my brain that tells me I have to be this and that to these people and another thing to those people so that we can all just get along could be carved out. But I suppose that's just a much of me as what kind of music I like and what kind of art catches my eat. Perhaps it can be trained and refined but it can't be switched on and off.

About halfway through the set, during a break Steve Tannen, the husband half of The Weepies duo, took a sip of water from a clear keg cup. The hippy lady, who had migrated to the middle of the crowd in front of the stage, yelled out, "Don't drink out of plastic!"


That's not coffee.

I groaned and laughed to myself as did a few others around me, in nonverbal agreement that it seemed kind of rude to try and force your beliefs on others without them inviting the discourse beforehand, especially if that person is trying to entertain hundreds of other people who have paid for the pleasure.

Steve, who hadn't heard her clearly, squinted out at the audience and asked, "What was that?"

"I said don't drink out of plastic!"

Steve and his wife Deb both laughed and he replied with a smile, "Theoretically I totally agree." And after a brief dramatic pause he looked down and said, "But there's no water in the glasses here, only whisky."

From the side of the stage, one of the venue staffers appeared as if by magic with a shot glass and set it down on a stool next to Steve. To the cheers of the crowd he threw it back and the moment was passed and the music continued.

The world needs more people like this. People who voice themselves, even if others don't agree. Less people like me who would rather traffic just moves along smoothly. It was odd and maybe out of place but had the hippy lady really done anything wrong? What are we if we don't follow what's in our hearts? And could I really have expected any less in a city where, even at the music venues, people ask why there isn't a compose bin next to the recycling?


Still better than California public transportation.

Carl Sagan Might Save You Life

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. - Carl Sagan

A friend pointed me to this quote by after I had posted another mind-bendingly succinct and poignant observation that Sagan had made about how learning the science and mechanics of love in no way made the the feeling of it any less precious. In another era Sagan would have been called a sage and a philosopher but today he's probably more remembered as the guy with the funny voice that made videos my generation ignored during middle school science classes. Which is a shame because the more I read about him the more I think he deserves a higher seating in our collective consciousness. He was a scientist, philosopher, and humanist of the highest calibre, believing that the more we could understand about the universe around us, the more we could understand about the universe within us.

A few words about the proposed mosque near the 9/11 site

Seriously America, you are starting to piss me the fuck off. Stop this idiotic tea party reactionary group think and take a moment to really analyze what it is you think you fear so much.

When you say that putting a mosque near the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack is insensitive or some how a slap in the face of the survivors and family members of the victims, you are saying that all of Islam is defined by the radical extremist minority. It's like saying that building a new church is somehow promoting the fanatical anti-gay protesting of the Westboro Baptist Church crack-pots. You know, those assholes who go and protest in front of the funerals of American soldiers with signs that say things like "God hates fags" and "thank God for IEDs". Do you associate your belief as a Christian with those kinds of people? No. You don't. And the vast majority Muslim world doesn't associate itself with those who seek to cause chaos and death in the name of their faith.

So stop it. Just stop being scared of things you haven't taken any time to actually understand. It's embarrassing and it's just plain upsetting to someone who put their life on the line for a country that after 234 years, still can't seem to live up to it's founding principles of religious and personal freedoms.