[sic]

Not that this post will register even so much as a distant blip from the far outer banks of any of the great blog lakes, but one never knows what rings of what pebble dropped into its waters might resonate out far enough to register. So at the potential risk of this post getting noticed and thus incurring the scorn of the Boing Boing loving world (of which I’m normally a devoted member), I sometimes have to wonder hopefully and in wide-eyed skepticism (and a good measure of greening envy) if self-promotional posts such as this one:

…by the site’s co-founder Mark Frauenfelder are cooked up with a sheepish wink and a nod and posted with at least something of a knowledge aforethought that apparently there’s nothing they can’t make, autograph, overprice and deliver — no matter how trivial — that their adoring readership won’t snap up.

Yes, I know Frauenfelder is a virtual lord of the internest and his cred is not to be questioned and certainly not be the z-list likes of me. But as a non-fawner I have to admit to a level of incredulity not only when I see stuff like that being so blatantly shilled, but that it sells like limited edition hotcakes.

Perhaps there’s some context or connection I’m missing. Maybe this gape-mouthed gremlin is much sought-after iconography that my lack of fimilarity with his work precludes me from understanding. But even so… six bucks for a palm-sized cahier notebook? Even one with a fancy cover, signature and gape-mouthed gremlin? Maybe that makes a ripple as a gott-have-it bargain in some ponds, but not in mine.

And just like that I’m about to re-enter the realm of the gainfully employed. Granted, it’s a temporary copy-editing gig with a four-to-six week window, but it is a gig nonetheless  and one for which I’m tremendously grateful — and the finite time frame makes the 20-mile commute through the thick of the city that much less unbearable. Plus it pays a bitchin’ hourly wage — a few bucks more per than I typically charge for my freelance webstuff services.

And as a bonus it takes a bit of the building pressure off a second interview scheduled this Friday for a full-time content management job much closer to home. In other words, if I don’t land that one, at least I’ve got this thing to fall back on across the threshold of the new year.

I report tomorrow at 8 a.m.

So I chose today to be the day to go down to City Hall (by bike of course since it’s L.A.’s annual Bike To Work Day) and take care of the business license/tax money I owed because the city somehow couldn’t find me to collect so they shipped my account off to a collection agency in the great state of Wisconsin that was able to locate me (I wrote all about it here).

I don’t know what it is about civil servants, but they just seem to be about the grumpiest and most easily displeased people on the planet, and the lady I had the pleasure to interact with was no exception to that rule. So after entering City Hall for the very first time in my life and having my backpack scanned through the machine and having to demonstrate my Alphasmart was a functioning text-input device and then stepping to a counter to wait in line to get the sticker you see at right I then walked about 50 feet to my left to the Office of Finance where I took a number from the Take-A-Number machine (48) and as they were presently serving the holder of No. 38 I grabbed a chair and pulled out Chuck Pahalaniuk’s Choke, which I’m about halfway through and frankly wondering while I’m still reading it… it just ain’t all that compelling to me.

Then, as if in answer after one of the clerks calls for No. 42, Chucky gets my attention with:

That mountain, for example,” she said. She took the boy’s stupid chin between her thumb and forefinger and made him look with her. “That big glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I may have actually seen it.”

Another car slowed down, something brown and four-door, something too late-model, so the Mommy waved it away.

For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She’d seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She’d seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about the mountain.

What she’d seen in that flash wasn’t even a “mountain.” It wasn’t a natural resource. It had no name.

“That’s the big goal,” she said. “To find a cure for knowledge.”

For education. For living in our heads.

And right there in that waiting area of the Office of Finance on the first floor of the City Hall I’m nodding my head with a half grin on it and I’m sold on seeing Choke the rest of the way through. Even if that’s the only nugget in the whole strange damn novel, that’s enough.

“Number 48.” Oh shit, that’s me! I tuck Chuck back in the pack and scramble up to the window where I explain to the grumpy lady on the other side of some silly metal bars about receiving the collection notice and speaking with someone from the office who said it would be best to come into the office if I wished to request a waiver of the penalty —.

“Well you have to put that in writing!”

“Yes, I did that in this letter,” I tell her, sliding it across the counter. She snatches it up and barely looks at it, prefering to meticulously scan the collection notice from the company in cheesehead country. Then she launches into some condescending mumbly grumply speech about needing to provide documentation of my earnings corresponding with the tax year in question, but it’s all blahblahblah to me and now I’m thinking I didn’t even get a chance to piss this woman off and it’s already sounding as she’s going to to make me go home and get some verification of my wages as an independent contractor for 2004 and 2005, come back and put my backpack through the scanner, turn my laptop on and get another sticker so I can take another number and wait some more? At this point I’m ready to eat the penalty and pay the amount on the collection notice and be done with it.

Instead she asks me what type of work I do. I tell her it’s freelance writing and design work. She asks me how much I made in 2004. I tell her: $3,000. And in 2005? I tell her: $0. She gives me a look like what kind of lousy writer/designer are you and I squelch the urge to explain that I just wasn’t seeking work a whole lot during that period and all.

She wants my social security number. I tell her and for the next five surly hours minutes she’s mutely punching her keyboard and pulling up screens that I can’t see. For all I know she’s ordering From Grumpier To Grumpiest In Ten Unpleasant Days on Amazon. Or maybe stealing my identity.

Then without so much as a perfunctory grin or frown or any sort of explanation or reprimand, she punches her calculator and just says “$104.99.”

I slide my ATM card across the counter, a touch perplexed. See the $104.99 is what I was told on the phone that I owed for 2005, but there was also a matter of $114.93 for 2004. Before I can ask the woman’s walked away from me. A couple minutes later she returns with a temporary copy of my business license and a debit card slip in the amount of $104.99 for me to sign.

“But I was told I owed two amounts. Will you be charging that separately?” She ignores me as she makes a note in a ledger of my case with the Wisconsin agency being closed.

“What about the $114.93 I was told on the phone I owed?” And for the first time she makes eye contact with me and says in as ungrumpy a tone as she can muster: “Sir, it’s all taken care of.” I spit out a “But” but quickly stop myself from continuing on a fruitless course toward an explanation that would no doubt mire me in what I’m sure could be one be-yoot of a bureaucratic morass.

Instead I see the light and say “Then I’m just going to shut up and say thank you and good day.” I swear she almost chuckled. And I grabbed up my updated license and receipt and papers and got the hell out of there.

Now I’m not sure what happened that made her excuse the $114.93. I don’t think it was any sort of kindness on her part. Maybe it was bogus to begin with or maybe I was eating into her lunchbreak or she had to pee or both — who knows and who cares! All I know is that I went in expecting to be dinged for $219.92 and I got out of there having to part only with well less than half that.

Hallelujah!

My quick-’n-dirty business cards arrived via VistaPrint today. I ordered them after attending the blogger gathering at the Golden Gopher last week and I was practically the only one who didn’t have one to hand out. So I went home and whipped one up via VP’s handy cardbuilding tool — even used a photo I snapped exiting the Gopher of the defunct Italian Kitchen restaurant frontage across the street as the card’s background graphic:

Of course, the risk I run is that literal people will think I operate a business called Italian Kitchen. Whatever. All I care about and that is that they were cheap and easy and painless and now I have a not-your-every-day calling card where as yesterday I didn’t. Ta. Da.

Speaking of business, let’s talk about the freakin’ collection notice I get in the mail yesterday from some agency in Youbetcha Wisconsin telling me I owe the City of Los Angeles $157 and change. It doesn’t say for what honor I have of owing my native metropolis said amount, just that I do and that I’d better pay up and fast. Not that I don’t have some idea it has something to do with the business license I set up a couple years ago when I had delusions of some sort of full time freelance writing career, but I let it lapse in 2005 in part because I never received anything from the city offering to renew it and also because I didn’t do a thin red cent of freelance work in 2005.

So I’m wondering why I’m getting taxed $157.12 on a freelance income of Goose Egg. Typically I call the City’s Finance Office, which is listed as the creditor on the collection notice and — get this: they don’t have any idea who the hell I am. The lady on theother end of the line gives me some song and dance about accounts of less than $1,000 are automatically referred to these outside (way outside!) agencies. But I ask her why the hell didn’t the city first send me a freakin’ notice of money due? And before she can answer I say and besides why are you taxing me anyway since I didn’t make a taxable dime freelancing last year???

And all she can tell me to do is contact the agency — which I do and when I tell them I don’t owe squat they tell me to call the city again. Greeeeeeaaaaaaaat. Fortunately when I call the city I get a much more helpful and knowledgeable person who takes the time to find me in the system and to explain that the money I owe is not tax so much as it’s basically the renewal fee for the license. One that I never really needed in the first place. And certainly didn’t in ‘05.

When I ask why oh why didn’t the city send me a renewal notice she punched some buttons on her computer and said it was because the city didn’t know where I was. I had to laugh out loud that the city I live in couldn’t find me but some Green Bay Packer-lovin’ bill collector in Beerbatter Wisconsin was able to paint me with a laser beam probably in between bites of his brat and kraut sammich.

Sheeesh!

Anyway, it was nicely offfered to waive the $47 penalty portion of the amount and mutually decided that my best course of action would be to come down to City Hall and settle up the amount in person. Right before hanging up it dawned on me that I might be on the hook for mo’ money for the current year and sure enough after punching a few more buttons she basically said she was glad I asked because indeed there was another delinquent bill getting ready to be shipped via the Polar Express to Badgerland.

I told her howsabout we make my information more current since it’s obvious your office probably still thinks I live in the valley or something (close, they had my address on Del Mar — though I’m pretty sure I sent in a letter notifying them of my current Silver Lake addy when I moved in with Susan almost two years ago).

So essentially I’m on the hook for a couple hundred bucks — then I can cancel the license if I want. The good news is that I may have a use for the thing after being so long dormant. My friend Rodger Jacobs was kind enough to email me yesterday to say the editor of a trade mag he writes for on occasion is always looking for new penners and would I be interested in potentially gigging for the publication. I believe I responded with a diplomatic version of hell yeah!

Thank you for the assist Rodger and here’s hoping it pans out. And at least now I have a bizcard to hand to the editor if we ever meet. That and a current city license to operate a keyboard or a ballpoint pen.

Now I’m off to the downtown YMCA to swing a tennis racquet for the first time in about 10 months. No license required.

Checking email this evening I just found a notification from Cafepress telling me that I just made a sale — my first! — of one of my 2006 calendars I’ve been hawking here for the last couple weeks or so. It was purchased by a Janet Z. who resides somewhere up in the great state of Washington, and to my recollection she is not someone with whom I am personally acquainted.

Thank you Janet!