[sic]

At right is a re-creation of the vanity license plate I saw on the ass of the ridiculously large and and even more ridiculously expensive-looking Fleetwood Revolution LE Earth Schooner cruising eastbound ahead of me in the No. 3 lane of the Pomona Freeway on Friday.

Maybe your interpretation is the correct one, but my reading of the incomplete words was as “SWEAT SUCKS,” which was followed by a semi-incredulous shrug of my shoulders while thinking that if the vehicle’s owner is proud to broadcast his or her or their aversion to any type of physical activity either laborious or recreational that produces perspiration, so be it.

Whatever floats your land boat, Jabba.

But then I got close enough to read the custom frame around the plate (also re-created below), and though it clarified things entirely it opened up a whole other level of incredulity, while inducing some chuckle-induced eye-rolling:

Instead of “SWEAT SUCKS,” the plate was an approximation of “SWEET SUCCESS.”

Full Disclosure: I am of the unwavering opinion that with the possible exception of 0.00002 percent of ALL the vanity plates in existence in the galaxy, the rest are lame.

So it is that from so unapologetically biased a basis I decree this particular plate is among the other 99.99998 percent, first and foremost because in the list of unwritten rules regarding vanity plates (the first one being: Don’t get a vanity plate), one of the top ones is:

If, in the course of requesting and acquiring a vanity plate, there is any possible ambiguity in the lettering that could cause a misread, you shouldn’t get that vanity plate.

I can just imagine this owner smugly ordering and blissfully attaching this plate to his spanking new Fleetwood’s backside, proud to proclaim his financial achievement and totally blind to the fact that it can be so easily misread… until it’s finally brought to his attention by other lesser motorists at various red lights or RV parks.

“Ha! ‘Sweat sucks!’ That’s funny! I hate sweat, too!”

“No! It’s ‘Sweeeeeeet successssssss!’

“Oh. Well… ‘Sweat sucks’ is better.”

“But it’s –.”

“Whatever, dude.”

Eventually it happened enough times where the owner frustratingly figured he had to get the frame to put a stop to the madness. And that’s where the unwritten subsection of that unwritten rule above comes in, involving the unfortunate after-the-fact realization of the confusion inducement:

If, after acquiring the plate you only then are made aware that it is being misread, you should immediately surrender the plate and by no means purchase and install a customized frame to clarify and or correct and or otherwise correctly and completely spell out the misinterpreted wording.

Of course, there’s no real penalty for breaking these rules, just as there’s no real cure for dumbshit. But in looking further into this specific violation one wishes there were ordinances prohibiting a person’s transgressions against basic common sense — for their own safety!

Allow me to explain, by showcasing the specific recreational vehicle in question, one which  veritably turns full-sized quad-cab pick-up trucks into Tonka Toys like this, by the way (click it for the bigger picture):

Check out the size. This beast is 43 feet long. It’s powered by a 400-horsepower diesel engine. Width and height I’d guesstimate to be 10 feet and 12 feet, respectively. Something that big comes with a big price tag. A quick check of the internut found used and new ones in a price range spanning $200,000 to $400,000.

Four. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. Gasoline not included.

In a nutshell: the vehicle alone makes a bigger-than-bold statement. By itself it already screams FLTHYRCH, so putting a vanity plate as a backside exclamation that augments that blaring point is RDNDNT at best and DNG STPD, at worst.

Why stupid? Well see, it’s all well and good if the only attention this vehicle attracts is from the likes of mild-mannereds like me and the reactions don’t go past smirks, chuckling and eye rolls.

But seeing as it’s piloted by a privileged 1-percenter hogging up the public highway lanes across this great city, county, state, and country, rolling along surrounded by the rest of us 99-percenters, there are inevitably some far more desperate and angry than I who instead of seeing a humongous RV with a lame vanity plate and a lamer explanatory frame, sees a giant bag of money driven flagrantly by someone who just has to be an equally ginormous tool. Maybe they imagine a neon sign in the rear window that says RIPE FOR THE PICKING and/ or a bumper sticker that reads:

DRIVER CARRIES NO MORE
THAN $10,000 IN CASH.

Maybe it’s a 65-year-old handyman who’ll be lucky to retire at all and sees nothing funny about it. Maybe it’s a 20-something day laborer with a family back in Mexico who hasn’t been able to send money home in a month for lack of work. Maybe it’s a gangbanger and his homies with nothing better to do. Maybe it’s a guy rapidly approaching 50 who’s putting himself through a training program at his own expense in hopes of landing a job that barely pays him in a year a tenth of the top-end cost for that RV. Oops, that last one’s a bit too close to home.

Without belaboring it any more than I’ve already belabored it, my point is: One person’s “success” is another’s “sucks.”  Especially so the latter when it’s those that fail at recognizing they’re doing themselves no favors by flaunting their SUCS to those among us who think that SUCS.

There’s a subset of strangers and acquaintances I meet and or interact with out there who — despite all evidence to the contrary — find it perfectly acceptable to call me “Bill.” I find it fascinating. What I also find fascinating is that it’s not a two-way street. If I did go by “Bill” I would bet the odds would be preeeeeeetty long that anyone would auto-default to “Will.”

To me this kneejerk opt-in to an overtly familiar short-version of William is an intriguing  paradox because anyone familiar with me knows I don’t cotton to Bill in the slightest, and if you’re not familiar with me why are you going there without even the courtesy of asking my preference or permission to do so?

Does this substitute-B shit happen to  the world’s Waldos and Wades and Walters and Warrens and Waynes, Wendells, Wesleys, Winstons, Woodys, Wyatts and Wyntons?

“Hi. How are you, I’m Don Geevadam.”

“Hi, Don. I’m Walt Weethadoubayoo.”

“Pleased to meet you, Balt.”

Halt! Never happened. Never bill — I mean: will.

But it happens to me. And when it does — far more than it should — I am quick to correct, as in this screengrab example below that I’ll leave you with from a Facebook exchange this morning with the Auto Club of Southern California over my disappointment that a new program I was interested in wasn’t available to us because our Ford is a hybrid (slightly enlarged if clicked):

(click for better readability)

I love finding random stuff. Some litterbug’s trash is my momentary treasure. Even moreso when it’s just chock-full of unintentional irony, such as this second page of a brief scene discovered this morning in the gutter in front of our house. Why ironic? Well, being someone who makes valiant attempts to minimize the use of my automobile I found the stuff in one of its car-cultcha characters, Russell, ‘fessing up to something of an addiction to excessive driving (though it’s probably a lie to cover up what he’s actually doing). To further the fun, it looks as if the page has been tread upon by a vehicle tire.

Perhaps these were sides used in an audition for this unfunded yet purportedly upcoming Silverlake [sic] 90026 pilot?

If so and otherwise just for the hella, here’s an audio of me undertaking not one but both deeply dramatic roles:

…since I last sat in a barber’s chair. No lie. A full calendar year. Don’t really remember why I decided to stop — I liked my barber; Louie over at Tony’s Barbershop next to the KFC where Glendale Boulevard  meets Fletcher — but as I just kept not going the idea of just letting things grow kinda grew on me. After all, I’ve been wearing it short since I was in ninth grade.

Not that in the past 12 months I haven’t tried to keep some semblance of order to my locks. I bought one of those clipper kits at Costco a few months back and use it to kept the sides short. Mostly. And Susan’s been a dear in helping keep the back from going full-blown mullet — or at least she used to until she finally stopped bringing up the rear probably in hopes I’d seek the services of a professional to tame things.

It’s true things are pretty wild up there. See? I call this look the Angler Fish:

Maybe you can’t tell from the above snap, but there’s hairs up top in that air that are knockknockknockin’ on the eight-inch-length door. The last time I wore it anywhere near that long? Sixth grade. And that wasn’t by choice, that was by the haircuts-aren’t-as-big-a-priority-as-food rule given my mom’s limited income.

Now it’s by choice, and I think it’s probably a mid-life thing. I’ve worn my hair so close to the scalp for so long that it’s nice at this late stage to be able to let it all hang out — and actually makes me miss not doing so when I was younger. Maybe it’s a silly way to capture lost youth, but far less so than, say… a Harley.

As evidenced by discovering two relatively fresh piles on the parkway today while sweeping up the frontyard and sidewalk, either one dog-walker or more have become perfectly OK with their pooch pooping in front of our house and then failing to remove the fecal matter.

As such I’m mulling over the following options for signage and could use guidance among the following three I’m considering:

1. Please scoop your dog’s poop
2. If you’re not a dick, up the dogshit you will pick
3. Circumstance and a dogged (no pun intended) sense of righteousness will eventually conspire to allow me to catch you not cleaning up your dog’s dungheap. So by all means, go ahead and let your pooch crap in front of my house — again. But be warned: when that glorious day of reckoning arrives, I shall race down like winged vengeance upon the steaming pile, palm it from where it lays and do my level best to decorate the back of your head with it.

No. 1 is respectful and direct, but I like No. 2′s Yoda-esque truth. No. 3, though, is very, very satisfying, but would require a pretty large piece of cardboard, hope that the offender isn’t too short-attention spanned, and probably a good lawyer to help get me acquitted of any assault charges. Thoughts?

I think occasionally I’ll come up with an amazing photograph (or at least one that I find so), simply because I take so many pictures. It’s a law of averages that once every couple thousand snaps I’ll be blown away by what I find. It’s certainly not from a mastery of camera mechanics so much as a massive amount of frames made.

The corner of calles Allende and Madero in historic Queretaro, Mexico.
(click it for the bigger picture)

Take the above photo for instance, which I thought was lost when my previous desktop computer crapped out for good last November (but it turned out I’d had the foresight to migrate my photo archives to an external hard drive). It’s a timed exposure — about five seconds in length — with the camera handheld but braced against the balcony railing of our room overlooking Calle Ignacio Allende at the spectacular La Casa de la Marquesa Hotel in Queretaro, Mexico, during our extraordinary visit in the summer of 2008.

I did the long exposure simply because it was too dark to get the scene of the beggar in a doorway without using the flash and destroying all the rich color and texture. And it’s doubtful the flash would’ve illuminated the mood even if I’d used it.

So I opened the shutter it turns out a moment prior to the couple coming from around the corner and walking past the woman ignoring her and her outstretched hand that held a cup presumably to catch any spare pesos that might be offered.

Little did I know that the headlights of a vehicle approaching Calle Madero on Allende from the right would have a bonus strobe effect on the couple’s legs as they walked past.

Pros could certainly argue why it’s not a better fauxtograph than photograph. It’s blurry, busy, and not an easy or quick read. But to me it’s one of my favorite shots of the thousands I took during that trip in large part because of the serendipitous inclusion of the passersby, ghostlike and fleeting against the flesh-and-bone woman looking for a handout. I don’t want to dive too deep into tortured symbolism, but it juxtaposes the fantasy of affluence against the reality of poverty.  I couldn’t have intentionally captured that even if I knew what I was doing.

This morning I enjoyed a couple unique experiences, the first involving a spider floating in full retracted dead position upon the surface of the backyard waterbowl, who turned out not to be dead, and the second demonstrating a rather exceptional ability to find things I hadn’t even lost yet.

Maybe you saw my video a little while ago of a jumping spider I found skating along the surface of the backyard birdbath’s water. Well, this morning during my chores I found a spider of indeterminate species floating in the dog bowl, legs fully pulled in. Fishing it out with a dead leaf I looked for any sign of life but found none, and left what I thought may very well be its tiny little corpse sitting on an adjacent brickwall. Checking back a few minutes later I saw it still hadn’t moved — even when I flipped it over on its back. Oh well.

Then I came back outside about a half-hour later and wouldn’t you know I found it upright and nestled into a nook in the brick, having just needed some extra time to revive. Yay:

For my next trick, I ventured into uncharted territory within the space/time continuum to find something I hadn’t even known was lost: my truck keys. That’s right I went back into the past to rescue something before I discovered it missing in the future. Dood. Let that soak in for a bit.

It was when I went out this morning (after the spider rescue) and down to retrieve the newspaper. Coming back up to the door I glanced entirely randomly at the following section of the edge of the landing at the top of the front steps:

More specifically, my eye somehow caught the partially hidden shiny thing in the center, indicated by the arrow, like so:

Said shiny object turned out to be the key to my truck’s steering wheel lock, and with it unseen is my truck’s key. Now, I’m not sure how the keys got there, but the last time I was in the truck was Tuesday, a full three days prior. So that’s how long they’d been sitting there. My only guess is that while coming up from the garage, the connector opened that allows me to separate the truck keys from my house keys and they dropped there. Whoa.

No big deal? Au contraire. With my propensity to compulsively obsess over things I can’t find when I need them, I invite you to imagine — had I needed the keys before and/or not chanced to spy them in the grass this morning –  how search crazy I would have become when I discovered my keys weren’t where I normally keep them. I literally would have spent hours turning the house upside down and inside out in the mother of all fruitless searches, because despite looking everywhere they could be (as well as in dozens of places they couldn’t physically be), I nevernevernever would have looked along the edge of the walkway at the south side of the house.

So in resting my amazed appreciation at being able to go back in time to find something I hadn’t yet misplaced, I pay homage to “Diehard’s” Hans Gruber: “You asked for miracles, Theo. I give you my Lucky. Keen. Eye.”