Man I ain't too sure what's up with Ray

Dude just came in here all needin' me to do up some computer help, particularly graphics. I ain't too much for Photoshop but after I calmed him down and got his basic wants clarified I was able to teach myself the program fairly quickly as it is pretty intuitive (you have to mentally navigate with the awareness that this is a very old program with a massive feature set yet also has had teams trying to dumb it down for years -- it's like dancing with a beautiful woman, but a church lady is holding a ruler between you the whole time).

Anyhow this is what he wanted me to make:

It is Not Winter

There is I guess an apricot tree or something and its branches sort of stick past the window where I sit and type. Today it completely exploded with white little flowers, like every four inches along, looking straight-up like a popcorn tree. A lot of other plants are acting up now too, and it's that time of year where the gray seems to be gone and cool air pushes like star jasmine and lily fragrances all around. In my brain I get kind of a *click* and I turn some sort of corner out of winter. I need to sit down and figure out what the trigger is so I can pull it earlier in the year.

Trees are kind of like dinosaurs: ancient as all hell, just way slow to adapt, and tough. You can tell how primitive a thing is by how many children it makes, like how spiders and sea turtles make like a thousand babies just to get one or six to survive. Apricot trees are the same way. They make a thousand apricots a year and if every single one took root where it fell, they would kill the mother tree and each other. However, apricot trees exist because they "know" a raccoon and a badger will see *most* of the fruit on the ground and go all NOM NOM NOM...no, this is bad reasoning. Does an apricot seed need the fruit surrounding it in order to germinate, or does it count on an animal eating the fruit and dispersing the seed somewhere else, like in a pile of fresh nutritious poop? I need to go to college. This is like real basic horticulture or botany or something. I wish I had any kind of education at all.

Okay I just got back from lookin' at the course listing catalog for the Community College and I remembered why I never went back to school. If I want to learn about why apricot trees do what they do, I have to pay sixty bucks, sit in a classroom for three months behind some guy who really, really likes the San Francisco Giants, and hope all to hell that the teacher covers that topic. Man that is inefficient.

I think the Community College should just be like a hotline where every professor is an operator and your question gets routed to the right one when you call. Each call could be a dollar. Looks like it's time for some school reforms, based on my new idea of cost-effective learning. Look out, world's education system. Everything changes today, with this blog about how I am too boneheaded to just look up apricot trees on Wikipedia.

New Italian Place that Ray made me go

Dang but they shoehorned this new Martha Stewart-type Italian place into the old Letty's Taqueria space, that old dingy F-minus "what in the hell empty since six years where do they get a dollar" taco shop on the drag on Benson. I never really saw how they stayed in business since if you ordered a chicken burrito you could really tell that the chicken was sittin' around in a cold steel tray for five days developin' grain. I ate there twice and got the read and freaked hard each time on dreams of pump skitters and doin' the fetus pinwheel in sweated-up sheets.

Ray totally loves this new place, mainly based on the Italian dude Vito who runs it and is all friends with every customer pretty hard. I don't know. I get that read on Vito like, "The man who is friends with everyone is friends with no one." Ray eats it up like the bread, actin' all "made" when the dude says, "Is a special lasagna today for you Ray, I bring it to you special." He don't give it to Ray for any kind of deal and the only thing special about it is that the word "special" got said twice. I think he's just sellin' it to Ray 'cause he knows Ray would buy anything he talked about and it's one of those casserole-based dishes that you can scrape outta the pan corner and dump some red sauce on. Ray pays twenty-nine dollars for stuff Vito's dishwasher would put his cigarette butt in.

Here are the following categories of dude accents that can sell things to dumb American guys, graded by power of accent:

1. Italian
2. English
3. Irish
4. Franco-Bedouin (seriously, Youtube this)
5. Dennis Leary (eclipsed Bill Cosby in 1993)

First Rain.

Alright so the deal with first rain is that I like to bundle all up in this preposterous old North Face "ski rescue"-type thigh-length jacket that I lifted outta Ray's car one time (it has like seventeen zippers and three drawstrings and a thermal-lined waterproof hood that stuffs down into one of the collars) and put on some shorts and my crispiest Chucks and walk the town for a good half day or so. I smell the creek and look at the gutters run (kind of foamy since it's the first) and listen to the drops fall on my lid when I go under the cedars by the high school. I always make a little pass by a storm drain we used to skate; it's all broken up by time and throbbin' ground now and crammed with roots. I run kind of fast and sideways up where the edge of the bank was and jump over the gap where we would ollie. I doubt I could even ollie any more. I doubt anyone would care if I did. I certainly don't think anyone needs me to.

After I did my big long walk today, all miles and miles, I stopped into a calzone place and got a pretty good do-up. Then I hoofed it home and Molly was on the TV and I just read my sites for a good long bit. I hope you had a good first rain too or that you have one soon. I don't realize it but it's probably the center of my year.

Why did I get screamed at

Man I was down at Lucky Go getting the wrong printer cable for Molly and when I was out in the parking lot with my cheap little plastic bag this forty five year-old gutty dude with real flat wet combed hair got out of his car (a pretty bad old Nissan that a man his age should be beyond) and started over at me. He kept patting down his hair and running his thumbs around the inside of his waistband, you know, and when he got like ten feet from me he had a pretty good lather on, just screaming that I was a son of a bitch. It gave me the feeling that I hadn't noticed him earlier when he drove by and he thought I had flipped him off (I had not just errantly done any flipping off that morning so that seems unlikely). Maybe he reasoned me for another dude who had done him over with some cash or parts. I just started to back away because I didn't have much anger at the time and when he advanced I actually ran fifteen feet. When I saw that he didn't chase after me I started to walk again. It was a pretty basic "weird scene," like might make sense if you were looking at two fairly sophisticated beetles in a terrarium but man was this guy coming off the whiskey or something. Or is it whisky? No wonder people who drink whiskey are always so mad, they're like WHAT THE HELL AM I DRINKING WHISKY OR WHISKEY and that just makes them drink more. This guy was like that, a man who would drink to excess because his beverage had an outmoded spelling distinction, and then yell at people by the cheap electrical parts store. That is the kind of guy who usually notices me in public.

Ray's Pedicure Routine.

So like Ray was all mincin' around dandy on the white carpet in his living room today while I was watching car races on the satellite, and that kind of ate at me after a while, so I was like "what's up with you making tiny little pleased steps and smiling. You look like Liberace doing the Don't Step On The Baby Ants Dance." Then the dude smiled directly at me and the rest went like this.

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RAY: Dude, I just had the mother of all pedicures. This girl Xa Bi was rubbin’ on my doggies so hard and long, I don't mind tellin' you that I closed my eyes and thought about the act for like half an hour.

ME: Well that's fine I mean I hope you did not get a nasty old tumescence though.

RAY: Like hell I didn't! Why you think I go there?

ME: To have your feet cleaned and your nails trimmed and perhaps some calluses scraped, I don't know.

RAY: Don't get me wrong, they do that. But a big part of their service is the whole fantasy angle. It's like, "Wink, nudge, you are making me hot as the devil, and don't you know it, you sweet little mystical peach."

ME: I think if the chick knew you were thinking that she would jump back like that part in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox plays a guitar note through Doc Brown's massive speaker.

RAY: Hell no, dogg. Those ladies know what it's all about. They're hella cuttin' it up in Vietnamese, all smilin', and sometimes I catch the other ladies in the shop lookin' over at me and smilin' and gigglin'. They know I know the deal, man of the world, all that. Plus, I ALWAYS tip well.

ME: Uh huh and can they actually see your wrong old tumescence.

RAY: Damn straight, man. It's cultural — you got to let it show, so they can know you're in on the deal and gettin' the most of it. I always wear these real light, loose linen pants to my pedicure, and I go commando, so they can watch me pitch the tent. Another sign of respect. It's like how a sommelier won't offer you certain bottles if he knows you ain't a real player.

ME: Do you always get the same girl.

RAY: No, they always give me the youngest one. It's kind of a form of old-school respect, since they know the youngest girl will work the hardest.

ME: Oh uh okay I see. And at the end is the girl like all gracious and chatty when you give her the tip.

RAY: See, that's another thing you don't understand about the Vietnamese. They are real shy and embarrassed when it comes to money changin' hands — it's almost shameful to them. Every time I hand my girl her tip, she blushes and just kind of looks down and away as she takes it. The older ladies always bust out in this big laugh and she runs back to the towel room. Every time, dude. It's their way.

ME: And how do you leave the place.

RAY: Oh, I get up and give everybody a big wave goodbye. They all laugh some more, because homeboy is so blissed. After that I strut out and get a taco or two next door.

ME: Man where did you even learn how to get a pedicure all in the know like that.

RAY: I read so many magazines, dude, it all kind of blends together. I wish I remembered, sorry, or I'd let you borrow it.

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McDonald's vs Starbucks vs Ray vs Me

Dang it man but Ray just has so much faith in McDonald's it is ridiculous. Today it came out in the news that Mickey D's is gonna try to compete with Starbucks by havin' baristas and fancy coffee drinks and Ray was just all kinds of sure that was gonna put Starbucks outta business. It's lazy to side with the big-ass (well, bigger-ass) ruthless worldwide conglomerate and it shows no bag. Maybe that's how you make it in his investments and finances world but lazy don't fly with me.

RAY: Check it out, dude! McDonald’s is gonna wipe Starbucks off the map by havin’ baristas and fancy coffee drinks!

ME: Man that is baloney the Venn diagram of their customer bases looks like an eight

RAY: Say what you want. McDonald’s plays to win.

ME: Tell me what you like most about Starbucks I mean I know you get coffee there

RAY: The chicks who work there, dude! All tight black pants, smilin’, hell of took a shower lately...

ME: Now tell me what you remember about the McDonald’s worker chicks

RAY: They...they get these weird little purple blotches on their faces, but they don’t seem to come to a head. And...and they got those flappy bellies that the company makes them tuck into their pants. Bellies that could hang into a sink, but not stick out above a sink. Wait, hold on a minute, man—

ME: Plus think about it Ray if they can’t even repeat NUMBER THREE, DIET COKE how they gonna do with a double venti short tall nonfat mocha no foam cappuccino with two ice cubes and a half shot of sugarfree vanilla for Mackenzie who by the way is a skinny woman in Versace sunglasses and not a fat Irish man in an Aran cable sweater holding a Guinness

RAY: Well, they wouldn't offer all those options, first of all. You wouldn't be allowed to customize.

ME: In that case they ain't competin' with Starbucks then since Starbucks' whole model is that Starbucks is the ONLY place you can get your exact drink and your exact drink is a sacred event without which your day is ruined

RAY: That may be, but there are a lotta fringe people who ain't into complicated coffee drinks yet and Starbucks ain't got their business. McDonald's will get these customers.

ME: So my point about the Venn diagram holds up even on your side because McDonald's would not be taking any existing customers from Starbucks and in fact McDonald's will actually serve as a gateway to frou-frou coffee which will then lead frou-frou coffee converts to the greater options and hotter, bathed chicks of Starbucks

RAY: Jesus Christ, dude! How much in advance did you think about all this?! Enough, already!

ME: I don't have to think about things in advance to know what I think

RAY: Alright, alright. Maybe Starbucks will stay in business. You only all on about this 'cause your fiancée works there.

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We cooled it from there, since I knew I was just gettin' steamed and gonna dis on my fellow, and all in all I knew it wasn't more than just cola wars. Let Starbucks and Mickey D's try to out-sell each other in hot brown narcotics and god but am I ashamed I even let myself get worked up for either side. Jesus Christ do I got to go on that week-long trip to the desert men sometimes need.