I'm up late tonight, cleaning the house in preparation of M returning from Los Angeles. We are in agreement with David Bowie - LA should burn to the fucking ground. All that sunshine and mountains and sea, and they still managed to fuck it up somehow. I really do think there is something to limitations and constraints being the wellspring of creativity. Even Boston is better!

I was driving around Boston late, and I heard this come up on the radio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ-KB1gqqMg

So, you may hear it and say, "yeah Moxie, that's more British jingly-jangly dreamy shit that you always send links of". And to that, I say - well, yeah. I like it. And as I was pulling onto that exciting loop over the Charles River by MIT, making my turn unnecessarily tight to squeeze out a little slippage from my 2-seater, I got to thinking of how times are much better than way-back-when.

Leaving out as much of the teenage-angst, I recall that, for those who really DIG something that happened to run against the mainstreams of the time, that you had to have a little bit of leather to your hide or no fucks to give about the negative comments you might get. As a teenage radio restorer with a penchant for early-30's jazz AND disco...well, that just about speaks for itself. But as I've been looking around for all the odd and new fashions today, I get this awesome feeling, not unlike an electric blanket, for all sorts of little niche things like mopeds, robot builting, LEGOs, there is a community that supports and champions it - even getting a little scratch out of it!

That in itself isn't new - that's just the Internet delivering on some of the promises of long ago. Guess all it took was bandwidth. There is something more. A sort of meritocracy - that if you do SOMETHING well, and call up in the voice of the inner child in all of us, that it deserves applause. Build a monster robot in your shed, stack and unstack cups wicked fast, mix a beat to a cockatiel singing - that's COOL. Personally, I've always thought so. But I teleported one of those Steampunk guys to 1984; a bunch of kids in my neighborhood threw crab apples at him!

Why this tolerance? I thought as I passed the Capitol Theater on Mass Ave. Is this part of a great swinging of the pendulum, from a positivism to past-itivitsm and back? Could this be the beginning of our own personal 1960s? Or is it a compensation for our current situation, that we give everybody a pass because otherwise we'd all realize that things are, or are going to be, in the shitter for a long time and we'd be best to take our suicide pills. That we are making our own little parts of the world as nice as we can to overcome the gloom around us. I hope it's the former.

I've gotta dash, because I'm cooking some rice and it is boiling over - and if there is one thing you must not do to an Asian woman hankering for rice, is fuck up the rice.