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Have any of you seen that Goofy cartoon in which the meek family man turns into a raving lunatic as soon as he gets behind the wheel? It’s probably the funniest cartoon I’ve ever seen, but even more importantly, it’s totally true. Driving can bring out the worst in people.

In point of fact, it is on the road where all that is wrong and twisted with the human race is given free reign, where all the repressed and submerged psychoses bubble to the surface, and men become monsters, women become … wyverns?

Shane Nickerson, in an effort to improve our lives and our society, has instituted the Asshole Fine. Basically this means that anyone who behaves in a manner Assholeish must pay a fine. Nearly all Assholeish behaviors are exhibited while driving. For example, driving a vehicle with a bumper sticker with any character from Calvin & Hobbes urinating. Instant Asshole Fine.

I would now like to dispense a mass Asshole Fine to about a thousand and one drivers. I shall explain.

To get across Pasadena, I often take one or the other of the broad avenues running from East to West. Most often, I find myself on Del Mar, which as any native of Pasadena will tell you, is probably the fastest way to cut across the city, especially when the 210 Freeway has gone into parking lot mode (i.e. nineteen hours out of every day).

Del Mar is a 35mph zone. I often go 40 to 45 (sorry, mom). Since the police are not friendly to me in a generalized sense, I’ll be damned if I risk another speeding ticket (yes, another — I still have nightmares) and push it to 50.

I really don’t think going 45 in a 35 zone is pokey, do you? Yet invariably some mofo creeps up on my tail and tries to basically drive up on top of me, in some pathetic bid to pressure me into going faster.

I’m not talking driving a bit close behind me. I’m talking driving up so close that it’s a miracle our bumpers don’t touch, until the tailgater’s car completely dominates my rear-view mirror. I’m talking about being so close that, if an animal or a kid ran in front of my car and I had to slam on the brakes in a hurry, the person behind me would have no distance to react, plow into me, and probably knock my own car forward into the animal/kid.

I fucking hate tailgaters. I think a special level of hell should be reserved for said fuckheads, where the fires get nice and toasty, and Shane’s Asshole Fine should be at the maximum permissable by law. If you are not a tailgater, thank you. If you are, please mend your ways and turn from the Path of the Asshat before all is lost. Because those fires burn hot way down there, man.

And, do these tailgaters actually think that I’m going to go faster just because they’re breathing down my neck? It reminds me of telemarketers — do they really believe that making me annoyed by tying up my phone is going to induce me to go with their service? Same with tailgaters. Taking out their pent-up aggression to get home three minutes faster by endangering themselves and me is really kind of impotent. All it does is make me angry.

Case in point. Some while ago, in the foggy mists of the recent past, I was driving home through a quiet neighborhood back to my house, armed with cappucinos. I was going a hair over 40 on a 35mph street. The entire distance in front of and behind me was empty of vehicles. Post-morning rush hour. The only car was some complete asshole young woman in a black BMW, tailgating me like she was a particular unpleasant breed of tick which had lodged itself in my rear license plate.

She clung to the rear of my car for about a half mile of driving (over the speed limit, mind you) before I became so infuriated that I slowed down, first to the speed limit, then five below. Then ten below. Finally, I came to a dead stop right in the middle of the road.

I tried to glare at her through my rear-view mirror. But instead of perhaps flooring it and whipping round me, or giving me the finger or something, anything, instead I discovered to my horror that she was taking the opportunity of me stopping dead right in the middle of the road to re-apply her makeup in her own rear-view mirror. Like it was completely natural that the car in front of her might come to a complete standstill in the middle of the road and that under no circumstances was it at all possible that it was because she had been tailgating the car in front of her to the point of extreme danger for the last mile.

So I started forward again. And, sure enough, like a lover who cannot bear to be parted from the embrace of her loved one, she proceeded to tailgate me to the extreme tailgating permissable by physical law, until I finally turned off onto the side street which would lead me home, and we were twain.

Why? Why must people do this? This young woman wasn’t even being particularly aggressive. In her case this was like some kind of sick, depraved psychological condition manifesting itself on the road. A need to belong, perhaps? A need to be cozily close to the person ahead of you, to avoid being alone? Had she put on the wrong contact lenses that morning and actually mistakenly believed I was actually a few car-lengths ahead of her? Was she in need of medical of professional assistance?

For those who know it, Foothill Blvd. is a major two-lane thoroughfare that kind of runs parallel to the 210. I cannot count the number of times that I have been driving along at over fifty miles per hour, while someone behind me tailgates me the whole bloody way, even though there are no cars whatsoever in the other lane and they can easily shift over to pass me. Yet they don’t. They just spend the whole way breathing down my neck while I drive and drive and drive and become more and more infuriated. They just cling, oblivious, needy.

In my roundabout sort of unprofessional way, I suppose I’m coming to the conclusion that there are two principal types of tailgaters: those who cling because it is their way, and those who push because they want to go faster and you’re in their way. Both are equally annoying, both must be charged the maximum possible Asshole Fine.

On the German Autobahnen, where nearly two-thirds of the highways have no speed limit, tailgating is a major offense, because it’s so dangerous. Unmarked police cars with camera equipment drive around catching people in the act. Then they cut their heads off. No, they don’t, but I’m told that the ticket bears a heavy price tag. No cop has over pulled over a tailgater here in America in the sum of my experience. Have any of you even heard of someone getting a ticket for tailgating? I’d feel good if you did, but I bet you haven’t.

Tailgaters. Mend your ways before you roast, roast, roast.

I wonder if Shane has made his first million from collecting on the Asshole Fine yet?

After a hell of a scorching weekend, Los Angeles’ unique phenomenon known as the June Gloom has settled in.

I have mixed feelings about the June Gloom. On the one hand, it offers relief from intense heat. That’s a good thing. I hate intense heat (which makes me question my sanity about moving to an LA valley, but that’s another story for another time). Sorta on the same hand, it makes me a bit nostalgic for the San Fran Bay Area, where I was born and spent many years of my youth. Ocean fog is a unique trait of the Bay Area, and a feature of it I love. Though in recent years there was less of it (global warming, perhaps? I hope not).

On the other hand it fulfills its title — gloom — quite nicely. I wrote a rant a few weeks back about how the gloomy weather had really induced depression, not just in me, but in some other locals. And this gloom we have today is very similar. If today is anything to go by, the weather helps to fuel my constant feelings of depression, worthlessness, and general loseraucity (I do apologize, this post will be all about inventing stupid new words).

A quick trip to the Weather Underground confirms that the week will roll out with more of the same, possibly burning to some hazy sunshine in the afternoon, possibly not, while the highs taper off out of the 80s and into the upper 70s. Again, that’s a good and bad thing, all at the same time.

Anyway, this week I haven’t posted anything new to this lame blog, because I really haven’t known what to say. Truth be told, I’m in something of a blog crisis. I’m very new to this blog trick, and I really don’t feel I’ve found my right path yet, both in writing the entries, and in figuring out what this blog is supposed to be about.

Of the blogs and podcasts I visit/hear on a regular basis, all of them can be separated into one of two categories:

1. personal blogs
2. topic blogs

By which I mean that personal blogs are an open journal or diary of their author, writing about whatever the author wishes to, and reflecting that author’s personality and life. They are often fiercely honest. Among these are some of the local Los Angeles-based blogs I read, including Shane Nickerson, Wil Wheaton, Liz Rizzo, and so on. These blogs are reflections of their authors’ personalities and thoughts, on whatever topic those thoughts might happen to dwell at that particular point. What gives these blogs coherency and direction is that they’re always a reflection of the author’s persona, despite the variation in subject matter.

The topic blogs, as I call them, are not an online diary but rather more like a newsletter or zine done by one or more authors on a particular topic. Although they certainly reflect the attitudes and opinions of their authors, they are usually limited entirely to one subject or topic. Most professional blogs fall into this category, including many of the web design blogs I visit, such as Eric Meyer, Dave Shea, and Jason Santa Maria. Similarly, some of the gaming blogs I read do the same thing, with posts pretty much sticking to the topic at hand. Many of these blogs will occasionally see unrelated posts or personal posts pop in, but only occasionally and often with apologies for straying off-topic.

Of these two categories, it was the former — the personal blog — which I wanted mine to fall into. But as I cast back over the handful of posts I’ve written since launching this site in early April, I see that very, very few of the posts are very personal at all. Some of them are downright inane. When I first launched I was interested in writing on a variety of fun topics that were of interest to me: a bit of science fiction, a bit of gaming, a smattering of heavy metal. And, pretty much, that’s what I did.

It wasn’t the right way to go. It’s not that I don’t like to write on these subjects. It’s that they really don’t mesh together very well to form any sort of coherency. Actually, it’s entirely possible that I’m the only person on the entire Internetsphere who actually likes all those subjects, at the same time. It’s my belief that the scattered nature of my posts make for a scattered, unfocused blog.

On the 16th, Shane Nickerson is going to throw this get-together with a hand-selected group of local bloggers reading their best selections on-stage. I wager that, in addition to those up on the stage, many of the audience will themselves be bloggers (including me). This idea of forming a community out of geographically-close blog people is really exciting to me. I personally can’t wait to go.

Yet. The one sort of sour side of it to me is that makes me see that my own blog hasn’t really been the success I want it to be. It makes me compare their blogs to mine, and I find mine wanting. Looking over my posts, I realized there really wasn’t anything I had ever written that was stage-worthy. For some of those guys who will appear, they have an embarrassment of riches. Of course, some of them have been blogging for years and years, but still.

I realize that I lack the courage and perspective to write the fiercely personal blog I wish to. In order to make it that which I want it to be, I must somehow find that courage, and that perspective on myself.

This post itself is somewhat unfocused. There’s no solution or goal I seek in writing this. It is observation, and disposition. Nothing more. I’ll still keep plugging away, writing my silly things. Evolution, improvement may come. Or it may not. We’ll see. Hope I’ll have some people join me for the ride. I’ve only been blogging for two months. I’m a first level rogue still struggling to pick those super-easy locks, to build the experience to make it to level two.

And for those of you who are interested in web design, but hate heavy metal, or those of you interested in heavy metal but hate Star Wars: sorry. I’m a weird guy; I have weird combinations of interests.

Negativity ain’t a great disposition. I blame it on the weather. I blame it on the June Bloggoom.

Yesterday Wil Wheaton, fourth Earl of Pasadena, posted this message about Spring here in Pasadena. His cheerful disposition reminded me that I should probably have more of a cheerful disposition; sometimes I’m so wrapped up in the shit I’m dealing with that I forget to step back and appreciate what I have right in front of me.

I’ve been living in a house that I’ve been remodeling from a dump into, hopefully, a work of art. It’s been cripplingly expensive, miserably unhappy, and immensely difficult to work on. Essentially, I’ve done all the remodeling alone with my brother without any help, including plumbing, electrical, structural, woodworking, tile-laying … and landscaping.

And landscaping must surely be one of the most rewarding. I’ve planted salvias, vines, lavenders, hibiscus, tons of roses, and on and on, and it’s unspeakably gratifying to see a plant you’ve planted and nurtured grow and mature into something truly spectacular.

But I can lose sight of that. It’s been such a royal pain in the ass living through this project, and it’s so often jeopardized so many other aspects of my life, that I can lose sight of what I’ve accomplished here. So it’s a nice thing to have my consciousness jogged a bit now and again, so I can step back and look at the fruits of my labors and think, “yeah, I fucking planted that.”

(click image to biggify lots)

And the hummingbirds love me.

Lately, for some reason, I’ve been recalling moments of shame from my distant past, and feeling miserable about them. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because mentally I’m not in the best of places right now, but in any event these moments pop unbidden into my mind and force me to look at them and don’t really seem to much want to go back away again.

One of them takes me way back to the fifth grade, and to a moment when I did something shitty that I’ve never been able to forget, or ignore. I call it a moment of guilt nostalgia.

My best friend of the third and fourth grades, Rob, was a great kid. He was nice and he was thoughtful, and our favorite thing to do was stage these elaborate fictional epics with our action figures out in the yard of his house, that would go on for hours. Like William Goldman has mentioned about The Princess Bride being the best thing he ever wrote because it just came to him when telling a story to his daughters, I think those elaborate epics with my friend Rob were the best things I ever wrote, because they flowed without contrivance, like a pure exercise of the imagination.
When Rob had his birthday party in the fourth grade, it was just him and me. We rented a bunch of scummy post-apocalypse action flicks and stayed up half the night.

Enter the fifth grade, which, in the town I lived, was the first year of middle school, and thus a different school in a different part of town. Rob and I drifted apart and I didn’t see him as much because — and this was my greatest flaw as a kid — other kids latched on to me and dictated my time and my activities. These new friends marginalized Rob and capitalized all my time, and I was too dumb and too lazy to keep control of my own friends and my own time.

Here’s where things get difficult.

I hadn’t seen Rob in a while. One day, during recess or lunch time or whatever, I happened to be loitering with a group of kids, none of whom were my friends, and Rob was a few feet away playing with this techy windup car that was a fad at the time. It took the concept of windup and made it super windup, the Optimus Prime of windups. But that’s not the point. Rob was kind of a heavy kid at the time, and as he stooped down one of the kids who was not my friend but whom I was standing near made a crack about Rob. I don’t know what he said, but I know it was mean, and I know it was hurtful, because Rob turned and looked at the group I was standing near, who of course all laughed in that delightful, innocent way children do, when they see an opportunity to get a rise out of mercilessly crushing one of their fellows. And this is the part I keep reliving over and over in my mind …

I laughed too.

It was more of a confused titter. Kids around me were laughing and in my dazed, idiotic state I joined in. But I did laugh.

A laugh which choked to death in my throat when I saw the expression of hurt on Rob’s face. Not directed at me; he didn’t even look at me, which might actually have made it worse. But it was the pained look of a kid victimized by a group of his peers.

Now, here’s where the guilt comes in. It took one look at Rob’s face to know that he was hurt and that I was tittering at something like a fool when I should have really hauled back and broken the teeth of the little prick who had made the crack about my friend.

I didn’t. I didn’t even walk over to Rob and let him know that I was not one of those kids laughing cruelly at him, offer him the support of a friend.

Instead, I guiltily skulked away, ashamed at my accidental laugh and ashamed at my skulking.

Rob and I continued to drift apart, and at the end of that school year, my family uprooted and relocated three hundred miles away, and I haven’t been in contact with Rob since, though I’ve often wished to renew the contact.

Even writing about it now renews the pain and the guilt I felt at the time, and the regret that I didn’t do what a friend should do and support him.

And that, my friends, is guilt nostalgia.

There are those admissions in life which cause instant, mass derision, lowering of opinion, sneering, possibly convulsive dismay. Admissions which transform you from a relatively normal person into a stoner dropout, from a more-or-less acceptable human being into an outcast from society. Admissions which send you to the back of the class, the back of the bus, the back of the queue.

No, I’m not talking about being an RPGer (another post, another time). I am talking, of course, about being a heavy metal fan.

Particularly in America, heavy metal fans have a long, long popular misconception to live down. They were the kids with the torn jeans hanging out at the high school with the hackeysack, who smelled like cigarettes and had the long hair and the jean jackets. They might even have been the kids who hung out at the BMX race tracks, swapping crystal meth stories.

At least in the environment in which I grew up, this was the standard accepted image of the typical heavy metal fan, especially in the Eighties. Now, now with death metal and Norwegian black metal bands who burn down churches and eat children … Jesus, the popular image of the HM fan might actually be worse. I can’t imagine.

I’ve been a heavy metal fan off and on since I was a teenager. For better or worse, I’ve never had long hair, I’ve never owned a jean jacket (with or without patches), I’ve never been a smoker and I’ve always been a terrible HackeySack player. But I was a big metal fan as a teenager and, in recent years — probably because I’m going through some kind of pathetic nostalgic regression — I’ve returned to the metal fold in a big way, and it now eats up most of my listening hours.

I’m not talking about the new (nu) metal stuff, or any of the many flavors of extreme metal. I can’t get with that stuff. For me, heavy metal is classic metal, the groups that came to the fore when the term was new and fresh, who defined the genre in its heyday. And the bands who exist now who prefer to pay homage to that unfashionable, uncommercial sound.

To me, heavy metal music is music with grand visions of realms of fantasy, of retrieving The Sword from the Lady of the Lake, of finding yourself in an enchanted forest fleeing from the snarling, ravening hordes. Or smuggling illicit goods in my spacecraft through Zhodani Space. Or being a powerslave, a living god, in ancient Egypt.

Heavy metal music stirs my imagination the same way the books I read do. To a large extent, its subject matter is the books I read.

This is not fashionable. These lyrical concepts are not fashionable. And I’ve known for a long time that this style of music will not make me popular. Most people with whom I speak won’t share the enthusiasm I have for this dusty, moldery form of music whose time has probably long since come and gone, and was never highly-regarded even at its peak. I can accept that. But I love this crazy, silly, energetic little corner of the music shelves, and I could never accept letting it go.

My name is Raphael, and I am a heavy metal fan.