Thought Sausage

Looks like that'll about do it for yet another halloween weekend. I expect pics to be posted by some party involved @ some point. I like Halloween because A. It basically is an excuse for women to dress slutty and not feel slutty, B. There's inevitably a shitload of parties that involve me not spending an heinous amount of money and C. It is usually the last weekend before the 'cold' sets in making hopping around to various nightspots a pain in the ass due to cold. I DON'T like halloween because A. 90% of the costumes men wear usually just make them look like bigger tools than they already are B. It is another one of these holidays that doesn't really have any real significance to our culture, as in recent times, it was a holiday invented to get people to spend more money (like Valentines Day) and C. My usual haunts that are populated by people who are out every weekend are now invaded by people who rarely go out and thus, don't know how to handle themselves in a bar or a party once they attempt to consume as much alcohol as the rest of us. This usually results in people acting like complete fucking idiots. I did pretty good this year at avoiding altercations, but usually, my Halloweens net at least one instance where I punch somebody the fuck out or come very near to it because of something they said or did to me or my friends. i guess I'm growing up.

On a non-Halloween (aka something that actually matters) note, Tomas and I hit Palos all day Saturday and tore some shit up. This weekend we found ''the good shit". Boy howdy the south west corner of that park has some tasty trails. I'm getting good enough to where I can actually hop rocks and get air rather than just lumber through things. The negative side of taht is that it looks like my days of not destroying tubes are over. I punctured the hell out of my front tire towards the end of the day which meant I had to walk/limp the thing back to the car for a solid 3 miles. That sucked to say the least. Normally I'm loaded to the gills for my road bike excursions with extra tubes, pumps CO2 etc. Not so much that day and that little 3 mile hike has learned me but good. So going forward, I'll be armed with plenty of tubes and CO2 (cos I'll be damned if I'm gonna hand-pump a fucking MTB tube).

Other than that, trail conditions were pretty muddy...so my bike looks pretty cool right now with all the mud all over it. This weekend I think I'm going to head for Iowa (specifically the Scott County Park) and check out the trails there. Rumor has it they are decent, but after what we did in Palos this weekend my expectations are kind of high. Also on the agenda for this weekend is me eating lots of Mongolian BBQ. Jesus that's crack to me.

Woke up uncharacteristically early today seeing as how I actually didn't get home until 5:15 or so, and then I tinkered with shit on the Roxbox till about 6. Headed over to Schmudde's new pad. As more evidence that Dave is without a doubt one of the cooler motherfuckers to shuffle onto this mortal coil, he tracked down a pretty goddamn sweet loft. We had a typical Dave/Dave jam session with conversation ranging from problems we've encountered with women to the current presidential spread to places that have free buffalo wings. Turns out Dave's next project is a documentary on the Rust Belt. We got to talking about Waterloo Iowa and how it is one of the cities that would technically be part of that ilk and how based on census info, it's one of the cities that hasn't rebounded. For those of you who don't live there or know anything about it, it was once a large manufacturing hub (by Iowa's standards) for a few major manufacturers. John Deere is still there but they reduced their presence in the downtown area significantly since the 80's. As a result their downtown area has had a lot of problems trying to recover and reinvent themselves. Add to this their constant bickering with their half-retarded sister town of Cedar Falls (on a city politic level, nobody else can be bothered to give a flying fuck) and this racial divide that basically dictates "black people to the east, white people to the west" which seems silly for a town with a population hovering around 60k and you basically come up with a blue collar city that is struggling with identity and purpose.

Then Dave sent me this email tonight:

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Just the way the world works man:

http://www.mettransit.org/

Not only is information on how to take public transportation to the new
Waterloo casino available, it is on the front page, in a different
colour, different font and larger size just to make sure no one can
miss it.

This is a pretty common trend with these things. Casinos are there to
take advantage of people that don't have the power to say no... that
live hopeless lives already.... you have to make sure that a bus gets
to it and that every stupid fucking poor person knows. These people
then incur larger debts and the money goes into the city council's
pockets then redistributed in their own interests (which usually has
very little to do with the actual interests of Joe Jobless who just
needs to learn how to handle money and raise his 10 kids).

Sad

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To clarify what Dave is talking about here...riding the bus in Waterloo is very different than riding the bus in Chicago or another large area. It's usually there for the really poor or disabled people. Makes ya think....

Not that I'm a huge anti-gambling guy. I personally don't gamble, as that's a vice that never held my interest. But this does produce a sad commentary on the state of things when the public transit trumpets going to the casino as a great development.

I can't get the pdf thingy to work, but does MET go to Hickory Hills, stop at George Wyth or Hartman Reserve?

To be fair though, a lot of people that use that bus probably also work at the casino and rely on it for transportation to work. Doesn't change the fact that a casino does what it does.