week 43 of 2024

long week, lock in. sorry for the long post, didn’t have the energy to make it shorter.

chee’s list

• [x] taco truck
• [x] ask everyone if they work in pictures
• [x] crush on a girl in the record store
• [ ] jump off the H of the Hollywood sign

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A ver.

The start of the week was a little under a century ago. There was a lackadaisy. It was low vroomph. I was. The week carried on, I watched the LIVEstream of LIVE as I packed my bags. Great talks in that. It’s strange watching a conference on-line that’s 8000km away while you pack your bags to get ready to be in that very room with those very people tomorrow. Someone asked LU about emotional unblockers for writing and i quickly threw together typewriter as a digital replica of the unblocking from the clonky typewriter i got as a teenager.

The closest we’ve ever gotten to an ideal model of computing is Microsoft Excel.

5pm is no time for a flight. No staying up all night for that, no going to stay at the airport hotel the night pre. It’s no time for a flight, makes a whole day wrong the way shaped. I was pretty plastered already by the time I arrived. Met a girl called Shelby at the security line, I’d found a couple of white claws in my pocket and offered her a lime. But she was in a panic & a pickle, didn’t know she only got to have one translucent bag and had brought enough make up to put on a minstrel show. I rented her space in my trancluent pouch ‘cause i had plenty of space having brought only 1 liquid and 3 pastes. On the other side we caught up for a quick pint while she repacked her contraband. Turns out she’s a finance girly who goes to UCLA, in London for a year at LSE, and today was on her way to Sofia, Bulgaria. A basic white girl from SoCal with the most beautiful green eyes, essentially my idol, everything i’ve ever wished i were. “What are your must-dos for a week in Los Angeles?”

shelby’s list

• [ ] The Getty Villa
• [ ] Erewhon
• [ ] in-n-out
• [ ] Venice beach (boardwalk)
• [ ] Laugh Factory
• [ ] Brother’s Cousin (westwood/ucla)
• [ ] Barney’s beanery (popular with friends)

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i’ve not done any of this yet, this is why i’ll never be a moneyed up socal white girl with the most beautiful green eyes i’ve ever seen. I did really try to hit up In-n-Out one time but apparently 10.m. is their busy period as well as all other periods. The other people I met in the airport… that info’s a little hazy. I remember buying lipstick from someone, being followed into a cigarette store, and meeting a guy called Kurt who told me to rent a convertable and drive around. well i haven’t done that neither.

So let’s get on the plane, okay, easy money. Virgin Atlantic tell me that because i’m so drunk they won’t be able to serve me on the flight. i watch half a show, remember i’d meant to pack a dazzy for this part, oh well and sleep for a few hours. an okay lunch and dinner. plane’s the only time i ever eat a dessert.

Border control, easy money. Smoothest experience i ever had at US entry. We were laughing and joking and talking tequila. I asked him how’s your shift and he said nearly over and i guess that’s why it was so nice and easy breezy lime juice.

How do i get out of the airport? Airports are all a big circle when you get out, i just wanna walk but i keep ending up where i came from. i find the area where i can book a Lyft and Daniel picks me up and we have a good chat about Mexico (he’s from CDMX) and Sofia (so why didn’t you marry her?) and this and that and hip-hop and tequila.

Hotel, check-in at the night side window. Upstairs, 320, suite, refrigerator, bathtub, bed, thin blankets and soft pillows. Wrap up, curl up and disappear.

In the morning:

the pacific might be a bitch ass little pussy of ocean that never learnt how to fight but the sunsets and sunrise are so beautiful. you wouldn’t believe how pale the blue or how bright the yellow how burnt orange the lower ombré. and it smells like lizards here. back in the USA baby. ate a salty as sin gas station hot dog, picked up a pack of Marlboro Rojo 72s and watched the sun rise over the ramada on a bench outside the hotel. i’m in pasadena which is where which rich wives kill their husbands and get away with it until there’s just one thing that bothers leftenant colombo or philip marlowe.

the sun gets up on top of itself and we have a day ahead of us. folks in the chat are heading to some coffee place and i feel like an outsider. while i’m unpacking a gram of ketamine and two 2cbs fall out of my bag. lmao. had no idea they were in there.

i walk to the hilton. the sky above the hills is crazy pretty. ray bradbury says ‘you can live your whole life in LA and never see the part they put in pictures’ but i guess if you go to pasadena then you just see the part they put in pictures.

the things i’ve missed in the USA aren’t the good parts. you can get good coffee anywhere, you can only get shitty california coffee in california. you gotta be able to taste the water. like what toby used to say about chicago pizza, it’s in the dough, it’s in the water, you gotta make it with the water from that rancid river or it just don’t cook right. and you can’t get that in santa barbara. marlboro red 72s, gas station hot dogs, diner coffee with a tiny plastic creamer. good to be back.

Met L&F in the hotel lobby. very fond of that pair. later, being introduced to somebody else L pronounced “have you met chee” with a tone like “has this happened to you yet”.

I spend a lot of the day avoiding the conference. Stifling energy. It’s always like this. Like everybody else was issued a list of rules before life started that I wasn’t made privy to, and they all know them and i don’t and they sure let me know that i don’t. and i know i don’t belong, but it’s okay. everybody doesn’t have to belong everywhere.

i tell myself it’s okay just relax and be yourself but it’s unnatural for me to be here… how can i relax and be myself? myself wouldn’t be anywhere near. myself’d go south and eat tacos. i don’t know why i am here. when i explained it to Shelby she said “angel numbers”. she’s right.

stopped by Onward! to catch a truly fantastic talk on a paper by the author called A Case For Feminism in Programing Language Design. learned some about feminist epistemology and about how hard things are valued more than easy things regardless of the result. and about how if you do something that’s outside of that (valuable to actual material people but not a “hard” problem) you have to spend so much time walking to where they are and talking them to your foundation that you never get a chance to talk up on that higher level. ruminated a little about noam chomsky’s observation that “concision is inherently conservative”, that being concise is a luxury afforded to people who are saying what you already think. if you’re summing up received wisdom you can use 5 words but if you’re trying to change minds, change the world, you’re gonna need five thousand pages. ruminated on how we need to kill all quants, it’s humanity’s only hope for survival. the first question afterwards in the Q&A was a gentleman asking “you’re wrong” and i just booked it, dipped out through the side door and drank several glasses of water where i couldn’t hear a thing. when i got back he appeared to have experienced an existential crisis. a shell of a man sweating and typing several thousand wpm and i think that whatever happened in the span i missed was a time of great growth for the fellow and i wish him luck in all his future endeavors.

LU’s talk afterwards was fab as always. Dave Ackley is not crazy. ruminated a little on the word “mere”. If you’ve never watched every video Dave Ackley has ever uploaded i’d like to recommend that you do so for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe. here on his main youtube, and on the t2tile project channel.

you can change yourself or change others, changing others needs waking up with boundless energy every single day while changing yourself only requires giving up.

went back to the hotel because i was supposed to switch rooms, i’d only paid one night for the suite and in another the rest of the days. but turns out the girl who booked the suite next said she’s rather have the cheaper kinda room so i kept living on where i lived. hopped in brian’s lyft on the way back. quite an experience of a fella. tells me his first therapy session is next up after this trip. his girlfriend’s making him. “‘you cant suck a dick three times in one night and then complain that your boyfriend is hypersexual’ what do you think of that, doc?” he’s walking in with that one already in the chamber. “and if you disagree we’re gonna fucking bomb you. can you pick out yemen on a map? i fucking can’t, but bomb the hell out of them anyway” and “this city is a fucking cesspool.” and he dropped me off and shouted “ GOD  BLESS  AMERICA ” and zipped away.

there was a group lunch but i don’t think i was invited so i ate jimmy johns on the cigarette smoking bench out front. good amount of mustard. hard to get a good cheap basic reliable deli sandwich like that back home. it’s the little things. while im in the hotel where the event is being held im filled with these extreme feelings of self-hate and despair. then i leave and i’m okay again. but i keep going back for some reason.

on my way home i had the visceral experience of being reminded that USA is actually real and not just something they talk about on podcasts, looking out the window of my taxi there’s a run of houses with HARRIS/WALZ signs in their lawns. oh damn.

got home, drew the curtains, flicked on the television and found a sabrina the teenage witch marathon. love u salem. it’s funny that one of the main themes of this show is that melissa joan hart is not popular at school. ok lol.

sleepy, crazy commercials. multiple adverts for the constitution. one for “heart powder”. a veteran-thanking advert. they are coming for our rights. i am about to die of a “heart event” and wet bladder disease. the only hope for my skin is crepe cream, and post-biotics, and pre-biotics and several products made of beetroot. an evangelical preacher tells me israel needs my money more than ever and if i donate now i get a bracelet. it’s a wonder everyone in this country isn’t fuckin insane.

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another sunrise. these beautiful impossibly pale pinks giving way to the warmest yellows and the deepest ocean blue, so blue it’s wet and you can feel it on your skin.

i pop to the conference hall and meet taylor.town going the opposite way. i shout “taylor dot town!” and we have a quick chat and i’m very fond of him and we go our separate ways.

so i head to El Cholo for tacos and tequila and micheladas (though they’re turn out only to be cheladas) but that’s okay. maybe that’s a regional thing. i text jimena to tell her that los angeles is one of my favourite cities in mexico. estoy en el cielo.

bring the leftover pibil back to the hotel. spot an old black man in a wide-brimmed black hat, a full loose-fitting one piece black cloth outfit with a silver belt, fingerless leather gloves that covered the wrist and half the forearm. beautiful. have a nap.

there are so many cybertrucks. drink some modelo negra cheladas (which appear to actually be micheladas? i guess it’s a regional thing) and a hot dog. spot a girl at the crossing with pink leopard print tattooed on her right cheek. beautiful. hop on the bus.

oh i just remembered i meant to ask you to sign my copy of the halting problem.

had a nice chat with JM, taylor.town and a peter (who, after i’d said “https://github.com/chee/automerge-repo-solid-primitives”, said “you just became interesting” but in a way that was charming actually and wrote my name on a piece of paper). taylor.town (a socal native) hits me with an LA todo list:

taylor’s version

• [ ] sawtelle (little osaka)
• [ ] the bungalo (90401)

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everyone went out for dinner but i bounced. ate a gas station corn dog and headed home to listen to the new gaga and the nixon tapes.

one my favourite thing when abroad is clocking tiny inconsequential pieces of human behaviour that are normal here but would be strange at home and then trying them on for size. like paying for a pack of cigarettes and then saying “oh gimmie a book of matches” and they say sure thing and toss one of those little folding paper hotel lobby lieutenant colombo matchbooks over the counter at you and you slide it off while you’re turning away and say thanks buddy. saw a guy do that and then did it myself at the next station. it’s fun to holiday in other people’s lives. to holiday in other people’s lives.

ok so saturday was an EXTREMELY LONG DAY.

the ink and switch unconf was great. it was well disorganized, there were some really good chats. the venue was incredibly nice. i really wanted to write more about it but i am falling asleep as i type. in the middle of the day i split to check into my hotel. there’s a super weird smell in the hallway on the second floor like somebody tried to clean up shit with vomit and then sprayed axe body spray on the smell.

I really enjoyed talking with Alex Good, who i’ve always known i’d like. I’ve been in his house. He wasn’t there. I told him that, the first thing i said, “I’ve been in your house. you weren’t there.” Seeing Cole was lovely too. And learning from Lu that all ideas collapse down to time. There were so many conversations that i struck up before realizing how tired i was. I am so used to starting a sentence without knowing where it’s going and just trusting myself to find the words and directions by the time i get to blank spaces, but i always forget that tired or on drugs means the words aren’t there when i get there. that’s what i fear most about aging, that will get harder. and it’s really one of the only valuable qualities i have as a human being.

My driver tells me how he’d been hit a month or two ago by another car. The other car didn’t have insurance. His insurance won’t pay out because he was driving for Lyft. Lyft won’t pay out because he’d just dropped off a customer and wasn’t on his way to a new one yet so he wasn’t driving for Lyft. That’s the squeeze.

Reminded me that guy i met in London who lost a day when a girl threw up in his back seat and he brought the car to be cleaned. He asked uber if they could pay for the cleaning fee and they asked to see a picture from before it got cleaned. he lost half a day’s work to getting it cleaned, and then the bill on top. If i remember right he posted about it on social media and uber paid him to take it down.

in the last hour of the unconf i roll back in. me and a nice person called Maya hop out to Home Depo to see if they have a 9V DC power supply for Alex Warth’s new Alesis Micron because i’ve always wanted to know what bret victor hid behind “secret hint: while turning it on, hold (octave+) and (programs)”. they said they could order it in, but there was no way to get one today. so i continue to live in occlusion from the secrets of bret victor.

i’d like to thank that person who gave me a sticky drawing of a jellyfishbox, it fell off me somewhere and i couldn’t find it again and i miss the jellyfishbox to this day.

i’d like to thank Todd🌹 for the photo of me really giving the business to Alex Good (automerge) about whatever it is i’m talking too much about here: ( i truly will cherish this artifact.)

after the conf everyone heads out for dinner but i bounce to get ready for the Snow event. cole and i walk down the hollywood walk of fame looking at the stars and i stick my unconf name badge down in one of the empty ones where i think we can all agree my name has always belonged.

so i eat half a 2cb, head to Snow. when i hop in the cab he’s blasting Dom Kennedy - Still Grindn’ like he’s trying to set the scene in this movie the two of us are in. it’s sick! man rapping “when i’m on Sunset” i’m literally on Sunset right now!!! i got picked up on Sunset!!!! the time i get to the venue i’m so tired i’m ready to keel over, i have a modelo and a patrón. it costs $30. for two drinks. i realize where i am now, an event “hosted” by somebody who is gonna come out once and hour and say something on mic so that everyone keeps buying drinks and nobody leaves for fear of missing out. it was nice seeing Snow though. my second favourite five foot mexican. i stop being able to communicate pretty soon… the 2cb hits me unexpectedly strong. i spend the evening in the smoking area puffing on luckies with joey and kacey, professional scarers at six flags. joey yells me how about horny men in their thirties regularly grope him while he’s working and how this is common in six flags. i told him he needs a union and gave him a 2cb.

the night is over, i’m a night’s hotel room stay price deep in modelo y patrón. i wander home for an hour chatting with becostumed hollywood strangers about how i’m not scared to die. it’s a weird city. give a guy a cigarette he acts like you gave him a job. say hello how are you doing he’s acting like it’s the set up for a scam.

yeah, weird city. wonderful city. feels like london. like peckham. it’s got the right level of anything-can-happen kinda danger for me to be able to relax.

i get home and i sleep.

the next day i head up the boulevard to see W.C. Fields’s stars, and then head to Amoeba record shop to buy some cassette tapes. I’ve been bumping this one Phantom Orchid tape all week, which is superb, but there’s nothing quite like having a few albums to rotate for a few days in a foreign land.

Guy in the record store says “you know this one, right?” and shows me Konono N°1’s congotronics series record. I don’t know it. We had a quick chat about bourbon, tequila, new orleans and african rhythms, i bought Konono N°1 on his recomendation and i’d like to pass recomendation that onto you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Los0qjV9Ecg

these fuckers are playing these little resonating thumb pianos and amplifying themselves with microphones they made themselves out of trash. magnets from car parts. and the sound is fuckin sick, some rhythms go somewhere in your belly that’s deeper than the earth and older than time. You can see how we ended up on the subject of New Orleans.

The person who served me at Amoeba was super sweet. Next time you’re in souf east london hit me up, Tristan.

so now i’m lying in a bed full of tape cassettes, staring at an empty water bottle, reminiscing over a time when i once was hydrated and wondering should that ever happen to me again.

it’s 9pm. i should really pack before bed so it isn’t a rush at breakfast but i’m conked. i’ve had my eyes closed typing most of the time.

stay humble