Please.

راق ظا كازبة ظا كلاش قمبات راق

After our test in Arabic, our professor handed us chalk and told us to "go Banksy in Arabic" in the science library courtyard. It doesn't say anything in Arabic; my friend and I transliterated "Rock the Casbah, The Clash, Combat Rock" using the alphabet. Our professor was the only one who got it.

How Eugeney.

A man in cheetah print pajamas, complete with paw slippers and a tail, held the door for me as I left the corner market. This is the city I live in.

Waxing nostalgic.

I was 15 when my older brother gave me a copy of Aaron Cometbus's "collected works." It was easily two and half inches thick, filled with xeroxed pages of intimidating punk subculture.

"Read this and anyone over 21 will think you're at least 28," he said. So I did. I carried it around everywhere, underlined and bookmarked the bits I found poignant or amusing or particularly relatable.

Remembering one of those quips an hour ago, I flipped through the book again, and found all those things 15-year-old me had thought were so important. I used to relate to the feelings of social ostracism and alternative youth subcultures; now I relate to living in the half-hipster, half-slum neighborhood and scraping by on ramen and spare change. The notes on World War II dated three years ago that fell out when I opened to the first page, however... still over my head.

I wish I had the time to read this book again, underline everything I find germane now and compare and contrast, find out what sticks through high school and college and what was just me being angst-ridden and punkish. I want to write retroactive notes to 15-year-old me and tell myself how true some of these things will be in a few years.

This is probably my favorite thing I bookmarked:

"Portland. It started as a bad mood and slowly grew into a city. One big surly sprawl of mean spirits and bad luck. But you know, Portland is okay sometimes, just like a bad mood is okay sometimes, like when you have a good reason to feel shitty. A good day in Portland is like that, like the way you feel when you're in a bad mood for a good reason. It's sort of relaxing in a way, because everything is nicely focused and clear and there are reasons why everything sucks.

Look, there's the boarded up building that used to be a diner where I used to sit and watch my ice cream melt while waiting for the girl who was flaking on me ... She was the reason to be in a bad mood in Portland, really the reason to be in Portland at all, and now I'm in a badd mood without a good reason. Ah, Portland.

Portland, a sightseeing tour. Look, another hipster. Dodge, another lecherous scumbag. Avoid, the overzealous cops on bikes. Oh wow, another bridge. Beautiful or mind-numbingly boring? It's hard to tell. Can a city itself be against you, and if so, is bad luck in a city that loves you going to work out better than good luck it a city that hates you? I mean, is the worst luck in Berkeley better than the best luck in Portland?"

The irony of my moving to Portland years after reading this is made better by the fact that it was written in the mid to late 90s. Ah, Portland indeed. Some things really never change.

Hope. Chaaaaange. Joe Biden.

And I thought voting for him in the primary was liberating. There's not a Bush or a Clinton on the ballot, and I gotta say, that makes me really fucking happy. To have the two dynasties that ruled the free world for as long as I've been alive NOT be on the ballot of the first major election I'm able to vote in... well, it lets me sleep at night. Maybe Bob Dylan had a point. The times, they have a-changed.

END NIGH; R U SAVED?

Preachers of the UO Campus

• The End [is] Nigh Guy: Kicks it Old Testament and is under the impression that the end is nigh. He's always on campus with his sign and his dog, who I nicknamed Azrael (I'm a terrible person, I know). He apparently doesn't believe in using the verb "to be," nor has he seen 28 Days Later. That sign should read "The end is extremely fucking nigh." Personal opinion.
• Jesus Loves U Bike Guy: New wave "Jesus luvs errbody" type. Rides around Eugene on a bike decorated with posterboards proclaiming this fact. He and The End [is] Nigh Guy are buddies and stand in the outdoor amphitheater together, silent stalwarts of the "hold a sign and convert the masses" movement. They're frequently used as a meeting spot, as in "I'll meet you for lunch at 3 by the Jesus Loves U guy." He appeared on an Arabic homework assignment I had last night. No shit, the instructions were, "Translate this conversation you overheard while standing next to the Jesus Loves U Bike Guy at the EMU Amphitheater."
  
• Fall of Babylon Guy: Not a campus regular like End [is] Nigh Guy and Jesus Loves U Guy, but occasionally appears 20 feet away from the pair and yells about the fall of Babylon. Noisy, but harmless.
• Angry/Loud Jesus Guy: The yin to Jesus Loves U Guy's yang. While not a regular, Angry/Loud Jesus Guy makes enough of an impression in one day to make up for his absences. Waving a sign that proclaims everyone from loose women to sports fans are going to hell, he yells at student passersby and intimidates them into loving Jesus. "Going to Hell Bingo" is a popular game in which you count how many demographics you belong to that are damned to hell based on his sign.
  

I have a problem.

There's an urban legend floating around regarding two poverty-stricken college students who innocently wanted to know if one really could live on top ramen and top ramen alone. In the name of science, they found themselves at their local warehouse superstore, hauling several flats of oodles of various flavors of noodles. Rumor has it that after a month one of the pair had died of scurvy; the other had eaten Skittles in a moment of weakness and obtained enough vitamin C to live.

Whether or not this is true is irrelevant; it's the fear of scurvy that drove my roommate and I to pick up a carton of fruit punch, a gallon of orange juice, and a sack of those little tangerines the last time we went shopping. We were deathly serious about it; our grocery list read "milk, eggs, bread, scurvy prevention measures." 

The fruit punch and the orange juice were the first casualties of the war against scurvy, mostly a result of my roommate's utter disdain for water. "It doesn't taste like anything," she'd whine over a glass of lemonade. "And it's better for me than soda. Maybe one of these days I'll move on to Crystal Light and then make the jump to water."

"Dare to dream," I'd say, and peel a tangerine. 

But here's the problem: those tangerines are a pain in the ass to eat if you're as anal about stringy food as I am. I don't know why, but string has always disturbed me. There's a home video of my third or fourth Christmas and my mother is yelling at my older brother to unwrap my present because I'm afraid of the yarn she used to tie the box.

A few years later, a friend of mine found a string in her milkshake and it only got worse. Bananas, spaghetti squash, even particularly stringy cheese on pizza made me recoil in horror. And if you've ever eaten one of these tangerines, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Once you remove the peel, it's all stringy horror. The pith, as it's technically called, sticks in veiny pieces to the fruit and requires ten to fifteen minutes of tedious pith-string removal before I can reasonably expect to eat it.

I suppose this is why it took us so long to get through all those tangerines. We were waifish with hunger one afternoon, fainting on the couch and complaining about how there was nothing to eat except the flat of ramen and, oh god, the tangerines. Remembering the college student of yore and his untimely demise, we both dashed towards the bag on the counter but were halted by the unmistakeable smell of rotting fruit. 

In addition to the smell, a few tiny fruit flies had begun buzzing in the proximity. We promptly removed the offending fruit from our apartment, as it had something of a mold colony growing in population and threatening to take over the island before intimidating the pots and pans into joining it in a coup against the small appliances.

The mold junta never got off the ground, but the fruit flies didn't follow their beloved tangerines to their ultimate fate in our complex's dumpster. Instead they were content to stay in our toasty two-bedroom, settle down, and start a family. This can be the only explanation as to why, one morning, I was being pestered by a rather curious swarm of fruit flies. I couldn't set down an empty yogurt cup without five of them dive bombing it. No joke; in my short walk from the sofa to put my cereal bowl in the sink, the Indiana Jones of fruit flies nearly met his fate in the Temple of Doom (my left nostril, at the time -- insert Crystal Skull joke at your leisure) after raiding the remnants of my Honey Bunches of Oats.

I declared war when I went into my bathroom and found a swarm had collected on the mirror. We had lived in a peaceful cohabitation up until this point; I had grown to enjoy their curiosity towards every stray piece of discarded food that found its way onto the counter instead of the sink. But they intruded my bathroom. My private bathroom. The reason I am willing to pay the outlandish rent that I pay for this apartment. And I just couldn't let that fly. 

No pun intended.

And so I became that cranky old man I hated who swore and clapped and smacked infinitely at those little nuisances invisible to everyone except him. If I spotted one, I'd drop everything to hunt it and not give up until it was squished between my palms. Our friends were disturbed when, mid-conversation, I would stutter to a stop and begin clapping at random intervals in the air, running around the apartment and jumping on the furniture in pursuit of my prey. But now, it has become a problem. I stand in the kitchen and wait to see a fruit fly flutter in my peripherals. I lay in wait and have debated what would make the best camouflage to match our linoleum. 

But if I do say so, I've gotten quite good at catching the little fuckers. I know their reaction time is slower than the average fly, but still fast enough to keep me on my toes and remind me not to underestimate them. A kleenex is ideal for sqishing them against a solid, vertical surface; a flip-flop is overkill and a paper towel is too burdensome for such a small bug. Raid is out of the question.

There is a post-it note on the refrigerator door that tallies my casualties, although I don't think it's an accurate reflection anymore as I believe the ones that have starved to death at this point should count in my favor. It'll be only a few more days before the strongest and fastest of the lot are gone. There's one in my bathroom still I haven't quite been able to get.