El Gringoqueño

Patent #10298498 - Method for the Consumption of Crunchy Cheetos to Avoid Orange Finger Syndrome.

I’ve done it. They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Well this one is a mother indeed. Eureka! I jumped, I danced, I rejoiced. Never again shall I have orange fingers from eating Cheetos brand corn puffs.

Chopsticks, my friends, chopsticks.

Ahem, it’s only the crunchy ones for me. None of that poofy nonesense. Real men eat crunchy style Cheetos which, curiously enough, go well with a rum and coke (lime, not lemon… perhaps another patent opportunity?)

I’ll make millions, I tell you. Millions.

I dismounted my bike, grabbed a couple of dollars from my bike bag, and started into the bakery. Coming up the sidewalk were four young attractive women. A man walking into the bakery ahead of me, stopped short, arching his back and his head at an awkward angle as he gawked. I almost walked into him. I cleared my throat, "Ahem, con permiso." I shook my head, wasn’t that the damnedest thing. He should’ve taken a picture. It would have lasted longer.

I made my way to the line in the panadería. It was just after eight o’clock in the morning, the busiest time. The line was long, the bakery crowded. I tried to get there earlier, but sometimes, you just can’t get out the door.

The young women, stepped into the bakery, chatting loudly, giggling, carrying on. They were noticeable because they were all dressed in filmy, revealing, noodle strap dresses, high heels, and an unusual amount of makeup for so early in the morning. There were indeed hot, and they were about to unleash their wiles on a bakery full of old weak men. Poor devils.

The bakery came to a complete stand-still. It was like a television freeze frame, ala TJ Hooker. A fifty-ish short balding man walking toward where I stood, muttered to his friend, "… e gusta el lechón con gandules." I didn’t hear the first part… Me, te (you), if it was a question or what… but the point was clear. "Pork and pigeon peas" go well together in a sexual way. The innuendo was unmistakable, and I tried to contain a smirk. Only a Puerto Rican can say he likes pork meat and pigeon peas in a way that connotes sex. I mused on comical variations, taking liberty, but couldn’t push it to hyperbole in Spanish. I like marshmellows in my coffee. I like ketchup on my burger. I like little toys with my happy meal. And slowly, with feeling… I like salty… deep fried… artery clogging, pork rinds mashed into gigantic mounds of green bananas. Nope, just cannot push it far enough. Everything sounded sexual in Spanish.

I shook my head to myself, and watched the funny time warp within the bakery. The women were standing directly behind me in line, carrying on, obviously excited by the eyes burrowing holes in their flimsy clothing. I had a good vantage point to observe the leering, as I was directly in its line of site, and despite being clad in a bright red spandex skin suit, bike helmet, and sunglasses, was completely invisible. I was a camouflaged nature photographer, dressed in bright orange, invisible to the color-blind wild beasts. It was absurd. It was hilarious. I continued to watch the reactions from behind my bright blue lenses, the population of older men visually undressing the women with their unabashed desires and their longing gazes. These people have not even the tiniest slice of shame, their decorum thinly dressed in colorful food metaphors.

I asked Esteban for a dozen eggs. "Esteban, I don’t have an egg carton today, do you think you could rig me something up?"

"Sure," he said as he proceeded to put the eggs in a paper bag.

"Um, do you think you could put them in a cardboard container? I’m on my bicycle. They’ll surely break in a paper bag."

"Oh, sorry, he proceeded to break down one of the cardboard trays used to deliver the eggs, and put it inside a plastic bag."

"Um, do you think you could put some plastic wrap around it. They’ll surely fall out. Sorry for the bother. Next time I’ll be sure to bring my receptacle."

"No bother, really. Service is why we are here." And he handed me five eggs crudely wrapped in plastic.

"Esteban, I wanted - Um, nevermind, good day." I wasn’t going to get my twelve eggs today. The sirens had conspired with the gods to keep me from my goal.

War is ugly. War should be ugly. I watch the Bush administration trying to contain the fire, batting it back as they try to save Mosques, civilians, trinkets within the house that is on fire. The house is burning, you moron. You’ve got to put it out. If bad guys are using a Mosque to store weapons, the Mosque is already gone. Level it it and anything in it, around it, underneath it. If a block is harboring bad guys, take it out, the entire block, eliminate the fire, lest it spread and burn everything else. Put it out. Fuck the civilians, they should get the fuck out if they want to live. The house is on fire, get the fuck out, get as far away as possible, take your kids, your family. Don’t go fucking buy fruit in the middle of a fire fight and cry about your little girl getting shot through the head. Get the fuck out of the burning house, because it’s coming down. Once the fire’s out and the firefighters have gone, THEN you can come back and put your life back together.

Does that sound terrible to you? God, I hope so. The goal of war is to put an end to it as quickly as possible, lest we become comfortable with it. War must be prosecuted with extreme prejudice but no malice. War is terrible, war is not something that should be entered lightly. I’m sorry, but “credible intel” sounds too much like a hunch to me. YOU DON’T GO TO WAR ON A HUNCH. Hunches are for TV gumshoes. They have no place in foreign or domestic policy. I’m starting to wonder if we’ve learned anything since Vietnam. You can’t manage a war and you sure as hell can’t manage a fire… you can only put it out or let it burn.

Sometimes I think that the black bile will overwhelm me, fill me up to my eyeballs with anger and despair, anger at those in power that have not accepted the true responsibility to those they serve, and despair at being so utterly powerless to affect the change that I feel this world so desperately needs.

Here I am with this stinking goo leaking out of me, affecting those around me, venom poisoning relationships, attitudes, positive change, weighing down, hanging in the air with its foul putrefying odor.

I was speaking to my dear old friend Courtney the other day, and she said, "It’s just that the complete powerlessness… I mean, the Bush administration just makes me feel so… powerless." I had been feeling so under the weather about the present state of the world, my military service, my military fellows, Laura’s brother Carlos who has been put on standby to be sent to Iraq. I wanted to scream and point out this evil mist that had settled over American society. I couldn’t scream though, buried as I was in my own excrement.

I have been working so hard, seems like 17 hours a day, and getting nowhere. Oppressing me is this shroud of ugliness both from within and without, angry, nasty, vile, desperate thoughts, as I hear Fox News in the background, parroting cheerful messages of war and how liberals are undermining America. Hello, people?! We’re at fucking WAR. You’re prisoners in your OWN homes! And your government thinks you’re all criminals and wants to SPY on all of you! Liberals are doing what again?!

I toil for clients that don’t pay, put up with ingrates, degenerates, and malcontents, while I hear Bush’s administration’s "stop loss" shenanigans, designed as a back door draft, whose purpose is to keep in harm’s way those that have already sacrificed so much. Bush is taking advantage of the faithful service of thousands of Americans pressing them into involuntary servitude beyond their enlistment contracts, beyond their retirement, beyond any measure of good faith that should have been rendered to them. This comes from a man who did everything he could to avoid military service himself, who never sacrificed, who didn’t do shit. Look! daddy set me up in a cool airplane! Chicks dig pilots. Do you think, Mr. President that chicks dig disabled veterans? Of course you don’t Mr. President, despite what you’ve read in Penthouse.

Does it make me feel powerless in the face of this evil dictator who acts like he owns the country? This is our country, dammit! Bush is the CEO, we elected him to the board, but we shareholders own the thing. It’s our country, but he wields it like his personal conviction with his smug little smirk and federalist totalitarian self. Midget dictator, fucking creep, smug bastard, beady eyed miscreant, bible thumping wacko, American society hostage taking fool, abuser of military service, arrogant trampler of civil rights, and big business whore.

I was asked recently if I had seen Fahrenheit 9/11. Hell, no, I responded. I’ve lived it! Why would I want to drag myself through that shit, something to make me feel more powerless, less significant, less valued, and a victim of a presidency gone horribly awry. Fuck that, I can get that from Fox News, and the fucking erroneous pay or die letters I get from the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) for recoupment of military service WHICH I PERFORMED! Fuckers.

There, I’ve let some of the ugliness out, exorcised some of my demons. Whew, it felt good. You know what. If I were ever on Inside the Actor’s Studio (which I won’t be), FUCK would be my favorite expletive… there’s such a nice draining feeling to it, like a good satisfying puss-filled pimple pop.

I think I’ll go sit next to Laura and see if she’ll put up with me now.

When will I learn? I don’t care how many times in the last five years I’ve had to mess with LDAP, I never learn. Why the hell don’t I write shit down when I figure it out. Do I enjoy re-learning the same stupid crap over and over and over? Must be.

Okay here’s the thing. I shall endeavor to remember the following:

1. When upgrading an LDAP directory service, make sure to dump the data out of the running system before breaking it down.
2. If I fail to do #1, please oh please dear God have made a backup of it at least. chroot into the old environment, launch the ldap server, slapcat the whole shebang and proceed to step three
3. slapadd the slapcat-ed ldif file… NOT ldapadd. ldapadd is suggested in most places as the tool of choice, but slapadd is what I need. Geez, stupid fuckers.  Of course who’s the bigger idiot, the fool or the fool who follows him?
4. Make sure to modify the slapd.conf file to change the default db from ldbm to bdm.

Pretty damn simple, eh? Not so simple when I’ve forgotten more of this LDAP shit than any sane person would care to remember.

While I’m at it, please oh please, remember for the next time about the dbmmange httpd password files. You’ve got to export the old entries, and then import them dbmmanage2 users import < old-data, modify the .htaccess files and be done with it.

Oh and a neat trick for dumping reliably an entire PosgreSQL database for an upgrade:

pg_dumpall > backup.sql

stop PostgreSQL, upgrade it, wipe the data directory, run initdb as user postgres and then psql -f backup.sql template1

Flawless. At least that part went well. The cursing was fun though.