So yeah, there's a reason I haven't updated this blog in like 8 months. It's because I got a better, privately hosted, one over here at the tribal underground. You can get to it here:

21st Century Soap-Boxing

So go now ye intrepid adventurers and catch up on what's new in the life of a lolo since you last heard from him.

we were THIS close, i mean THIS close, to hopping on an airplane this weekend and going up to Portland. So close, but so far away. I woke up on Saturday morning to hear a message from the delightful Ms. Stacia saying that a friend of ours from way back was in Portland for the weekend looking for flats to rent and they were participating in much debauchery on account of such a splendid event. THIS close. But work once more got in the way. So now I am desperate to get up to Portland as soon as possible for some much-needed reunions, visitations, pilgrimages to Powell's Books. Still, it pointed to a growing trend among friends of mine, that is, the mass exodus to the free state of Cascadia, nestled in among the winding PDX steets. It seems every day that more friends I know, from vastly different groups of friends. One of my old roommates in Hawaii has relocated to the City of Dreams, along with a friend who used to live on our couch. Not to mention the huge flock of people form Eugene who've transplanted themselves further up the Willamette. Now friends from way back are finding their way to the Rose City. Portland, the Seattle of the 21st century. If only it would avoid raining for six months out of the year, I would be there in an instant. I am made for warmer climes these days.

In other news, Wilco kicks much ass. Bill Fay is possibly the greatest musician that you have never heard of. Moby has sold his talent to the devil for his one-time mainstream breakthrough on 1999's Play, and it shows so clearly on his newest album "Hotel." Ted Leo and the Pharmacists will rock your world. And I don't know what is up with these musical collectives such as "the Go Team" or "Animal Collective," but I like their style.

where did my little pointy man go? why do I have a broken link where he used to be? cursed blogdrive. it's almost enough to make me learn html, buy my own domain name, and launch lolosrun.com. well, then i would feel compelled to post more updates, more often, and make some sort of fun interactive games.... i think i'm just a smidge too lazy for that. i think i'll just settle for trying to fix the link so my favorite little graffitti man can return to guarding my page. Curse you laziness!!! you win again!!!

It always says something when you begin to go out of your way to look for the most esoteric and off-kilter music you can find. For me, I don't know quite what it says, though for the past couple of days I have been insanely happy with the fact that I've been able to download several albums worth of Balinese Gamelan music- you know the kind, with the sound of a metal xylophone made from pieces of corrugated roofing, quality music if I do say so myself. Not to be outdone, I've just received an album of gong music of vietnam and laos. why? why do I do this? because it sure as hell beats the latest top 40 bubble gum pop single? because my rabid dislike of contemporary pop music has driven me to the khmer rouge extreme of seeking a complete reversal of industrial progress? because the latest acid-driven beats of aphex twin just aren't scratching that hard to reach itch in my ear? I don't honestly know. I do know that I've been grooving to gamelan while mowing the yard, and that it's mighty catchy music. Where this will all end up, it's in the hands of others now...

This Friday past marked Lolo's return to the grand world of live music after a several month hiatus hiding in my cave up here in Northern Cal. And what grandiose musician could ever possess enough talent and skill to lure me from my cosy den illuminated solely by the kindly glow of my notebook? None other than the immensely-talented, divinely-inspired, mouthpiece-of-the-almighty: Amon Tobin. The man whose aural soundscapes opened up new worlds of possibility for sound and music. The man who has provided the soundtrack for my life since that rainy Eugene afternoon 5 years ago when i purchased his album "permutations" from a crackhead on the street for the insignificant cost of $5. The man who I may rightly blame my music freakishness on. I had missed him by three months when i moved from Eugene to Hawaii, and had regretted it ceaselessly, often wishing to bash my head upon a wall for the soul-shattering ecstasty of seeing him work his magic live. So it was with great joy that i was fooling around on the net a week or so ago and saw that he was coming to the Bay for a night as a performer in the 4 day Noise Pop festival. I leapt on it. Pulling K@ from her pre-slumber fugue state, i informed her that we were going to the bay next weekend come armageddon or nuclear warfare. I was so serious in this respect that i even volunteered the unthinkable- I would drive home. Those who know me are well aware of my aversion to driving. I loathe it. I despise it. If I could, I would ride mass transit wherever it ran, and my bike everywhere else. Yet I digress. So, with K@ slipping back into catatonia, I purchased tickets (learning my lesson from the "wait-until-last-minute-to-buy-ween-tickets" fiasco of last year).

Fast forward to Friday evening. K@ returned from work at 6 and we were off, car filled with gas, us filled with red bulls. We hit the city and surprisingly were not immediately tossed willynilly into the abyss of winding one way streets that normally spells doom whenever we embark to SF. The fates were on our side that night, we did not become hopelessly entangled in the backstreets, in fact only took one wrong turn which was easily put right. Found the venue with minimal fuss and were in. The opening act was just winding up, a dark minimalist set by telephonejimjesus- a heavily stoned dready in an impecable dark suit. Next up was a quartet from the bay area called roots of orchis providing an epic sound along the lines of godspeed you black emporer! and mogwai, with the addition of a drummer doubling as dj, and the guitarist doing part-time on a DAT machine. the highlight of this group was watching them all switch positions and instruments with such smooth surety, they were a definite group, comfortable with each other and the music they were making together. The third openers I missed out on. I got pissed off at a drunk man standing behind me yelling insults at the band, so wandered off to the bar to make some friends and see if I could find K@.

Finally, the time came and the man himself was up center-stage. His hair unruly under a baseball cap, and a cigarette pushed defiantly between his lips (screw California anti-smoking laws! damn puritans!) he started the show off with Lighthouse, the first single off his new album- chaos theory, the soundtrack for the new splinter cell game. And it only got better from there. Playing tracks from all across his vast catalogue, as well as some of the hardest hitting drum and bass that human speakers can support, he had me dancing more than i've done in years, turning myself into a sweating heap under the disco lights. Amon had just dropped one of my favorite tracks from Permutations, when i just happened to look over at the girl who was dancing next to me. "Hmmm," I thought. "She looks a lot like Tamar from high school." I snuck another look. "Yeah, she really looks like Tamar, except the last time i saw her she had a really short pixie haircut." This girl's hair could only be described as an unruly mane. Still, it had been four years since I had last seen her, maybe it could be. I decided to chance it, calling "Tamar" loud above the music. She looked at me, looked away. Looked back. Double take.... "LOGAN??!!??" I had guessed correctly... We hugged and over the thumping bass exchanged news. We were both the first people from high school we had ever spontaneously run into since leaving coeur d'alene, and were utterly shocked that it would happen here of all places. Still, of all the people I could ever expect to run into at an amon tobin show, it would be Tamar. She had always had superb taste in music, and even when CDA was all wrapped up in the rave thing, she always exhibited the best taste in the music, eschewing fluffy house and emotionless trance in favor of the drive-it-through-the-floor-feel-it-in-your-bones-hours-later drum and bass music. In fact, I had been thinking of just such a night on our drive down to the show, and wondering what had happened to Tamar, Josh Beckett, and even Mike Mayo. The show carried on, Tamar and I dancing until we were only sweaty messes oozing around on the floor. The show wrapped up about an hour later, with Amon segueing from his orgasmically good remix of the velvet underground's "venus in furs," into a death metal metallica song laid over the bass line from "reanimator" from permutations, which managed to evoke one last burst of energy from the wrung out audience. WHAT A NIGHT!!! It definitely re-ignited my love for live music, and a need to see more groups in their natural environment. I figure, what's the point of living on the mainland if you don't enjoy the best parts about it? So there shall definitely be more shows for K@ and lolo in the future.

Pitchfork's review of Amon Tobin's Supermodifed
Pitchfork's review of Amon Tobin's Permutations
Pitchfork's review of Amon Tobin's Out From Out Where

and so, after much griping and complaining, i have finally seen the light. nearly six months to the day since it's release (finally!!!), i have at last recognized the genius within Brian Wilson's "Smile." Truly. It's not over-rated, it just may be the most impactful cd of the milenium, thus far. definitely worth the 30 year wait which the former Beach Boys front-man subjected us to. pick it up at your local record shop, download it from the net, whatever you do listen to this album.

A Savage Journey
Story by Rob Mitchum
from pitchforkmedia.com

To my knowledge, Hunter S. Thompson never wrote a record review. His famous involvement with Rolling Stone was incidental to its focus on music, and due merely to Jann Wenner's willingness to publish lengthy screeds and pay both relatively well and on time. But, despite some people's opinion, we at Pitchfork are all writers, and as ones prone to the occasional experimental flight and its frequent partner self-indulgence, we live in the shadow of Hunter just as much as those of Lester or Greil.

Predictably, most body-still-warm retrospectives on Thompson's life have been drawn to wrongheaded discussions of drug use and general debauchery rather than his influence on the writing world. But it's hard to get too self-righteous about this treatment-- by the time of his death, HST had long been something of a caricature, both literally, in Doonesbury, and figuratively, through his increasingly bizarre rants about paranoia and football gambling published on ESPN's Page 2. Whether drawn by Trudeau or Steadman, Thompson is cursed to be forever portrayed with cartoon circles orbiting his Panama hat, nothing but a Halloween costume or a t-shirt.

Few seem to have noticed that the absurdly exaggerated drug use of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is given a portrayal that is far from enticing, note-perfectly enacted by Terry Gilliam's film of the book. To Thompson, his persona's ingestion of drugs wasn't a celebration of counterculture mind exploration, but a desperate self-inoculation against the increasingly diseased American atmosphere closing in on all sides. Fear & Loathing didn't earn its place in American literature as a celebration of pharmaceutical joyriding, but rather as an obituary for the delusional promises of the 1960s--it's a literary Altamont.

Also seemingly misunderstood are Thompson's politics, often summed up merely as being anti-Nixon and, as such, implicitly leftist. In truth, HST's views ran much closer to libertarian recluse, with his main political issue being the right to own very large guns, and his lunatic run for sheriff on the Freak Power ticket mostly a reaction to ski resorts moving in on his Colorado compound. If Thompson had a political agenda, it was primarily against the invasion of government into private life, and recent times had only given him renewed reason to trot out the phrase most often associated with his work.

But the truly lasting impact of Hunter S. Thompson's life will forever be his subversion of traditional journalistic technique, injecting pure subjectivity into the sometimes pious, self-deceiving arm of reporting. Realizing that it was impossible to completely subvert one's personality towards the end of objectively stating facts, Thompson took things to the opposite extreme, placing himself in the scene whenever possible and running off on fantastical tangents when reality got too dry. He knew riding with and subsequently getting beat down by the Hell's Angels would get the story better than interviews and microfiche, knew that the Kentucky Derby's snobbish depravity was better covered drunk and betting profligately than from the detachment of the press box.

Yet this innovation isn't merely manifest today in the pretensions of silly indie rock reviewers. In a news world overrun by pundits drunk on their sense of infallibility, the needle of Gonzo journalism is all the more necessary, which is probably why "The Daily Show" out-reports the 24-hour infotainment factories with a scarily high frequency. Literature meanwhile continues to go through cycles of fourth-wall demolition, most recently with the rise and fall of hyper-reflective memoirs, while documentary films start to free themselves from the restrictions of cold, emotionless observation and embrace subjectivity with the same rush HST delivered 30 years ago.

While Thompson's self-inflicted death immediately felt more horrible than a natural-cause variety exit, the waiting period of a slow deadline has brought his choice into sharper focus, almost seeming like a logical final act to his career. Anyone who has seen recent footage of the man knows his health was grim at best, and it's only fitting that Thompson would choose to flex his subjectivity one last time regarding the timing and nature of his own demise. So let's not dwell on the ugly details of his death, nor the cultural distortion of his personality into a grinning Johnny Depp gripping a cigarette holder between his teeth and popping mescaline. Instead, let's dwell on the Jill Krementz's photo on the cover of his second letters collection: sitting in a car, wearing an ugly shirt, thinning hair, and a contemplative expression while, in his mind, he redrafts the rules of journalism.

Hunter S. Thompson blasted through the world like a big-finned rocket of defiance and revulsion. He leaves a big burned hole and a safer, duller world.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Cintra Wilson

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

Last night, the night that Hunter S. Thompson was apparently shooting himself (an exit somehow befitting the self-styled anarchy and insouciantly godless iconoclasm of the man) my friend "Dirty Bobby," a magazine photographer, and I were in the kitchen of my house discussing a road trip he'd taken on a journalism assignment in Nevada. Suffice to say there was a lot of crystal meth involved, a rental car with a V-8 engine, a half-naked, semi-conscious female basketball player from UNLV, and a remake of an automatic Nazi "grease-gun," which was fired repeatedly out the window at 80 mph.

It was the first time in my life I have ever considered the possibility that Dr. Thompson's work might have had a questionable impact on the youth of today. This was certainly not the first of such stories I'd heard.

While there is a lot to be said for this kind of self-consuming, skid-marks-on-the-lawn-of-the-establishment behavior, most of the kids who imitated Thompson didn't really get that he wasn't simply depraved for the sake of depravity. Thompson may have seemed to be merely flailing violently among the vultures and wolverines wafting up from the spilled ether in his Buick floor mat, but he actually had a point: He was searching for the American dream. The twisted style in which he conducted this crusade was a reflection of how twisted he felt that dream had become.

If artists are the uninsulated emotional conductors for the rest of society, Thompson was a one-man power grid of paranoia, revulsion and defiance. He was a canary in our collective coal mine, an ulcer on our societal tongue, a warning. He was physically a big and strong enough man to recklessly embody the idea that we should all Beware of Where We Are Headed. A shuddering red flag.

Alienation was a big part of Thompson's voice, but not (I believe) because he wanted to be alienated. HST wrote very movingly about participating in the thrillingly inclusive group energies of the 1960s. He just didn't really fit in very well to anyone else's scene. He was a bit too charismatic, clean-cut and bizarre on his BSA, with his cigarette holder, to blend in with the Hell's Angels. He needed to be the center of attention too much to comfortably share the spotlight in rooms where other luminati of the day were having their moments -- rock stars, politicians, the various and infamous. Thompson was trapped, somewhat, in the limbo between Journalist and Personality: the neither-nor underworld of the rock-star scribe, who wields a little too much personal gravity to yield the focus to a subject other than himself.

But nobody wanted Thompson to stop talking about himself -- we loved living vicariously and seeing the world through his yellow target-range aviator lenses. He was our reluctant superhero of ultra-decadence. The contexts in which Thompson was placed (in a younger, finer world, when Rolling Stone had the balls and decency to trust the untrustworthy for the sake of Thor's whipsong, faxed to the editor on paper napkins in scrawls illegible) were really just an excuse to hear more of him, commenting on anything. It wasn't that his subjects were so terribly important, or even timely -- his deadlines came and went -- it was the verbal synapse-connections -- poison flowers that could only blossom from an overheating brain: Teeth like baseballs, eyes like jellied fire ... shoot the pasties off an 8-foot bull dyke and win a cotton-candy goat ...

Sure, the man had been dehydrated since 1971; he needed electrolytes and proteins and Thorazine and antidepressants and probably something for his ailing joints because he probably had no cartilage in his knees or hips at all, and a whole host of other difficulties that comes of applying a lifelong scorched-earth policy to your mind and body. Thompson was old, and life had finally become sufficiently uncomfortable for him to check out.

I think it is improper and disrespectful to whine about this suicide. Thompson was in the game for a very, very long time, and I think it is a safe bet that he was never comfortable. This was a profoundly tortured guy, the smoke from whose ears always made a whole lot of exciting colors that we all enjoyed. It was a great brain to watch but you wouldn't want to live in it, I'd aver. He was a butch motherfucker and I'd bet cash he stuck it out significantly longer than he really wanted to. Let's face it, HST was not one for the nursing home -- he'd have just stolen everyone else's barbiturates and hurt people trying to arm-wrestle.

May the kindly trickster gods collect you, Hunter Thompson, and drive you to where the buffalo roam, where your mind can unspool itself forever and your spirit can go on groping unsuspecting tits and trashing hotel rooms. You have earned it, Golden and Immortal Son of Classic Letters. Rest in Whatever You Would Prefer to Peace. We, the filthy and leaderless children who cherish your legacy, salute you, and will honor you with every bullet fired out of our car windows toward the unmarked desert sky.

Selah.

from the San Francisco Chronicle:

HUNTER S. THOMPSON: 1937-2005
Original gonzo journalist kills self at age 67
'Fear and Loathing' author, ex-columnist for S.F. Examiner dies of gunshot wound

Tanya Schevitz, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, February 21, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson, the counterculture writer credited with creating a new form of journalism in books like "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," was found dead Sunday from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in his Aspen- area home, authorities said.

Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a friend of Thompson, and Thompson's son, Juan, who reportedly found his father's body, confirmed the death of the 67-year-old writer to the Aspen Daily News.

"Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," Juan Thompson said in a statement to the newspaper, according to the Associated Press.

Thompson's wife, Anita, was not home at the time of his death.

San Francisco writer Ben Fong-Torres, a former colleague of Thompson's at Rolling Stone magazine, said he was surprised and saddened to hear about Thompson's apparent suicide.

"He was one of the great pioneers of new journalism and his own invention: gonzo journalism, in which he immersed himself in the story," Fong-Torres said. "He presented it in a way that nobody else, as hard as they tried, could imitate. He was singular and will not be matched anytime soon."

Fong-Torres said Thompson leaves a legacy in the field of journalism.

"It doesn't matter that he was a guy who was capable of doing anything and known to live on-and-beyond the edge," he said in a phone interview Sunday night. "It's a tremendous loss, no matter where he was, at what stage he was, how ill he had gotten -- he was still capable of humorous insights."

Chronicle Executive Vice President and Editor Phil Bronstein spent a few nights last summer with Thompson and his wife in Colorado. He said that Thompson was recovering from spinal surgery and a broken leg from a fall but that there were no signs that the eccentric Thompson was depressed.

They watched the Republican Convention and hours of footage for a documentary that was being made about Thompson. He showed off a new neon shooting target he had, and he held court at the local Woody Creek Tavern, Bronstein said.

"He was exercised about what was going on in the world as he always was," Bronstein said. "He seemed, as always, bizarre and interesting and fascinating and was a remarkably charming and friendly host."

Thompson, who wrote for the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner in the mid-to-late 1980s, lived the legend he created with his writing.

David McCumber, a former editor at the Examiner and now managing editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, edited Thompson's columns at the Examiner in the mid-1980s.

"Everything was legitimate about the man's reputation," he said. "The surprise was as I got to know him ... everything was real ... and that could be scary sometimes."

He said that one day he was on a three-way call with Thompson and Gary Hart's campaign manager when the campaign manager learned that the Miami Herald had the story about Hart's relationship with Donna Rice.

Thompson was at his home in Woody Creek outside Aspen and remembered that his neighbor singer/songwriter Don Henley knew Rice. He went to Henley's house, rifled his drawers, and found a picture for the Examiner, making it the first news organization to have a picture of Rice.

"We always had a very active time. It was never dull," McCumber said. "One of the joys of editing Hunter was you never knew if you were going to get hallucinatory prose or trenchant analysis," he said.

Jeanette Etheredge, another close friend of Thompson and owner of the North Beach fixture, Tosca, said he knew where every ice machine was at every motel in San Francisco.

One night when they were out driving around, he stopped abruptly in front of the Seal Rock Inn and jumped out.

"When he came back, he had a bucket of ice for his bottle," she said.

Chronicle Executive News Editor Jay Johnson, who also edited Thompson's columns when he wrote for the Examiner, said Thompson could not dictate over the phone, so he filed his stories page by page over the fax, sending multiple revisions as the two spent many hours throughout the night and into the morning "wrestling the column to the ground."

"Nobody was as much his editor as his sounding board. He needed to talk it out and get reaction to it. It was not the average creative process," Johnson said.

One morning as deadline neared and they were still working it out, Thompson, who was known to have an affinity for controlled substances, told Johnson, "Our real drug of choice is adrenaline."

Johnson said Thompson was easiest to work with when he was covering a presidential campaign. But he was often just "riffing," Johnson said.

He fondly recalled one night when Thompson told him how he had tried to cheer up a friend who was scheduled to go in for back surgery. He took a bunch of explosives out to the backyard and stuffed them into his Jeep. As the hood flew into the air and the Jeep exploded into pieces, the two friends realized what they had projected into the sky would soon come back down.

"They are like dancing around with this shrapnel coming down," Johnson said.

Johnson told him to write it down and that became Thompson's next column.

Johnson said it seemed that part of the reason Thompson enjoyed writing his column for the Examiner was that he had a burning desire to be plugged in. In the days before the Internet, Thompson turned to Johnson to give him the latest news.

"By calling in, he could ask what was on the wires. He would ask me to read him stuff. That way he could be involved in the business," Johnson said.

When he was in San Francisco, Thompson was a regular at Tosca, even running the bar once when owner Etheredge was out getting a root canal.

He broke his ankle once doing a pirouette off the bar, she said, and then refused medical help, instead taping his broken ankle with electrical tape.

She said he was always a gentleman. One time after hanging out at his hotel all night and into the morning, she told him that she had to go home. It was about 5 a.m. and he insisted on escorting her in a taxi.

But when they were walking through the hotel lobby to get into a cab, she noticed he was wearing just underwear. And when they reached her house, she had to give him money to get back to the hotel.

Sunday night, she was shocked by the death of someone who was so vibrant.

"I spoke to him a few weeks ago and he sounded good," she said. "The one person I would never think would do something like that goes and does it."

Thompson was born in Louisville, Ky., on July 18, 1937, His father, Jack, was an insurance agent. Thompson got his start in newspaper writing while he was serving in the Air Force in the late 1950s.

An acute observer of the decadence and depravity in American life, Thompson wrote such books as "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" in 1973 and the collections "Generation of Swine" and "Songs of the Doomed." His first- ever novel, "The Rum Diary," written in 1959, was first published in 1998.

"The Rum Diary" came out of Thompson's experiences in Puerto Rico. Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy, who had been friends with Thompson since he rejected the then-young writer for a job at the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico, described Thompson as a trailblazer.

"Hunter found a way to be new in the world. His attitude, his language, his subject matter, his take on history, his plunge into booze and drugs -- all these were singular," Kennedy said. "Maybe other people behaved this way, but nobody ever wrote about it with such spectacular originality. He was all by himself."

Thompson's other books include "Hell's Angels" and "The Proud Highway." His most recent effort was "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and The Downward Spiral of Dumbness."

"Hunter was a gifted writer, political observer and sportsman with a huge appetite for life in every dimension," said William R. Hearst III, a director of the Hearst Corp. "Like Mark Twain before him he occasionally wrote for this newspaper and neither of them tolerated fools gleefully. We will miss his words and collect his letters."


goodbye hunter. we will truly miss your voice, and will cherish always the impact you've made on our hearts. our hats are off to you, you star-eyed dynamo. drinks are on the house the rest of the night...

so, i've become convinced that being utterly schizophrenic must be a requirement for upper management. every job i've ever had has had an absolute nutter for a manager, and not in the good way either. there was my obsessive compulsive coffee shop manager, who would tell you to clean the same thing 4 times, regardless of the fact that you had already done it before she even asked you, and then create conspiracy theories involving the bums who came in, thinking they were trying to get her fired. then there was my manager from the movie theater job way back when in idaho, who decided to start an investigation to see if i was dating one of the assistant managers, who happened to be her cousin and good friend, and who would have lost her job if she had been involved with me. then, of course, there were my two lovely bosses from the hostel in prague, one of which was convinced that gypsies were sneaking in the upper floor windows and stealing guest's things, the other who threatened to have somebody shipped across the border into the ukraine where he "knew people" who could make them disappear. This is the past that i'm working from here. Finally, though, I thought I had reached a safe harbor from the maelstrom of mad management. Au contraire.

It all began this tuesday, lolo's birthday- a national holiday (yet to be recognized). The cafe staff, knowing my deep and abiding love of pirates, ruffians, and scalliwags of all sorts, put together a splendid little package of pirate paraphenalia, hook/eye patch/flag/spanish doubloons/tri-quarter hat. Thrilled, I decided to wear the hat during work yesterday, yet was informed by my boss that I couldn't because it wasn't part of dress code. I was bummed, but swiftly over it. Fast forward to today. I was out front doing barista-like things (leaning against the pastry case, most likely) and my boss was in back putting things away with the cafe supervisor. He saw the hat resting on the counter and asked why we had a pirate hat back there. Carly, the badass cafe supervisor, told him that they'd given it to me for my birthday. Completely misplacing his memory of yesterday, he then asked why I wasn't wearing it. Carly could do nothing more than look at him aghast, and remind him that he'd forbade me from wearing it not a day previously. He honestly had no memory of being that menacing authority figure. This is what i deal with, job after job. I'm just trying to figure out now whether they were all loony before they became authority-figures or whether the job twisted them into the sorrowful wrecks that they are today.