Adam helped me make the transition from Pittsburgh reporter to Washington protester by letting me stay at his house and work with him at the Mintwood Media Collective, a grassroots PR firm he founded nearly three years ago (four eyes on the prize indeed!). We would do press releases and calls for nonprofits with little money and/or no communications directors. Eventually I had to quit because of the money factor and because I got sick and tired of working around some of the sexist left-leaning dolts in our community ... but not before Adam helped me get a gig on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. I appeared as an activist who was helping organize the demonstrations against both bloated parties and their 2000 national conventions. It was nerve-wracking fun; I got a free mug and a bagel and got to answer questions from callers across the country. Most of the callers really liked me -- I used a special brand of smiling and verbal aikido that helped me get through the event unscathed and on top. The only person who was weird called in to ask me if I had ever read Marx ("Yes") and if I wished my mother had aborted me ("uh, no").

Adam is a very creative and dynamic person. One time we played husband and wife and performed a skit about campaign finance reform in front of the lines waiting to enter the U.S. Capitol. You can see it here; that's me in the dome. We also did some dancing with tubers. All films made by Mike Flugennock, a Yippie who knows how to wheatpaste like nobody's business.

Shop, Drop, and Roll

I apologize; this is an enhanced email segment [hey, I get tired too]. Thanks to the original recipient (you know who you are) for the inspiration:

Tonight I went to The Big San Antonio-based Grocery Chain (Hancock Center outlet), which is sort of like breaking a rule (I prefer to give money to thelocal co-op, the local Fresh Plus stores, anybody indie) but I wanted lots of vegetables and other healthy foodstuffs in a big bad way. Well, I bought way too much to carry, so from Superfoodaramaland to home I did this bizarre shuttle run-type thing so my arms wouldn't fall off. It involved putting one bunch of bags (six per bunch, full of milk, turkeys, cans ... nice 'n' heavy items) on the sidewalk, then walking the other bundle a block, putting that one down and then going back to retrieve the first bundle. It was the longest walk home ever. What a moron! From time to time the French onions would fall out of their bag and start rolling. Then the spinach. Then the organic mushroom soup. Luckily the Middle Eastern or subcontinental guy who owns the Speedway Grocery was very nice (it's Christmas) and let me put my bags there for a minute while I wove my way through the Christmas Goobers (one of the nearby streets, 37th, is a holiday spectacle with lots of trees dripping colored lights and Christmas angel sculptures made of oven parts) and got home. Now I'm making lasagna and doing all sorts of awkward and clumsy things, like pouring the hot water from the noodles on my hand and setting off the fire alarm and burning my hands AGAIN by touching the hot noodles and forgetting to remove the sticker from the eggplant.

To increase Christmas vibeology, a turkey breast is thawing in the fridge. I was going to buy an entire turkey but that seemed excessive, especially because no one lives in this little box of an apartment but me, and no one's coming over for the holidays because all of my friends went to visit their families to eat their families' foods and, oh, probably get into fistfights with their sister's asshole boyfriends or whatever it is people do during holidays (my family argued and yelled). Not to mention that dark meat sucks. I thought I'd cook like I had a family, just to know a little what it's like and to express some old-fashioned solidarity with my proletarian mother. Too bad stuffed bunnies don't eat.

The turkey has some "flavoring solution" in it, which kind of worries me because I don't know what that means. It's not a smoked turkey or anything. it was impossible to find a turkey that wasn't injected with "solutions" or "flavors." Many foods have "artificial flavors" and "natural flavors" that might as well be artificial; the flavors come from these hocus pocus chemifabricas clustered together alongside a highway in northern New Jersey. Scientists walk around their laboratories holding test tubes full of "popcorn smell" and essences. You can read all about it in Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser: "One of the hits of the year ... breathtaking. You'll never eat pig heads again." � Jerkus Reviews