If you had 24 hours to live....

[bluereaper]

eh i would hope i guess the people in the gun store wouldn't exspect me comming so i would have time to make it to the teller and kill him before he pulled out his gun....eh who needs logic in a killing rampage

[viking thunder]

by the way, if I had only 24 hours to live. I beleive I could make very positive progress towards an enduring freedom for the people of my country. by being able to make the hard decisions that otherwise are impossible.

[MeDeFe]

I'd buy the dice generator and proceed to win all my games.

[Thorthoth]

I suppose I'd pack a picnic of all my favourite foods and take a scenic hike to some beautiful spot. I'd bring a long a notebook and a camera. Maybe also a sleeping bag to lie down in comfortably at the end.

[Bernie Sanders]

I would spend every second of my last 24 hours hunting down the turd who revived an old thread. Why you ask?

Cause the moron can't start an original entertaining thread on his own, unless he's crying about how cruel and unfair life is in these CC forums.

[Thorthoth]

Yes, life certainly can be cruel and unfair... my having to respond to you idiocy being a case in point...

All forum threads are conversations that are constantly paused and then later continued. Did it ever even occur to you that if everybody only posted new threads, each one would only be that one initial thread. Your stupidity is staggering.

[riskllama]

*your

[Thorthoth]

*your

That is just a missed letter in typing ('you' instead of 'your'). You're becoming neurotic.
I won't even correct that one, just to show how silly you're being.

[DoomYoshi]

This is a thread of yore.

[riskllama]

DY wins this thread.

[riskllama]

thx agane, JP...

[DoomYoshi]

Thorthoth, do you even know what you've unearthed here? Do you know the significance of this thread? I doubt it.

[riskllama]

Thorthoth, do you even know what you've unearthed here? Do you know the significance of this thread? I doubt it.

don't tell him, DY...

[Thorthoth]

Thorthoth, do you even know what you've unearthed here? Do you know the significance of this thread? I doubt it.

don't tell him, DY...

DY wins nothing, now please, shut your ungulate-cunt mouth and keep it shut.

[2dimes]

Way to bump this unoriginal thread jackass.

Prophecy Update - If you're not ready you best get ready! - 2/14/06

Randy Thomas

Feb 14, 2006



PROPHECY UPDATE - News & Information for the End Times



Greetings,



"For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing." (1Thessalonians 5:9-11)



"Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words. (1Thessalonians 4:13-18)



"Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come upon the whole world to test those who live on the earth. I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown. Him who overcomes I will make a pillar in the temple of my God. Never again will he leave it. I will write on him the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from my God; and I will also write on him my new name." Revelation 3:10-12



Encouraging words indeed! Let's make the short time we have left count for all eternity! Stay Informed! Don't Be Left Behind!

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Hamas leader Mahmoud a-Zahar declares Palestinian war on Israel will go on - Debka



Spelling out the incoming Palestinian government's agenda, a-Zahar said: We will not recognize Israel; our armed struggle will go on until all of Palestine is "liberated;" we will abrogate the Oslo accords and all the agreements the PLO and the Palestinian Authority signed; all negotiations with Israel must go through a third party; we don't need money from Israel or "the Satan;" Arab nations will give us money; we have long-range missiles.



DEBKAfile: Mahmoud a-Zahar, who is terminally ill with cancer, in effect handed down his political-military testament. It contained the incoming Palestinian government's point-by-point response to the conditions laid down by the United States, Israel and the Middle East Quartet (sans Russia) for dealing with a Hamas-led government – recognize Israel, renounce terror and honor international accords. He showed the Islamic terrorists to be unmoved by threats of isolation and the restrictive rules of engagement the Olmert government proposes to impose on a Palestinian Authority after Hamas is sworn in.



Responding to Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's election pledge to set Israel's final borders, the Hamas leader declared total war on the Jewish state and its very existence.



A-Zahar scorned the constitutional "white" revolution to unseat Hamas which Abu Mazen attempted on the last day of the departing, Fatah-dominated legislature.



He was also telling Fatah-al Aqsa Brigades that Hamas could match the new Aqsa 207 Katyusha rockets they had just acquired.

_________________________________________________________________



Supreme Court Justice Mishael Heshin defines the Palestinian Authority as an enemy state de facto - Debka



He rejected petitions to allow Palestinians married to Israelis to settle in Israel under the family reunification law as a loophole that would pose a risk to state security. "Just listen to daily declarations made by Hamas," Heshin said. "The Palestinian people chose Hamas, which seeks to destroy Israel, and they are citizens of an enemy state."



He asked why Israel should take risks with Israeli lives, any more than did England and America by admitting Germans during World War II. The judge said no one is preventing mixed couples from building a family, but they should live in Jenin. The right to life takes priority over any other consideration, he said.

_________________________________________________________________



Hamas politburo head Khaled Mashaal says: Our mission is to liberate Jerusalem, purify the Aqsa Mosque - Debka



Addressing a pro-Hamas rally in Khartoum, Sudan, Mashaal referred to Western threats to cut off aid: "God, the Islamic nation are with us, will lead us to victory and liberation. Do not fear poverty." He thanked Sudanese parties for raising funds for the Hamas-ruled Palestinian Authority government.

_________________________________________________________________



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Learn why Israel is called God's Timepiece; learn why the Bible says the days before the Lord returns will be As in the Days of Noah. Learn why the Rapture must take place before the Antichrist is revealed; learn why the massive military force that is set to invade Israel is already on the horizon and why Jerusalem is called "A Cup of Trembling"!



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Mofaz: Hamas part of 'axis of evil' - Yaakov Katz, THE JERUSALEM POST



Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the Presidential palace in Cairo Tuesday that Israel would not negotiate with Hamas until it dismantled its terror infrastructure, recognized the State of Israel and accepted all previous agreements made between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.



"Hamas's control over the Palestinian Authority is just another part of the 'axis of evil' that includes Iran, Syria, and now extends to the PA from where it will extend to additional countries that harbor terror organizations," Mofaz told reporters following his hour long meeting with Mubarak.



In addition to Hamas's win in the Palestinian elections, the two officials also discussed the current tense situation along Israel's northern border with Hizbullah and the growing global terror perpetrated by Islamic Jihad and Al Qaida.



Israel, Mofaz told Mubarak, believed that Syria and Iran were giving financial and logistical support to Hizbullah with the goal of shifting the international community's focus from those countries to the Hizbullah.



"Their goal is that the focus of the international world will be there [along the northern border] and not on Syria, since the Syrians are under pressure," Mofaz said.



Mubarak, Mofaz said, asked Israel to "have patience" since Egypt believed that it was only a matter of time before the Hamas met all of Jerusalem's criteria for the renewal of negotiations between the PA and Israel.



"Mubarak believes that the pressure Egypt has placed on Abu Mazen [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas] and the Hamas will bear fruit and that the Hamas will change its ways," Mofaz said.

_________________________________________________________________



'3rd intifada on its way'- By Aaron Klein - WorldNetDaily.com



Terror leaders detail for WND 'massive new war' against Israel



With Hamas now in power, the long-ruling Fatah party and its "military wing" Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades forced into the opposition, and Israel announcing it will soon withdraw from the West Bank, Palestinian terror leaders tell WorldNetDaily recent events here are leading them to launch what they call a third intifada – or violent confrontation – against Israel consisting of suicide bombings, rocket attacks against Jewish communities and "a few new surprises in our arsenal."



Some terror leaders, particularly from the Al Aqsa Brigades, whose associated Fatah party scored poorly in last month's parliamentary elections, say they are planning massive violence against Israeli civilians mostly to revolt against the new Hamas-controlled Palestinian government.





"The new intifada is only a question of time and this will be the hardest and the most dangerous one. It's just about timing until the order to blow up a new wave of attacks will be given," Abu Nasser, a senior Al Aqsa Brigades leader from the Balata refugee camp in northern Samaria told WorldNetDaily in an interview.



Israel expecting new wave of terror



In the last 10 days Israeli forces intercepted 12 potential suicide bombers and have stopped several dozen bombings the past few months, prompting fears of "a new and worrisome wave of terror," said Yuval Diskin, head of Israel's Shin Bet security services.



Hamas last month catapulted to power, winning Palestinian parliamentary elections by a large margin and wresting control from Fatah. Israel has warned the losing terror groups, particularly Fatah's Al Aqsa Brigades, will try to stymie efforts by Hamas to form a new government and sign a long-term cease fire with the Jewish state. Also, members of the Islamic Jihad terror group expressed disappointment their organization decided not to run in elections, and have warned they will stop Hamas from imposing a truce.



Last week, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his Kadima party, leading overwhelmingly in the polls for next month's Israeli elections, will seek to "change Israel's borders" by withdrawing from most of the West Bank. Some security officials told WND they fear terror groups will increase attacks to claim credit for an Israeli West Bank pull-out.



After Israel announced its withdrawal from Gaza, which it carried out this past summer, terror organizations, mostly led by Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees umbrella group, increased attacks in the area, at one point firing an average of seven rockets per week at Gaza's Jewish communities.



Diskin warned that Iran and Syria, currently under mounting international pressure, are streaming large sums of money to Palestinian terror groups to spur on local cells to carry out attacks in hopes of starting regional violence.



The Palestinians launched their first intifada in 1987, which developed into a well-organized violent rebellion orchestrated by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization from its headquarters in Tunis. The so-called second intifada was initiated in 2000 after Arafat rejected at Camp David an Israeli offer of a Palestinian state on most of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and sections of eastern Jerusalem. Some 993 Israelis and 3,781 Palestinians have been killed so far. Many say the second intifada is still being waged.



The terror groups themselves say they are planning a new wave of violence against Israelis, which some terror leaders are calling a "third intifada." They detailed for WorldNetDaily how they will carry it out.



Al Aqsa Brigades: 'We'll kill Israelis to revolt against Hamas'



The Al Aqsa Brigades was formed in 2000 by then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat as a military offshoot of the Fatah party. PA President Mahmoud Abbas signed a cease fire with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last February, to which the Brigades was party – but the terror group continued carrying out attacks.



Al Aqsa's Abu Nasser claims Israel put Hamas in power, and says his group is preparing a new terror onslaught as a result.



"For the last 10 months we respected a cease fire expecting to see changes in the lives of the Palestinian people, but we received from the Israeli side more assassinations ... and above all we received the Hamas victory, which seems to be the result of an Israeli and international conspiracy. They believe that Hamas will give up easier our lands and rights. I think that they are right, but we will not allow this to happen. We will fight and we will blow up the new intifada," Abu Nasser told WND.



Sources close to Al Aqsa say Abu Nasser was involved in preparing the last three suicide bombings in Israel, including the attack last month at a Tel Aviv shwarma restaurant that injured more than 30 Israelis.



Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal over the weekend said his group might sign a long-term cease fire with Israel, but told reporters he will not ask other Palestinian group to stop attacks.



Abu Nasser told WND the Brigades will not respect any cease fire agreed to by Hamas and will not halt attacks at Hamas' request.



"I am sure Hamas will start arresting us, but it will not be that easy [for them]," said Abu Nasser. "We are preparing ourselves for the worst scenario."



Asked if Al Aqsa's new terror war will be launched less out of aggression toward Israel and more to revolt against Hamas, Abu Nasser replied, "This is partially true. When we were in power, we were obliged to be more sensitive and more obedient to the instructions and policies of our leadership. Now that we lost the elections, why should we obey the leaders and just who do we obey? The Hamas?



Continued Abu Nasser: "I am sure once [Hamas is] in power it is only that power that is really important for them. They will be ready to give up things that President Arafat refused to do. The proof for what I am saying is that in the last days when the Israeli army killed more than 15 Palestinian activists, most of them from our Brigades, we did not hear the voice of Hamas. Where are their resistance principles? Did they disappear after the elections?"



Abu Nasser warned the so-called third intifada will be a combination of suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Jewish towns.



"The Al Aqsa Brigades recently unified most of our cells and groups and we will wait for the most suitable moment to launch our resistance acts. As for the acts, there will be suicide attacks but there will be a massive use of rockets. These rockets will be launched against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but also if needed against Israeli cities inside the green line."



Rocket war against Israel



Since Israel's evacuation of the Gaza Strip this past August, security officials have been warning that the Palestinian terror groups transferred their rocket capabilities to the West Bank, which is within firing range of Israel's international airport and many major Israeli cities, including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.



Israel has confirmed that at least two rockets have been fired in the West Bank so far from the northern Samaria town of Jenin. There is information terror groups in the West Bank, particularly the Al Aqsa Brigades and Islamic Jihad, will step up attacks against the area's Jewish communities ahead of any Israeli withdrawal from the area.



WorldNetDaily caught up with Abu Oudai, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader responsible for coordinating the organization's rocket network in the West Bank. He warned that his organization is preparing a rocket war against Israel:



"We have launched [several] times and with the help of Allah we will launch these rockets regularly. There will be no calm, no cease fire until the occupation leaves our land. I don't need to tell you that the aerial distance from Jenin to Netanya, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other cities is not big without telling you what are all our plans concerning other parts of the West Bank."



Oudai said his organization and other terror groups have stockpiled Palestinian rockets, including Qassams, which can travel about 2 miles, more primitive Jenin-1 and Jenin-2s, and Arafat-1 and Arafat-2 rockets, some of which can reportedly travel up to 3 miles. He claimed his group is developing a new rocket that will put all of Israel's major cities within firing range.



"The very near future will prove their capacity to kill and destroy and to beat the Israelis in the West Bank exactly like we did with these rockets in the Gaza Strip," Oudai said.



Oudai pocked fun at Israel's West Bank security barrier, which has been credited with making it more difficult for Palestinian groups to carry out suicide bombings.



"[The Israelis] have built a huge wall on which [it] spent billions of dollars but still we are hitting Israel with our rockets and reaching every target we want. This wall will not defend [Israel] from our rockets which have defeated the wall and all the security measures taken to prevent our attacks," Oudai boasted.



Israeli military leaders previously warned that the Jewish state will launch an "unprecedented" military campaign against any rocket firing from the West Bank.



The Israeli Defense Forces did not initiate any large-scale anti-rocket operation in response to the rockets launched from Jenin. It has been largely unable to stop the rockets regularly fired from Gaza into nearby Israeli Negev towns.



The Israeli army regularly responds to Qassam firings from Gaza with surgical missile strikes and artillery fire at areas it says are used to launch rockets. In December, Israel set up a buffer zone in sections of Gaza occasionally used to fire rockets into nearby Israeli Negev communities, but the Palestinian terrorists shifted their launching sites to other areas and have continued the attacks.



Said Oudai: "Israel already has used all its tools. Tanks, aircrafts, assassinations and everything it could use. But we are still here and still fighting. We do not get excited from the Israeli threats. What can be this unprecedented reaction? They have already tried everything."



In Gaza, the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella organization of several Palestinian terror groups, has taken credit for many of the rockets launched from the area since 2000.



Abu Abir, spokesman for the Committees, boasted his group transported missiles to the West Bank.



"If there is need, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and everywhere in Israel can become our target. Israelis must also know that we have already transferred the knowledge and the technology of producing rockets to the West Bank," Abu Abir told WorldNetDaily.



Abu Abir said his group has "improved [our] capacities in shooting these rockets. Even the Israeli officers agreed that the improvement is at all levels, [including] the distance that these rockets can reach, the capacity of explosives and their accuracy. In the last five years, there is no doubt that our abilities have improved."



Islamic Jihad: 'The Israelis should wait for our surprises'



Islamic Jihad has claimed responsibility for every suicide bombing against Israel since last February's cease fire, including bombings in a Tel Aviv disco and restaurant and a Netanya shopping mall, among others. Al Aqsa leaders told WorldNetDaily they aided the recent bombings. Islamic Jihad also says it fired most of the rockets launched from the Gaza Strip since Israel's August withdrawal.



Israel says Islamic Jihad is directly backed by Iran and Syria. Jihad chief Ramadan Shallah operates openly from Damascus and regularly visits Tehran.



Security sources say Hezbollah headquarters in Damascus and Beirut have ordered Islamic Jihad to carry out attacks in hopes of drawing Israel into a protracted military conflict.



Israel's Diskin warned that Iran and Syria are looking to use Islamic Jihad in part to distract mounting international pressure against their respective countries.



Iran is under fire for its alleged nuclear ambitions, and the international community led by the United States has threatened to bring Syria to the United Nations Security Council for allegedly interfering in the investigation into the assassination last year of former Lebanese Prime Minister Raqif Hariri, for which Syria has been widely blamed.



WorldNetDaily spoke with Islamic Jihad's northern West Bank leader Abu Khalil, who warned his terror group is planning a terror onslaught to chase Israel from the West Bank and eventually from Jerusalem.



"We will launch very soon very painful attacks that will shake the enemy. In fact, this is more the continuation of the (second) intifada because we never said that the intifada has ended. We will never give calm and security to the enemy. This will happen only when Israel will run away from Jerusalem and the West Bank like it did in Gaza," Abu Khalil said.



Abu Khalil, like leaders from the Al Aqsa Brigades, said his group will not respect a Hamas request to halt attacks against Israel.



"I don't believe the brothers in Hamas will ask us to stop. In any case, our only commitment is towards Allah, and the blood of our people and brothers and towards our political leadership," Abu Khalil told WND.



"Therefore we will not give up the right to defend ourselves and to launch all kinds of attacks against Israel everywhere there is an Israeli soldier or any Israeli goal in the West Bank and 1948 occupied Palestine [the entire state of Israel]."



Asked which weapons will be emphasized during Islamic Jihad's next wave of terror attacks, Abu Khalil replied, "I should not answer this question for operational reasons. But we proved that we use everything Allah enables us to achieve and to use – suicide attacks, rockets and more surprises. The Israelis should wait for interesting surprises."



Hamas: 'Our goal is to rebuild Palestinian society'



Hamas, a terror group responsible for more than 60 suicide bombings, last month won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament and is currently attempting to form a governing coalition.



Hamas leaders claim they will focus on rebuilding Palestinian society, and have stated they may sign a long term cease fire agreement with Israel.



Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas chief in Gaza, told WorldNetDaily his group will "rebuild the Palestinian life shattered by corruption in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This is our goal now. To make a better life for the Palestinians."



In a widely circulated interview, al-Zahar even recently claimed to WorldNetDaily that Hamas might negotiate with Israel using a third party.



He said his group will likely agree to a long-term cease fire with the Jewish state, but said it will not recognize Israel or renounce its charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel by "assaulting and killing."



Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal this weekend said his group will not stop other Palestinian organizations from carrying out attacks against Israel.



Still, some analysts contend Hamas might use its power to halt some anti-Israel violence in hopes of receiving financial aide from international donors.



But the Al-Mustaqbal Research Center in Gaza warned that after Israel's Gaza withdrawal Hamas attacks will be focused on West Bank Jewish communities. The Center is reportedly closely aligned with Hamas and, according to Israeli security officials, it espouses Hamas ideology:



"[Hamas will be] transporting warfare technologies such as mortars and rockets from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. These will provide an easy way to bombard Israeli populated areas adjacent to the security fence, and the fence, which is currently under construction, will therefore become useless," stated a recent publication by the Research Center, according to a translation by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at Israel's Center for Special Studies.



Al-Mustaqbal stated Israel's Gaza withdrawal provided Hamas and other terror groups with a staging ground from which to launch attacks and to transport rockets to West Bank communities. It said the Gaza withdrawal proves Israel will vacate other areas in response to repeated attacks.



PFLP: Terror forced Israel out of Gaza, will get us rest of Jewish state



The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has carried out recent West Bank shooting attacks and rocket firings from the Gaza Strip. The group's leader, Ahmad Saadat, is in a Palestinian jail in Jericho for allegedly planning the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavaam Zeevi in October 2001.



Israeli security officials say the PFLP has scaled back its participation in attacks the past few months, but Abu Hani, a leader of the PLFP's "armed wing," the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, told WorldNetDaily his group used the time earned from last year's cease fire to build its arsenal in preparation for a third intifada.



"The last months were used for a rest in order to rehabilitate forces. The Palestinian people preserves its right to fight against Israel," Abu Hani said.



He told WorldNetDaily the PFLP is "forced" to launch a new terror war.



"It is not that we prepare an intifada. It is the reality on the ground that dictates a new intifada. There is the fence, there is the building in the Jewish settlements, the daily Israeli penetration into Palestinian cities, villages and camps and of course the killing of our comrades and brothers," Abu Hani says.



Israel routinely conducts anti-terror military raids in the West Bank when it receives intelligence warning of new attacks. The Israeli Air Force fires at targets in Gaza in attempts to halt Palestinian groups from launching rockets at nearby Jewish communities.



Abu Hani warned, "The current situation does not leave to the Palestinians many choices but to fight with all the tools we have or can have. The Gaza withdrawal proves unfortunately that force, attacks and rockets is the only language and attitude that the Israelis understand. They do not withdraw unless they are hit by the Palestinian resistance. So if there is a way that has already obliged the Israelis to withdraw, why not to use it again?"

__________________________________________________________________



Events Sweeping World Leaders Toward Apocalyptic Confrontation With Israel - By Bill Wilson, KIN Senior Analyst - http://www.watch.org



Wash—Feb 13—KIN—Since the beginning of 2006, a riptide of current events has been propelling the leaders of Russia, Iran and Syria toward an irreversible apocalyptic confrontation with Israel that surpasses even their own understanding and fulfills the predictions of ancient prophets.



Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syria's Bashar Assad are taking public decisions that reach far beyond peaceful geo-political strategy as the path they have chosen seems to be an unalterable march to eliminate Israel using Islam as the point of the dagger hidden beneath a cloak of peace and behind the rhetoric of reason.



The prophet Ezekiel proclaimed some 2,500 years ago, "Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: and I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army…Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet…in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains of Israel, which have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations…(Ezekiel 38:3-8)."



The nation of Israel was re-established from the vote of the United Nations in May 1948 (brought forth out of the nations where Jews from around the world re-gathered to form the nation after being separated throughout millennia because of the sword, or wars) and biblical scholars widely agree that Gog is the land occupied by today's Russia, Persia is Iran and Ethiopia is Northeast Africa, including Egypt, and Libya is Northwest Africa, including Libya, Sudan, Nigeria and other nations hostile to Israel. This apocalyptic battle results in these nations being miraculously destroyed where it will take seven months to bury the dead (Ezekiel 39:12) and the weapons will burn for seven years (Ezekiel 39:9)



Russia's actions, irrespective of whether Putin even understands how his decisions have coincided with prophecy, are those of a country preparing for war. Russia, once the heart of the powerful communist Soviet Union, has historically supported Islamic nations such as Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon against Israel as evidenced in the immediate 1948 fight for independence and the 1967 and 1973 wars against Israel. But today, Russia is renewing its move tip the balance of power in the Middle East boldly using Islamic fascism that aims to annihilate the tiny nation of Israel and her steadfast ally, the United States.



Putin on January 31 boasted to the world that Russia has new missiles capable of penetrating any missile defense system and said, "Russia has tested missile systems that no one in the world has. These missile systems don't represent a response to a missile defense system, but it doesn't matter to them whether that exists or not. They are hypersonic and capable of changing their flight path." Putin also said the new missiles are nuclear capable. The Russian military since has announced it is revamping and upgrading its nuclear arsenal. Russia has been at the heart of the international crisis over Iran's nuclear program as Putin has agreements to build Iran's nuclear plants and Russian engineers, as assisted by North Korean and Chinese colleagues, are known to be helping the Iranians design missile systems capable of carrying nuclear warheads long range.



In one of his boldest foreign policy moves to date, Putin took a public decision to solidify Russia's position in the Middle East by opening dialogue with yet another political body sworn to the destruction of Israel. Putin invited leaders of Hamas to Moscow for discussions. And Putin signaled to the world that there was more than just diplomacy at stake. Putin said he was inviting Hamas to Russia to hold talks, reminding the international community that, Russia has never, in Putins words, "considered Hamas a terrorist organization. Today we must recognize that Hamas has reached power in Palestine as a result of legitimate elections and we must respect the choice of the Palestinian people." Putin said it's not good to burn political bridges and that's why Russia has not "rushed to call any organization 'terrorist'."



This raised immediate red flags within the diplomatic circles at the White House since Russia, a member of the Middle East Peace Quartet also including the United Nations, the United States and the European Union, was a signatory to a statement after the Palestinian elections saying "that there is a fundamental contradiction between armed group and militia activities and the building of a democratic State. A two-State solution to the conflict requires all participants in the democratic process to renounce violence and terror, accept Israel's right to exist, and disarm, as outlined in the Road Map." Putin's move drew a sharp response from U.S. State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack on February 9, "We would urge any government that might have contact with Hamas to deliver the very clear message that was in the Quartet statement and that is that Hamas has some decisions to make. They must recognize the state of Israel, renounce terror and live up to the international obligations that the Palestinian Authority has signed up to. As a member of the Quartet, we would certainly expect that Russia would deliver that same message." Then the day after, he said, "We believe that should Russia have taken the opportunity to have chosen to have a meeting, they should take it as an opportunity to reinforce the message. Whether or not it has any effect on Hamas is going to be up to Hamas. They're the ones -- the onus is on Hamas to make certain decisions. The international community has laid out very clearly what is required of them. It's up to them to respond to that."



Despite the State Department's optimism that Russia will deliver the so-called "international message" to Hamas, several analysts believe Russia is playing a different game—one of strengthening its military ties in the Middle East—and Putin's statements say little to change that impression. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has stated emphatically that Russia will deliver the message to Hamas, it remains to be seen how strongly in private the message will be delivered and whether it will be communicated with a "wink." Relying on Russia to assist in keeping the peace in Iraq held a disastrous conclusion in the Oil for Food scandal where Putin, himself, reportedly received bribes from Saddam Hussein and Russia's influence over Iran's nuclear program has hardly yielded any legitimate hope for a diplomatic solution. Russia in general and Putin in particular, has a proven track record that supports Islamic fascism rather than the goals of western democracy.



Meanwhile, Iran's Ahmadinejad has been busy since the New Year spreading his militant philosophy throughout the Middle East. In early January, Ahmadinejad told theological students in Iran that its time for Islam to rule the world. "We must believe in the fact that Islam is not confined to geographical borders, ethnic groups and nations. It's a universal ideology that leads the world to justice. We don't shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world," Ahmadinejad said. "We must prepare ourselves to rule the world and the only way to do that is to put forth views on the basis of the Expectation of the Return." According to Mehran Riazaty, an Iranian Analyst, Ahmadinejad believes Islam must prepare the world for the return of its Shiite messiah, the Mahdi, who, on his return, will establish justice in a world consumed by chaos and corruption. Ahmadinejad believes Mahdi will come within the next two years and then will rule the world for seven years. It is very interesting that Ahmadinejad's beliefs parallel prophecies about the anti-Christ and the tribulation. The anti-Christ will rule for seven years, some believe, after a major catastrophic event will launch him into power—an event like the Gog-Magog war.



Ahmadinejad, on the eve of the Palestinian elections, met with Hamas and other terrorist groups in Syria. Hamas came away with Ahmadinejad's commitment to support the terrorist group both militarily and financially. Ahmadinejad's support was a public unveiling of what many in the intelligence community knew was happening all along, but Iran used the pending victory of Hamas to signal to the Islamic world that it would stand behind those who want to eliminate Israel and its ally, America. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that Hamas would receive funding from Iran and urged the terrorist organization to not buckle under pressure of the West to recognize Israel, which Ahmadinejad says, should be "wiped off the map."



Iran, too, is preparing for war. During the week of January 20, Iran begins withdrawing its money from European bank accounts. Also in late January were terrorist attacks in Israel that pointed directly to Iran and Syria as the culprits. Ynet News reported that Israeli Defense officials gathered solid evidence in the hours following the January 19th suicide bombing in Tel Aviv to show the attack was a direct result of cooperation between Iran, Syria, and Palestinian terrorists. "The attack was funded by Iran, planned by Syria, and executed by the Palestinians," Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz charged during a meeting with top security officials in Tel Aviv following the bombing. Mofaz said "we possess conclusive evidence that the attack is a direct result of the terror axis operating against Israel at all times." Defense officials were able to trace based on "unequivocal evidence," the funding of the attack to Iran. Meanwhile, the Islamic Jihad headquarters in Damascus was the one to provide operative orders that resulted in the bombing, according to the evidence. The execution of the attack was entrusted with an Islamic Jihad cell in the West Bank town of Nablus, where the suicide bomber originated.



Additionally, intelligence sources revealed in January that Iran is also supporting Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups as Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad are using the borders of Syria as staging grounds to send militants into both Iraq and Israel. The military alliance between Iran and Syria was shored up during a January meeting between Ahmadinejad and Assad. Emboldened, Assad's actions in Syria since the Ahmadinejad meeting prompted senior Israeli Defense Force officials from the Northern Command to report on February 9th that if Syrian President Bashar Assad continues to feel threatened by the United States and the rest of the international community, he may be pushed into a corner and decide to fire missiles at Israel. The Jerusalem Post reported that according to the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Syria has an estimated 45 missile launchers and has probably assembled a few Scud D rockets with a range of nearly 700 kilometers - a major threat to Israel because they can be armed with chemical warheads. The IDF officers said they did not foresee a near-term war with Syria. But Assad's handling of diplomatic affairs has the IDF concerned.



While the Russian, Iranian and Syrian leaders are seemingly supernaturally dashing toward their destiny with prophecy, the United States is also playing into the prophetic conundrum. U.S. President George W. Bush expressed his unease with Iran's inflammatory rhetoric in an interview with Reuters February 2nd: "Israel is a solid ally of the United States. We will rise to Israel's defense, if need be. So this kind of menacing talk is disturbing. It's not only disturbing to the United States; it's disturbing for other countries in the world, as well." Asked whether he meant the United States would rise to Israel's defense militarily, Bush, as if having Ezekiel's words etched upon his subconscious, replied: "You bet, we'll defend Israel." The remarks puzzled analysts and historians alike, who claimed this was the first time a U.S. President publicly stated that America would militarily defend Israel against its enemies.



It is as if these world leaders have little control over the words that leave their lips or the orders they give when it comes to the question of Israel—one of the smallest nations in the world, yet the only nation that burdens the entire world. In Zechariah 12:3, the Lord says, "And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered against it.: And Zechariah 2:8 also speaks of Israel prophetically , "For thus says the Lord of hosts; After the glory hath he sent me unto the nations which spoiled for you: for he that lays a hand upon you, strikes the pupil of His eye."

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If you're not ready you best get ready! - Jerry Golden - http://www.thegoldenreport.com



And if you don't think a Middle East war is about to get underway you should get your head out of that hole and look around. Iran today has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East it is believed that they already have nuclear weapons. And they have an army just to our north called Hizbullah, who they have armed with over 13,000 missiles armed with chemical warheads to attack Israel with. It is also known that Iran wants desperately to produce many more nuclear bombs before they go to war, but are willing to go with what they now have. They feel confident that they can destroy Israel before anyone can stop them, they are wrong. Their missiles can reach nearly all of Europe as well as Turkey and they can count on! an attack. The United States knows that Iran can reach them from any number of merchant vessels in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and deliver a nuclear bomb for EMP literally closing down the entire country for months if not years. We need to understand something very clearly, some nations have nuclear weapons for protection but Iran wants them so they can use them. Iran will use them and very soon, we are talking about insane Islamic devils.



Today high ranking IDF Generals are saying that Bashar Assad of Syria is contemplating an all out offensive again! st Israel and has acquired many missiles capable of reaching all of Israel thanks to Russia. It has come out in today's Israeli newspapers that Putin has invited the heads of the Islamic Terror Organization to Moscow for talks. With weapons pouring across the Gaza/Egypt border and Hamas now in total power in Gaza, along with the Iranian armed Hizbullah massed on our northern borders and the President of Syria under extreme pressure from the international community for harboring Terrorist groups in Damascus, not to mention the fact that he has taken in all of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and has them hidden in Syria. And now has the United States breathing down his neck making sounds that sounds more like an attack in soon coming. Like all Dictators when faced with this kind of pressure their only solution is to start a war to unit their people behind them.



Lets say the US will be spared and only Israel and Europe gets hit with Iranian nukes. Is there anyone on earth that thinks Israel will sit here and take it without sending nuclear bombs over Iran? Israel also knows that the moment they send missiles towards Iran, that Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia will attack Israel as well, so you can expect Israel to turn the Middle East into a giant glass factory. Folks this is deadly serious, get ready. Even if the US is spared have you given any thought to what will happen to the price of oi! l. My guess is it will go over $500 a barrel or even higher. The US simply will not be able to survive, the US economy will simply collapse and the US is a materialistic society. And folks from that point thousands of other unthinkable events will begin to happen across the US. So I will ask you again, are you ready, if not get ready. I believe God is quickening the minds of Believers to prepare so they can be a witness in a time of crisis. It's hard to witness while you're digging in a garbage can for food to feed your kids.



There is something I do know because the Bible tells me so, Israel will survive and will be here for the return of Messiah Yeshua, for He will plant His feet on the Mount of Olives, not in New York, Paris or anywhere else but right here in Israel. I also believe that between now and then a terrible price will be paid for Israel's sin against the most high God of Israel. God will shake and cleanse His own house in a violent and terrible way, and all will fear Him like they have never feared Him before. Jews in Israel will fall on their faces repenting and seeking God in their lives, then we will see the Messiah.



Jews around the world will be under such persecution many will be killed and many will lie denying their Jewishness, but many others will flee running for their lives to Israel. For the world will once again blame the Jews for all the ills of the human race, saying if it were not for the Jews and Israel none of this would have happened, let us kill the Jews and rid ourselves of this terrible curse. It is then that the world will feel the full wrath of God's anger and know that His Word is true.



I'm not saying you need to dig a hole and fill it with food to last for years. But you should have a couple months of food on hand, but most important is water, if you don't have drinkable water you will die, and it may surprise you to find out how much one person uses in a weeks time. As for a nuclear attack, if you are upwind from the attack and not to near, your chances of survival are good. If you are downwind you need a lot of help from fall out. If you are to close to ground zero, you won't need any of the above, say hello to your Master, and I pray it is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and if it's not, right now would be a great time to settle that, just get on your knees and ask Yeshua to be the Lord of your life, and live for Him.



If God has called you to this ministry it is time to realize there would be no better place to invest your money, for when this all comes down you won't have any anyway. For regardless of what happens God's Word will come to pass and He will re-gather the Jews back to the Land that He calls His own. The Ruach Ha Koddesh (Holy Spirit) has touched this messenger and others to prepare to collect Jews and bring them home. We have precious little time to get everything in order, and the larger boat must be purchased soon. Just as important is the groundwork in Turkey and elsewhere, and the word has to be put out in certain places i! n Europe. We need your part of this ministry ASAP. Not one Jew will be saved without the help of many Believers who made it possible, and God is certainly watching.



Connie and I just returned from a trip to Cyprus, got back in Israel around 2AM. It was a successful trip with meetings with other Believers and some very necessary arrangements put into action for this Ministry. It is now necessary for us to make other trips to meet with others in Turkey for it is there that most of the groundwork must be accomplished. It is also there where we will buy the larger boat. God is calling only the very serious to this Ministry and it is with a spiritual certainty that we move forward knowing that God has witnessed to those who have drawn close to Him knowing the seriousness of the day that we now live.



In a recent letter I said that it may be necessary for Connie and I to move to Cyprus or even possibly into Turkey, but on this last trip to Cyprus God has shown us that He wants us to stay in Israel, that from this location we will receive His directions. Because of the problems Cyprus and Turkey have with each other it is not possible! to travel back and forth between those two countries and we must be able to move freely when the time comes.



In conclusion I will say that I know this is a frightening report, but it is one you need to read over again, for what is about to happen is beyond the ability of most to even comprehend. If this ministry is not fully ready we will do what we can with what God has given us. We still have the time to prepare to rescue many, but that depends of the obedience of those God has touched to bless the Apple of His eye. For most it comes down to a decision of priority, and making a choice of who or what do you serve.



There are few Believers who have been given the opportunity to really bless Israel like we have. Maybe we should be looking at it in reverse, God is not asking us to give but to receive. Gen. 12:3.



Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, for our son Joel and all the IDF soldiers, for all those who have come to fight the Islamic enemies. Pray for this Ministry and your part in it. Shalom, jerry golden

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Maranatha ! - (Lord Come Quickly)



YBIC-Randy







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I used to be terrified of Mexican food. I guess this was because of Speedy Gonzalez, that little mouse who used to whip a bottle of Hot Sauce out of his magical invisible back pocket and sprinkle it on the food Yosemite Sam was about to eat, causing his mouth to burst into flame until he put the fire out by dunking his head into a nearby horse trough. No wonder I didn't try a taco until I was sixteen.

That was when the first Taco Bell opened on Long Island. My father used to take my sister and me to dinner at Friendly's every Saturday afternoon (our parents were divorced), and Suzanne and I liked our dinners predictable: grilled cheese or hamburgers with fries, followed by ice cream sundaes. We were food wimps, basically, and the only way to get either of us to try something new was to beg and plead. Which our father did, and after a sufficient amount of this we begrudgingly agreed to let him take us to the new Taco Bell.

I ordered a taco and promptly announced that I didn't like it. Suzanne did the same. We made Dad feel so bad he ended up taking us to Friendly's for dessert.

I don't know exactly what happened after that. I remember riding my bike past the new Taco Bell a few weeks later and getting a perverse urge to go in. Something about the taste fascinated me. I ordered a taco, ate it and left, never imagining that I would do this again. I repeated the act the next day, and then began to do this regularly, soon eating two or three tacos at a time, all the time still believing that I was a person who did not like Mexican food.

In fact, I was on the verge of a serious obsession.

Once I became a Mexican food addict, the Taco Bell taco ceased to satisfy me. The Taco Bell taco is a very proper, clean food item. The corn shell is crisp and neat like a wafer, and it is filled with a symmetrical spoonful of spicy ground beef, some shredded lettuce, chunks of tomatoes and tiny, ephemeral confetti strips of melting yellow cheese. It is a good food, a respectable food, but it is not enough. I quickly found myself moving on to the hard stuff, like the Jack In The Box Super Taco or the 7-11 Red Hot Beef and Bean Burrito. The 7-11 burrito is the most concentrated form of Mexican junk food easily available on the East Coast, and if you see somebody eating this more than once a week you can be sure this person is in trouble. When removed from it's plastic wrapper it is cold and clammy to the touch, and it is usually zapped in the powerful 7-11 mega-microwave for three to four minutes, after which it emerges in it's true form. Barely a food at all, it consists of just two components, a gummy white flour tortilla and a burning-hot glutenous paste of processed beef and chopped pinto beans cemented together by a peppery red grease that vaguely resembles STP motor oil. For three years I was a burrito-eater, and I lived with other burrito-eaters. I was in Hellhound, a heavy-metal/punk/thrash band that almost made it during the mid-eighties. I played bass and helped write the songs. If I had to describe us I'd say we were a combination of the Ramones and Jane's Addiction with a touch of Spinal Tap. We had one genius in the band, our lead singer Kevin Whitman. He was a sensitive soul, and I guess we didn't realize how much our long negotiations with record companies and video producers were stressing him out. He really wanted us to make it big, and one bad week after Atlantic Records decided not to offer us a contract and MTV turned down our video, Kevin flipped out. He started doing jigsaw puzzles in his bedroom (in his parents' house where he still lived) and he stopped coming to rehearsals because he said he needed to keep doing jigsaw puzzles until he got his brain to calm down. For seven days he only left his house to drive to the mall and buy more jigsaw puzzles. Then he tried to kill himself in the middle of the night and got committed to a mental hospital. Someday I'll tell you the whole story of Kevin Whitman. For now the reason I'm mentioning this is that Hellhound used to play Friday nights at a dive in Massapequa called Diamond Lil's, and there was a 7-11 right down the block. We always stopped there on the way home after a gig. Man! those red-hot beef-and-bean burritos sure tasted good at three in the morning when we were sweaty and beer-soaked, tired and hungry, deaf and happy.
A few years after Hellhound broke up my life completely fell apart. Actually I think it fell apart exactly at the point that Hellhound broke up. I'm just a slow learner and it took me a while to figure that out.

Kevin had been the dreamer of the group, and until he bowed out I didn't realize how much I'd been caught up in the dream myself. I wanted to be a rock star now; I wasn't even a great bassist, but I'd been setting my sights on this goal. I was twenty-eight years old and working for a robotics firm on Long Island, where I'd been living for much too long. What the f*ck was I doing in a dull family suburb, working a 9 to 5 job? My life had no direction, and nothing in it meant anything to me.

Not even Cindy. She'd been my girlfriend since college, but our relationship had lost its magic. When we went out to dinner I'd sit there bored, wishing to be home on my couch watching baseball. Even when we made love I was depressed. She started to notice this, and one Friday night she told me she wanted to break up. Which kind of took me by surprise. I knew our relationship had gone bad, but I also liked having a girlfriend around to remind me to eat right and buy me presents on my birthday and call my mother so I wouldn't have to do it. Now I was really confused. I began hanging around my apartment not doing a fucking thing. I'd sit on my couch with a bag of burritos and a bong, and I'd watch pro wrestling and Knight Rider and any other shit that was on, anything to divert me from my miserable life. I lived in this marshmallow-like hellish condition for about three months, not doing laundry or cutting my hair, sitting in a dull haze at work and falling behind on my schedule, eating burritos not once a day but two and finally three times a day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I'd become a truly disgusting person, and I have to say thank you to my sister Suzanne, because she was the one who got me out of it. She called from California (where she now lived), and knew the moment she heard my voice that I was in a bad place. She offered to help me break my routine by coming to stay with her for a week or two.

I'd never been to California; in fact I'd never been much of anywhere. It sounded like a fun idea, and I was happy to see Suzanne again. As soon as I arrived we stopped in an airport bar for a beer and a talk, and she ended up listening to all my problems and giving me a major pep-talk in which she explained that everybody felt confused when a relationship suddenly ended, and that everything I was going through was normal and healthy. Did I mention that my sister is a professional therapist? I felt better after a few hours of this, and then we agreed to go out to dinner. She asked me what kind of food I liked and I said "Mexican."

"Really?" she said. "I love Mexican food!"

"You do? When Dad brought us to Taco Bell I thought you hated it."

"I thought you hated it."

She got excited at the idea of having a Mexican meal, and decided to buy all the ingredients and cook me up a big dinner herself. "Do you know how to cook?" I asked suspiciously. I was hungry, and I remembered Suzanne turning up some ghastly dinners back when she used to take Home-Ec in high school. "Of course I do!" she said. "Don't you remember the dinners I used to make?"

"Yes, I do," I said sadly. We stopped at a grocery store, and my sister proceeded to buy the strangest collection of ingredients I'd ever seen: a clove of garlic, a stalk of celery, a tub of tofu, a package of bean sprouts, a can of black beans, a bag of lentils, three kinds of expensive European cheeses. "Suzanne," I said. "There are four ingredients in a Mexican meal. Meat, taco shells, sauce and cheddar cheese. Period."

"You don't know the California style," she said.

We got to her apartment, and she went into the kitchen to cook. An hour later she began the dinner by placing a dish of gigantic oven-warmed (and slightly burnt) tortillas on the table, then followed it with all the rest of the bizarre ingredients she'd bought at the store. "Okay, it's do-it-yourself," she said.

I stared at the table. "This is a nice salad," I said. "Would you please bring out the main course?"

It turned out the salad was the main course, and that's the California style. During the next few days I found myself unable to get used to this. Suzanne lived on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and there were about ten burrito stands or tacquerias on this street, but I couldn't get a real burrito at any one of them. This made me feel alienated and homesick. The fact was, even though Suzanne's long talks were making me feel better, I was still in a very confused state. I knew Suzanne was right that I needed to snap out of my depression, but I still needed something to provide that climactic force and make the change happen. In search of this elusive thing, I took the BART into San Francisco by myself one day while Suzanne was at work, hoping to find something in San Francisco to change my life. I thought I'd enjoy exploring the city by myself, but as soon as I stepped out of the BART station at Market Street I started to feel a crushing, panicky loneliness. I looked around at the shoe stores and donut shops of downtown San Francisco and felt lost and lonely. Suzanne and her friends had given me a long list of places to go, but I felt overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of everything around me. Like I said, I'd never really been anywhere before.

Suzanne and her friends had told me to go to the Exploratorium first. I walked all the way over, but as soon as I stepped inside and paid my admission I realized I wasn't in the mood for a science museum after all. I left and tried to walk back to the center of town but got lost in the Presidio for an hour and a half. I reached some kind of deserted military settlement at the north end of the park and looked out over the Golden Gate Bridge. The elemental beauty of the rust-colored bridge and black rocks and crashing waves only filled me with anxiety; I wanted to see the Brooklyn Bridge again. I finally found my way out of the park by walking down some wooden stairs onto a nude beach that only got me more depressed because almost all the nude people were guys. I pulled my tourist map from my back pocket and began walking towards the Haight. It took much longer to get there than I'd thought it would, and by the time I reached the famous corner of Haight and Ashbury my feet ached and I wasn't in the mood to look at record stores or drink coffee or find the house where the Grateful Dead used to live. Now, I realized, I was in the mood for a science museum. I wandered and wandered and reached the Castro, where I watched guys kissing each other passionately on the street and wondered why they wouldn't rather be hanging out at the nude beach by the Presidio. I walked and walked, lost and dying in the scary loneliness of walking; I found Lombard Street and descended the famous "crookedest street in the world" without enjoying it; I reached Market Street again and looked up at the pointy Pyramid building and then walked on to Fisherman's Wharf. I didn't know enough at this point in my life to stop at the City Lights bookstore, and I walked right through North Beach and ended up at Fisherman's Wharf, which disappointed me because it was obviously a place no self-respecting fisherman would ever go. It was nothing but a shopping mall, with yogurt shops and crystal stands and postcard stores, all dim and deserted and closing for the night. The sky was dark now, and I looked at the hushed skyline of cold empty San Francisco and thought of the line in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land where he says "Unreal City," just like that, with no explanation. That was what San Francisco felt like to me at that moment.
I was exhausted from all my walking, and I suddenly realized I couldn't walk another block. I didn't understand why I was so tired, as I'd walked across New York City many times without getting tired; I later came to understand that walking across San Francisco, with its vast parks and steep hills, is much harder than walking across Manhattan, which is as flat as an ironing board.

I was starving, and I decided to take a cab back to Berkeley. Sitting in the dark back seat as we crossed the Bay Bridge, I started to feel a strange sensation of calm and happiness. We drove through the streets of the East Bay and reached the familiar busy nighttime streets of downtown Berkeley, and I found myself feeling almost ecstatic, for no reason I could understand. I paid the cab driver (it cost forty dollars) and hopped out onto the corner of Telegraph and Durant. I almost walked up to the door of Suzanne's apartment when I caught the smell of Mexican food from a tacqueria two buildings down. I walked in to the tacqueria and sat down. A Mexican waiter tried to hand me a menu and I said, "Just give me your standard burrito. Put everything on it."

"Gotcha," he said. I knew I was asking for it. He returned with a porcelain plate holding nothing on it but a single huge burrito the size and shape of a slightly flattened melon, decorated with two sprigs of crunchy lettuce and a folded white paper cup of guacamole. I looked at it for a moment. I wasn't sure where to put my fork and decided to start with one of the tapered edges. I took my first bite. It was good. A bit crunchy, and too lukewarm. But I could relate to it. Brown rice and white beans and lettuce and avocado and barley and radishes and salsa ... there was something tremendously integrated about it. I took another bite, and another after that. Now I'd reached the lentils and tofu sour cream and pinto beans and carrots. Carrots in a burrito! I can't say I fully approved of this, but like I said, I was in a kind of crazy mood. And in this mood I suddenly understood the California Burrito. Inclusiveness was the philosophy. Foods have to learn to get along in the California Burrito, just like people have to learn to get along. It was like a political statement, with guacamole on the side.

I ended up eating a California Burrito every night for the rest of my stay in Berkeley. I returned home a changed person.

Something else happened to me during this trip. For a long time Suzanne had been telling me to read Jack Kerouac. This may strike some of you as funny, because many of you know me as the guy who created a web site about Beat Literature, but I didn't read Kerouac for the first time until a couple of years ago. I started "On The Road" for the first time on this trip, in fact, during the plane ride back from Berkeley to New York. I hadn't expected to like the book. I expected it to be pretentious and dated, but it turned out to be the freshest, funniest, truest piece of writing I'd read in a long time. Maybe the reason I liked it so much was that it was nothing more than the story of a depressed college-educated boy from the East Coast who can't stand to look at his hometown anymore and goes out to California in search of religion and kicks. I felt like I'd just met my soul brother.

I sat there on the airplane reading, and I reached the part where Sal Paradise meets a sweet pretty Mexican girl named Terry on a bus somewhere near Los Angeles. They start making out and think they might be falling in love, and since Sal has nowhere else to go she takes him back to the grape and cotton fields of Bakersfield to work with her and her family. For a few days the college boy gets to live the life of a Mexican grape-picker and he digs it, though he eventually runs scared back home. I read these lines: Terry and Johnny sat in the grass; we had grapes. In California you chew the juice out of grapes and spit the skin away, a real luxury. Nightfall came. Terry went home for supper and came to the barn at nine o'clock with delicious tortillas and mashed beans. This just blew my mind. Think about it: what exactly is Jack Kerouac talking about here? He's talking about his own personal discovery of the California Burrito.
Now it's my dream to write a book about the California Burrito. I see it an expensive coffee-table book, with lavish illustrations and color photographs. I'll start by examining the eating habits of the Aztec and Mayan peoples before their ancient civilizations were destroyed by Cortez and his successors. I'll discuss the interplay between European and Native American ways of eating, and I'll trace the evolution of Mexican cuisine as it spread through the Spanish territories of North America. We'll see how the taco and the burrito and the enchilada and the tamale moved through the fast-growing English-speaking cities of southern California, and how Mexican food merged with the barbecue sauce cowboy cuisine of Kansas City and Texas to form the style known as Southwestern or, later, Tex-Mex. I'll go from there to the arrival of the first chic Mexican restaurants in New York in the late 1960's, and from there to the sudden nationwide success of Taco Bell. I'll conclude with the invention of the California style, and then say a few words about the future of Mexican food in the ever-changing world.

And since I know I'll never really write this book, I can use this title for these pages instead. Here it is: THE HISTORY OF THE CALIFORNIA BURRITO. I'm sitting in the sleazy grimy Greyhound station waiting for the bus to New York, and I'm thinking: it was "My Fair Lady" that screwed up Todd's mind. That was the turning point; before he played Henry Higgins he was a straight kid who never cut classes or smoked weed or mouthed off to teachers. All the applause he got made him dizzy, and instead of going to music college like he planned to he decided to be a rock star. He went to New York City, just threw himself into the middle of everything to see where he'd end up. Which I thought was amazingly great. I just never thought it would be Todd, of all my friends, to go and really do this.

Now he's in a band and they're supposed to play their first gig tomorrow night, and the bassist is sick and can't make it. Which is why Todd called me, and which is why I'm heading for New York. I wish I had time to get myself in the right mental state, to get rid of the weird nervous feeling in my stomach. I always thought Todd was half-nerd and that I was his guide when it came to anything cool, but now he's in the city playing in a band and I'm a college student writing papers on Plato and Aristotle, which makes me think maybe I lost it and Todd is cooler than I am. A scary feeling. I catch my reflection in a bagel stand's clear plastic shield: I've got neat moussed hair, no dirt under my fingernails ... I'm a fucking Connecticut wet dream. I try to mess my hair up with my fingers but the gel I used this morning refuses to give up control and now I just look like an idiot. An old lady is looking at me. I curl my lip and stare her down. I decide I need cigarettes. I don't smoke, but I'm desperate to change my image. I buy a pack of Marlboros and light one up. It tastes good. I stub it out on the back of the seat in front of me, watching the antiseptic sea green molded plastic congeal into burnt black bubbles. I step off the bus in New York City with the best bad-ass expression I can come up with on my face, and catch the subway to Atlantic and Flatbush in Brooklyn. I walk six blocks to the apartment where Todd is staying and he buzzes me upstairs. I step up to his door and he swings it open and doesn't even say hello; instead he leaps at me and whirls me inside and drops me on a couch. "Thank fucking god you're here," he says. He starts trying to force a large black Fender bass guitar under my armpits. "Todd!" I yell. "Calm down! Say hello for f*ck's sake! Offer me a drink or something!"

"Oh," he says. "Yeah, hello. Shit, I'm hyper."

I kick my sneakers off. "Aren't you gonna ask me how my trip was?" "Yeah, yeah. How was your trip?"

"It sucked." Todd doesn't hear my answer, and I allow him to strap the black bass around me and plug it into the amp. He manages to do this despite the fact that his own guitar is hanging from his shoulders by a strap. He checks his tuning and looks at me pleadingly. "Todd," I say. "You don't wanna play some music or anything, do you?"

"Shit, man," he says. "I'm dying. I'm so nervous. This fucking thing with Spencer getting sick has me so damn mad. You know, I was nervous enough already. And the fucking dickhead isn't even sick. He's got the fucking sniffles. Man, I've been a lot sicker than he is without it slowing me down ... I can't believe he did this to us the day before our first gig."

"Okay," I say. "But just calm down. Look at you. I can't learn songs with you hyper like this."

Todd takes a deep breath. "Okay. Okay. Sorry."

"Anyway, maybe Spencer's just chickening out," I said. "Maybe he's afraid to go onstage."

Todd gives me a long, significant look. "Maybe," he says. "I've been thinking the same damn thing." Todd's had a lot of trouble finding good people to play with. For his first six months in New York he was bummed out playing lead guitar in a Pink Floyd copy band called Eclipse. He wrote me letters about the drummer who couldn't figure out the beat on "Money," who kept pacing the room babbling about 13/8 and 26/15 time signatures as if his crummy drumming was a mathematical puzzle he could solve in his mind. Finally Todd dumped this crew and hooked up with a decent drummer named Ragusa. Together they found Spencer the bassist, and this completed their band. I check the tuning on the bass and play the beginning notes of "Dazed and Confused." I don't play rock bass at all; the only reason Todd thinks I'm a bassist is that I used to play classical bass, and I wasn't even good at that. I played classical bass because I was told to in third grade. One day Mrs. Pearsall stuck her hands under my armpits, lifted me up and placed me on a wooden platform in front of a six-foot-tall instrument. She instructed me how to put my arms around the instrument and caress its wide womanly waist, even broader than my mother's or Mrs. Pearsall's, and she held her hand over mine to show me how to stroke a horsehair bow across the glittering thick steel strings. I did everything Mrs. Pearsall told me to do and she made a big fuss over me and said I could play Carnegie Hall someday if I worked hard enough at it. I held the first seat in the junior orchestra during seventh, eighth and ninth grades, and Todd was first violin. After ninth grade we joined the senior orchestra, but now instead of nice Mrs. Pearsall we had mean Mr. Minkof. He was a skinny angry guy with greasy black hair falling over his forehead who had a Ph.D. from the Harvard Music Department and was furious that he hadn't become a famous performer. He hated me because I was one of the crowd that smoked pot in the fields by the bike stands between classes. I came into his class late one day with a pretzel in my hand and a goofy smile on my face. Mr. Minkof went insane and descended on me like a "Fliedermaus" and smacked me on my cheek and sent me sprawling onto the floor on my ass. It totally shocked me and I sat there with my cheek stinging and my arms and legs spread out on the floor, and I started to scream "You asshole!" but I was so stunned my words came out in a choked sob, and the story went around that day that I was crying. Mr. Minkof got in trouble for hitting me, but I still hated him so much I never took a music class again.

Todd is still standing over me waiting to rehearse. "Todd," I say. "There's something I've always wanted to ask you. You liked Mr. Minkof, didn't you?"

"What?" he says. "Why are you talking about Mr. Minkof? We gotta get going here. Can I start the tape?"

"This is a serious question," I say, intending to drag this out as much as possible. I love watching Todd get frustrated. "If I'm going to play music with you it's important that we demolish any barriers that stand between us and prevent us from truly rocking out. This has been buggin' me since tenth grade. Did you really like him or were you just kissing his ass all that time? You liked him, didn't you? Just admit it."

Todd flaps his arms in desperation, willing to give me any answer I want but not knowing what answer I want. "I liked him," he says.

"You fucking slimeball bastard," I say. "I knew it! You traitor! How could you like him? Why?"

"He believed in music," Todd says with finality. "Now. I'm starting the tape. The bass is already in perfect tune. I tuned it while I was waiting for you. First song's in D."

"You don't have to tell me what key it's in," I say. The tape starts. The first song is a fast Primus kind of thing, cheaply recorded with a single mike. Todd watches as I start plucking at notes until I find the bassline. It's a simple progression, D to E minor for the verse and a chorus of D, G and A. I feel better once I realize I know how to play, and after the first song Todd breathes a sigh of relief. "So how the f*ck is college going, anyway?" he asks me.

"About the same," I say. "It's college."

"Why don't you blow it off and be our new bassist? We need somebody who isn't a dickhead like Spencer. You're a dickhead too but we'll take you anyway."

"Todd," I say. "I don't know how to play bass."

"Yes you do," he says. He starts up the second song, which has an even easier bassline. This one is called "Quiet Mystery," and I start to pay attention to the words Todd is singing on the tape. A network of secrets that you spin like a web
I stand at your ocean but the tide does ever ebb
I want you here beside me but you're way too far to see
I gaze through a haze at your quiet mystery. "Shit, Todd," I say. "You wrote this stuff?"
"Yeah," he says, embarrassed.

I smile and shake my head. "You think things like this? Man, you're fucked up. You better get some professional help." He shrugs. "I don't even know what I'm writing, I don't know what it means. I think I should see a shrink myself when I read some of the shit I write." He plops down in front of me what looks like a white $2.49 nylon-covered photo album from Woolworth's. I open it and see page after page of handwritten lyrics under clear plastic photo sheets. Some are illustrated with crayon sketches or magazine photo collages. I see a section labeled "f*ck You Poems" illustrated with a bleeding black heart and a color yearbook photo of Todd in his nerd mode, clean V-neck sweater over a nylon shirt, hair neatly combed, in the middle of the heart. The first poem begins "f*ck you mom, f*ck you dad," and Todd stutteringly tries to turn the page, pretending he wants me to see something he wrote on a different page, I guess because he realizes that I know his Mom and Dad, who are actually fairly cool people.

There's a knock on the door and it's Ragusa, the drummer. Ragusa has bleached blond hair cut so short that at first I think he's bald. He sits and stares at me like he doesn't like me. I think of a joke I once heard: what do you call a guy who likes to hang out with musicians? A drummer. Todd starts the tape for the third song, and while I work out the bass line Ragusa takes two plastic Chinese Restaurant chopsticks from his jacket pocket and starts to play a beat on the coffee table. We get through both sides of the tape and smoke a joint. Todd turns off the tape player and we start to jam for a while. Ragusa tip-taps away with his chopsticks on the coffee table and performs cymbal crashes on the lamp. When we hear the lock turn in the front door Todd jumps up. "Shit! I forgot to tell you, I don't live here. I'm sponging off my brother, and the other two people who live here are kind of pissed off about it. We gotta get out of their way."

"Who are the other two people?" I ask.

He listens to the heavy footsteps as somebody opens the door and steps inside. "That sounds like Wayne," he says. "He's just some guy, a lawyer or something, I don't really know much about him. I don't think he likes me." We gather our guitars and picks and patch cords and poetry books into our arms and get it all into Todd's brother's bedroom and slam the door behind us just as we hear footsteps enter the living room.

"Who's the other person who lives here?" I ask. "This girl Tara. She does modern dance or something. She doesn't really talk to me either. I just try to stay out of their way."

"How did your brother meet them?"

"An ad in the Village Voice."

"Wow," I say. "Just like 'The Real World,' except MTV isn't filming it."

Todd sneaks into the kitchen and returns with a two-foot-high plastic bag of potato chips and three bottles of Miller Beer. We go over some more songs until Ragusa goes home. At ten- thirty Todd's brother Paul arrives from work. Paul works as a computer programmer for a Wall Street bank, and he peels his suit off as he walks into the room. He is tall and thin and more serious looking than Todd, with a trimmed beard and red weary eyes from staring at computer screens all day. I see that he and Todd have a thing worked out that Todd doesn't speak to Paul until Paul has finished changing into a t-shirt and gym shorts and calling his girlfriend. "Paul hates his job," Todd whispers to me as Paul mutters into the phone across the room.

"Why doesn't he quit?" I whisper back.

"He makes pretty good money."

Paul hangs up the phone and asks where I'm going to sleep. Todd shows him how he's rearranged the blankets on the floor to make room for both of us. Paul shows me the Motorola beeper he'd taken off his belt when he came in. "It might go off in the middle of the night if there's a systems problem at the bank," he tells me. "If that happens I'm gonna have to turn the light on and log in from here until I fix it."

"How often does that happen?" I ask.

"Couple of times a month. Probably won't happen tonight."

Todd hands Paul a joint and Paul takes a long hit, exhaling and staring into space with his raccoon-ringed eyes. "I'm beat," he says. He gestures towards a gigantic record and CD collection spanning an entire wall and asks if I want to pick out an album. I stand up and study his collection. He's got as many records as a small record store. About half are bootlegs, and I find stuff I never knew existed: U2 in Japan, Neil Young at the Bottom Line, the Beatles at Shea Stadium. "I never knew there was a Beatles at Shea Stadium bootleg," I say. "There's a bootleg of most anything you can think of," he says. "Especially if you're willing to spend your entire fucking salary on it like I do."

He pulls himself up from the bed to show me something in his Bob Dylan section. "See this bootleg?" he says. "This was recorded at the Coffee Grinder. That's where you're playing tomorrow night."

"You're kidding," I say. "You mean we're playing one of those historic old Village clubs? Shit, now I'm even more scared."

"Ah, don't worry. The place is a dump. Once Dylan got famous he never played there again."

I look at the album cover, cheaply printed with a xerox of a skinny young Bob Dylan playing guitar in front of a brick wall. The club date is March 1961. "Can we hear it?" I say.

"Sure." We listen to the first three songs, but Paul and Todd are both tired and want to sleep. I'm still wide awake, so Todd, his eyes closing, suggests I go into the living room and watch TV.

I step out of the bedroom and see a pretty brown-haired woman sitting in the dark watching "Love Connection" on TV and eating Ben and Jerry's Fudge Brownie Frozen Yogurt slowly with a spoon.

"Oh," I say. "Hi."

She stares at me like she just turned on the kitchen light and I'm a cockroach running across her stove. "Ohh," she finally drawls, understanding that I'm yet another person there to sponge off Paul.

"I'm Jonathan," I say. "I'm sitting in with Todd's band tomorrow."

"Todd has a band?" she says blandly, and I realize that the bare minimum of communication has not taken place between the people currently living in this apartment.

"Yeah," I say. "Is it all right if I sit out here?"

"Not really," she says. "But I don't want to make you sit out in the hall so I guess I have no choice."

I sit on the chair farthest away from her and face the TV. The wavy-haired California boy in the middle chair says "When the night began she was tame as a kitten but after two drinks she was wild as a tiger." Chuck Woolery smirks and the audience goes crazy. Tara licks the matte silver surface of the bottom of her spoon. I think about the gig tomorrow night.
The next day we walk to Ragusa's apartment over a bicycle shop with a greasy window in a rusting black iron frame. We practice for about four hours with our amps turned low so Ragusa's neighbors don't complain. I know the ten songs we're going to play by now, but I have no idea how we're going to sound at performance volume. We cook spaghetti for dinner and carry our instruments outside. Ragusa spends about five minutes removing the bolts and chains wrapped around the steering wheel of his broken-down yellow '82 Mustang. "You're telling me somebody would steal this thing?" I ask Todd in a whisper. Todd nods.
Ragusa drives us over the Brooklyn Bridge while Todd passes around a joint. I take a long hit and suddenly see that we have entered a National Geographic article about life in Beijing. I see red awnings with painted white chinese characters, yellow and blue paper dragons flapping in the wind, a red and orange pagoda over a two-story McDonald's cramped between a vegetable stand and a jewelry store with glittering tiny mirrors pasted like a mosaic into 'DIAMONDS AND GOLD BOUGHT AND SOLD.' The air smells like fish. "Did you hear about this new fucking crime wave in Chinatown?" Ragusa says. "I probably shouldn't even drive through here anymore."

"Yeah, man," Todd says. "Fucking Chinese crime gangs, I hear even the Mafia's scared of them."

"I got stuck behind a Chinese gang funeral the other day," Ragusa says. "f*ck, man, there were like fifty guys in identical black suits with red carnations just walking behind this old black limousine! It was like something from The Godfather!"

It occurs to me that they are babbling because they're nervous. Todd is snapping his little rectangular armrest ashtray open and closed. "Will you fucking cut that out?" Ragusa yells. I look out the window and think: I want to be a Chinese gangster. I want to walk behind a black limousine with a red carnation on my lapel. I want to sit at the back of a restaurant eating a plate of Pork Lo Mein with a shiny silver gun on my lap. We cross some invisible line that divides Chinatown from Soho, and I forget about being a Chinese gangster and think about being an abstract artist. We reach the intersection of Bleecker and Bowery and I see the decaying silver awning of CBGB's. "Bow before the temple," Ragusa says as we drive past. "One month from now, I want us playing there."

"He always takes the long way so we can drive past CB's," Todd tells me. Ragusa runs a red light by mistake and a flannel- shirted baseball-capped guy bangs our car with his fist. We find a tiny parking space near the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, and go back and forth for five minutes while Ragusa squeezes us in.

The Coffee Grinder turns out to be a cramped little cellar with craggy red brick walls and black wood tables thickly shellacked to an unnatural shine. Jared Kaplan, the big droopy-eyed, black- bearded old man with tattoos on his biceps who owns the Coffee Grinder, tells us to put our instruments in the back room. We carry them back to a dark cement chamber filled with mops and pails and waterlogged cardboard cartons of plastic-wrapped packages of cocktail napkins. "There's gonna be fucking roaches climbing all over my drum set, I know it," Ragusa says. There's a tight passageway between the back room and the bar, and on the way back we have to stand against the wall to make room for the guys in the band who'll be playing before us. We don't say hello as they squeeze by. We find a table near the front of the bar and order beers. "Look at this shithole," Todd says. "Look at these bricks."

"Looks like somebody's fucking uncle built this place on his day off," Ragusa says. The bricks are laid at uneven angles with glops of cement between them. Todd pulls a crumbly ball of dried cement from between two bricks. I do the same, examining the round little moon-rock before I crush it into gray powder between my fingers. We start flicking the little balls at each other until Jared Kaplan saunters up to us. "Hey, stop taking apart my goddamn walls."

After he walks away, Todd says, "Doesn't Jared Kaplan look like his name should be Snake or something?"

"Yeah," Ragusa says. "He looks like he's about to fucking murder someone." We all stare at Kaplan, who stands with arms folded behind the bar, his big meaty biceps bulging from beneath his black t-shirt. "Remember the biker named Snake in the Partridge Family?" Todd says. "Remember when he fell in love with Laurie Partridge?"

"No," Ragusa says.

"The guy who was Meathead played Snake," Todd says.

"The guy who was Meathead," Ragusa repeats. "Who the f*ck is the guy who was Meathead?"

"Meathead," Todd says. "You know. Meathead."

The first band is on stage tuning up. It's a five-man band with keyboards and two guitars. I wish I was playing in a five-man band tonight. It'd be so much easier to hide. I listen as this band starts their first song, and I'm relieved that they sound fairly wimpy. Jared Kaplan walks over to us and asks us what we think. "They suck," Ragusa tells him.

"Yeah," Todd says. "They kind of remind me of a bunch of musicians with no talent who don't have anything to say."

Jared Kaplan nods as if considering this deeply. It occurs to me that he'll later ask this band what they think of us. I yell "'Scuse me!" to him over the noise. He squints at me and comes over.

I say, "How long have you owned this place?"

"Always," he grunts. "Opened it in 1959."

"Is it true Bob Dylan used to play here?"

"Sure it's true. They all played here. Peter Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Sonny and Cher."

"Did you meet Dylan?"

"Did I meet him? Yeah, I met everybody. I was the guy who paid them their money, they all made damn sure they met me. Bob Dylan, he looked like a little hillbilly kid who needed a bath. Judy Collins, now there was a beautiful lady."

I want to ask him something else but he's still talking. "Hey, Bill Cosby used to come here all the time. And whats-her-name played here, Melody. You know ... 'I got a brand new roller skate, you got my key.' Johnny Cash used to play here too." He points to a photo hanging over the ancient cash register behind the dark wood bar. I squint to see it and he walks away so quickly I think I did something to make him mad. He yanks the framed photo off the wall and brings it back to me. I see a younger thinner Jared Kaplan, beardless and bespectacled, with his arm around Johnny Cash, both of them smiling broadly for the camera. After an hour the first band leaves the stage to disinterested polite applause. About forty people are sitting around drinking beer and talking, and maybe ten more are playing darts or pinball. Ragusa climbs onto the stage and starts setting up his drum kit. Todd and I take our time finishing our beers because we have less setting up to do. "Nervous?" I ask Todd.

"Yeah," he says. "What about you?"

"Nah," I lie.

"Hey," he says. "Even if we f*ck up, at least I'll have gotten the first one over with. That's the only reason I'm doing this. Next time won't be as bad."

We step up on stage and I plug in my bass and stare into the crowd, trying to remember that I'm a Chinese gangster, that I smoke cigarettes in bus stations. I take a long slug of my Molson Golden but my hand is shaking and the beer spills down my neck and under the collar of my blue and white striped t-shirt. Now my hands are wet and I'm afraid I'll be electrocuted if I touch my bass, and Todd is plucking his low E string and waiting for me to pluck mine so we can tune up. I dry my hands quickly on my jeans and do it, trying not to get Todd more upset. We tune quickly, and Todd tapes a copy of the song list to the floor in front of me. It says:


I tell Todd that I always wanted to have somebody tape a song list to the floor in front of me. He smiles and we look back and Ragusa nods: he's ready. "First one's in A," Todd reminds me, although I know this. Ragusa taps his sticks together to signal 1-2-3-4 and we dig in and a strange rush comes over me as soon as I realize we're making music. Maybe it's because I'm stoned but the moment I hear the noise we're making come blasting out from the amps behind us I feel a great surge of pleasure course through my body. "f*ck!" I say out loud. Todd is playing a grungy lawn-mower-engine rhythm and I'm just booming on the A, hammering from G to start every measure Dee Dee Ramone-style, and it sounds great. I look at Todd and he's leaning into the microphone getting ready to sing and then he bursts out with his screechy vocal, and I look at him and think: this is not the Todd I used to know. Digging at his guitar strings like he's scratching an itch, singing at some pretty girl's face in the middle of the bar, he is doing this for real and the Todd I used to know has been put away somewhere for holidays and family occasions. Ragusa and I are right on the beat, and I feel so good I start playing improvising on the scale just for the f*ck of it, and it makes the song sound even sturdier. Todd howls into the mike. I look back and see Ragusa grinning as he bangs away; he's having a good time.

The song ends on a cymbal-crash A-chord and a long pained wail into the microphone from Todd, and we pause for one second, holding the tension, until Todd yells to me "F-sharp!" and we blast right into the next song. I look into the crowd and nobody hates us, even if nobody seems very interested either. Todd's brother Paul is sitting with his girlfriend at a table in the back, and he sees me looking at him and toasts me with his beer mug. Nobody is dancing, but a couple of people are bobbing their heads up and down a little. Todd yells "Get up and dance!" between the third and fourth song, but nobody does. We go through the whole set so fast it seems like five minutes to me. When it's over my ears are ringing and I feel dizzy, and I think Todd is confused that it ended so quickly too, because he gives me a quizzical look and I shrug to show him I know what he's feeling. I flick my amp off and unplug my bass and take a long dramatic swig from my beer bottle, which is now disgustingly warm from sitting on the hot surface of my amp through the set. We look up hopefully when we hear someone yell "Encore!" from the crowd, but it's just Paul at the back table, happily waving his glass mug in the air.

"Were we good?" Todd asks me as we hop off the stage.

"Yeah," I say. "I think we were good."

We help Ragusa carry his drum set to the back room. "We rocked, man," he says. "Hee hee!" He slaps me hard on the back. "You're joining the band. You blow Spencer away."

"Thanks," I say.

"Nah, he's too much of a wimp to join us," Todd tells Ragusa. "He's gotta go back to fucking college." We're in the back room now and it's all over; we're back to our regular selves. The next band is already up on stage setting up their stuff.

We pass Jared Kaplan on the way back into the bar. "What'd you think?" Todd asks him.

Jared Kaplan looks at Todd for a moment as if surprised by the question. He shrugs. "Good sized crowd."



It's three in the morning and the last band of the night is finished. Todd plops a Molson down in front of me and we sit with our feet up on the chairs around us. The guys on stage click their humming amps off, and a pleasurable soothing silence fills the room. The place is empty except for us and three or four stragglers. Todd's brother Paul is with us, though his girlfriend has gone home. "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf starts playing on the jukebox, and I hear it through cottony deafened ears. Jared Kaplan sits yawning on a stool by the front door. Ragusa is falling asleep and wants to leave. About five beers ago he announced there was no way he was driving home in his condition, so we're going to leave the car on Bleecker, hope it doesn't get stolen, and take a cab home with our instruments. "Can we go?" Ragusa says.

"Let us just finish our beers," Todd says.

"Let us diminish our gears," Paul rhymes, drunkenly and sleepily.

I drink again even though I have drunk too much. I guzzle the watery brown liquid feeling like my belly is a tank of gasoline and I'm standing at the pump topping it off to get to an even twenty dollars. The alcohol no longer brings a tingling warmth; I am fully beer-soaked and can saturate no more. I stare at the dark shimmering wood surface of the table. "Bad Reputation" by Joan Jett begins playing on the jukebox. Paul is nudging me. "Hey," he says. "Want to try something? First take a last hit of this." He is handing me his small brass pipe. He holds his lighter to the bowl and I take a hit. "Okay," he says. "Close your eyes. This is what I always do when I'm here."

I close my eyes. "Okay," Paul says. "Now open them and look at the stage. Don't look at anything else, just look at the stage. Then imagine that the room becomes totally silent and starts filling with a strange, weird fog, and then a single blue spotlight cuts through the fog and points at the middle of the stage. And there's this young guy standing there, he looks like somebody's teenage kid, he's wearing a sloppy corduroy jacket and's got frizzy messy hair and a big nose and you wonder what the hell a kid like that is doing up on stage. Are you with me?"

"Yeah."

"Then he starts to play, and the whole room gets quiet, and then he starts to sing and you realize he's singing the most amazing words anybody has ever heard sung. And this kid is standing there with the light shining on him and everybody's listening in total silence ... Ah! Listen to him! It's Dylan! Can you hear him?"

I stare at the stage. Paul and I are both staring like we see a vision there. If anybody was looking at us they would think we were crazy. "I hear him," I tell Paul.

Soon we're out on the street waiting for a cab. The night air feels as fresh and cool and clean as a bowl of vanilla ice cream. A tingly happiness creeps into my legs and arms and fingers and toes. The moonlight shines on the streets and I look up at the darkened windows of the apartments over our heads. Everybody in the Village is asleep. A yellow cab pulls up and we collapse into a pile on the cracked steel-blue leather seats and that's about the last thing I remember from this long great stoned cool Bleecker Street rock and roll Greenwich Village night.
When Maggie and I got married and she got pregnant we needed to find a place to live, and we came very close to moving into one of the suburban communities professional young couples were "supposed" to live in. We looked at places in Long Island and New Jersey and Westchester. Then one day we mentioned to Maggie's parents that we'd been toying with the idea of living in New York City.

They were aghast. Maggie's parents are rather conservative people, and they are very concerned with elegance and propriety. They do not have much money, but they see this as a temporary aberration and always try to do things the socially "correct" way. Raising kids in the city, to them, is okay if you live on the Upper East Side and can afford private school, but this is not what Maggie and I were planning on doing. This was a bit of a setback in my relationship with them, as they'd only recently begun adjusting to the fact that Maggie had actually married me. They'd finally stopped telling me how much they admired the Jewish people every goddam time they saw me, and they'd even gotten over their shock that I actually do eat pork (which they still have trouble understanding). But now we were talking about living in that cesspool of sin and racial variety known as New York City, and I was back on their shitlist.

Once Maggie and I saw how shocked they were, we knew what we had to do. Anything that annoyed them that much had to be great. Our decision was made.

We decided to be extra perverse about it and live in Queens. I wanted to do this because Queens is one of the most unfashionable places in the world to live. It's one of New York's five boroughs, but it's not sparkling and famous like Manhattan, and it's also not gritty and cool like Brooklyn or the Bronx. It's just a sprawling plain of residential ethnic neighborhoods that hangs off the end of Brooklyn the same way that Staten Island, New York's other unfashionable borough, perches off the coast of New Jersey. Queens is the place TV comedy writers (based in Los Angeles) use when they want a character to be from somewhere funny. All In The Family took place in Queens, and characters from Seinfeld and The Nanny are from here too. I guess I was always fascinated by Queens because I was born there. My ancestors had been living in Brooklyn since arriving from Europe a hundred years before, and my older brother and sister had been born in Brooklyn. But my parents, like so many of their generation, wanted to leave Brooklyn and live in the beautiful new suburbs that were springing up outside the city, and they moved first to Queens (which is halfway to suburbia, at least when you're from Brooklyn) and then finally out to the swimming pool suburban heaven known as Long Island.

But I was born during those Queens years. We lived in Flushing till I was two, then in Rosedale-Laurelton (near Jamaica) till I was four. I was the only member of my extended family born in Queens, and because of this Queens has always had a sort of romantic mysterious childhood sense to me. Or maybe I developed this fascination as a defensive mechanism: I have the indignity of a birth certificate that lists Flushing as my place of birth, and I suppose I needed to develop some kind of fierce loyalty just to counter the utter embarrasment of this. Flushing is actually a 17th Century town founded by Dutch settlers from the town of Vlassingen, Holland, but it's been a target for jokes since then. I remember a typical exchange from All In The Family when Archie Bunker is going through some boxes in his attic and picks up a big felt 'F'. Mike : What's that, your high school letter?
Archie : Yeah.
Mike : What's it stand for?
Archie : Flushing.
Mike : Oh, so that's what ya majored in!

Real funny. Ha ha. Me and Archie Bunker, we're not amused.
It was great fun, though, watching Maggie's parents react as Maggie and I bought a co-op (in Forest Hills), moved in, painted it and prepared to raise our new daughter there. We made them come visit us to see the baby, and if you want to picture the expressions on Lucille and Raymond's faces as they walked through the streets of Queens towards the door of our building, just try to picture Queen Elizabeth and her entourage seated in the hooligan section during a British football match. It was great. From that day on they tried to avoid having to come visit us in the city, and begged us to drive out to New Jersey instead, and when we refused they'd put on a big show of getting lost on the city streets. We'd just sit back and enjoy it: every time they'd come there'd be another woeful tale of getting lost in the wilds of Jamaica or almost getting mugged in Hollis, of near-death collisions involving maniacal cab drivers near Hunters Point -- neighborhoods, all of them, that they did not need to drive through at all to reach us in Forest Hills.

For chrissakes, the streets are numbered here. It doesn't take a friggin' genius. Maggie's younger brother Nick wasn't much of a help either. He's a cool guy, but he got married the same time we did, and right after we bought the co-op in Forest Hills he did the opposite and bought a ranch on two acres up in the Hudson Valley. Thanks a lot, Nick. I know he did it on purpose. Maggie would be on the phone talking to her mother, and I'd only hear one side of the conversation, but I'd know the other side:


Yes, it is a very nice house.
No, we don't want to.
Yes, I'm sure the air is very fresh up there. No, that never happens.
No, actually most of them are very nice.
Actually the water is very clean.
Yes, their living room is very beautiful.

Once Nick visited us on a Saturday, though, and saw that we get the pre-printed sections of the Sunday Times delivered to our door on Saturday. This really blew his mind, that we could read the Arts & Leisure section and the Book Review on Saturday, that we had a one-day jump on the ads in the Real Estate section, that we could actually finish the crossword puzzle (if we could finish it) before most of the world even got to see it. I saw the envious look on his face. To Nick this is the one and only reason anybody should want to live in New York City. Perhaps someday he will actually move here because of this.
Anyway, this is what Queens looks like. Click wherever you'd like to visit. Levi's Map of Queens


In case you don't have a graphical browser, here's a list of the clickable regions on the map: North East (Flushing, Bayside, Whitestone, College Point, Queens College, Creedmoor, Douglaston, Little Neck) South East (Jamaica, Hollis, Richmond Hill, Rosedale-Laurelton) Central (Forest Hills, Rego Park, Corona, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, LaGuardia Airport, Rikers Island) North West (Astoria, Steinway, Long Island City, Newtown Creek, Woodside, Sunnyside) South West (Ozone Park, Maspeth, Ridgewood, Kennedy Airport) Rockaway Beach Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Now we have a son too (that's him in the picture on top -- Eliza was the photographer), and on the the fourth of July I take the whole family up to the roof to watch the fireworks, and from the roof we can look in all different directions and see little fireworks going off all over, and I just look around me and think how beautiful it all is, and how funny it is that the world is so full of anger and suspicion and hate while here in Queens people from all over the world shop in the same stores and walk the same streets and live in friendship and peace.

Sometimes I'll tease Lucille and Raymond by saying "Yeah, we're getting tired of living in Queens. We're thinking it's time to move on." I'll watch their faces brighten, I'll wait a few beats, and then I'll say: "We're looking at some great places in Brooklyn."

One of these days we'll break it to them that we're raising the kids Buddhists.
One day I was riding the subway home from work and the words to 'Eleanor Rigby' sprang into my head. 'All the lonely people, where do they all come from?' I always found it interesting the way people let themselves be naked when they're riding home from work. In the morning everybody sits straight, bracing themselves for the day ahead. But in the evening they are tired of holding themselves up all day; they collapse into their seats on the train and you can see the stories of their lives on their faces.
I decided I wanted to steal some of these faces, and to create a photo essay with the lyrics to 'Eleanor Rigby' as the text. I picked a day -- March 23 1995 -- and took my video camera to work with me (I could not use a standard camera, because the clicks would give me away). I usually take the E train home from the World Trade Center, but I decided to shoot my pictures on the 7 train from Times Square to Flushing, Queens instead. The 7 train appealed to me for a few reasons: they run many trains on that line, so it's not as crowded as the E during rush hour; also the train goes above-ground once it reaches Queens (making it technically not a subway but an elevated line), and I figured this would give me good lighting. At first I was nervous pointing my video camera in people's faces, but most of them didn't notice, as I had planned a subterfuge. I held the camera a few inches away from me and kept peering at the buttons and controls with a puzzled look on my face, hoping that people would think I'd just bought the camera and was trying to figure out how to use it. Every once in a while I'd mumble to myself and touch a few buttons as if confused by them; in fact I was zooming in and out on particular faces and squinting to see into the viewer. I switched cars a few times, and also captured some good faces at the Queensboro Plaza station between trains. My battery ran out near Jackson Heights, but by that time I'd gotten enough good shots. I ate a quick dinner and rushed over to my friend Tony's house (he has an Intel video board in his PC) and we spent the evening extracting GIF's from the live video feed. It kinda bugged me that, with all the great Beatles songs out there, I'd picked a McCartney song instead of a Lennon one. I mentioned this to my wife, and she said "Why don't you do something with 'Working Class Hero' too?" Duh. Thanks, Maggie. Here, on the next two pages, are the pictures I got. I see tremendous beauty in these faces, and I hope you see it too. So here with no further ado is my 7-train 5-o'clock what-a-shitty-day time-to-go-home

[2dimes]

Way to bump this unoriginal thread jackass.

so I see the entire point of posting that huge post was to kill the thread.

I used to be terrified of Mexican food. I guess this was because of Speedy Gonzalez, that little mouse who used to whip a bottle of Hot Sauce out of his magical invisible back pocket and sprinkle it on the food Yosemite Sam was about to eat, causing his mouth to burst into flame until he put the fire out by dunking his head into a nearby horse trough. No wonder I didn't try a taco until I was sixteen.

That was when the first Taco Bell opened on Long Island. My father used to take my sister and me to dinner at Friendly's every Saturday afternoon (our parents were divorced), and Suzanne and I liked our dinners predictable: grilled cheese or hamburgers with fries, followed by ice cream sundaes. We were food wimps, basically, and the only way to get either of us to try something new was to beg and plead. Which our father did, and after a sufficient amount of this we begrudgingly agreed to let him take us to the new Taco Bell.

I ordered a taco and promptly announced that I didn't like it. Suzanne did the same. We made Dad feel so bad he ended up taking us to Friendly's for dessert.

I don't know exactly what happened after that. I remember riding my bike past the new Taco Bell a few weeks later and getting a perverse urge to go in. Something about the taste fascinated me. I ordered a taco, ate it and left, never imagining that I would do this again. I repeated the act the next day, and then began to do this regularly, soon eating two or three tacos at a time, all the time still believing that I was a person who did not like Mexican food.

In fact, I was on the verge of a serious obsession.

Once I became a Mexican food addict, the Taco Bell taco ceased to satisfy me. The Taco Bell taco is a very proper, clean food item. The corn shell is crisp and neat like a wafer, and it is filled with a symmetrical spoonful of spicy ground beef, some shredded lettuce, chunks of tomatoes and tiny, ephemeral confetti strips of melting yellow cheese. It is a good food, a respectable food, but it is not enough. I quickly found myself moving on to the hard stuff, like the Jack In The Box Super Taco or the 7-11 Red Hot Beef and Bean Burrito. The 7-11 burrito is the most concentrated form of Mexican junk food easily available on the East Coast, and if you see somebody eating this more than once a week you can be sure this person is in trouble. When removed from it's plastic wrapper it is cold and clammy to the touch, and it is usually zapped in the powerful 7-11 mega-microwave for three to four minutes, after which it emerges in it's true form. Barely a food at all, it consists of just two components, a gummy white flour tortilla and a burning-hot glutenous paste of processed beef and chopped pinto beans cemented together by a peppery red grease that vaguely resembles STP motor oil. For three years I was a burrito-eater, and I lived with other burrito-eaters. I was in Hellhound, a heavy-metal/punk/thrash band that almost made it during the mid-eighties. I played bass and helped write the songs. If I had to describe us I'd say we were a combination of the Ramones and Jane's Addiction with a touch of Spinal Tap. We had one genius in the band, our lead singer Kevin Whitman. He was a sensitive soul, and I guess we didn't realize how much our long negotiations with record companies and video producers were stressing him out. He really wanted us to make it big, and one bad week after Atlantic Records decided not to offer us a contract and MTV turned down our video, Kevin flipped out. He started doing jigsaw puzzles in his bedroom (in his parents' house where he still lived) and he stopped coming to rehearsals because he said he needed to keep doing jigsaw puzzles until he got his brain to calm down. For seven days he only left his house to drive to the mall and buy more jigsaw puzzles. Then he tried to kill himself in the middle of the night and got committed to a mental hospital. Someday I'll tell you the whole story of Kevin Whitman. For now the reason I'm mentioning this is that Hellhound used to play Friday nights at a dive in Massapequa called Diamond Lil's, and there was a 7-11 right down the block. We always stopped there on the way home after a gig. Man! those red-hot beef-and-bean burritos sure tasted good at three in the morning when we were sweaty and beer-soaked, tired and hungry, deaf and happy.
A few years after Hellhound broke up my life completely fell apart. Actually I think it fell apart exactly at the point that Hellhound broke up. I'm just a slow learner and it took me a while to figure that out.

Kevin had been the dreamer of the group, and until he bowed out I didn't realize how much I'd been caught up in the dream myself. I wanted to be a rock star now; I wasn't even a great bassist, but I'd been setting my sights on this goal. I was twenty-eight years old and working for a robotics firm on Long Island, where I'd been living for much too long. What the f*ck was I doing in a dull family suburb, working a 9 to 5 job? My life had no direction, and nothing in it meant anything to me.

Not even Cindy. She'd been my girlfriend since college, but our relationship had lost its magic. When we went out to dinner I'd sit there bored, wishing to be home on my couch watching baseball. Even when we made love I was depressed. She started to notice this, and one Friday night she told me she wanted to break up. Which kind of took me by surprise. I knew our relationship had gone bad, but I also liked having a girlfriend around to remind me to eat right and buy me presents on my birthday and call my mother so I wouldn't have to do it. Now I was really confused. I began hanging around my apartment not doing a fucking thing. I'd sit on my couch with a bag of burritos and a bong, and I'd watch pro wrestling and Knight Rider and any other shit that was on, anything to divert me from my miserable life. I lived in this marshmallow-like hellish condition for about three months, not doing laundry or cutting my hair, sitting in a dull haze at work and falling behind on my schedule, eating burritos not once a day but two and finally three times a day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I'd become a truly disgusting person, and I have to say thank you to my sister Suzanne, because she was the one who got me out of it. She called from California (where she now lived), and knew the moment she heard my voice that I was in a bad place. She offered to help me break my routine by coming to stay with her for a week or two.

I'd never been to California; in fact I'd never been much of anywhere. It sounded like a fun idea, and I was happy to see Suzanne again. As soon as I arrived we stopped in an airport bar for a beer and a talk, and she ended up listening to all my problems and giving me a major pep-talk in which she explained that everybody felt confused when a relationship suddenly ended, and that everything I was going through was normal and healthy. Did I mention that my sister is a professional therapist? I felt better after a few hours of this, and then we agreed to go out to dinner. She asked me what kind of food I liked and I said "Mexican."

"Really?" she said. "I love Mexican food!"

"You do? When Dad brought us to Taco Bell I thought you hated it."

"I thought you hated it."

She got excited at the idea of having a Mexican meal, and decided to buy all the ingredients and cook me up a big dinner herself. "Do you know how to cook?" I asked suspiciously. I was hungry, and I remembered Suzanne turning up some ghastly dinners back when she used to take Home-Ec in high school. "Of course I do!" she said. "Don't you remember the dinners I used to make?"

"Yes, I do," I said sadly. We stopped at a grocery store, and my sister proceeded to buy the strangest collection of ingredients I'd ever seen: a clove of garlic, a stalk of celery, a tub of tofu, a package of bean sprouts, a can of black beans, a bag of lentils, three kinds of expensive European cheeses. "Suzanne," I said. "There are four ingredients in a Mexican meal. Meat, taco shells, sauce and cheddar cheese. Period."

"You don't know the California style," she said.

We got to her apartment, and she went into the kitchen to cook. An hour later she began the dinner by placing a dish of gigantic oven-warmed (and slightly burnt) tortillas on the table, then followed it with all the rest of the bizarre ingredients she'd bought at the store. "Okay, it's do-it-yourself," she said.

I stared at the table. "This is a nice salad," I said. "Would you please bring out the main course?"

It turned out the salad was the main course, and that's the California style. During the next few days I found myself unable to get used to this. Suzanne lived on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and there were about ten burrito stands or tacquerias on this street, but I couldn't get a real burrito at any one of them. This made me feel alienated and homesick. The fact was, even though Suzanne's long talks were making me feel better, I was still in a very confused state. I knew Suzanne was right that I needed to snap out of my depression, but I still needed something to provide that climactic force and make the change happen. In search of this elusive thing, I took the BART into San Francisco by myself one day while Suzanne was at work, hoping to find something in San Francisco to change my life. I thought I'd enjoy exploring the city by myself, but as soon as I stepped out of the BART station at Market Street I started to feel a crushing, panicky loneliness. I looked around at the shoe stores and donut shops of downtown San Francisco and felt lost and lonely. Suzanne and her friends had given me a long list of places to go, but I felt overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of everything around me. Like I said, I'd never really been anywhere before.

Suzanne and her friends had told me to go to the Exploratorium first. I walked all the way over, but as soon as I stepped inside and paid my admission I realized I wasn't in the mood for a science museum after all. I left and tried to walk back to the center of town but got lost in the Presidio for an hour and a half. I reached some kind of deserted military settlement at the north end of the park and looked out over the Golden Gate Bridge. The elemental beauty of the rust-colored bridge and black rocks and crashing waves only filled me with anxiety; I wanted to see the Brooklyn Bridge again. I finally found my way out of the park by walking down some wooden stairs onto a nude beach that only got me more depressed because almost all the nude people were guys. I pulled my tourist map from my back pocket and began walking towards the Haight. It took much longer to get there than I'd thought it would, and by the time I reached the famous corner of Haight and Ashbury my feet ached and I wasn't in the mood to look at record stores or drink coffee or find the house where the Grateful Dead used to live. Now, I realized, I was in the mood for a science museum. I wandered and wandered and reached the Castro, where I watched guys kissing each other passionately on the street and wondered why they wouldn't rather be hanging out at the nude beach by the Presidio. I walked and walked, lost and dying in the scary loneliness of walking; I found Lombard Street and descended the famous "crookedest street in the world" without enjoying it; I reached Market Street again and looked up at the pointy Pyramid building and then walked on to Fisherman's Wharf. I didn't know enough at this point in my life to stop at the City Lights bookstore, and I walked right through North Beach and ended up at Fisherman's Wharf, which disappointed me because it was obviously a place no self-respecting fisherman would ever go. It was nothing but a shopping mall, with yogurt shops and crystal stands and postcard stores, all dim and deserted and closing for the night. The sky was dark now, and I looked at the hushed skyline of cold empty San Francisco and thought of the line in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land where he says "Unreal City," just like that, with no explanation. That was what San Francisco felt like to me at that moment.
I was exhausted from all my walking, and I suddenly realized I couldn't walk another block. I didn't understand why I was so tired, as I'd walked across New York City many times without getting tired; I later came to understand that walking across San Francisco, with its vast parks and steep hills, is much harder than walking across Manhattan, which is as flat as an ironing board.

I was starving, and I decided to take a cab back to Berkeley. Sitting in the dark back seat as we crossed the Bay Bridge, I started to feel a strange sensation of calm and happiness. We drove through the streets of the East Bay and reached the familiar busy nighttime streets of downtown Berkeley, and I found myself feeling almost ecstatic, for no reason I could understand. I paid the cab driver (it cost forty dollars) and hopped out onto the corner of Telegraph and Durant. I almost walked up to the door of Suzanne's apartment when I caught the smell of Mexican food from a tacqueria two buildings down. I walked in to the tacqueria and sat down. A Mexican waiter tried to hand me a menu and I said, "Just give me your standard burrito. Put everything on it."

"Gotcha," he said. I knew I was asking for it. He returned with a porcelain plate holding nothing on it but a single huge burrito the size and shape of a slightly flattened melon, decorated with two sprigs of crunchy lettuce and a folded white paper cup of guacamole. I looked at it for a moment. I wasn't sure where to put my fork and decided to start with one of the tapered edges. I took my first bite. It was good. A bit crunchy, and too lukewarm. But I could relate to it. Brown rice and white beans and lettuce and avocado and barley and radishes and salsa ... there was something tremendously integrated about it. I took another bite, and another after that. Now I'd reached the lentils and tofu sour cream and pinto beans and carrots. Carrots in a burrito! I can't say I fully approved of this, but like I said, I was in a kind of crazy mood. And in this mood I suddenly understood the California Burrito. Inclusiveness was the philosophy. Foods have to learn to get along in the California Burrito, just like people have to learn to get along. It was like a political statement, with guacamole on the side.

I ended up eating a California Burrito every night for the rest of my stay in Berkeley. I returned home a changed person.

Something else happened to me during this trip. For a long time Suzanne had been telling me to read Jack Kerouac. This may strike some of you as funny, because many of you know me as the guy who created a web site about Beat Literature, but I didn't read Kerouac for the first time until a couple of years ago. I started "On The Road" for the first time on this trip, in fact, during the plane ride back from Berkeley to New York. I hadn't expected to like the book. I expected it to be pretentious and dated, but it turned out to be the freshest, funniest, truest piece of writing I'd read in a long time. Maybe the reason I liked it so much was that it was nothing more than the story of a depressed college-educated boy from the East Coast who can't stand to look at his hometown anymore and goes out to California in search of religion and kicks. I felt like I'd just met my soul brother.

I sat there on the airplane reading, and I reached the part where Sal Paradise meets a sweet pretty Mexican girl named Terry on a bus somewhere near Los Angeles. They start making out and think they might be falling in love, and since Sal has nowhere else to go she takes him back to the grape and cotton fields of Bakersfield to work with her and her family. For a few days the college boy gets to live the life of a Mexican grape-picker and he digs it, though he eventually runs scared back home. I read these lines: Terry and Johnny sat in the grass; we had grapes. In California you chew the juice out of grapes and spit the skin away, a real luxury. Nightfall came. Terry went home for supper and came to the barn at nine o'clock with delicious tortillas and mashed beans. This just blew my mind. Think about it: what exactly is Jack Kerouac talking about here? He's talking about his own personal discovery of the California Burrito.
Now it's my dream to write a book about the California Burrito. I see it an expensive coffee-table book, with lavish illustrations and color photographs. I'll start by examining the eating habits of the Aztec and Mayan peoples before their ancient civilizations were destroyed by Cortez and his successors. I'll discuss the interplay between European and Native American ways of eating, and I'll trace the evolution of Mexican cuisine as it spread through the Spanish territories of North America. We'll see how the taco and the burrito and the enchilada and the tamale moved through the fast-growing English-speaking cities of southern California, and how Mexican food merged with the barbecue sauce cowboy cuisine of Kansas City and Texas to form the style known as Southwestern or, later, Tex-Mex. I'll go from there to the arrival of the first chic Mexican restaurants in New York in the late 1960's, and from there to the sudden nationwide success of Taco Bell. I'll conclude with the invention of the California style, and then say a few words about the future of Mexican food in the ever-changing world.

And since I know I'll never really write this book, I can use this title for these pages instead. Here it is: THE HISTORY OF THE CALIFORNIA BURRITO. I'm sitting in the sleazy grimy Greyhound station waiting for the bus to New York, and I'm thinking: it was "My Fair Lady" that screwed up Todd's mind. That was the turning point; before he played Henry Higgins he was a straight kid who never cut classes or smoked weed or mouthed off to teachers. All the applause he got made him dizzy, and instead of going to music college like he planned to he decided to be a rock star. He went to New York City, just threw himself into the middle of everything to see where he'd end up. Which I thought was amazingly great. I just never thought it would be Todd, of all my friends, to go and really do this.

Now he's in a band and they're supposed to play their first gig tomorrow night, and the bassist is sick and can't make it. Which is why Todd called me, and which is why I'm heading for New York. I wish I had time to get myself in the right mental state, to get rid of the weird nervous feeling in my stomach. I always thought Todd was half-nerd and that I was his guide when it came to anything cool, but now he's in the city playing in a band and I'm a college student writing papers on Plato and Aristotle, which makes me think maybe I lost it and Todd is cooler than I am. A scary feeling. I catch my reflection in a bagel stand's clear plastic shield: I've got neat moussed hair, no dirt under my fingernails ... I'm a fucking Connecticut wet dream. I try to mess my hair up with my fingers but the gel I used this morning refuses to give up control and now I just look like an idiot. An old lady is looking at me. I curl my lip and stare her down. I decide I need cigarettes. I don't smoke, but I'm desperate to change my image. I buy a pack of Marlboros and light one up. It tastes good. I stub it out on the back of the seat in front of me, watching the antiseptic sea green molded plastic congeal into burnt black bubbles. I step off the bus in New York City with the best bad-ass expression I can come up with on my face, and catch the subway to Atlantic and Flatbush in Brooklyn. I walk six blocks to the apartment where Todd is staying and he buzzes me upstairs. I step up to his door and he swings it open and doesn't even say hello; instead he leaps at me and whirls me inside and drops me on a couch. "Thank fucking god you're here," he says. He starts trying to force a large black Fender bass guitar under my armpits. "Todd!" I yell. "Calm down! Say hello for f*ck's sake! Offer me a drink or something!"

"Oh," he says. "Yeah, hello. Shit, I'm hyper."

I kick my sneakers off. "Aren't you gonna ask me how my trip was?" "Yeah, yeah. How was your trip?"

"It sucked." Todd doesn't hear my answer, and I allow him to strap the black bass around me and plug it into the amp. He manages to do this despite the fact that his own guitar is hanging from his shoulders by a strap. He checks his tuning and looks at me pleadingly. "Todd," I say. "You don't wanna play some music or anything, do you?"

"Shit, man," he says. "I'm dying. I'm so nervous. This fucking thing with Spencer getting sick has me so damn mad. You know, I was nervous enough already. And the fucking dickhead isn't even sick. He's got the fucking sniffles. Man, I've been a lot sicker than he is without it slowing me down ... I can't believe he did this to us the day before our first gig."

"Okay," I say. "But just calm down. Look at you. I can't learn songs with you hyper like this."

Todd takes a deep breath. "Okay. Okay. Sorry."

"Anyway, maybe Spencer's just chickening out," I said. "Maybe he's afraid to go onstage."

Todd gives me a long, significant look. "Maybe," he says. "I've been thinking the same damn thing." Todd's had a lot of trouble finding good people to play with. For his first six months in New York he was bummed out playing lead guitar in a Pink Floyd copy band called Eclipse. He wrote me letters about the drummer who couldn't figure out the beat on "Money," who kept pacing the room babbling about 13/8 and 26/15 time signatures as if his crummy drumming was a mathematical puzzle he could solve in his mind. Finally Todd dumped this crew and hooked up with a decent drummer named Ragusa. Together they found Spencer the bassist, and this completed their band. I check the tuning on the bass and play the beginning notes of "Dazed and Confused." I don't play rock bass at all; the only reason Todd thinks I'm a bassist is that I used to play classical bass, and I wasn't even good at that. I played classical bass because I was told to in third grade. One day Mrs. Pearsall stuck her hands under my armpits, lifted me up and placed me on a wooden platform in front of a six-foot-tall instrument. She instructed me how to put my arms around the instrument and caress its wide womanly waist, even broader than my mother's or Mrs. Pearsall's, and she held her hand over mine to show me how to stroke a horsehair bow across the glittering thick steel strings. I did everything Mrs. Pearsall told me to do and she made a big fuss over me and said I could play Carnegie Hall someday if I worked hard enough at it. I held the first seat in the junior orchestra during seventh, eighth and ninth grades, and Todd was first violin. After ninth grade we joined the senior orchestra, but now instead of nice Mrs. Pearsall we had mean Mr. Minkof. He was a skinny angry guy with greasy black hair falling over his forehead who had a Ph.D. from the Harvard Music Department and was furious that he hadn't become a famous performer. He hated me because I was one of the crowd that smoked pot in the fields by the bike stands between classes. I came into his class late one day with a pretzel in my hand and a goofy smile on my face. Mr. Minkof went insane and descended on me like a "Fliedermaus" and smacked me on my cheek and sent me sprawling onto the floor on my ass. It totally shocked me and I sat there with my cheek stinging and my arms and legs spread out on the floor, and I started to scream "You asshole!" but I was so stunned my words came out in a choked sob, and the story went around that day that I was crying. Mr. Minkof got in trouble for hitting me, but I still hated him so much I never took a music class again.

Todd is still standing over me waiting to rehearse. "Todd," I say. "There's something I've always wanted to ask you. You liked Mr. Minkof, didn't you?"

"What?" he says. "Why are you talking about Mr. Minkof? We gotta get going here. Can I start the tape?"

"This is a serious question," I say, intending to drag this out as much as possible. I love watching Todd get frustrated. "If I'm going to play music with you it's important that we demolish any barriers that stand between us and prevent us from truly rocking out. This has been buggin' me since tenth grade. Did you really like him or were you just kissing his ass all that time? You liked him, didn't you? Just admit it."

Todd flaps his arms in desperation, willing to give me any answer I want but not knowing what answer I want. "I liked him," he says.

"You fucking slimeball bastard," I say. "I knew it! You traitor! How could you like him? Why?"

"He believed in music," Todd says with finality. "Now. I'm starting the tape. The bass is already in perfect tune. I tuned it while I was waiting for you. First song's in D."

"You don't have to tell me what key it's in," I say. The tape starts. The first song is a fast Primus kind of thing, cheaply recorded with a single mike. Todd watches as I start plucking at notes until I find the bassline. It's a simple progression, D to E minor for the verse and a chorus of D, G and A. I feel better once I realize I know how to play, and after the first song Todd breathes a sigh of relief. "So how the f*ck is college going, anyway?" he asks me.

"About the same," I say. "It's college."

"Why don't you blow it off and be our new bassist? We need somebody who isn't a dickhead like Spencer. You're a dickhead too but we'll take you anyway."

"Todd," I say. "I don't know how to play bass."

"Yes you do," he says. He starts up the second song, which has an even easier bassline. This one is called "Quiet Mystery," and I start to pay attention to the words Todd is singing on the tape. A network of secrets that you spin like a web
I stand at your ocean but the tide does ever ebb
I want you here beside me but you're way too far to see
I gaze through a haze at your quiet mystery. "Shit, Todd," I say. "You wrote this stuff?"
"Yeah," he says, embarrassed.

I smile and shake my head. "You think things like this? Man, you're fucked up. You better get some professional help." He shrugs. "I don't even know what I'm writing, I don't know what it means. I think I should see a shrink myself when I read some of the shit I write." He plops down in front of me what looks like a white $2.49 nylon-covered photo album from Woolworth's. I open it and see page after page of handwritten lyrics under clear plastic photo sheets. Some are illustrated with crayon sketches or magazine photo collages. I see a section labeled "f*ck You Poems" illustrated with a bleeding black heart and a color yearbook photo of Todd in his nerd mode, clean V-neck sweater over a nylon shirt, hair neatly combed, in the middle of the heart. The first poem begins "f*ck you mom, f*ck you dad," and Todd stutteringly tries to turn the page, pretending he wants me to see something he wrote on a different page, I guess because he realizes that I know his Mom and Dad, who are actually fairly cool people.

There's a knock on the door and it's Ragusa, the drummer. Ragusa has bleached blond hair cut so short that at first I think he's bald. He sits and stares at me like he doesn't like me. I think of a joke I once heard: what do you call a guy who likes to hang out with musicians? A drummer. Todd starts the tape for the third song, and while I work out the bass line Ragusa takes two plastic Chinese Restaurant chopsticks from his jacket pocket and starts to play a beat on the coffee table. We get through both sides of the tape and smoke a joint. Todd turns off the tape player and we start to jam for a while. Ragusa tip-taps away with his chopsticks on the coffee table and performs cymbal crashes on the lamp. When we hear the lock turn in the front door Todd jumps up. "Shit! I forgot to tell you, I don't live here. I'm sponging off my brother, and the other two people who live here are kind of pissed off about it. We gotta get out of their way."

"Who are the other two people?" I ask.

He listens to the heavy footsteps as somebody opens the door and steps inside. "That sounds like Wayne," he says. "He's just some guy, a lawyer or something, I don't really know much about him. I don't think he likes me." We gather our guitars and picks and patch cords and poetry books into our arms and get it all into Todd's brother's bedroom and slam the door behind us just as we hear footsteps enter the living room.

"Who's the other person who lives here?" I ask. "This girl Tara. She does modern dance or something. She doesn't really talk to me either. I just try to stay out of their way."

"How did your brother meet them?"

"An ad in the Village Voice."

"Wow," I say. "Just like 'The Real World,' except MTV isn't filming it."

Todd sneaks into the kitchen and returns with a two-foot-high plastic bag of potato chips and three bottles of Miller Beer. We go over some more songs until Ragusa goes home. At ten- thirty Todd's brother Paul arrives from work. Paul works as a computer programmer for a Wall Street bank, and he peels his suit off as he walks into the room. He is tall and thin and more serious looking than Todd, with a trimmed beard and red weary eyes from staring at computer screens all day. I see that he and Todd have a thing worked out that Todd doesn't speak to Paul until Paul has finished changing into a t-shirt and gym shorts and calling his girlfriend. "Paul hates his job," Todd whispers to me as Paul mutters into the phone across the room.

"Why doesn't he quit?" I whisper back.

"He makes pretty good money."

Paul hangs up the phone and asks where I'm going to sleep. Todd shows him how he's rearranged the blankets on the floor to make room for both of us. Paul shows me the Motorola beeper he'd taken off his belt when he came in. "It might go off in the middle of the night if there's a systems problem at the bank," he tells me. "If that happens I'm gonna have to turn the light on and log in from here until I fix it."

"How often does that happen?" I ask.

"Couple of times a month. Probably won't happen tonight."

Todd hands Paul a joint and Paul takes a long hit, exhaling and staring into space with his raccoon-ringed eyes. "I'm beat," he says. He gestures towards a gigantic record and CD collection spanning an entire wall and asks if I want to pick out an album. I stand up and study his collection. He's got as many records as a small record store. About half are bootlegs, and I find stuff I never knew existed: U2 in Japan, Neil Young at the Bottom Line, the Beatles at Shea Stadium. "I never knew there was a Beatles at Shea Stadium bootleg," I say. "There's a bootleg of most anything you can think of," he says. "Especially if you're willing to spend your entire fucking salary on it like I do."

He pulls himself up from the bed to show me something in his Bob Dylan section. "See this bootleg?" he says. "This was recorded at the Coffee Grinder. That's where you're playing tomorrow night."

"You're kidding," I say. "You mean we're playing one of those historic old Village clubs? Shit, now I'm even more scared."

"Ah, don't worry. The place is a dump. Once Dylan got famous he never played there again."

I look at the album cover, cheaply printed with a xerox of a skinny young Bob Dylan playing guitar in front of a brick wall. The club date is March 1961. "Can we hear it?" I say.

"Sure." We listen to the first three songs, but Paul and Todd are both tired and want to sleep. I'm still wide awake, so Todd, his eyes closing, suggests I go into the living room and watch TV.

I step out of the bedroom and see a pretty brown-haired woman sitting in the dark watching "Love Connection" on TV and eating Ben and Jerry's Fudge Brownie Frozen Yogurt slowly with a spoon.

"Oh," I say. "Hi."

She stares at me like she just turned on the kitchen light and I'm a cockroach running across her stove. "Ohh," she finally drawls, understanding that I'm yet another person there to sponge off Paul.

"I'm Jonathan," I say. "I'm sitting in with Todd's band tomorrow."

"Todd has a band?" she says blandly, and I realize that the bare minimum of communication has not taken place between the people currently living in this apartment.

"Yeah," I say. "Is it all right if I sit out here?"

"Not really," she says. "But I don't want to make you sit out in the hall so I guess I have no choice."

I sit on the chair farthest away from her and face the TV. The wavy-haired California boy in the middle chair says "When the night began she was tame as a kitten but after two drinks she was wild as a tiger." Chuck Woolery smirks and the audience goes crazy. Tara licks the matte silver surface of the bottom of her spoon. I think about the gig tomorrow night.
The next day we walk to Ragusa's apartment over a bicycle shop with a greasy window in a rusting black iron frame. We practice for about four hours with our amps turned low so Ragusa's neighbors don't complain. I know the ten songs we're going to play by now, but I have no idea how we're going to sound at performance volume. We cook spaghetti for dinner and carry our instruments outside. Ragusa spends about five minutes removing the bolts and chains wrapped around the steering wheel of his broken-down yellow '82 Mustang. "You're telling me somebody would steal this thing?" I ask Todd in a whisper. Todd nods.
Ragusa drives us over the Brooklyn Bridge while Todd passes around a joint. I take a long hit and suddenly see that we have entered a National Geographic article about life in Beijing. I see red awnings with painted white chinese characters, yellow and blue paper dragons flapping in the wind, a red and orange pagoda over a two-story McDonald's cramped between a vegetable stand and a jewelry store with glittering tiny mirrors pasted like a mosaic into 'DIAMONDS AND GOLD BOUGHT AND SOLD.' The air smells like fish. "Did you hear about this new fucking crime wave in Chinatown?" Ragusa says. "I probably shouldn't even drive through here anymore."

"Yeah, man," Todd says. "Fucking Chinese crime gangs, I hear even the Mafia's scared of them."

"I got stuck behind a Chinese gang funeral the other day," Ragusa says. "f*ck, man, there were like fifty guys in identical black suits with red carnations just walking behind this old black limousine! It was like something from The Godfather!"

It occurs to me that they are babbling because they're nervous. Todd is snapping his little rectangular armrest ashtray open and closed. "Will you fucking cut that out?" Ragusa yells. I look out the window and think: I want to be a Chinese gangster. I want to walk behind a black limousine with a red carnation on my lapel. I want to sit at the back of a restaurant eating a plate of Pork Lo Mein with a shiny silver gun on my lap. We cross some invisible line that divides Chinatown from Soho, and I forget about being a Chinese gangster and think about being an abstract artist. We reach the intersection of Bleecker and Bowery and I see the decaying silver awning of CBGB's. "Bow before the temple," Ragusa says as we drive past. "One month from now, I want us playing there."

"He always takes the long way so we can drive past CB's," Todd tells me. Ragusa runs a red light by mistake and a flannel- shirted baseball-capped guy bangs our car with his fist. We find a tiny parking space near the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, and go back and forth for five minutes while Ragusa squeezes us in.

The Coffee Grinder turns out to be a cramped little cellar with craggy red brick walls and black wood tables thickly shellacked to an unnatural shine. Jared Kaplan, the big droopy-eyed, black- bearded old man with tattoos on his biceps who owns the Coffee Grinder, tells us to put our instruments in the back room. We carry them back to a dark cement chamber filled with mops and pails and waterlogged cardboard cartons of plastic-wrapped packages of cocktail napkins. "There's gonna be fucking roaches climbing all over my drum set, I know it," Ragusa says. There's a tight passageway between the back room and the bar, and on the way back we have to stand against the wall to make room for the guys in the band who'll be playing before us. We don't say hello as they squeeze by. We find a table near the front of the bar and order beers. "Look at this shithole," Todd says. "Look at these bricks."

"Looks like somebody's fucking uncle built this place on his day off," Ragusa says. The bricks are laid at uneven angles with glops of cement between them. Todd pulls a crumbly ball of dried cement from between two bricks. I do the same, examining the round little moon-rock before I crush it into gray powder between my fingers. We start flicking the little balls at each other until Jared Kaplan saunters up to us. "Hey, stop taking apart my goddamn walls."

After he walks away, Todd says, "Doesn't Jared Kaplan look like his name should be Snake or something?"

"Yeah," Ragusa says. "He looks like he's about to fucking murder someone." We all stare at Kaplan, who stands with arms folded behind the bar, his big meaty biceps bulging from beneath his black t-shirt. "Remember the biker named Snake in the Partridge Family?" Todd says. "Remember when he fell in love with Laurie Partridge?"

"No," Ragusa says.

"The guy who was Meathead played Snake," Todd says.

"The guy who was Meathead," Ragusa repeats. "Who the f*ck is the guy who was Meathead?"

"Meathead," Todd says. "You know. Meathead."

The first band is on stage tuning up. It's a five-man band with keyboards and two guitars. I wish I was playing in a five-man band tonight. It'd be so much easier to hide. I listen as this band starts their first song, and I'm relieved that they sound fairly wimpy. Jared Kaplan walks over to us and asks us what we think. "They suck," Ragusa tells him.

"Yeah," Todd says. "They kind of remind me of a bunch of musicians with no talent who don't have anything to say."

Jared Kaplan nods as if considering this deeply. It occurs to me that he'll later ask this band what they think of us. I yell "'Scuse me!" to him over the noise. He squints at me and comes over.

I say, "How long have you owned this place?"

"Always," he grunts. "Opened it in 1959."

"Is it true Bob Dylan used to play here?"

"Sure it's true. They all played here. Peter Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Sonny and Cher."

"Did you meet Dylan?"

"Did I meet him? Yeah, I met everybody. I was the guy who paid them their money, they all made damn sure they met me. Bob Dylan, he looked like a little hillbilly kid who needed a bath. Judy Collins, now there was a beautiful lady."

I want to ask him something else but he's still talking. "Hey, Bill Cosby used to come here all the time. And whats-her-name played here, Melody. You know ... 'I got a brand new roller skate, you got my key.' Johnny Cash used to play here too." He points to a photo hanging over the ancient cash register behind the dark wood bar. I squint to see it and he walks away so quickly I think I did something to make him mad. He yanks the framed photo off the wall and brings it back to me. I see a younger thinner Jared Kaplan, beardless and bespectacled, with his arm around Johnny Cash, both of them smiling broadly for the camera. After an hour the first band leaves the stage to disinterested polite applause. About forty people are sitting around drinking beer and talking, and maybe ten more are playing darts or pinball. Ragusa climbs onto the stage and starts setting up his drum kit. Todd and I take our time finishing our beers because we have less setting up to do. "Nervous?" I ask Todd.

"Yeah," he says. "What about you?"

"Nah," I lie.

"Hey," he says. "Even if we f*ck up, at least I'll have gotten the first one over with. That's the only reason I'm doing this. Next time won't be as bad."

We step up on stage and I plug in my bass and stare into the crowd, trying to remember that I'm a Chinese gangster, that I smoke cigarettes in bus stations. I take a long slug of my Molson Golden but my hand is shaking and the beer spills down my neck and under the collar of my blue and white striped t-shirt. Now my hands are wet and I'm afraid I'll be electrocuted if I touch my bass, and Todd is plucking his low E string and waiting for me to pluck mine so we can tune up. I dry my hands quickly on my jeans and do it, trying not to get Todd more upset. We tune quickly, and Todd tapes a copy of the song list to the floor in front of me. It says:


I tell Todd that I always wanted to have somebody tape a song list to the floor in front of me. He smiles and we look back and Ragusa nods: he's ready. "First one's in A," Todd reminds me, although I know this. Ragusa taps his sticks together to signal 1-2-3-4 and we dig in and a strange rush comes over me as soon as I realize we're making music. Maybe it's because I'm stoned but the moment I hear the noise we're making come blasting out from the amps behind us I feel a great surge of pleasure course through my body. "f*ck!" I say out loud. Todd is playing a grungy lawn-mower-engine rhythm and I'm just booming on the A, hammering from G to start every measure Dee Dee Ramone-style, and it sounds great. I look at Todd and he's leaning into the microphone getting ready to sing and then he bursts out with his screechy vocal, and I look at him and think: this is not the Todd I used to know. Digging at his guitar strings like he's scratching an itch, singing at some pretty girl's face in the middle of the bar, he is doing this for real and the Todd I used to know has been put away somewhere for holidays and family occasions. Ragusa and I are right on the beat, and I feel so good I start playing improvising on the scale just for the f*ck of it, and it makes the song sound even sturdier. Todd howls into the mike. I look back and see Ragusa grinning as he bangs away; he's having a good time.

The song ends on a cymbal-crash A-chord and a long pained wail into the microphone from Todd, and we pause for one second, holding the tension, until Todd yells to me "F-sharp!" and we blast right into the next song. I look into the crowd and nobody hates us, even if nobody seems very interested either. Todd's brother Paul is sitting with his girlfriend at a table in the back, and he sees me looking at him and toasts me with his beer mug. Nobody is dancing, but a couple of people are bobbing their heads up and down a little. Todd yells "Get up and dance!" between the third and fourth song, but nobody does. We go through the whole set so fast it seems like five minutes to me. When it's over my ears are ringing and I feel dizzy, and I think Todd is confused that it ended so quickly too, because he gives me a quizzical look and I shrug to show him I know what he's feeling. I flick my amp off and unplug my bass and take a long dramatic swig from my beer bottle, which is now disgustingly warm from sitting on the hot surface of my amp through the set. We look up hopefully when we hear someone yell "Encore!" from the crowd, but it's just Paul at the back table, happily waving his glass mug in the air.

"Were we good?" Todd asks me as we hop off the stage.

"Yeah," I say. "I think we were good."

We help Ragusa carry his drum set to the back room. "We rocked, man," he says. "Hee hee!" He slaps me hard on the back. "You're joining the band. You blow Spencer away."

"Thanks," I say.

"Nah, he's too much of a wimp to join us," Todd tells Ragusa. "He's gotta go back to fucking college." We're in the back room now and it's all over; we're back to our regular selves. The next band is already up on stage setting up their stuff.

We pass Jared Kaplan on the way back into the bar. "What'd you think?" Todd asks him.

Jared Kaplan looks at Todd for a moment as if surprised by the question. He shrugs. "Good sized crowd."



It's three in the morning and the last band of the night is finished. Todd plops a Molson down in front of me and we sit with our feet up on the chairs around us. The guys on stage click their humming amps off, and a pleasurable soothing silence fills the room. The place is empty except for us and three or four stragglers. Todd's brother Paul is with us, though his girlfriend has gone home. "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf starts playing on the jukebox, and I hear it through cottony deafened ears. Jared Kaplan sits yawning on a stool by the front door. Ragusa is falling asleep and wants to leave. About five beers ago he announced there was no way he was driving home in his condition, so we're going to leave the car on Bleecker, hope it doesn't get stolen, and take a cab home with our instruments. "Can we go?" Ragusa says.

"Let us just finish our beers," Todd says.

"Let us diminish our gears," Paul rhymes, drunkenly and sleepily.

I drink again even though I have drunk too much. I guzzle the watery brown liquid feeling like my belly is a tank of gasoline and I'm standing at the pump topping it off to get to an even twenty dollars. The alcohol no longer brings a tingling warmth; I am fully beer-soaked and can saturate no more. I stare at the dark shimmering wood surface of the table. "Bad Reputation" by Joan Jett begins playing on the jukebox. Paul is nudging me. "Hey," he says. "Want to try something? First take a last hit of this." He is handing me his small brass pipe. He holds his lighter to the bowl and I take a hit. "Okay," he says. "Close your eyes. This is what I always do when I'm here."

I close my eyes. "Okay," Paul says. "Now open them and look at the stage. Don't look at anything else, just look at the stage. Then imagine that the room becomes totally silent and starts filling with a strange, weird fog, and then a single blue spotlight cuts through the fog and points at the middle of the stage. And there's this young guy standing there, he looks like somebody's teenage kid, he's wearing a sloppy corduroy jacket and's got frizzy messy hair and a big nose and you wonder what the hell a kid like that is doing up on stage. Are you with me?"

"Yeah."

"Then he starts to play, and the whole room gets quiet, and then he starts to sing and you realize he's singing the most amazing words anybody has ever heard sung. And this kid is standing there with the light shining on him and everybody's listening in total silence ... Ah! Listen to him! It's Dylan! Can you hear him?"

I stare at the stage. Paul and I are both staring like we see a vision there. If anybody was looking at us they would think we were crazy. "I hear him," I tell Paul.

Soon we're out on the street waiting for a cab. The night air feels as fresh and cool and clean as a bowl of vanilla ice cream. A tingly happiness creeps into my legs and arms and fingers and toes. The moonlight shines on the streets and I look up at the darkened windows of the apartments over our heads. Everybody in the Village is asleep. A yellow cab pulls up and we collapse into a pile on the cracked steel-blue leather seats and that's about the last thing I remember from this long great stoned cool Bleecker Street rock and roll Greenwich Village night.
When Maggie and I got married and she got pregnant we needed to find a place to live, and we came very close to moving into one of the suburban communities professional young couples were "supposed" to live in. We looked at places in Long Island and New Jersey and Westchester. Then one day we mentioned to Maggie's parents that we'd been toying with the idea of living in New York City.

They were aghast. Maggie's parents are rather conservative people, and they are very concerned with elegance and propriety. They do not have much money, but they see this as a temporary aberration and always try to do things the socially "correct" way. Raising kids in the city, to them, is okay if you live on the Upper East Side and can afford private school, but this is not what Maggie and I were planning on doing. This was a bit of a setback in my relationship with them, as they'd only recently begun adjusting to the fact that Maggie had actually married me. They'd finally stopped telling me how much they admired the Jewish people every goddam time they saw me, and they'd even gotten over their shock that I actually do eat pork (which they still have trouble understanding). But now we were talking about living in that cesspool of sin and racial variety known as New York City, and I was back on their shitlist.

Once Maggie and I saw how shocked they were, we knew what we had to do. Anything that annoyed them that much had to be great. Our decision was made.

We decided to be extra perverse about it and live in Queens. I wanted to do this because Queens is one of the most unfashionable places in the world to live. It's one of New York's five boroughs, but it's not sparkling and famous like Manhattan, and it's also not gritty and cool like Brooklyn or the Bronx. It's just a sprawling plain of residential ethnic neighborhoods that hangs off the end of Brooklyn the same way that Staten Island, New York's other unfashionable borough, perches off the coast of New Jersey. Queens is the place TV comedy writers (based in Los Angeles) use when they want a character to be from somewhere funny. All In The Family took place in Queens, and characters from Seinfeld and The Nanny are from here too. I guess I was always fascinated by Queens because I was born there. My ancestors had been living in Brooklyn since arriving from Europe a hundred years before, and my older brother and sister had been born in Brooklyn. But my parents, like so many of their generation, wanted to leave Brooklyn and live in the beautiful new suburbs that were springing up outside the city, and they moved first to Queens (which is halfway to suburbia, at least when you're from Brooklyn) and then finally out to the swimming pool suburban heaven known as Long Island.

But I was born during those Queens years. We lived in Flushing till I was two, then in Rosedale-Laurelton (near Jamaica) till I was four. I was the only member of my extended family born in Queens, and because of this Queens has always had a sort of romantic mysterious childhood sense to me. Or maybe I developed this fascination as a defensive mechanism: I have the indignity of a birth certificate that lists Flushing as my place of birth, and I suppose I needed to develop some kind of fierce loyalty just to counter the utter embarrasment of this. Flushing is actually a 17th Century town founded by Dutch settlers from the town of Vlassingen, Holland, but it's been a target for jokes since then. I remember a typical exchange from All In The Family when Archie Bunker is going through some boxes in his attic and picks up a big felt 'F'. Mike : What's that, your high school letter?
Archie : Yeah.
Mike : What's it stand for?
Archie : Flushing.
Mike : Oh, so that's what ya majored in!

Real funny. Ha ha. Me and Archie Bunker, we're not amused.
It was great fun, though, watching Maggie's parents react as Maggie and I bought a co-op (in Forest Hills), moved in, painted it and prepared to raise our new daughter there. We made them come visit us to see the baby, and if you want to picture the expressions on Lucille and Raymond's faces as they walked through the streets of Queens towards the door of our building, just try to picture Queen Elizabeth and her entourage seated in the hooligan section during a British football match. It was great. From that day on they tried to avoid having to come visit us in the city, and begged us to drive out to New Jersey instead, and when we refused they'd put on a big show of getting lost on the city streets. We'd just sit back and enjoy it: every time they'd come there'd be another woeful tale of getting lost in the wilds of Jamaica or almost getting mugged in Hollis, of near-death collisions involving maniacal cab drivers near Hunters Point -- neighborhoods, all of them, that they did not need to drive through at all to reach us in Forest Hills.

For chrissakes, the streets are numbered here. It doesn't take a friggin' genius. Maggie's younger brother Nick wasn't much of a help either. He's a cool guy, but he got married the same time we did, and right after we bought the co-op in Forest Hills he did the opposite and bought a ranch on two acres up in the Hudson Valley. Thanks a lot, Nick. I know he did it on purpose. Maggie would be on the phone talking to her mother, and I'd only hear one side of the conversation, but I'd know the other side:


Yes, it is a very nice house.
No, we don't want to.
Yes, I'm sure the air is very fresh up there. No, that never happens.
No, actually most of them are very nice.
Actually the water is very clean.
Yes, their living room is very beautiful.

Once Nick visited us on a Saturday, though, and saw that we get the pre-printed sections of the Sunday Times delivered to our door on Saturday. This really blew his mind, that we could read the Arts & Leisure section and the Book Review on Saturday, that we had a one-day jump on the ads in the Real Estate section, that we could actually finish the crossword puzzle (if we could finish it) before most of the world even got to see it. I saw the envious look on his face. To Nick this is the one and only reason anybody should want to live in New York City. Perhaps someday he will actually move here because of this.
Anyway, this is what Queens looks like. Click wherever you'd like to visit. Levi's Map of Queens


In case you don't have a graphical browser, here's a list of the clickable regions on the map: North East (Flushing, Bayside, Whitestone, College Point, Queens College, Creedmoor, Douglaston, Little Neck) South East (Jamaica, Hollis, Richmond Hill, Rosedale-Laurelton) Central (Forest Hills, Rego Park, Corona, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, LaGuardia Airport, Rikers Island) North West (Astoria, Steinway, Long Island City, Newtown Creek, Woodside, Sunnyside) South West (Ozone Park, Maspeth, Ridgewood, Kennedy Airport) Rockaway Beach Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Now we have a son too (that's him in the picture on top -- Eliza was the photographer), and on the the fourth of July I take the whole family up to the roof to watch the fireworks, and from the roof we can look in all different directions and see little fireworks going off all over, and I just look around me and think how beautiful it all is, and how funny it is that the world is so full of anger and suspicion and hate while here in Queens people from all over the world shop in the same stores and walk the same streets and live in friendship and peace.

Sometimes I'll tease Lucille and Raymond by saying "Yeah, we're getting tired of living in Queens. We're thinking it's time to move on." I'll watch their faces brighten, I'll wait a few beats, and then I'll say: "We're looking at some great places in Brooklyn."

One of these days we'll break it to them that we're raising the kids Buddhists.
One day I was riding the subway home from work and the words to 'Eleanor Rigby' sprang into my head. 'All the lonely people, where do they all come from?' I always found it interesting the way people let themselves be naked when they're riding home from work. In the morning everybody sits straight, bracing themselves for the day ahead. But in the evening they are tired of holding themselves up all day; they collapse into their seats on the train and you can see the stories of their lives on their faces.
I decided I wanted to steal some of these faces, and to create a photo essay with the lyrics to 'Eleanor Rigby' as the text. I picked a day -- March 23 1995 -- and took my video camera to work with me (I could not use a standard camera, because the clicks would give me away). I usually take the E train home from the World Trade Center, but I decided to shoot my pictures on the 7 train from Times Square to Flushing, Queens instead. The 7 train appealed to me for a few reasons: they run many trains on that line, so it's not as crowded as the E during rush hour; also the train goes above-ground once it reaches Queens (making it technically not a subway but an elevated line), and I figured this would give me good lighting. At first I was nervous pointing my video camera in people's faces, but most of them didn't notice, as I had planned a subterfuge. I held the camera a few inches away from me and kept peering at the buttons and controls with a puzzled look on my face, hoping that people would think I'd just bought the camera and was trying to figure out how to use it. Every once in a while I'd mumble to myself and touch a few buttons as if confused by them; in fact I was zooming in and out on particular faces and squinting to see into the viewer. I switched cars a few times, and also captured some good faces at the Queensboro Plaza station between trains. My battery ran out near Jackson Heights, but by that time I'd gotten enough good shots. I ate a quick dinner and rushed over to my friend Tony's house (he has an Intel video board in his PC) and we spent the evening extracting GIF's from the live video feed. It kinda bugged me that, with all the great Beatles songs out there, I'd picked a McCartney song instead of a Lennon one. I mentioned this to my wife, and she said "Why don't you do something with 'Working Class Hero' too?" Duh. Thanks, Maggie. Here, on the next two pages, are the pictures I got. I see tremendous beauty in these faces, and I hope you see it too. So here with no further ado is my 7-train 5-o'clock what-a-shitty-day time-to-go-home

[Thorthoth]

That is just so unnecessary...

[DoomYoshi]

That is just so unnecessary...

You are the one who chose this thread.

[Thorthoth]

That is just so unnecessary...

You are the one who chose this thread.

Actually, everybody who reads or posts on the tread 'chooses' it, but the topic is NOT 'Make a Ludicrously Long & Random Cut & Paste Job.

[DoomYoshi]

That is just so unnecessary...

You are the one who chose this thread.

Actually, everybody who reads or posts on the tread 'chooses' it, but the topic is NOT 'Make a Ludicrously Long & Random Cut & Paste Job.

Yes, it very definitely is. You don't know your CC history well enough.

[2dimes]

How could she?

So much of it was erased.

Then some is necro bumped and subsequently altered.

[Bernie Sanders]

Way to bump this unoriginal thread jackass.

Prophecy Update - If you're not ready you best get ready! - 2/14/06

Randy Thomas

Feb 14, 2006



PROPHECY UPDATE - News & Information for the End Times



Greetings,



"For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing." (1Thessalonians 5:9-11)



"Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words. (1Thessalonians 4:13-18)



"Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come upon the whole world to test those who live on the earth. I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown. Him who overcomes I will make a pillar in the temple of my God. Never again will he leave it. I will write on him the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from my God; and I will also write on him my new name." Revelation 3:10-12



Encouraging words indeed! Let's make the short time we have left count for all eternity! Stay Informed! Don't Be Left Behind!

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Hamas leader Mahmoud a-Zahar declares Palestinian war on Israel will go on - Debka



Spelling out the incoming Palestinian government's agenda, a-Zahar said: We will not recognize Israel; our armed struggle will go on until all of Palestine is "liberated;" we will abrogate the Oslo accords and all the agreements the PLO and the Palestinian Authority signed; all negotiations with Israel must go through a third party; we don't need money from Israel or "the Satan;" Arab nations will give us money; we have long-range missiles.



DEBKAfile: Mahmoud a-Zahar, who is terminally ill with cancer, in effect handed down his political-military testament. It contained the incoming Palestinian government's point-by-point response to the conditions laid down by the United States, Israel and the Middle East Quartet (sans Russia) for dealing with a Hamas-led government – recognize Israel, renounce terror and honor international accords. He showed the Islamic terrorists to be unmoved by threats of isolation and the restrictive rules of engagement the Olmert government proposes to impose on a Palestinian Authority after Hamas is sworn in.



Responding to Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's election pledge to set Israel's final borders, the Hamas leader declared total war on the Jewish state and its very existence.



A-Zahar scorned the constitutional "white" revolution to unseat Hamas which Abu Mazen attempted on the last day of the departing, Fatah-dominated legislature.



He was also telling Fatah-al Aqsa Brigades that Hamas could match the new Aqsa 207 Katyusha rockets they had just acquired.

_________________________________________________________________



Supreme Court Justice Mishael Heshin defines the Palestinian Authority as an enemy state de facto - Debka



He rejected petitions to allow Palestinians married to Israelis to settle in Israel under the family reunification law as a loophole that would pose a risk to state security. "Just listen to daily declarations made by Hamas," Heshin said. "The Palestinian people chose Hamas, which seeks to destroy Israel, and they are citizens of an enemy state."



He asked why Israel should take risks with Israeli lives, any more than did England and America by admitting Germans during World War II. The judge said no one is preventing mixed couples from building a family, but they should live in Jenin. The right to life takes priority over any other consideration, he said.

_________________________________________________________________



Hamas politburo head Khaled Mashaal says: Our mission is to liberate Jerusalem, purify the Aqsa Mosque - Debka



Addressing a pro-Hamas rally in Khartoum, Sudan, Mashaal referred to Western threats to cut off aid: "God, the Islamic nation are with us, will lead us to victory and liberation. Do not fear poverty." He thanked Sudanese parties for raising funds for the Hamas-ruled Palestinian Authority government.

_________________________________________________________________



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Learn why Israel is called God's Timepiece; learn why the Bible says the days before the Lord returns will be As in the Days of Noah. Learn why the Rapture must take place before the Antichrist is revealed; learn why the massive military force that is set to invade Israel is already on the horizon and why Jerusalem is called "A Cup of Trembling"!



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From the outset, we are given the most important truth about the Book of Revelation: it does show us the Antichrist, it does show us God's judgment, it does show us calamity on the earth, it does show us Mystery Babylon and all it entails - but most of all, it reveals Jesus Christ to us. If we catch everything else, but miss Jesus in the book, we have missed the book.



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Mofaz: Hamas part of 'axis of evil' - Yaakov Katz, THE JERUSALEM POST



Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the Presidential palace in Cairo Tuesday that Israel would not negotiate with Hamas until it dismantled its terror infrastructure, recognized the State of Israel and accepted all previous agreements made between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.



"Hamas's control over the Palestinian Authority is just another part of the 'axis of evil' that includes Iran, Syria, and now extends to the PA from where it will extend to additional countries that harbor terror organizations," Mofaz told reporters following his hour long meeting with Mubarak.



In addition to Hamas's win in the Palestinian elections, the two officials also discussed the current tense situation along Israel's northern border with Hizbullah and the growing global terror perpetrated by Islamic Jihad and Al Qaida.



Israel, Mofaz told Mubarak, believed that Syria and Iran were giving financial and logistical support to Hizbullah with the goal of shifting the international community's focus from those countries to the Hizbullah.



"Their goal is that the focus of the international world will be there [along the northern border] and not on Syria, since the Syrians are under pressure," Mofaz said.



Mubarak, Mofaz said, asked Israel to "have patience" since Egypt believed that it was only a matter of time before the Hamas met all of Jerusalem's criteria for the renewal of negotiations between the PA and Israel.



"Mubarak believes that the pressure Egypt has placed on Abu Mazen [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas] and the Hamas will bear fruit and that the Hamas will change its ways," Mofaz said.

_________________________________________________________________



'3rd intifada on its way'- By Aaron Klein - WorldNetDaily.com



Terror leaders detail for WND 'massive new war' against Israel



With Hamas now in power, the long-ruling Fatah party and its "military wing" Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades forced into the opposition, and Israel announcing it will soon withdraw from the West Bank, Palestinian terror leaders tell WorldNetDaily recent events here are leading them to launch what they call a third intifada – or violent confrontation – against Israel consisting of suicide bombings, rocket attacks against Jewish communities and "a few new surprises in our arsenal."



Some terror leaders, particularly from the Al Aqsa Brigades, whose associated Fatah party scored poorly in last month's parliamentary elections, say they are planning massive violence against Israeli civilians mostly to revolt against the new Hamas-controlled Palestinian government.





"The new intifada is only a question of time and this will be the hardest and the most dangerous one. It's just about timing until the order to blow up a new wave of attacks will be given," Abu Nasser, a senior Al Aqsa Brigades leader from the Balata refugee camp in northern Samaria told WorldNetDaily in an interview.



Israel expecting new wave of terror



In the last 10 days Israeli forces intercepted 12 potential suicide bombers and have stopped several dozen bombings the past few months, prompting fears of "a new and worrisome wave of terror," said Yuval Diskin, head of Israel's Shin Bet security services.



Hamas last month catapulted to power, winning Palestinian parliamentary elections by a large margin and wresting control from Fatah. Israel has warned the losing terror groups, particularly Fatah's Al Aqsa Brigades, will try to stymie efforts by Hamas to form a new government and sign a long-term cease fire with the Jewish state. Also, members of the Islamic Jihad terror group expressed disappointment their organization decided not to run in elections, and have warned they will stop Hamas from imposing a truce.



Last week, acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his Kadima party, leading overwhelmingly in the polls for next month's Israeli elections, will seek to "change Israel's borders" by withdrawing from most of the West Bank. Some security officials told WND they fear terror groups will increase attacks to claim credit for an Israeli West Bank pull-out.



After Israel announced its withdrawal from Gaza, which it carried out this past summer, terror organizations, mostly led by Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees umbrella group, increased attacks in the area, at one point firing an average of seven rockets per week at Gaza's Jewish communities.



Diskin warned that Iran and Syria, currently under mounting international pressure, are streaming large sums of money to Palestinian terror groups to spur on local cells to carry out attacks in hopes of starting regional violence.



The Palestinians launched their first intifada in 1987, which developed into a well-organized violent rebellion orchestrated by Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization from its headquarters in Tunis. The so-called second intifada was initiated in 2000 after Arafat rejected at Camp David an Israeli offer of a Palestinian state on most of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and sections of eastern Jerusalem. Some 993 Israelis and 3,781 Palestinians have been killed so far. Many say the second intifada is still being waged.



The terror groups themselves say they are planning a new wave of violence against Israelis, which some terror leaders are calling a "third intifada." They detailed for WorldNetDaily how they will carry it out.



Al Aqsa Brigades: 'We'll kill Israelis to revolt against Hamas'



The Al Aqsa Brigades was formed in 2000 by then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat as a military offshoot of the Fatah party. PA President Mahmoud Abbas signed a cease fire with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last February, to which the Brigades was party – but the terror group continued carrying out attacks.



Al Aqsa's Abu Nasser claims Israel put Hamas in power, and says his group is preparing a new terror onslaught as a result.



"For the last 10 months we respected a cease fire expecting to see changes in the lives of the Palestinian people, but we received from the Israeli side more assassinations ... and above all we received the Hamas victory, which seems to be the result of an Israeli and international conspiracy. They believe that Hamas will give up easier our lands and rights. I think that they are right, but we will not allow this to happen. We will fight and we will blow up the new intifada," Abu Nasser told WND.



Sources close to Al Aqsa say Abu Nasser was involved in preparing the last three suicide bombings in Israel, including the attack last month at a Tel Aviv shwarma restaurant that injured more than 30 Israelis.



Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal over the weekend said his group might sign a long-term cease fire with Israel, but told reporters he will not ask other Palestinian group to stop attacks.



Abu Nasser told WND the Brigades will not respect any cease fire agreed to by Hamas and will not halt attacks at Hamas' request.



"I am sure Hamas will start arresting us, but it will not be that easy [for them]," said Abu Nasser. "We are preparing ourselves for the worst scenario."



Asked if Al Aqsa's new terror war will be launched less out of aggression toward Israel and more to revolt against Hamas, Abu Nasser replied, "This is partially true. When we were in power, we were obliged to be more sensitive and more obedient to the instructions and policies of our leadership. Now that we lost the elections, why should we obey the leaders and just who do we obey? The Hamas?



Continued Abu Nasser: "I am sure once [Hamas is] in power it is only that power that is really important for them. They will be ready to give up things that President Arafat refused to do. The proof for what I am saying is that in the last days when the Israeli army killed more than 15 Palestinian activists, most of them from our Brigades, we did not hear the voice of Hamas. Where are their resistance principles? Did they disappear after the elections?"



Abu Nasser warned the so-called third intifada will be a combination of suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Jewish towns.



"The Al Aqsa Brigades recently unified most of our cells and groups and we will wait for the most suitable moment to launch our resistance acts. As for the acts, there will be suicide attacks but there will be a massive use of rockets. These rockets will be launched against Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but also if needed against Israeli cities inside the green line."



Rocket war against Israel



Since Israel's evacuation of the Gaza Strip this past August, security officials have been warning that the Palestinian terror groups transferred their rocket capabilities to the West Bank, which is within firing range of Israel's international airport and many major Israeli cities, including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.



Israel has confirmed that at least two rockets have been fired in the West Bank so far from the northern Samaria town of Jenin. There is information terror groups in the West Bank, particularly the Al Aqsa Brigades and Islamic Jihad, will step up attacks against the area's Jewish communities ahead of any Israeli withdrawal from the area.



WorldNetDaily caught up with Abu Oudai, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader responsible for coordinating the organization's rocket network in the West Bank. He warned that his organization is preparing a rocket war against Israel:



"We have launched [several] times and with the help of Allah we will launch these rockets regularly. There will be no calm, no cease fire until the occupation leaves our land. I don't need to tell you that the aerial distance from Jenin to Netanya, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other cities is not big without telling you what are all our plans concerning other parts of the West Bank."



Oudai said his organization and other terror groups have stockpiled Palestinian rockets, including Qassams, which can travel about 2 miles, more primitive Jenin-1 and Jenin-2s, and Arafat-1 and Arafat-2 rockets, some of which can reportedly travel up to 3 miles. He claimed his group is developing a new rocket that will put all of Israel's major cities within firing range.



"The very near future will prove their capacity to kill and destroy and to beat the Israelis in the West Bank exactly like we did with these rockets in the Gaza Strip," Oudai said.



Oudai pocked fun at Israel's West Bank security barrier, which has been credited with making it more difficult for Palestinian groups to carry out suicide bombings.



"[The Israelis] have built a huge wall on which [it] spent billions of dollars but still we are hitting Israel with our rockets and reaching every target we want. This wall will not defend [Israel] from our rockets which have defeated the wall and all the security measures taken to prevent our attacks," Oudai boasted.



Israeli military leaders previously warned that the Jewish state will launch an "unprecedented" military campaign against any rocket firing from the West Bank.



The Israeli Defense Forces did not initiate any large-scale anti-rocket operation in response to the rockets launched from Jenin. It has been largely unable to stop the rockets regularly fired from Gaza into nearby Israeli Negev towns.



The Israeli army regularly responds to Qassam firings from Gaza with surgical missile strikes and artillery fire at areas it says are used to launch rockets. In December, Israel set up a buffer zone in sections of Gaza occasionally used to fire rockets into nearby Israeli Negev communities, but the Palestinian terrorists shifted their launching sites to other areas and have continued the attacks.



Said Oudai: "Israel already has used all its tools. Tanks, aircrafts, assassinations and everything it could use. But we are still here and still fighting. We do not get excited from the Israeli threats. What can be this unprecedented reaction? They have already tried everything."



In Gaza, the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella organization of several Palestinian terror groups, has taken credit for many of the rockets launched from the area since 2000.



Abu Abir, spokesman for the Committees, boasted his group transported missiles to the West Bank.



"If there is need, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and everywhere in Israel can become our target. Israelis must also know that we have already transferred the knowledge and the technology of producing rockets to the West Bank," Abu Abir told WorldNetDaily.



Abu Abir said his group has "improved [our] capacities in shooting these rockets. Even the Israeli officers agreed that the improvement is at all levels, [including] the distance that these rockets can reach, the capacity of explosives and their accuracy. In the last five years, there is no doubt that our abilities have improved."



Islamic Jihad: 'The Israelis should wait for our surprises'



Islamic Jihad has claimed responsibility for every suicide bombing against Israel since last February's cease fire, including bombings in a Tel Aviv disco and restaurant and a Netanya shopping mall, among others. Al Aqsa leaders told WorldNetDaily they aided the recent bombings. Islamic Jihad also says it fired most of the rockets launched from the Gaza Strip since Israel's August withdrawal.



Israel says Islamic Jihad is directly backed by Iran and Syria. Jihad chief Ramadan Shallah operates openly from Damascus and regularly visits Tehran.



Security sources say Hezbollah headquarters in Damascus and Beirut have ordered Islamic Jihad to carry out attacks in hopes of drawing Israel into a protracted military conflict.



Israel's Diskin warned that Iran and Syria are looking to use Islamic Jihad in part to distract mounting international pressure against their respective countries.



Iran is under fire for its alleged nuclear ambitions, and the international community led by the United States has threatened to bring Syria to the United Nations Security Council for allegedly interfering in the investigation into the assassination last year of former Lebanese Prime Minister Raqif Hariri, for which Syria has been widely blamed.



WorldNetDaily spoke with Islamic Jihad's northern West Bank leader Abu Khalil, who warned his terror group is planning a terror onslaught to chase Israel from the West Bank and eventually from Jerusalem.



"We will launch very soon very painful attacks that will shake the enemy. In fact, this is more the continuation of the (second) intifada because we never said that the intifada has ended. We will never give calm and security to the enemy. This will happen only when Israel will run away from Jerusalem and the West Bank like it did in Gaza," Abu Khalil said.



Abu Khalil, like leaders from the Al Aqsa Brigades, said his group will not respect a Hamas request to halt attacks against Israel.



"I don't believe the brothers in Hamas will ask us to stop. In any case, our only commitment is towards Allah, and the blood of our people and brothers and towards our political leadership," Abu Khalil told WND.



"Therefore we will not give up the right to defend ourselves and to launch all kinds of attacks against Israel everywhere there is an Israeli soldier or any Israeli goal in the West Bank and 1948 occupied Palestine [the entire state of Israel]."



Asked which weapons will be emphasized during Islamic Jihad's next wave of terror attacks, Abu Khalil replied, "I should not answer this question for operational reasons. But we proved that we use everything Allah enables us to achieve and to use – suicide attacks, rockets and more surprises. The Israelis should wait for interesting surprises."



Hamas: 'Our goal is to rebuild Palestinian society'



Hamas, a terror group responsible for more than 60 suicide bombings, last month won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament and is currently attempting to form a governing coalition.



Hamas leaders claim they will focus on rebuilding Palestinian society, and have stated they may sign a long term cease fire agreement with Israel.



Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas chief in Gaza, told WorldNetDaily his group will "rebuild the Palestinian life shattered by corruption in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. This is our goal now. To make a better life for the Palestinians."



In a widely circulated interview, al-Zahar even recently claimed to WorldNetDaily that Hamas might negotiate with Israel using a third party.



He said his group will likely agree to a long-term cease fire with the Jewish state, but said it will not recognize Israel or renounce its charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel by "assaulting and killing."



Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal this weekend said his group will not stop other Palestinian organizations from carrying out attacks against Israel.



Still, some analysts contend Hamas might use its power to halt some anti-Israel violence in hopes of receiving financial aide from international donors.



But the Al-Mustaqbal Research Center in Gaza warned that after Israel's Gaza withdrawal Hamas attacks will be focused on West Bank Jewish communities. The Center is reportedly closely aligned with Hamas and, according to Israeli security officials, it espouses Hamas ideology:



"[Hamas will be] transporting warfare technologies such as mortars and rockets from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. These will provide an easy way to bombard Israeli populated areas adjacent to the security fence, and the fence, which is currently under construction, will therefore become useless," stated a recent publication by the Research Center, according to a translation by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at Israel's Center for Special Studies.



Al-Mustaqbal stated Israel's Gaza withdrawal provided Hamas and other terror groups with a staging ground from which to launch attacks and to transport rockets to West Bank communities. It said the Gaza withdrawal proves Israel will vacate other areas in response to repeated attacks.



PFLP: Terror forced Israel out of Gaza, will get us rest of Jewish state



The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has carried out recent West Bank shooting attacks and rocket firings from the Gaza Strip. The group's leader, Ahmad Saadat, is in a Palestinian jail in Jericho for allegedly planning the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavaam Zeevi in October 2001.



Israeli security officials say the PFLP has scaled back its participation in attacks the past few months, but Abu Hani, a leader of the PLFP's "armed wing," the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, told WorldNetDaily his group used the time earned from last year's cease fire to build its arsenal in preparation for a third intifada.



"The last months were used for a rest in order to rehabilitate forces. The Palestinian people preserves its right to fight against Israel," Abu Hani said.



He told WorldNetDaily the PFLP is "forced" to launch a new terror war.



"It is not that we prepare an intifada. It is the reality on the ground that dictates a new intifada. There is the fence, there is the building in the Jewish settlements, the daily Israeli penetration into Palestinian cities, villages and camps and of course the killing of our comrades and brothers," Abu Hani says.



Israel routinely conducts anti-terror military raids in the West Bank when it receives intelligence warning of new attacks. The Israeli Air Force fires at targets in Gaza in attempts to halt Palestinian groups from launching rockets at nearby Jewish communities.



Abu Hani warned, "The current situation does not leave to the Palestinians many choices but to fight with all the tools we have or can have. The Gaza withdrawal proves unfortunately that force, attacks and rockets is the only language and attitude that the Israelis understand. They do not withdraw unless they are hit by the Palestinian resistance. So if there is a way that has already obliged the Israelis to withdraw, why not to use it again?"

__________________________________________________________________



Events Sweeping World Leaders Toward Apocalyptic Confrontation With Israel - By Bill Wilson, KIN Senior Analyst - http://www.watch.org



Wash—Feb 13—KIN—Since the beginning of 2006, a riptide of current events has been propelling the leaders of Russia, Iran and Syria toward an irreversible apocalyptic confrontation with Israel that surpasses even their own understanding and fulfills the predictions of ancient prophets.



Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syria's Bashar Assad are taking public decisions that reach far beyond peaceful geo-political strategy as the path they have chosen seems to be an unalterable march to eliminate Israel using Islam as the point of the dagger hidden beneath a cloak of peace and behind the rhetoric of reason.



The prophet Ezekiel proclaimed some 2,500 years ago, "Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: and I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army…Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet…in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains of Israel, which have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations…(Ezekiel 38:3-8)."



The nation of Israel was re-established from the vote of the United Nations in May 1948 (brought forth out of the nations where Jews from around the world re-gathered to form the nation after being separated throughout millennia because of the sword, or wars) and biblical scholars widely agree that Gog is the land occupied by today's Russia, Persia is Iran and Ethiopia is Northeast Africa, including Egypt, and Libya is Northwest Africa, including Libya, Sudan, Nigeria and other nations hostile to Israel. This apocalyptic battle results in these nations being miraculously destroyed where it will take seven months to bury the dead (Ezekiel 39:12) and the weapons will burn for seven years (Ezekiel 39:9)



Russia's actions, irrespective of whether Putin even understands how his decisions have coincided with prophecy, are those of a country preparing for war. Russia, once the heart of the powerful communist Soviet Union, has historically supported Islamic nations such as Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon against Israel as evidenced in the immediate 1948 fight for independence and the 1967 and 1973 wars against Israel. But today, Russia is renewing its move tip the balance of power in the Middle East boldly using Islamic fascism that aims to annihilate the tiny nation of Israel and her steadfast ally, the United States.



Putin on January 31 boasted to the world that Russia has new missiles capable of penetrating any missile defense system and said, "Russia has tested missile systems that no one in the world has. These missile systems don't represent a response to a missile defense system, but it doesn't matter to them whether that exists or not. They are hypersonic and capable of changing their flight path." Putin also said the new missiles are nuclear capable. The Russian military since has announced it is revamping and upgrading its nuclear arsenal. Russia has been at the heart of the international crisis over Iran's nuclear program as Putin has agreements to build Iran's nuclear plants and Russian engineers, as assisted by North Korean and Chinese colleagues, are known to be helping the Iranians design missile systems capable of carrying nuclear warheads long range.



In one of his boldest foreign policy moves to date, Putin took a public decision to solidify Russia's position in the Middle East by opening dialogue with yet another political body sworn to the destruction of Israel. Putin invited leaders of Hamas to Moscow for discussions. And Putin signaled to the world that there was more than just diplomacy at stake. Putin said he was inviting Hamas to Russia to hold talks, reminding the international community that, Russia has never, in Putins words, "considered Hamas a terrorist organization. Today we must recognize that Hamas has reached power in Palestine as a result of legitimate elections and we must respect the choice of the Palestinian people." Putin said it's not good to burn political bridges and that's why Russia has not "rushed to call any organization 'terrorist'."



This raised immediate red flags within the diplomatic circles at the White House since Russia, a member of the Middle East Peace Quartet also including the United Nations, the United States and the European Union, was a signatory to a statement after the Palestinian elections saying "that there is a fundamental contradiction between armed group and militia activities and the building of a democratic State. A two-State solution to the conflict requires all participants in the democratic process to renounce violence and terror, accept Israel's right to exist, and disarm, as outlined in the Road Map." Putin's move drew a sharp response from U.S. State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack on February 9, "We would urge any government that might have contact with Hamas to deliver the very clear message that was in the Quartet statement and that is that Hamas has some decisions to make. They must recognize the state of Israel, renounce terror and live up to the international obligations that the Palestinian Authority has signed up to. As a member of the Quartet, we would certainly expect that Russia would deliver that same message." Then the day after, he said, "We believe that should Russia have taken the opportunity to have chosen to have a meeting, they should take it as an opportunity to reinforce the message. Whether or not it has any effect on Hamas is going to be up to Hamas. They're the ones -- the onus is on Hamas to make certain decisions. The international community has laid out very clearly what is required of them. It's up to them to respond to that."



Despite the State Department's optimism that Russia will deliver the so-called "international message" to Hamas, several analysts believe Russia is playing a different game—one of strengthening its military ties in the Middle East—and Putin's statements say little to change that impression. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has stated emphatically that Russia will deliver the message to Hamas, it remains to be seen how strongly in private the message will be delivered and whether it will be communicated with a "wink." Relying on Russia to assist in keeping the peace in Iraq held a disastrous conclusion in the Oil for Food scandal where Putin, himself, reportedly received bribes from Saddam Hussein and Russia's influence over Iran's nuclear program has hardly yielded any legitimate hope for a diplomatic solution. Russia in general and Putin in particular, has a proven track record that supports Islamic fascism rather than the goals of western democracy.



Meanwhile, Iran's Ahmadinejad has been busy since the New Year spreading his militant philosophy throughout the Middle East. In early January, Ahmadinejad told theological students in Iran that its time for Islam to rule the world. "We must believe in the fact that Islam is not confined to geographical borders, ethnic groups and nations. It's a universal ideology that leads the world to justice. We don't shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world," Ahmadinejad said. "We must prepare ourselves to rule the world and the only way to do that is to put forth views on the basis of the Expectation of the Return." According to Mehran Riazaty, an Iranian Analyst, Ahmadinejad believes Islam must prepare the world for the return of its Shiite messiah, the Mahdi, who, on his return, will establish justice in a world consumed by chaos and corruption. Ahmadinejad believes Mahdi will come within the next two years and then will rule the world for seven years. It is very interesting that Ahmadinejad's beliefs parallel prophecies about the anti-Christ and the tribulation. The anti-Christ will rule for seven years, some believe, after a major catastrophic event will launch him into power—an event like the Gog-Magog war.



Ahmadinejad, on the eve of the Palestinian elections, met with Hamas and other terrorist groups in Syria. Hamas came away with Ahmadinejad's commitment to support the terrorist group both militarily and financially. Ahmadinejad's support was a public unveiling of what many in the intelligence community knew was happening all along, but Iran used the pending victory of Hamas to signal to the Islamic world that it would stand behind those who want to eliminate Israel and its ally, America. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said that Hamas would receive funding from Iran and urged the terrorist organization to not buckle under pressure of the West to recognize Israel, which Ahmadinejad says, should be "wiped off the map."



Iran, too, is preparing for war. During the week of January 20, Iran begins withdrawing its money from European bank accounts. Also in late January were terrorist attacks in Israel that pointed directly to Iran and Syria as the culprits. Ynet News reported that Israeli Defense officials gathered solid evidence in the hours following the January 19th suicide bombing in Tel Aviv to show the attack was a direct result of cooperation between Iran, Syria, and Palestinian terrorists. "The attack was funded by Iran, planned by Syria, and executed by the Palestinians," Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz charged during a meeting with top security officials in Tel Aviv following the bombing. Mofaz said "we possess conclusive evidence that the attack is a direct result of the terror axis operating against Israel at all times." Defense officials were able to trace based on "unequivocal evidence," the funding of the attack to Iran. Meanwhile, the Islamic Jihad headquarters in Damascus was the one to provide operative orders that resulted in the bombing, according to the evidence. The execution of the attack was entrusted with an Islamic Jihad cell in the West Bank town of Nablus, where the suicide bomber originated.



Additionally, intelligence sources revealed in January that Iran is also supporting Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups as Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad are using the borders of Syria as staging grounds to send militants into both Iraq and Israel. The military alliance between Iran and Syria was shored up during a January meeting between Ahmadinejad and Assad. Emboldened, Assad's actions in Syria since the Ahmadinejad meeting prompted senior Israeli Defense Force officials from the Northern Command to report on February 9th that if Syrian President Bashar Assad continues to feel threatened by the United States and the rest of the international community, he may be pushed into a corner and decide to fire missiles at Israel. The Jerusalem Post reported that according to the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Syria has an estimated 45 missile launchers and has probably assembled a few Scud D rockets with a range of nearly 700 kilometers - a major threat to Israel because they can be armed with chemical warheads. The IDF officers said they did not foresee a near-term war with Syria. But Assad's handling of diplomatic affairs has the IDF concerned.



While the Russian, Iranian and Syrian leaders are seemingly supernaturally dashing toward their destiny with prophecy, the United States is also playing into the prophetic conundrum. U.S. President George W. Bush expressed his unease with Iran's inflammatory rhetoric in an interview with Reuters February 2nd: "Israel is a solid ally of the United States. We will rise to Israel's defense, if need be. So this kind of menacing talk is disturbing. It's not only disturbing to the United States; it's disturbing for other countries in the world, as well." Asked whether he meant the United States would rise to Israel's defense militarily, Bush, as if having Ezekiel's words etched upon his subconscious, replied: "You bet, we'll defend Israel." The remarks puzzled analysts and historians alike, who claimed this was the first time a U.S. President publicly stated that America would militarily defend Israel against its enemies.



It is as if these world leaders have little control over the words that leave their lips or the orders they give when it comes to the question of Israel—one of the smallest nations in the world, yet the only nation that burdens the entire world. In Zechariah 12:3, the Lord says, "And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered against it.: And Zechariah 2:8 also speaks of Israel prophetically , "For thus says the Lord of hosts; After the glory hath he sent me unto the nations which spoiled for you: for he that lays a hand upon you, strikes the pupil of His eye."

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If you're not ready you best get ready! - Jerry Golden - http://www.thegoldenreport.com



And if you don't think a Middle East war is about to get underway you should get your head out of that hole and look around. Iran today has the largest inventory of ballistic missiles in the Middle East it is believed that they already have nuclear weapons. And they have an army just to our north called Hizbullah, who they have armed with over 13,000 missiles armed with chemical warheads to attack Israel with. It is also known that Iran wants desperately to produce many more nuclear bombs before they go to war, but are willing to go with what they now have. They feel confident that they can destroy Israel before anyone can stop them, they are wrong. Their missiles can reach nearly all of Europe as well as Turkey and they can count on! an attack. The United States knows that Iran can reach them from any number of merchant vessels in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and deliver a nuclear bomb for EMP literally closing down the entire country for months if not years. We need to understand something very clearly, some nations have nuclear weapons for protection but Iran wants them so they can use them. Iran will use them and very soon, we are talking about insane Islamic devils.



Today high ranking IDF Generals are saying that Bashar Assad of Syria is contemplating an all out offensive again! st Israel and has acquired many missiles capable of reaching all of Israel thanks to Russia. It has come out in today's Israeli newspapers that Putin has invited the heads of the Islamic Terror Organization to Moscow for talks. With weapons pouring across the Gaza/Egypt border and Hamas now in total power in Gaza, along with the Iranian armed Hizbullah massed on our northern borders and the President of Syria under extreme pressure from the international community for harboring Terrorist groups in Damascus, not to mention the fact that he has taken in all of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and has them hidden in Syria. And now has the United States breathing down his neck making sounds that sounds more like an attack in soon coming. Like all Dictators when faced with this kind of pressure their only solution is to start a war to unit their people behind them.



Lets say the US will be spared and only Israel and Europe gets hit with Iranian nukes. Is there anyone on earth that thinks Israel will sit here and take it without sending nuclear bombs over Iran? Israel also knows that the moment they send missiles towards Iran, that Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia will attack Israel as well, so you can expect Israel to turn the Middle East into a giant glass factory. Folks this is deadly serious, get ready. Even if the US is spared have you given any thought to what will happen to the price of oi! l. My guess is it will go over $500 a barrel or even higher. The US simply will not be able to survive, the US economy will simply collapse and the US is a materialistic society. And folks from that point thousands of other unthinkable events will begin to happen across the US. So I will ask you again, are you ready, if not get ready. I believe God is quickening the minds of Believers to prepare so they can be a witness in a time of crisis. It's hard to witness while you're digging in a garbage can for food to feed your kids.



There is something I do know because the Bible tells me so, Israel will survive and will be here for the return of Messiah Yeshua, for He will plant His feet on the Mount of Olives, not in New York, Paris or anywhere else but right here in Israel. I also believe that between now and then a terrible price will be paid for Israel's sin against the most high God of Israel. God will shake and cleanse His own house in a violent and terrible way, and all will fear Him like they have never feared Him before. Jews in Israel will fall on their faces repenting and seeking God in their lives, then we will see the Messiah.



Jews around the world will be under such persecution many will be killed and many will lie denying their Jewishness, but many others will flee running for their lives to Israel. For the world will once again blame the Jews for all the ills of the human race, saying if it were not for the Jews and Israel none of this would have happened, let us kill the Jews and rid ourselves of this terrible curse. It is then that the world will feel the full wrath of God's anger and know that His Word is true.



I'm not saying you need to dig a hole and fill it with food to last for years. But you should have a couple months of food on hand, but most important is water, if you don't have drinkable water you will die, and it may surprise you to find out how much one person uses in a weeks time. As for a nuclear attack, if you are upwind from the attack and not to near, your chances of survival are good. If you are downwind you need a lot of help from fall out. If you are to close to ground zero, you won't need any of the above, say hello to your Master, and I pray it is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and if it's not, right now would be a great time to settle that, just get on your knees and ask Yeshua to be the Lord of your life, and live for Him.



If God has called you to this ministry it is time to realize there would be no better place to invest your money, for when this all comes down you won't have any anyway. For regardless of what happens God's Word will come to pass and He will re-gather the Jews back to the Land that He calls His own. The Ruach Ha Koddesh (Holy Spirit) has touched this messenger and others to prepare to collect Jews and bring them home. We have precious little time to get everything in order, and the larger boat must be purchased soon. Just as important is the groundwork in Turkey and elsewhere, and the word has to be put out in certain places i! n Europe. We need your part of this ministry ASAP. Not one Jew will be saved without the help of many Believers who made it possible, and God is certainly watching.



Connie and I just returned from a trip to Cyprus, got back in Israel around 2AM. It was a successful trip with meetings with other Believers and some very necessary arrangements put into action for this Ministry. It is now necessary for us to make other trips to meet with others in Turkey for it is there that most of the groundwork must be accomplished. It is also there where we will buy the larger boat. God is calling only the very serious to this Ministry and it is with a spiritual certainty that we move forward knowing that God has witnessed to those who have drawn close to Him knowing the seriousness of the day that we now live.



In a recent letter I said that it may be necessary for Connie and I to move to Cyprus or even possibly into Turkey, but on this last trip to Cyprus God has shown us that He wants us to stay in Israel, that from this location we will receive His directions. Because of the problems Cyprus and Turkey have with each other it is not possible! to travel back and forth between those two countries and we must be able to move freely when the time comes.



In conclusion I will say that I know this is a frightening report, but it is one you need to read over again, for what is about to happen is beyond the ability of most to even comprehend. If this ministry is not fully ready we will do what we can with what God has given us. We still have the time to prepare to rescue many, but that depends of the obedience of those God has touched to bless the Apple of His eye. For most it comes down to a decision of priority, and making a choice of who or what do you serve.



There are few Believers who have been given the opportunity to really bless Israel like we have. Maybe we should be looking at it in reverse, God is not asking us to give but to receive. Gen. 12:3.



Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, for our son Joel and all the IDF soldiers, for all those who have come to fight the Islamic enemies. Pray for this Ministry and your part in it. Shalom, jerry golden

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Maranatha ! - (Lord Come Quickly)



YBIC-Randy







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I used to be terrified of Mexican food. I guess this was because of Speedy Gonzalez, that little mouse who used to whip a bottle of Hot Sauce out of his magical invisible back pocket and sprinkle it on the food Yosemite Sam was about to eat, causing his mouth to burst into flame until he put the fire out by dunking his head into a nearby horse trough. No wonder I didn't try a taco until I was sixteen.

That was when the first Taco Bell opened on Long Island. My father used to take my sister and me to dinner at Friendly's every Saturday afternoon (our parents were divorced), and Suzanne and I liked our dinners predictable: grilled cheese or hamburgers with fries, followed by ice cream sundaes. We were food wimps, basically, and the only way to get either of us to try something new was to beg and plead. Which our father did, and after a sufficient amount of this we begrudgingly agreed to let him take us to the new Taco Bell.

I ordered a taco and promptly announced that I didn't like it. Suzanne did the same. We made Dad feel so bad he ended up taking us to Friendly's for dessert.

I don't know exactly what happened after that. I remember riding my bike past the new Taco Bell a few weeks later and getting a perverse urge to go in. Something about the taste fascinated me. I ordered a taco, ate it and left, never imagining that I would do this again. I repeated the act the next day, and then began to do this regularly, soon eating two or three tacos at a time, all the time still believing that I was a person who did not like Mexican food.

In fact, I was on the verge of a serious obsession.

Once I became a Mexican food addict, the Taco Bell taco ceased to satisfy me. The Taco Bell taco is a very proper, clean food item. The corn shell is crisp and neat like a wafer, and it is filled with a symmetrical spoonful of spicy ground beef, some shredded lettuce, chunks of tomatoes and tiny, ephemeral confetti strips of melting yellow cheese. It is a good food, a respectable food, but it is not enough. I quickly found myself moving on to the hard stuff, like the Jack In The Box Super Taco or the 7-11 Red Hot Beef and Bean Burrito. The 7-11 burrito is the most concentrated form of Mexican junk food easily available on the East Coast, and if you see somebody eating this more than once a week you can be sure this person is in trouble. When removed from it's plastic wrapper it is cold and clammy to the touch, and it is usually zapped in the powerful 7-11 mega-microwave for three to four minutes, after which it emerges in it's true form. Barely a food at all, it consists of just two components, a gummy white flour tortilla and a burning-hot glutenous paste of processed beef and chopped pinto beans cemented together by a peppery red grease that vaguely resembles STP motor oil. For three years I was a burrito-eater, and I lived with other burrito-eaters. I was in Hellhound, a heavy-metal/punk/thrash band that almost made it during the mid-eighties. I played bass and helped write the songs. If I had to describe us I'd say we were a combination of the Ramones and Jane's Addiction with a touch of Spinal Tap. We had one genius in the band, our lead singer Kevin Whitman. He was a sensitive soul, and I guess we didn't realize how much our long negotiations with record companies and video producers were stressing him out. He really wanted us to make it big, and one bad week after Atlantic Records decided not to offer us a contract and MTV turned down our video, Kevin flipped out. He started doing jigsaw puzzles in his bedroom (in his parents' house where he still lived) and he stopped coming to rehearsals because he said he needed to keep doing jigsaw puzzles until he got his brain to calm down. For seven days he only left his house to drive to the mall and buy more jigsaw puzzles. Then he tried to kill himself in the middle of the night and got committed to a mental hospital. Someday I'll tell you the whole story of Kevin Whitman. For now the reason I'm mentioning this is that Hellhound used to play Friday nights at a dive in Massapequa called Diamond Lil's, and there was a 7-11 right down the block. We always stopped there on the way home after a gig. Man! those red-hot beef-and-bean burritos sure tasted good at three in the morning when we were sweaty and beer-soaked, tired and hungry, deaf and happy.
A few years after Hellhound broke up my life completely fell apart. Actually I think it fell apart exactly at the point that Hellhound broke up. I'm just a slow learner and it took me a while to figure that out.

Kevin had been the dreamer of the group, and until he bowed out I didn't realize how much I'd been caught up in the dream myself. I wanted to be a rock star now; I wasn't even a great bassist, but I'd been setting my sights on this goal. I was twenty-eight years old and working for a robotics firm on Long Island, where I'd been living for much too long. What the f*ck was I doing in a dull family suburb, working a 9 to 5 job? My life had no direction, and nothing in it meant anything to me.

Not even Cindy. She'd been my girlfriend since college, but our relationship had lost its magic. When we went out to dinner I'd sit there bored, wishing to be home on my couch watching baseball. Even when we made love I was depressed. She started to notice this, and one Friday night she told me she wanted to break up. Which kind of took me by surprise. I knew our relationship had gone bad, but I also liked having a girlfriend around to remind me to eat right and buy me presents on my birthday and call my mother so I wouldn't have to do it. Now I was really confused. I began hanging around my apartment not doing a fucking thing. I'd sit on my couch with a bag of burritos and a bong, and I'd watch pro wrestling and Knight Rider and any other shit that was on, anything to divert me from my miserable life. I lived in this marshmallow-like hellish condition for about three months, not doing laundry or cutting my hair, sitting in a dull haze at work and falling behind on my schedule, eating burritos not once a day but two and finally three times a day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I'd become a truly disgusting person, and I have to say thank you to my sister Suzanne, because she was the one who got me out of it. She called from California (where she now lived), and knew the moment she heard my voice that I was in a bad place. She offered to help me break my routine by coming to stay with her for a week or two.

I'd never been to California; in fact I'd never been much of anywhere. It sounded like a fun idea, and I was happy to see Suzanne again. As soon as I arrived we stopped in an airport bar for a beer and a talk, and she ended up listening to all my problems and giving me a major pep-talk in which she explained that everybody felt confused when a relationship suddenly ended, and that everything I was going through was normal and healthy. Did I mention that my sister is a professional therapist? I felt better after a few hours of this, and then we agreed to go out to dinner. She asked me what kind of food I liked and I said "Mexican."

"Really?" she said. "I love Mexican food!"

"You do? When Dad brought us to Taco Bell I thought you hated it."

"I thought you hated it."

She got excited at the idea of having a Mexican meal, and decided to buy all the ingredients and cook me up a big dinner herself. "Do you know how to cook?" I asked suspiciously. I was hungry, and I remembered Suzanne turning up some ghastly dinners back when she used to take Home-Ec in high school. "Of course I do!" she said. "Don't you remember the dinners I used to make?"

"Yes, I do," I said sadly. We stopped at a grocery store, and my sister proceeded to buy the strangest collection of ingredients I'd ever seen: a clove of garlic, a stalk of celery, a tub of tofu, a package of bean sprouts, a can of black beans, a bag of lentils, three kinds of expensive European cheeses. "Suzanne," I said. "There are four ingredients in a Mexican meal. Meat, taco shells, sauce and cheddar cheese. Period."

"You don't know the California style," she said.

We got to her apartment, and she went into the kitchen to cook. An hour later she began the dinner by placing a dish of gigantic oven-warmed (and slightly burnt) tortillas on the table, then followed it with all the rest of the bizarre ingredients she'd bought at the store. "Okay, it's do-it-yourself," she said.

I stared at the table. "This is a nice salad," I said. "Would you please bring out the main course?"

It turned out the salad was the main course, and that's the California style. During the next few days I found myself unable to get used to this. Suzanne lived on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and there were about ten burrito stands or tacquerias on this street, but I couldn't get a real burrito at any one of them. This made me feel alienated and homesick. The fact was, even though Suzanne's long talks were making me feel better, I was still in a very confused state. I knew Suzanne was right that I needed to snap out of my depression, but I still needed something to provide that climactic force and make the change happen. In search of this elusive thing, I took the BART into San Francisco by myself one day while Suzanne was at work, hoping to find something in San Francisco to change my life. I thought I'd enjoy exploring the city by myself, but as soon as I stepped out of the BART station at Market Street I started to feel a crushing, panicky loneliness. I looked around at the shoe stores and donut shops of downtown San Francisco and felt lost and lonely. Suzanne and her friends had given me a long list of places to go, but I felt overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of everything around me. Like I said, I'd never really been anywhere before.

Suzanne and her friends had told me to go to the Exploratorium first. I walked all the way over, but as soon as I stepped inside and paid my admission I realized I wasn't in the mood for a science museum after all. I left and tried to walk back to the center of town but got lost in the Presidio for an hour and a half. I reached some kind of deserted military settlement at the north end of the park and looked out over the Golden Gate Bridge. The elemental beauty of the rust-colored bridge and black rocks and crashing waves only filled me with anxiety; I wanted to see the Brooklyn Bridge again. I finally found my way out of the park by walking down some wooden stairs onto a nude beach that only got me more depressed because almost all the nude people were guys. I pulled my tourist map from my back pocket and began walking towards the Haight. It took much longer to get there than I'd thought it would, and by the time I reached the famous corner of Haight and Ashbury my feet ached and I wasn't in the mood to look at record stores or drink coffee or find the house where the Grateful Dead used to live. Now, I realized, I was in the mood for a science museum. I wandered and wandered and reached the Castro, where I watched guys kissing each other passionately on the street and wondered why they wouldn't rather be hanging out at the nude beach by the Presidio. I walked and walked, lost and dying in the scary loneliness of walking; I found Lombard Street and descended the famous "crookedest street in the world" without enjoying it; I reached Market Street again and looked up at the pointy Pyramid building and then walked on to Fisherman's Wharf. I didn't know enough at this point in my life to stop at the City Lights bookstore, and I walked right through North Beach and ended up at Fisherman's Wharf, which disappointed me because it was obviously a place no self-respecting fisherman would ever go. It was nothing but a shopping mall, with yogurt shops and crystal stands and postcard stores, all dim and deserted and closing for the night. The sky was dark now, and I looked at the hushed skyline of cold empty San Francisco and thought of the line in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land where he says "Unreal City," just like that, with no explanation. That was what San Francisco felt like to me at that moment.
I was exhausted from all my walking, and I suddenly realized I couldn't walk another block. I didn't understand why I was so tired, as I'd walked across New York City many times without getting tired; I later came to understand that walking across San Francisco, with its vast parks and steep hills, is much harder than walking across Manhattan, which is as flat as an ironing board.

I was starving, and I decided to take a cab back to Berkeley. Sitting in the dark back seat as we crossed the Bay Bridge, I started to feel a strange sensation of calm and happiness. We drove through the streets of the East Bay and reached the familiar busy nighttime streets of downtown Berkeley, and I found myself feeling almost ecstatic, for no reason I could understand. I paid the cab driver (it cost forty dollars) and hopped out onto the corner of Telegraph and Durant. I almost walked up to the door of Suzanne's apartment when I caught the smell of Mexican food from a tacqueria two buildings down. I walked in to the tacqueria and sat down. A Mexican waiter tried to hand me a menu and I said, "Just give me your standard burrito. Put everything on it."

"Gotcha," he said. I knew I was asking for it. He returned with a porcelain plate holding nothing on it but a single huge burrito the size and shape of a slightly flattened melon, decorated with two sprigs of crunchy lettuce and a folded white paper cup of guacamole. I looked at it for a moment. I wasn't sure where to put my fork and decided to start with one of the tapered edges. I took my first bite. It was good. A bit crunchy, and too lukewarm. But I could relate to it. Brown rice and white beans and lettuce and avocado and barley and radishes and salsa ... there was something tremendously integrated about it. I took another bite, and another after that. Now I'd reached the lentils and tofu sour cream and pinto beans and carrots. Carrots in a burrito! I can't say I fully approved of this, but like I said, I was in a kind of crazy mood. And in this mood I suddenly understood the California Burrito. Inclusiveness was the philosophy. Foods have to learn to get along in the California Burrito, just like people have to learn to get along. It was like a political statement, with guacamole on the side.

I ended up eating a California Burrito every night for the rest of my stay in Berkeley. I returned home a changed person.

Something else happened to me during this trip. For a long time Suzanne had been telling me to read Jack Kerouac. This may strike some of you as funny, because many of you know me as the guy who created a web site about Beat Literature, but I didn't read Kerouac for the first time until a couple of years ago. I started "On The Road" for the first time on this trip, in fact, during the plane ride back from Berkeley to New York. I hadn't expected to like the book. I expected it to be pretentious and dated, but it turned out to be the freshest, funniest, truest piece of writing I'd read in a long time. Maybe the reason I liked it so much was that it was nothing more than the story of a depressed college-educated boy from the East Coast who can't stand to look at his hometown anymore and goes out to California in search of religion and kicks. I felt like I'd just met my soul brother.

I sat there on the airplane reading, and I reached the part where Sal Paradise meets a sweet pretty Mexican girl named Terry on a bus somewhere near Los Angeles. They start making out and think they might be falling in love, and since Sal has nowhere else to go she takes him back to the grape and cotton fields of Bakersfield to work with her and her family. For a few days the college boy gets to live the life of a Mexican grape-picker and he digs it, though he eventually runs scared back home. I read these lines: Terry and Johnny sat in the grass; we had grapes. In California you chew the juice out of grapes and spit the skin away, a real luxury. Nightfall came. Terry went home for supper and came to the barn at nine o'clock with delicious tortillas and mashed beans. This just blew my mind. Think about it: what exactly is Jack Kerouac talking about here? He's talking about his own personal discovery of the California Burrito.
Now it's my dream to write a book about the California Burrito. I see it an expensive coffee-table book, with lavish illustrations and color photographs. I'll start by examining the eating habits of the Aztec and Mayan peoples before their ancient civilizations were destroyed by Cortez and his successors. I'll discuss the interplay between European and Native American ways of eating, and I'll trace the evolution of Mexican cuisine as it spread through the Spanish territories of North America. We'll see how the taco and the burrito and the enchilada and the tamale moved through the fast-growing English-speaking cities of southern California, and how Mexican food merged with the barbecue sauce cowboy cuisine of Kansas City and Texas to form the style known as Southwestern or, later, Tex-Mex. I'll go from there to the arrival of the first chic Mexican restaurants in New York in the late 1960's, and from there to the sudden nationwide success of Taco Bell. I'll conclude with the invention of the California style, and then say a few words about the future of Mexican food in the ever-changing world.

And since I know I'll never really write this book, I can use this title for these pages instead. Here it is: THE HISTORY OF THE CALIFORNIA BURRITO. I'm sitting in the sleazy grimy Greyhound station waiting for the bus to New York, and I'm thinking: it was "My Fair Lady" that screwed up Todd's mind. That was the turning point; before he played Henry Higgins he was a straight kid who never cut classes or smoked weed or mouthed off to teachers. All the applause he got made him dizzy, and instead of going to music college like he planned to he decided to be a rock star. He went to New York City, just threw himself into the middle of everything to see where he'd end up. Which I thought was amazingly great. I just never thought it would be Todd, of all my friends, to go and really do this.

Now he's in a band and they're supposed to play their first gig tomorrow night, and the bassist is sick and can't make it. Which is why Todd called me, and which is why I'm heading for New York. I wish I had time to get myself in the right mental state, to get rid of the weird nervous feeling in my stomach. I always thought Todd was half-nerd and that I was his guide when it came to anything cool, but now he's in the city playing in a band and I'm a college student writing papers on Plato and Aristotle, which makes me think maybe I lost it and Todd is cooler than I am. A scary feeling. I catch my reflection in a bagel stand's clear plastic shield: I've got neat moussed hair, no dirt under my fingernails ... I'm a fucking Connecticut wet dream. I try to mess my hair up with my fingers but the gel I used this morning refuses to give up control and now I just look like an idiot. An old lady is looking at me. I curl my lip and stare her down. I decide I need cigarettes. I don't smoke, but I'm desperate to change my image. I buy a pack of Marlboros and light one up. It tastes good. I stub it out on the back of the seat in front of me, watching the antiseptic sea green molded plastic congeal into burnt black bubbles. I step off the bus in New York City with the best bad-ass expression I can come up with on my face, and catch the subway to Atlantic and Flatbush in Brooklyn. I walk six blocks to the apartment where Todd is staying and he buzzes me upstairs. I step up to his door and he swings it open and doesn't even say hello; instead he leaps at me and whirls me inside and drops me on a couch. "Thank fucking god you're here," he says. He starts trying to force a large black Fender bass guitar under my armpits. "Todd!" I yell. "Calm down! Say hello for f*ck's sake! Offer me a drink or something!"

"Oh," he says. "Yeah, hello. Shit, I'm hyper."

I kick my sneakers off. "Aren't you gonna ask me how my trip was?" "Yeah, yeah. How was your trip?"

"It sucked." Todd doesn't hear my answer, and I allow him to strap the black bass around me and plug it into the amp. He manages to do this despite the fact that his own guitar is hanging from his shoulders by a strap. He checks his tuning and looks at me pleadingly. "Todd," I say. "You don't wanna play some music or anything, do you?"

"Shit, man," he says. "I'm dying. I'm so nervous. This fucking thing with Spencer getting sick has me so damn mad. You know, I was nervous enough already. And the fucking dickhead isn't even sick. He's got the fucking sniffles. Man, I've been a lot sicker than he is without it slowing me down ... I can't believe he did this to us the day before our first gig."

"Okay," I say. "But just calm down. Look at you. I can't learn songs with you hyper like this."

Todd takes a deep breath. "Okay. Okay. Sorry."

"Anyway, maybe Spencer's just chickening out," I said. "Maybe he's afraid to go onstage."

Todd gives me a long, significant look. "Maybe," he says. "I've been thinking the same damn thing." Todd's had a lot of trouble finding good people to play with. For his first six months in New York he was bummed out playing lead guitar in a Pink Floyd copy band called Eclipse. He wrote me letters about the drummer who couldn't figure out the beat on "Money," who kept pacing the room babbling about 13/8 and 26/15 time signatures as if his crummy drumming was a mathematical puzzle he could solve in his mind. Finally Todd dumped this crew and hooked up with a decent drummer named Ragusa. Together they found Spencer the bassist, and this completed their band. I check the tuning on the bass and play the beginning notes of "Dazed and Confused." I don't play rock bass at all; the only reason Todd thinks I'm a bassist is that I used to play classical bass, and I wasn't even good at that. I played classical bass because I was told to in third grade. One day Mrs. Pearsall stuck her hands under my armpits, lifted me up and placed me on a wooden platform in front of a six-foot-tall instrument. She instructed me how to put my arms around the instrument and caress its wide womanly waist, even broader than my mother's or Mrs. Pearsall's, and she held her hand over mine to show me how to stroke a horsehair bow across the glittering thick steel strings. I did everything Mrs. Pearsall told me to do and she made a big fuss over me and said I could play Carnegie Hall someday if I worked hard enough at it. I held the first seat in the junior orchestra during seventh, eighth and ninth grades, and Todd was first violin. After ninth grade we joined the senior orchestra, but now instead of nice Mrs. Pearsall we had mean Mr. Minkof. He was a skinny angry guy with greasy black hair falling over his forehead who had a Ph.D. from the Harvard Music Department and was furious that he hadn't become a famous performer. He hated me because I was one of the crowd that smoked pot in the fields by the bike stands between classes. I came into his class late one day with a pretzel in my hand and a goofy smile on my face. Mr. Minkof went insane and descended on me like a "Fliedermaus" and smacked me on my cheek and sent me sprawling onto the floor on my ass. It totally shocked me and I sat there with my cheek stinging and my arms and legs spread out on the floor, and I started to scream "You asshole!" but I was so stunned my words came out in a choked sob, and the story went around that day that I was crying. Mr. Minkof got in trouble for hitting me, but I still hated him so much I never took a music class again.

Todd is still standing over me waiting to rehearse. "Todd," I say. "There's something I've always wanted to ask you. You liked Mr. Minkof, didn't you?"

"What?" he says. "Why are you talking about Mr. Minkof? We gotta get going here. Can I start the tape?"

"This is a serious question," I say, intending to drag this out as much as possible. I love watching Todd get frustrated. "If I'm going to play music with you it's important that we demolish any barriers that stand between us and prevent us from truly rocking out. This has been buggin' me since tenth grade. Did you really like him or were you just kissing his ass all that time? You liked him, didn't you? Just admit it."

Todd flaps his arms in desperation, willing to give me any answer I want but not knowing what answer I want. "I liked him," he says.

"You fucking slimeball bastard," I say. "I knew it! You traitor! How could you like him? Why?"

"He believed in music," Todd says with finality. "Now. I'm starting the tape. The bass is already in perfect tune. I tuned it while I was waiting for you. First song's in D."

"You don't have to tell me what key it's in," I say. The tape starts. The first song is a fast Primus kind of thing, cheaply recorded with a single mike. Todd watches as I start plucking at notes until I find the bassline. It's a simple progression, D to E minor for the verse and a chorus of D, G and A. I feel better once I realize I know how to play, and after the first song Todd breathes a sigh of relief. "So how the f*ck is college going, anyway?" he asks me.

"About the same," I say. "It's college."

"Why don't you blow it off and be our new bassist? We need somebody who isn't a dickhead like Spencer. You're a dickhead too but we'll take you anyway."

"Todd," I say. "I don't know how to play bass."

"Yes you do," he says. He starts up the second song, which has an even easier bassline. This one is called "Quiet Mystery," and I start to pay attention to the words Todd is singing on the tape. A network of secrets that you spin like a web
I stand at your ocean but the tide does ever ebb
I want you here beside me but you're way too far to see
I gaze through a haze at your quiet mystery. "Shit, Todd," I say. "You wrote this stuff?"
"Yeah," he says, embarrassed.

I smile and shake my head. "You think things like this? Man, you're fucked up. You better get some professional help." He shrugs. "I don't even know what I'm writing, I don't know what it means. I think I should see a shrink myself when I read some of the shit I write." He plops down in front of me what looks like a white $2.49 nylon-covered photo album from Woolworth's. I open it and see page after page of handwritten lyrics under clear plastic photo sheets. Some are illustrated with crayon sketches or magazine photo collages. I see a section labeled "f*ck You Poems" illustrated with a bleeding black heart and a color yearbook photo of Todd in his nerd mode, clean V-neck sweater over a nylon shirt, hair neatly combed, in the middle of the heart. The first poem begins "f*ck you mom, f*ck you dad," and Todd stutteringly tries to turn the page, pretending he wants me to see something he wrote on a different page, I guess because he realizes that I know his Mom and Dad, who are actually fairly cool people.

There's a knock on the door and it's Ragusa, the drummer. Ragusa has bleached blond hair cut so short that at first I think he's bald. He sits and stares at me like he doesn't like me. I think of a joke I once heard: what do you call a guy who likes to hang out with musicians? A drummer. Todd starts the tape for the third song, and while I work out the bass line Ragusa takes two plastic Chinese Restaurant chopsticks from his jacket pocket and starts to play a beat on the coffee table. We get through both sides of the tape and smoke a joint. Todd turns off the tape player and we start to jam for a while. Ragusa tip-taps away with his chopsticks on the coffee table and performs cymbal crashes on the lamp. When we hear the lock turn in the front door Todd jumps up. "Shit! I forgot to tell you, I don't live here. I'm sponging off my brother, and the other two people who live here are kind of pissed off about it. We gotta get out of their way."

"Who are the other two people?" I ask.

He listens to the heavy footsteps as somebody opens the door and steps inside. "That sounds like Wayne," he says. "He's just some guy, a lawyer or something, I don't really know much about him. I don't think he likes me." We gather our guitars and picks and patch cords and poetry books into our arms and get it all into Todd's brother's bedroom and slam the door behind us just as we hear footsteps enter the living room.

"Who's the other person who lives here?" I ask. "This girl Tara. She does modern dance or something. She doesn't really talk to me either. I just try to stay out of their way."

"How did your brother meet them?"

"An ad in the Village Voice."

"Wow," I say. "Just like 'The Real World,' except MTV isn't filming it."

Todd sneaks into the kitchen and returns with a two-foot-high plastic bag of potato chips and three bottles of Miller Beer. We go over some more songs until Ragusa goes home. At ten- thirty Todd's brother Paul arrives from work. Paul works as a computer programmer for a Wall Street bank, and he peels his suit off as he walks into the room. He is tall and thin and more serious looking than Todd, with a trimmed beard and red weary eyes from staring at computer screens all day. I see that he and Todd have a thing worked out that Todd doesn't speak to Paul until Paul has finished changing into a t-shirt and gym shorts and calling his girlfriend. "Paul hates his job," Todd whispers to me as Paul mutters into the phone across the room.

"Why doesn't he quit?" I whisper back.

"He makes pretty good money."

Paul hangs up the phone and asks where I'm going to sleep. Todd shows him how he's rearranged the blankets on the floor to make room for both of us. Paul shows me the Motorola beeper he'd taken off his belt when he came in. "It might go off in the middle of the night if there's a systems problem at the bank," he tells me. "If that happens I'm gonna have to turn the light on and log in from here until I fix it."

"How often does that happen?" I ask.

"Couple of times a month. Probably won't happen tonight."

Todd hands Paul a joint and Paul takes a long hit, exhaling and staring into space with his raccoon-ringed eyes. "I'm beat," he says. He gestures towards a gigantic record and CD collection spanning an entire wall and asks if I want to pick out an album. I stand up and study his collection. He's got as many records as a small record store. About half are bootlegs, and I find stuff I never knew existed: U2 in Japan, Neil Young at the Bottom Line, the Beatles at Shea Stadium. "I never knew there was a Beatles at Shea Stadium bootleg," I say. "There's a bootleg of most anything you can think of," he says. "Especially if you're willing to spend your entire fucking salary on it like I do."

He pulls himself up from the bed to show me something in his Bob Dylan section. "See this bootleg?" he says. "This was recorded at the Coffee Grinder. That's where you're playing tomorrow night."

"You're kidding," I say. "You mean we're playing one of those historic old Village clubs? Shit, now I'm even more scared."

"Ah, don't worry. The place is a dump. Once Dylan got famous he never played there again."

I look at the album cover, cheaply printed with a xerox of a skinny young Bob Dylan playing guitar in front of a brick wall. The club date is March 1961. "Can we hear it?" I say.

"Sure." We listen to the first three songs, but Paul and Todd are both tired and want to sleep. I'm still wide awake, so Todd, his eyes closing, suggests I go into the living room and watch TV.

I step out of the bedroom and see a pretty brown-haired woman sitting in the dark watching "Love Connection" on TV and eating Ben and Jerry's Fudge Brownie Frozen Yogurt slowly with a spoon.

"Oh," I say. "Hi."

She stares at me like she just turned on the kitchen light and I'm a cockroach running across her stove. "Ohh," she finally drawls, understanding that I'm yet another person there to sponge off Paul.

"I'm Jonathan," I say. "I'm sitting in with Todd's band tomorrow."

"Todd has a band?" she says blandly, and I realize that the bare minimum of communication has not taken place between the people currently living in this apartment.

"Yeah," I say. "Is it all right if I sit out here?"

"Not really," she says. "But I don't want to make you sit out in the hall so I guess I have no choice."

I sit on the chair farthest away from her and face the TV. The wavy-haired California boy in the middle chair says "When the night began she was tame as a kitten but after two drinks she was wild as a tiger." Chuck Woolery smirks and the audience goes crazy. Tara licks the matte silver surface of the bottom of her spoon. I think about the gig tomorrow night.
The next day we walk to Ragusa's apartment over a bicycle shop with a greasy window in a rusting black iron frame. We practice for about four hours with our amps turned low so Ragusa's neighbors don't complain. I know the ten songs we're going to play by now, but I have no idea how we're going to sound at performance volume. We cook spaghetti for dinner and carry our instruments outside. Ragusa spends about five minutes removing the bolts and chains wrapped around the steering wheel of his broken-down yellow '82 Mustang. "You're telling me somebody would steal this thing?" I ask Todd in a whisper. Todd nods.
Ragusa drives us over the Brooklyn Bridge while Todd passes around a joint. I take a long hit and suddenly see that we have entered a National Geographic article about life in Beijing. I see red awnings with painted white chinese characters, yellow and blue paper dragons flapping in the wind, a red and orange pagoda over a two-story McDonald's cramped between a vegetable stand and a jewelry store with glittering tiny mirrors pasted like a mosaic into 'DIAMONDS AND GOLD BOUGHT AND SOLD.' The air smells like fish. "Did you hear about this new fucking crime wave in Chinatown?" Ragusa says. "I probably shouldn't even drive through here anymore."

"Yeah, man," Todd says. "Fucking Chinese crime gangs, I hear even the Mafia's scared of them."

"I got stuck behind a Chinese gang funeral the other day," Ragusa says. "f*ck, man, there were like fifty guys in identical black suits with red carnations just walking behind this old black limousine! It was like something from The Godfather!"

It occurs to me that they are babbling because they're nervous. Todd is snapping his little rectangular armrest ashtray open and closed. "Will you fucking cut that out?" Ragusa yells. I look out the window and think: I want to be a Chinese gangster. I want to walk behind a black limousine with a red carnation on my lapel. I want to sit at the back of a restaurant eating a plate of Pork Lo Mein with a shiny silver gun on my lap. We cross some invisible line that divides Chinatown from Soho, and I forget about being a Chinese gangster and think about being an abstract artist. We reach the intersection of Bleecker and Bowery and I see the decaying silver awning of CBGB's. "Bow before the temple," Ragusa says as we drive past. "One month from now, I want us playing there."

"He always takes the long way so we can drive past CB's," Todd tells me. Ragusa runs a red light by mistake and a flannel- shirted baseball-capped guy bangs our car with his fist. We find a tiny parking space near the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, and go back and forth for five minutes while Ragusa squeezes us in.

The Coffee Grinder turns out to be a cramped little cellar with craggy red brick walls and black wood tables thickly shellacked to an unnatural shine. Jared Kaplan, the big droopy-eyed, black- bearded old man with tattoos on his biceps who owns the Coffee Grinder, tells us to put our instruments in the back room. We carry them back to a dark cement chamber filled with mops and pails and waterlogged cardboard cartons of plastic-wrapped packages of cocktail napkins. "There's gonna be fucking roaches climbing all over my drum set, I know it," Ragusa says. There's a tight passageway between the back room and the bar, and on the way back we have to stand against the wall to make room for the guys in the band who'll be playing before us. We don't say hello as they squeeze by. We find a table near the front of the bar and order beers. "Look at this shithole," Todd says. "Look at these bricks."

"Looks like somebody's fucking uncle built this place on his day off," Ragusa says. The bricks are laid at uneven angles with glops of cement between them. Todd pulls a crumbly ball of dried cement from between two bricks. I do the same, examining the round little moon-rock before I crush it into gray powder between my fingers. We start flicking the little balls at each other until Jared Kaplan saunters up to us. "Hey, stop taking apart my goddamn walls."

After he walks away, Todd says, "Doesn't Jared Kaplan look like his name should be Snake or something?"

"Yeah," Ragusa says. "He looks like he's about to fucking murder someone." We all stare at Kaplan, who stands with arms folded behind the bar, his big meaty biceps bulging from beneath his black t-shirt. "Remember the biker named Snake in the Partridge Family?" Todd says. "Remember when he fell in love with Laurie Partridge?"

"No," Ragusa says.

"The guy who was Meathead played Snake," Todd says.

"The guy who was Meathead," Ragusa repeats. "Who the f*ck is the guy who was Meathead?"

"Meathead," Todd says. "You know. Meathead."

The first band is on stage tuning up. It's a five-man band with keyboards and two guitars. I wish I was playing in a five-man band tonight. It'd be so much easier to hide. I listen as this band starts their first song, and I'm relieved that they sound fairly wimpy. Jared Kaplan walks over to us and asks us what we think. "They suck," Ragusa tells him.

"Yeah," Todd says. "They kind of remind me of a bunch of musicians with no talent who don't have anything to say."

Jared Kaplan nods as if considering this deeply. It occurs to me that he'll later ask this band what they think of us. I yell "'Scuse me!" to him over the noise. He squints at me and comes over.

I say, "How long have you owned this place?"

"Always," he grunts. "Opened it in 1959."

"Is it true Bob Dylan used to play here?"

"Sure it's true. They all played here. Peter Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Sonny and Cher."

"Did you meet Dylan?"

"Did I meet him? Yeah, I met everybody. I was the guy who paid them their money, they all made damn sure they met me. Bob Dylan, he looked like a little hillbilly kid who needed a bath. Judy Collins, now there was a beautiful lady."

I want to ask him something else but he's still talking. "Hey, Bill Cosby used to come here all the time. And whats-her-name played here, Melody. You know ... 'I got a brand new roller skate, you got my key.' Johnny Cash used to play here too." He points to a photo hanging over the ancient cash register behind the dark wood bar. I squint to see it and he walks away so quickly I think I did something to make him mad. He yanks the framed photo off the wall and brings it back to me. I see a younger thinner Jared Kaplan, beardless and bespectacled, with his arm around Johnny Cash, both of them smiling broadly for the camera. After an hour the first band leaves the stage to disinterested polite applause. About forty people are sitting around drinking beer and talking, and maybe ten more are playing darts or pinball. Ragusa climbs onto the stage and starts setting up his drum kit. Todd and I take our time finishing our beers because we have less setting up to do. "Nervous?" I ask Todd.

"Yeah," he says. "What about you?"

"Nah," I lie.

"Hey," he says. "Even if we f*ck up, at least I'll have gotten the first one over with. That's the only reason I'm doing this. Next time won't be as bad."

We step up on stage and I plug in my bass and stare into the crowd, trying to remember that I'm a Chinese gangster, that I smoke cigarettes in bus stations. I take a long slug of my Molson Golden but my hand is shaking and the beer spills down my neck and under the collar of my blue and white striped t-shirt. Now my hands are wet and I'm afraid I'll be electrocuted if I touch my bass, and Todd is plucking his low E string and waiting for me to pluck mine so we can tune up. I dry my hands quickly on my jeans and do it, trying not to get Todd more upset. We tune quickly, and Todd tapes a copy of the song list to the floor in front of me. It says:


I tell Todd that I always wanted to have somebody tape a song list to the floor in front of me. He smiles and we look back and Ragusa nods: he's ready. "First one's in A," Todd reminds me, although I know this. Ragusa taps his sticks together to signal 1-2-3-4 and we dig in and a strange rush comes over me as soon as I realize we're making music. Maybe it's because I'm stoned but the moment I hear the noise we're making come blasting out from the amps behind us I feel a great surge of pleasure course through my body. "f*ck!" I say out loud. Todd is playing a grungy lawn-mower-engine rhythm and I'm just booming on the A, hammering from G to start every measure Dee Dee Ramone-style, and it sounds great. I look at Todd and he's leaning into the microphone getting ready to sing and then he bursts out with his screechy vocal, and I look at him and think: this is not the Todd I used to know. Digging at his guitar strings like he's scratching an itch, singing at some pretty girl's face in the middle of the bar, he is doing this for real and the Todd I used to know has been put away somewhere for holidays and family occasions. Ragusa and I are right on the beat, and I feel so good I start playing improvising on the scale just for the f*ck of it, and it makes the song sound even sturdier. Todd howls into the mike. I look back and see Ragusa grinning as he bangs away; he's having a good time.

The song ends on a cymbal-crash A-chord and a long pained wail into the microphone from Todd, and we pause for one second, holding the tension, until Todd yells to me "F-sharp!" and we blast right into the next song. I look into the crowd and nobody hates us, even if nobody seems very interested either. Todd's brother Paul is sitting with his girlfriend at a table in the back, and he sees me looking at him and toasts me with his beer mug. Nobody is dancing, but a couple of people are bobbing their heads up and down a little. Todd yells "Get up and dance!" between the third and fourth song, but nobody does. We go through the whole set so fast it seems like five minutes to me. When it's over my ears are ringing and I feel dizzy, and I think Todd is confused that it ended so quickly too, because he gives me a quizzical look and I shrug to show him I know what he's feeling. I flick my amp off and unplug my bass and take a long dramatic swig from my beer bottle, which is now disgustingly warm from sitting on the hot surface of my amp through the set. We look up hopefully when we hear someone yell "Encore!" from the crowd, but it's just Paul at the back table, happily waving his glass mug in the air.

"Were we good?" Todd asks me as we hop off the stage.

"Yeah," I say. "I think we were good."

We help Ragusa carry his drum set to the back room. "We rocked, man," he says. "Hee hee!" He slaps me hard on the back. "You're joining the band. You blow Spencer away."

"Thanks," I say.

"Nah, he's too much of a wimp to join us," Todd tells Ragusa. "He's gotta go back to fucking college." We're in the back room now and it's all over; we're back to our regular selves. The next band is already up on stage setting up their stuff.

We pass Jared Kaplan on the way back into the bar. "What'd you think?" Todd asks him.

Jared Kaplan looks at Todd for a moment as if surprised by the question. He shrugs. "Good sized crowd."



It's three in the morning and the last band of the night is finished. Todd plops a Molson down in front of me and we sit with our feet up on the chairs around us. The guys on stage click their humming amps off, and a pleasurable soothing silence fills the room. The place is empty except for us and three or four stragglers. Todd's brother Paul is with us, though his girlfriend has gone home. "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf starts playing on the jukebox, and I hear it through cottony deafened ears. Jared Kaplan sits yawning on a stool by the front door. Ragusa is falling asleep and wants to leave. About five beers ago he announced there was no way he was driving home in his condition, so we're going to leave the car on Bleecker, hope it doesn't get stolen, and take a cab home with our instruments. "Can we go?" Ragusa says.

"Let us just finish our beers," Todd says.

"Let us diminish our gears," Paul rhymes, drunkenly and sleepily.

I drink again even though I have drunk too much. I guzzle the watery brown liquid feeling like my belly is a tank of gasoline and I'm standing at the pump topping it off to get to an even twenty dollars. The alcohol no longer brings a tingling warmth; I am fully beer-soaked and can saturate no more. I stare at the dark shimmering wood surface of the table. "Bad Reputation" by Joan Jett begins playing on the jukebox. Paul is nudging me. "Hey," he says. "Want to try something? First take a last hit of this." He is handing me his small brass pipe. He holds his lighter to the bowl and I take a hit. "Okay," he says. "Close your eyes. This is what I always do when I'm here."

I close my eyes. "Okay," Paul says. "Now open them and look at the stage. Don't look at anything else, just look at the stage. Then imagine that the room becomes totally silent and starts filling with a strange, weird fog, and then a single blue spotlight cuts through the fog and points at the middle of the stage. And there's this young guy standing there, he looks like somebody's teenage kid, he's wearing a sloppy corduroy jacket and's got frizzy messy hair and a big nose and you wonder what the hell a kid like that is doing up on stage. Are you with me?"

"Yeah."

"Then he starts to play, and the whole room gets quiet, and then he starts to sing and you realize he's singing the most amazing words anybody has ever heard sung. And this kid is standing there with the light shining on him and everybody's listening in total silence ... Ah! Listen to him! It's Dylan! Can you hear him?"

I stare at the stage. Paul and I are both staring like we see a vision there. If anybody was looking at us they would think we were crazy. "I hear him," I tell Paul.

Soon we're out on the street waiting for a cab. The night air feels as fresh and cool and clean as a bowl of vanilla ice cream. A tingly happiness creeps into my legs and arms and fingers and toes. The moonlight shines on the streets and I look up at the darkened windows of the apartments over our heads. Everybody in the Village is asleep. A yellow cab pulls up and we collapse into a pile on the cracked steel-blue leather seats and that's about the last thing I remember from this long great stoned cool Bleecker Street rock and roll Greenwich Village night.
When Maggie and I got married and she got pregnant we needed to find a place to live, and we came very close to moving into one of the suburban communities professional young couples were "supposed" to live in. We looked at places in Long Island and New Jersey and Westchester. Then one day we mentioned to Maggie's parents that we'd been toying with the idea of living in New York City.

They were aghast. Maggie's parents are rather conservative people, and they are very concerned with elegance and propriety. They do not have much money, but they see this as a temporary aberration and always try to do things the socially "correct" way. Raising kids in the city, to them, is okay if you live on the Upper East Side and can afford private school, but this is not what Maggie and I were planning on doing. This was a bit of a setback in my relationship with them, as they'd only recently begun adjusting to the fact that Maggie had actually married me. They'd finally stopped telling me how much they admired the Jewish people every goddam time they saw me, and they'd even gotten over their shock that I actually do eat pork (which they still have trouble understanding). But now we were talking about living in that cesspool of sin and racial variety known as New York City, and I was back on their shitlist.

Once Maggie and I saw how shocked they were, we knew what we had to do. Anything that annoyed them that much had to be great. Our decision was made.

We decided to be extra perverse about it and live in Queens. I wanted to do this because Queens is one of the most unfashionable places in the world to live. It's one of New York's five boroughs, but it's not sparkling and famous like Manhattan, and it's also not gritty and cool like Brooklyn or the Bronx. It's just a sprawling plain of residential ethnic neighborhoods that hangs off the end of Brooklyn the same way that Staten Island, New York's other unfashionable borough, perches off the coast of New Jersey. Queens is the place TV comedy writers (based in Los Angeles) use when they want a character to be from somewhere funny. All In The Family took place in Queens, and characters from Seinfeld and The Nanny are from here too. I guess I was always fascinated by Queens because I was born there. My ancestors had been living in Brooklyn since arriving from Europe a hundred years before, and my older brother and sister had been born in Brooklyn. But my parents, like so many of their generation, wanted to leave Brooklyn and live in the beautiful new suburbs that were springing up outside the city, and they moved first to Queens (which is halfway to suburbia, at least when you're from Brooklyn) and then finally out to the swimming pool suburban heaven known as Long Island.

But I was born during those Queens years. We lived in Flushing till I was two, then in Rosedale-Laurelton (near Jamaica) till I was four. I was the only member of my extended family born in Queens, and because of this Queens has always had a sort of romantic mysterious childhood sense to me. Or maybe I developed this fascination as a defensive mechanism: I have the indignity of a birth certificate that lists Flushing as my place of birth, and I suppose I needed to develop some kind of fierce loyalty just to counter the utter embarrasment of this. Flushing is actually a 17th Century town founded by Dutch settlers from the town of Vlassingen, Holland, but it's been a target for jokes since then. I remember a typical exchange from All In The Family when Archie Bunker is going through some boxes in his attic and picks up a big felt 'F'. Mike : What's that, your high school letter?
Archie : Yeah.
Mike : What's it stand for?
Archie : Flushing.
Mike : Oh, so that's what ya majored in!

Real funny. Ha ha. Me and Archie Bunker, we're not amused.
It was great fun, though, watching Maggie's parents react as Maggie and I bought a co-op (in Forest Hills), moved in, painted it and prepared to raise our new daughter there. We made them come visit us to see the baby, and if you want to picture the expressions on Lucille and Raymond's faces as they walked through the streets of Queens towards the door of our building, just try to picture Queen Elizabeth and her entourage seated in the hooligan section during a British football match. It was great. From that day on they tried to avoid having to come visit us in the city, and begged us to drive out to New Jersey instead, and when we refused they'd put on a big show of getting lost on the city streets. We'd just sit back and enjoy it: every time they'd come there'd be another woeful tale of getting lost in the wilds of Jamaica or almost getting mugged in Hollis, of near-death collisions involving maniacal cab drivers near Hunters Point -- neighborhoods, all of them, that they did not need to drive through at all to reach us in Forest Hills.

For chrissakes, the streets are numbered here. It doesn't take a friggin' genius. Maggie's younger brother Nick wasn't much of a help either. He's a cool guy, but he got married the same time we did, and right after we bought the co-op in Forest Hills he did the opposite and bought a ranch on two acres up in the Hudson Valley. Thanks a lot, Nick. I know he did it on purpose. Maggie would be on the phone talking to her mother, and I'd only hear one side of the conversation, but I'd know the other side:


Yes, it is a very nice house.
No, we don't want to.
Yes, I'm sure the air is very fresh up there. No, that never happens.
No, actually most of them are very nice.
Actually the water is very clean.
Yes, their living room is very beautiful.

Once Nick visited us on a Saturday, though, and saw that we get the pre-printed sections of the Sunday Times delivered to our door on Saturday. This really blew his mind, that we could read the Arts & Leisure section and the Book Review on Saturday, that we had a one-day jump on the ads in the Real Estate section, that we could actually finish the crossword puzzle (if we could finish it) before most of the world even got to see it. I saw the envious look on his face. To Nick this is the one and only reason anybody should want to live in New York City. Perhaps someday he will actually move here because of this.
Anyway, this is what Queens looks like. Click wherever you'd like to visit. Levi's Map of Queens


In case you don't have a graphical browser, here's a list of the clickable regions on the map: North East (Flushing, Bayside, Whitestone, College Point, Queens College, Creedmoor, Douglaston, Little Neck) South East (Jamaica, Hollis, Richmond Hill, Rosedale-Laurelton) Central (Forest Hills, Rego Park, Corona, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, LaGuardia Airport, Rikers Island) North West (Astoria, Steinway, Long Island City, Newtown Creek, Woodside, Sunnyside) South West (Ozone Park, Maspeth, Ridgewood, Kennedy Airport) Rockaway Beach Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Now we have a son too (that's him in the picture on top -- Eliza was the photographer), and on the the fourth of July I take the whole family up to the roof to watch the fireworks, and from the roof we can look in all different directions and see little fireworks going off all over, and I just look around me and think how beautiful it all is, and how funny it is that the world is so full of anger and suspicion and hate while here in Queens people from all over the world shop in the same stores and walk the same streets and live in friendship and peace.

Sometimes I'll tease Lucille and Raymond by saying "Yeah, we're getting tired of living in Queens. We're thinking it's time to move on." I'll watch their faces brighten, I'll wait a few beats, and then I'll say: "We're looking at some great places in Brooklyn."

One of these days we'll break it to them that we're raising the kids Buddhists.
One day I was riding the subway home from work and the words to 'Eleanor Rigby' sprang into my head. 'All the lonely people, where do they all come from?' I always found it interesting the way people let themselves be naked when they're riding home from work. In the morning everybody sits straight, bracing themselves for the day ahead. But in the evening they are tired of holding themselves up all day; they collapse into their seats on the train and you can see the stories of their lives on their faces.
I decided I wanted to steal some of these faces, and to create a photo essay with the lyrics to 'Eleanor Rigby' as the text. I picked a day -- March 23 1995 -- and took my video camera to work with me (I could not use a standard camera, because the clicks would give me away). I usually take the E train home from the World Trade Center, but I decided to shoot my pictures on the 7 train from Times Square to Flushing, Queens instead. The 7 train appealed to me for a few reasons: they run many trains on that line, so it's not as crowded as the E during rush hour; also the train goes above-ground once it reaches Queens (making it technically not a subway but an elevated line), and I figured this would give me good lighting. At first I was nervous pointing my video camera in people's faces, but most of them didn't notice, as I had planned a subterfuge. I held the camera a few inches away from me and kept peering at the buttons and controls with a puzzled look on my face, hoping that people would think I'd just bought the camera and was trying to figure out how to use it. Every once in a while I'd mumble to myself and touch a few buttons as if confused by them; in fact I was zooming in and out on particular faces and squinting to see into the viewer. I switched cars a few times, and also captured some good faces at the Queensboro Plaza station between trains. My battery ran out near Jackson Heights, but by that time I'd gotten enough good shots. I ate a quick dinner and rushed over to my friend Tony's house (he has an Intel video board in his PC) and we spent the evening extracting GIF's from the live video feed. It kinda bugged me that, with all the great Beatles songs out there, I'd picked a McCartney song instead of a Lennon one. I mentioned this to my wife, and she said "Why don't you do something with 'Working Class Hero' too?" Duh. Thanks, Maggie. Here, on the next two pages, are the pictures I got. I see tremendous beauty in these faces, and I hope you see it too. So here with no further ado is my 7-train 5-o'clock what-a-shitty-day time-to-go-home

[2dimes]

I read somewhere quoting that is unnesisary.

I know that is spelled wrong yet iPad says, "no replacement found" worst spell cheque in the world.

[Dukasaur]

I read somewhere quoting that is unnesisary.

I know that is spelled wrong yet iPad says, "no replacement found" worst spell cheque in the world.

It's spelled "Toblerone".

[2dimes]

You do.