Thanks, former United States Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford as portrayed by Donald Sutherland, for guiding my minute and seemingly-inconsequential life decisions by erecting the framework of your historically-aware and carefully-considered foreign policy maxims around them.

I realize I’m a month late on breaking this story, but I just can’t let such a resounding victory for justice in the War on Terror go unrecognized. You see, the TSA and its body scanners got their man.

Who is this nefarious fiend, you ask?

Kurtis Blow.

Yep.

The Kurtis Blow.

I could not possibly make this up. It is beyond my capacity to concoct a story where a multi-billion dollar, international security enterprise nabs the world’s first gold-certified MC for having less than an ounce of weed in his possession.

You may remember Grooverider languishing in a jail in the United Arab Emirates because he wore the wrong trousers to a gig. That was a terrible injustice.

Fortunately, Blow was not apprehended in Dubai, but rather Los Angeles. At the time of Blow’s arrest, possession of up to one ounce of marijuana for recreational use was little more than a criminal misdemeanor in California. As of just under a week ago, that same offence is a civil infraction.

It’s basically a parking ticket.

Bad timing on the part of Kurtis Blow. But these are not really The Breaks. As I interpret them, the breaks are occurrences of misfortune that almost always fall outside the victim’s control. They do not cover acts of sheer stupidity, like taking your ganja through an airport body scanner.

Although I suppose it’s no more foolish than claiming your cat as a dependent or borrowing money from the mob. And just who, exactly, made those 18 phone calls to Brazil? Come to think of it, Kurtis Blow is not as sympathetic a protagonist as I remember him being.

But we’ve learned two very important things from this event.

First, overarching authorities will spare no expense of cash, technology, manpower or audacity to catch us in the act of doing whatever it is they’re convinced we must be doing. Second, once they’ve caught us, our only hope is that our democratic compatriots have had the courage and foresight to reign in this bullshit as the fine citizens of California have done with SB 1449.

“Back to the story, it’s not hard to find. Ninja’s not just of the body, but of the mind.”

—Partners In Kryme

Last time—which was a while ago—we discussed dreams.

I’m not crazy about the idea of turning the Hot Rod into a glorified dream journal, but sometimes it’s helpful to retrace our steps. Plus, I had a dream last night that directly addressed the single comment left on my last post.

Once again, my dream was not “a mercilessly visceral homage to the platonic ideal of male homoeroticism.” Rather, it featured a good number of prominent characters from my college years, both peers and instructors. They were staging an intervention that demanded I publicly address the issue of my sexuality. Fortunately, I had an evasive ace up my sleeve.

I’m not entirely certain what my pretext for being at my former instructor’s house was, but my purpose there was clear. I had a sheet of plastic stickers that were, in fact, cameras. I was to place them around the house so that myself and some unspecified authoritarian body could monitor this group of my educational assistants as they discussed matters of illegal whaling.

The whole wiretapping aesthetic is directly attributable to the influence of outside information. I’ve recently been watching Outlaw Bikers, The Wire and The Informant!

I’m pretty certain that cigar is (mostly) just a cigar. Although it probably tells me that I don’t have a highly-reliable corridor of trust with many people with whom I am allegedly close.

Illegal whaling! What?

I’m not literally the whales, but I’m clearly aligned with them. And I’m hoping to invoke the protection of some universally-powerful force to which the whales and I are entitled. God. The FBI. Who knows?

The whales and I are inconsequential leviathans. Benevolent giants who couldn’t be killed in an obsolete age. West Coast Redwoods falling for a big-box Staples. Collateral damage in a comfortable conspiracy. People need paper. It is a regrettable-but-noble pursuit.

You see, we can’t just let whales be whales. We must afford them special protections. International regulations and cull quotas. We must control what we can control and control what we can’t control. Know everything, and define our world accordingly.

In the end, I couldn’t do it.

I confronted the group about their activities, knowing that if I stuck that camera on that grandfather clock some douchebag in a robe would send my friends to jail. I didn’t care if they hated me or wanted me to be gay or, more than likely, were totally fucking indifferent to my existence in the same way they couldn’t give a shit about a shipping lane bisecting a whale migration.

They don’t deserve to rot in jail. So, whatever…

Two days before I got unreasonably drunk on Christmas and told my parents I wanted to kill myself, I had another dream.

I had a wife and a child. I remember my wife as an ethereal presence, as I have nothing to which I can compare her.

Almost certainly naively, I remember that child as though he were real. I remember the smile on his face as I held him. The warmth in the veneer of his shimmering brown eyes. The potential I always knew must exist, but could never realize. The despair shattering into less than that when she stole his life for reasons none of us would ever dare to comprehend.

I slid out of the covers. Went to HMV and bought DVDs for the family so I wouldn’t fail on Christmas Eve when we all opened our presents to celebrate the birth of the Christ Child.

Density is an earned quality.

When the universe was young, everything was soft. Over time, through heat and pressure, things got hard. Tough. Impenetrable. Unforgiving.

I sincerely doubt that’s readily reversible.

But, I wonder if, instead of suffocating the future, this weight can’t be used to build a wall against the past.

Well, the Hot Rod is just that cliché. A post has, more or less, been missed.

Blame it on my shitty job. Blame it on the shitty weather. Blame it on the shitty tequila and the surprisingly-unshitty beer.

Personally, I blame it on the remarkable coziness of my bed and the fascinating nature of my dreams.

I can’t really remember what most of them were about, but the most interesting one featured a prominent character from my days in grade school.

It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to describe him as a jock. The connotations surrounding the term All-American fit much better, except that he’s (assumedly) not American. But I can’t say for certain.

Now I know what all—like, what?—six of you who are reading this are thinking: Was it a mercilessly visceral homage to the platonic ideal of male homoeroticism? Sadly, no. That would make too much sense, and probably be far less disturbing.

We had our clothes on. I believe we were in the blue hallway beside the main gym in our junior high school. My companion towered over me, as he always did, and beamed out his trademark positivity, as though his happiness core had reached a critical mass and was now killing everyone else in the school with its uncontainable radiation.

I’m pretty sure he said something, but I can’t remember the details. He was either going to help me achieve something or was proud of something I had achieved. And this made me feel phenomenal.

Have you ever ingested a shit ton of codeine?

Well his approval felt better than that.

And that’s when I woke up. And that’s as much as I remembered, before I laid back down to hopelessly chase the praise of someone with whom I’ve had no interaction in the last ten years. Besides, whatever it was about me that impressed him more than likely didn’t actually occur.

And a very large part of me suspects that anything my friend would’ve been proud of me for is not something that would likely make me proud of myself.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is this chain of bizarre encounters we must have had with each other in our dreams. It will have totally coloured our perceptions of one another based on chance meetings with brainwaves.

That, I suspect, is why we’ll most likely keep the smalltalk to a minimum if we ever see each other again.

Or maybe I’ll start keeping a dream journal and press my luck.

I definitely have a few regrets. Most of the specifics are stories for another time. Some of them are off topic in a hopelessly-irrelevant fashion while others might single me out of a police line-up.

Anonymity is a problematic issue. Those of us aspiring to honesty are inclined to surrender it. However, if we lack the patience for the unduly-continual process of scrutiny and censure—boards, panels, committees, reports, reviews, diagnoses, citations, tickets, courts, rulings, prisons and permanent records—the willful omission of questionably-relevant details can be regrettably prudent.

It is an unfortunate corner in which we find ourselves.

The case of Andrew Feldmar has never sat well with me. He’s a psychologist who employed LSD in some select treatments, and lacked enough foresight to write an article about it. US Customs Agents read it on the internet, and now Feldmar can’t visit his grandchildren.

As near as I can figure, the only sensible lesson we can learn from this is not to incriminate ourselves on Google. At least insofar as we can help it.

I am left standing here holding truths that may put me at odds with one authority or another—the actual police or maybe just my mom’s church friends. Either force can make my life extremely unpleasant. Having previously declared my intention to distill spirits without a permit, the only license in which I place any faith is artistic.

My experiences may or may not be legitimate. My intentions may or may not be serious. My persona may or may not be real. That uncertainty is more personal than any of my uniquely-identifying particulars.

After all, what is objective truth but the dismissal of subjective experience?

We can bleach our character with countless white lies or just take the label off the waistband and forget about the stains. But until the winds change, which I sincerely and earnestly believe they will, I can’t argue against bundling up.

Don’t you just love it when people establish the relevance of their positions with phrases like, “There’s been a lot of talk about my topic lately” or “Don’t you just love it when people establish the relevance of their positions with some circularly-logical premise”?

It makes me wonder whether or not Andy Rooney is still alive.

Since X-Files left the airwaves I haven’t had cause to crowd around the TV on Sunday nights, and I miss the comfortably-challenging insights of that meanderingly-ponderous complainant. I would be lying if I said he wasn’t deserving of a citation somewhere in my pantheon of personal heroes. And I don’t fancy myself a liar.

I imagine Andy Rooney to be the triumphant revitalization of Atticus Finch after he suffered a uniquely-curious brain injury in a particularly-disturbing motor vehicle collision. The other driver was obviously at fault. Atticus Finch had a sterling driver’s abstract. And I don’t think Andy Rooney ever got his license back.

Brain injury is no laughing matter. Unless that’s exactly what it happens to be. It’s funny that way.

But it seems to me that when Andy Rooney dies—if he hasn’t already—he will part with fewer regrets than Atticus Finch.

I used to hate Cineplex’s pre-screening advertainment feature, until I realized I was its exact target audience.

Like all advertising, I’m pretty sure it’s designed to make people feel better about themselves. I spent many hours waiting for films to start while thinking, “Man, what kind of hopeless losers would actually enjoy this shit?” When I finally answered that question honestly, I had to concede it was probably the kind of hopeless loser who feels the need to constantly criticize advertising disguised as journalism by putting thoughts into quotation marks.

It was at this juncture that I came to one of my many inconsequential epiphanies. No matter how hopeless a loser I may be, I can still be a wildly-successful belligerent smartass. There’s probably more to be said about this, but for now, I am content to enjoy the serenity of this self awareness.

Thank you, advertisers, for shamelessly berating me along the road of self discovery.

I’ve been working on a ridiculous piece of writing that I cannot, for the life of me, conclude. I know I had a point when I started it, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was.

The experience has me reflecting on what is, perhaps, my favourite conclusion to an episode of The Simpsons. The episode Das Bus, loosely based on Lord of the Flies, strands the students of Springfield Elementary on a deserted island. It randomly finishes with a narration from James Earl Jones that ends with, “And, eventually, the children were rescued by—oh, let’s say—Moe.”

Then I realized that reflecting on Simpsons quotes is something old people do. I am old. Oh, well. I guess I knew it was coming. I just assumed I would have accomplished more by the time it happened.

Like maybe finishing that stupid piece of writing.

I have always maintained that topic should never determine a piece of writing’s ability to entertain or engage. Pop music, then, would seem to be as ideal a place as any to wind up the ol’ hot rod.

A short while ago, Willow Smith’s Whip My Hair shocked and awed my facebook news feed. All of my earnest intentions to see the new Karate Kid movie collapsed into a burning desire to waste a couple of minutes on Youtube.

Not that any of us should ever feel compelled to justify why we did or did not watch a music video, it would be extraordinarily difficult for anyone to argue that this video/song/product spread through our attention-deficit popular consciousness on any merits beyond brand recognition and market capitalization. If I was feeling particularly hurtful, I might suggest that Willow Smith is to Will Smith as Shark Tale is to Finding Nemo. But Willow Smith has won my heart and mind, so I will make no such disparaging remark.

Whip My Hair isn’t topping my most played tunes, but if I’m playing radio roulette I’d much rather hear Willow Smith than, say, John Mayer. If I had a nine-year-old daughter, I would much rather she spend her formative years programming her brain with Willow Smith generously spreading mantras of self-determination over top of a Samsonian kick drum ambling along like a drunken Tyrannosaurus than with Taylor Swift desperately mixing metaphors about owning some obtuse boy.

I’d like to think I’d raise a daughter who is capable of shooting someone rather than a daughter who is likely to shoot someone. There’s a big difference. But I digress.

My initial objection to Whip My Hair was the line:

Don’t let haters keep me off my grind. Keep my head up, I know I’ll be fine.

Willow Smith is one syllable away from having arguably the most recognizable name in contemporary popular media. As a pop princess, she’ll never have to worry about haters keeping her off her grind or whether or not she’ll be fine. These are both very real concerns for the rest of us. Maybe it’s little more than clever marketing, but I feel it’s commendable that Willow Smith isn’t addressing her issues but our issues. I could sit here all day whining about how she’s disingenuously pandering to a commercially-viable demographic monstrosity, but that would ignore the reality that she is offering that demographic something tangible, regardless of how she’s doing it.

Gifting her subjects with hope is the fundamental function of a princess, pop or otherwise. In a time where the existence of royalty is no longer necessitated, we have, for reasons I don’t comprehend, elected to celebrate it anyway.

I appreciate the return of the favour.