I guess no one ever said it was supposed to be fun to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, but even bracing myself for a few hours of boredom I was not really ready for 6 and a half hours of standing in lines. It really was awful, but rather than flexing my splenetics against state workers, I will skip ahead to the really big news. Last night, at about 3:30 AM PST there was an earthquake. It was not that bad, as earthquakes go, about 4.7 on the Richter scale, and it's epicenter was located far to the south of me, about a hundred miles or so below Los Angeles. But there were aftershocks felt up the coast. Which may be why I had the experience of sitting up in bed in the middle of the night thinking that a truck had crashed into my building. I might have just dreamed it, or maybe there was a car accident outside my window.

I was just reading the review of a book by a Russian memoirist, who has cranked out something like ten memoirs. He is a colorful character, who veered off from the role of writer into a career in politics, and evenually became head of a facist party, and was also known for innapropriate behavior like breaking a bottle of wine over another writer's head but has now wound up in jail.

In case you are curious, I'm talking about Edward Limonov, who currently stands accused of plotting to invade Kazakhstan. Anyway, the reason I mention him is that in the review it said something like, some writers look into themselves and find the world, and others look into the world and see only themselves. Which got me thinking, even though I am keeping a diarist account, maybe there is too much emphasis on my own impressions and experiences should be more objectively reported, like giving headlines of the news, like telling about how that Great White concert erupted in flames. Only I couldn't resist adding that back in high school, in the early 80s when Great White was at their peak of fame, I was in a band with a lead singer who wore white lycra pants and no shirt but copious scarves, (much like Great White) and we had flashpots. Flash pots are basically coffee cans that have been emptied of coffee, then we lined them with something like plaster, with two wires in it and an inch or so of gunpowder.

Even though we, Shadowfax, were just playing local gigs around town, we had a lighting guy who travelled with us, who operated a crudely made lighting board, made of cobbled parts from the hardware store mounted in a kind of plywood box. When he hit the switch, power ran into the coffee can and the gun powder would explode in a vertical whoosh of fire. Of course, we also had lights and strobes and big long wooden trays with foot lights in them. If you put too much gun powder in the flashpot, it would explode, which happened once or twice, when our lighting guy, who would loosen up for shows by drinking a lot of beer, over estimated the amount. Anyhow, flash pots are what set the bar on fire that White Snake played in, resulting in something like 100 people dying in the fire and another 50 or so seriously injured. Which is terrifically sad.