Today is a glorious bright spring day; not a cloud in the sky, the sun is shining brightly, and the air smells like flowers. I actually LEFT THE HOUSE this morning. I went to Seattle Central to withdraw from my pre-calculus class, which is being taught by someone who should have been a mean football coach and certainly will not be MY instructor (I wanted to go up to him after class and shout “YOU’RE FIRED!”).

Here are some of the things I learned.

I cannot get a cash or check refund, only a credit back to my credit card for about 75% of the amount paid, even though I’ve already paid off my credit card. What say you they charge me about 25% of the remainder for me to get my hands on the stinkin’ dough?

There are many, many, many vacant businesses up and down Broadway, the main shopping drag in my nabe.

People will chip in with up to eight cents when in a cash register line to complete a purchase.

Capitol Jewelry and Loan has no strap buttons handy, but does have a 1-channel hard disk recording interface available for $149, which until a couple weeks ago might have sounded like a good deal. now it does not. Especially when I saw a Mackie 16-channel powered board right next to it for about $600.

There are “FOR RENT” signs EVERYWHERE.

The Henry Branch of the Seattle Public Library is currently a big hole in the ground.

Both Rolling Stone and Maxim feature a cover of [insert one-word female popstar name here] over a similar tagline: how [insert one-word female popstar name here] “Seduced America”, which makes me think they must be running out of trained chimps in the headline writers’ guild again. Additionally, apparently the grey in my hair provides some sort of memory impairment field since I can’t recall ever hearing of any of the acts that grace the covers of the music mags I glimpsed.

I saw a nice article in a mag called ‘baseline’ about razor-blade package art from 1900 to about 1950 by Steven Heller, whom I vaguely know online from the graphics list. The art was lovely.

Finally I concluded that I must communicate with Mr. Goldstein about concatenating our drivel and compounding the offense by actually comitting it to paper in the “Zine” form, as it is popularly called among the fashion-forward youth of today. Zounds! I must propose it forthwith.

We could include popular novelty items, such as trading cards, as well as the much-beloved subscription-assurance device known in the trade as “comics”.