Sixfoot6.com - Putting Stuff Away.

Hands down, my favorite caption of the year goes to the words printed below the photo of a giggling Michael Jackson in this News24.com article: Baby Dangler.

You can't beat that. Fine journalism.

Last night at 11:30 pm, I drove to the Kinkos in Hollywood (where both Andrew and Matt used to work) to scan a few slides sent to be by a visual artist whose website I'm building. The store was clean and mostly empty at that hour, attended by a dark-skinned gentleman, a man with a mustache, and a fellow in a wheelchair. I had brought extra ZIP disks and special powers of concentration, determined to optimize my $24/hour time on the scanner. It was equipped with an attachment, to backlight each tiny transluscent painting. The darkly-colored "Design PC" was all decked out, indeed.

Kinkos was minimally-staffed at that hour, so I helped a sad, single 40-year-old woman get herself situated on the nearby Macintosh. She needed to scan a picture of her cat, who had run away from home just hours before. Her face was pink. She had raised the tabby since he was two weeks old, she said, and he had never been outside of their house.

Her plain face winced with wrinkles and tears as I orally guided her through the scanning process, unable to see her monitor as I busied myself with my slides (open photoshop, wait for it to load, choose the file menu, then 'scantastic', wait for the scanner to warm up, choose your resolution) . She had already begun scanning one shot at high-resolution, so she showed me the other one: her tiny tabby sat on a hardwood floor in the picture, but I studied on the bookshelf in the background, loaded with Stephen King books.

As I finished, I stepped over to see how she was doing. On her 17-inch monitor I saw the scanned image of her tabby playing on that same hardwood floor in dappled sunglight. My eyes darted quickly, and I saw that at fullscreen, the ones-and-zeros shot of this small cat was displayed at only 8.5% of its actual size.

In her distress, she had scanned at unnecessarily high resolution. As I helped her resize, and packed up my things, I imagined her carrying a printed version of that 7000 pixel wide image out of the store with arms spread. Walking from the Kinkos back to her neighborhood, standing on her street-corner, waving the banner, crying and hoping that someone would recognize the giant tiny feline and bring him home safely.

I told her I would pray for him. I paid only $16 to the man in the wheelchair.

It's raining in Los Angeles tonite, the first actual "you're getting good and wet here" rain I've really experienced since I moved here 9 months ago. It's a whole different town, walking in a knit cap with your head down, water beading down glasses. I drove through slippery streets, distractingly bright with reflected lights, listening to the new Sigur Ros album in a laid back dream. LA, the opposite of Iceland. Alone, dark and wet and two accidents on the 101.

Dear Colgate-Palmolive,

My girl tells me that I have a very keen sense of smell. I enjoy smells, and the smelling process. A smell can spark a sweeping rush of nostalgia, a crisp memory--cookouts in the late summer, blossoms in sprind, hot woodstove smoke eddying through the cold night air. Smell, and the memory of smell, has long been important to me.

Gentlemen, you guys are stinky something awful. I need a new a stick of deodorant every two or three months, and it seems like just when I get comfortable with one of your talented chemists' new odors, y'all motherfuckers up and change the whole line of Speed Stick on me. You're opressing me. You're depriving me of the quickest route to memories of my past.

I was down with your "Musk" scent, but that never seems to be available anymore. You're phasing out the "Fresh". Last month I was forced to submit and apply whatever it is a "Glacier" smells like to my underarm area. Last night, faced with a waining set of options, I opted for the "Alpine Fresh". At first, it sort of reminded me of Christmas at home in New England, cool air and pine trees. But you know what? It smells like Muld Cider. Correction--I smell like Muld Cider, cooked in a big cast iron pot. I'm going to smell like fucking fermented apples and cloves for the next two months. Do the Alps smell like cider? That shit aint right. This will be my own personal olefactory purgatory for the next three months, or at least until I can get another three dollars together.

Look, I'm not the most active guy on the planet. I just want something that will keep me from embarrassing myself at a hip-hop show. I don't want to smell like "Ocean Surf", "Northern Ice", or a godamned "Avalance". You know what else? "Lightning" doesn't have a smell. I'm no scientist, but I know this to be so. If anything, lightning smells like smoke, acid rain, and burnt wood. Also, where do you get off suggesting that "Cyclone" would be an appropriate smell for one's armpit? If anything, a cyclone smells like salty seaweed and dead fish, or else dusty crops and beeftorn homelessness. I know you're trying to be XTREME and everything, but it's getting ridiculous. People will collect these things on Ebay someday, they're so silly.

Gentlemen, I came to you out of frustration with other brands of deodorant, thinking, "This is Speed Stick, by Mennen. These mofos have been in the game since day one. They respect me and my body." But now I see the truth: you are a money-grubbing capitalist marketing machine, raising prices under the guise of new scent introduction.

You pull this shit one more time, and so help me God, I'm crossing over to Old Spice. I mayend up smelling like granpa, gentelmen, but at least over there those guys have respect for their own past.

Sincerely,
Ryan Gantz