29 December 2004

behind the Mask of Reasonableness.

oftentimes these days i feel that my shit does not amount to much; is rabbit shit. this line of thought is typically countered with a classic piece of brady family-style psychology: but i Haven't really Tried yet.

that this sniffling profundity is true does not make it less threadbare; which is to say that my tried-and-occasionally-true method of putting things off in favor of preserving an abstract notion of my Potential has been wavering, lately. recently, the way that waveriness manifests is for me to decide, on a whim, to take some sort of stock of the aforementioned shit; which soon gives way to a blank-eyed, drymouthed and rather crunchy state. sometimes, though--

--sometimes other people do my rationalizing for me. like just now. i was researching a doctor's past work and was gifted with a sliver of perspective: i could really try, could spend 4-5 years f'ing throwing myself at my field of study, really stretching my limits, and come out the other side with a 550 page tome -

Two Patterns of Wife Influence on Farm Innovation in a Midwestern Dairy State.

and, dude: No Soup for You.

27 December 2004

she keeps on passing me...

so i have an old friend who's coming back into town for a bit. we didn't know each other as kids or anything--we don't go that far back--but it feels as though we did. you know that kind of friendship? it's the kind with an uncomfortably pervasive sort of prescience; she will look at me for a long second, and in that time i will feel my ribs open up and give her a plain look at all my most closely held insides.

it is an odd sensation. and a disturbing one, for the way i crave the rare and true communion that comes with it. though i don't much consider what she gets from me, there's the most basic feeling of symbiosis that keeps me from being any other than the most-honest, least-presumptive version of myself. she is not yet here and already my eyes and mouth feel wet.

she'll be in town, and for a while i'll have the delight of her occasional company. will get to remember the way her presence always expands my scope. then she will go and i will be sad--a larger version of the way i'm sad when i run into a years-old school crush.you know, the kind where the fact that she is long forgotten does not prevent a moment of ineffable what-if-only-ness... and in comes the bass; cue the horn; then the words--the ones that tell of old and silly love, of love all the bigger for having never been realized:

all i could do was stare
back as kids we used to kiss
when we played truth or dare
now she's more sophisticated
highly edumacated
not at all over-rated
i think i need a prayer
to get in her boot
and it looks rather dry
i guess a twinkle in her eye
is just a twinkle in her eye.

23 December 2004

aspects of christmas. a list.

we shall set about making a bullet-ish, pointed list of the various aspects of christmas. with the full knowledge that the list may well end up comprising all of our thoughts on the matter, as opposed to the prelude it's intended to be. as we have spent the week translating early development research papers into copy for an audience who deems usa today rather off-putting for its complexity, bullet lists do not count as a cop-out:

+ how we really wish santa would bring us a new pair of pants.

...honest. other than a laptop, pants and some of those nice smartwool socks are what we want most. we prefer not to linger on the whens and whys of our turn toward sickeningly practical wishlists. tis uncomfortable to consider for any length. (though would be significantly less uncomfortable, were we wearing a nice pair of dockers smartpants.)

+ how Elf is the best christmas movie of the past 21 years. how we know two people--neither prone to emotional flare-ups in public--who CRIED at the end of it. the end of Elf.

+ why the appalling, stomach-turning testament to consumermate midland american orthodoxy that christmas has become neither appalls nor turns our stomach.

...not that we really enjoy it. but okay, fine, we can deal, for a couple of facts: christmas is our only national day-off religious holiday, and if we are to be collectively obligated to observe the anniversary of a jewish couple spending the night in a barn then we deserve to have the observation reflect some sort of collective sense. --that said reflection is provided by the Sharper Image Funhouse LT5050 may be uncomfortable, but is no less telling. if christianity is to have one of its (few) major holidays sacrileged, christmas isn't so big a loss. christmas isn't what the deal's About, anyhow: if not for what happened on easter, the events of christmas could be chalked up as a sort of aren't-we-feeling-fancy-today whimsical episode on god's part ---- let's set the scene with as much blue/brown-collar pathos as possible, then, bam! down swoops the regal chorus of angels, cue the sparkling star stage left, followed closely by the unlikely-yet-persistent triage of queer magi for the straight guy. sans the delectably consequential sacrifice of easter, christmas just wouldn't matter.

+ how i always thought my stocking looked better hanging from the mantle than either my brother's or sister's.

+ how any more than a modicum of eggnog results in drastastical anal outbursts.

+ how i forget this each year.

22 December 2004

..is not a test: i'm Rapping to the Beat.

when i awake with a song already stuck in my head--not one i've heard recently--it gives me small and soporifical pause. for i know that the song was either a) featured on the soundtrack of my dreams or b) said dream was about my own fantastic rock star/karaoke master career. but i can never remember my dreams. or very very rarely. when i do, they cover a very limited scope of plot lines that are not particularly instructive (me & friends as members of scooby gang, me as USA cable indiana jones knock-off, britney [played by myself] reuniting with justin and escaping to a private island out in the deep blue). that i can never lock down where the song came from only increases my pleasure in singing helplessly along as i make my way through the opening bars of another devastatingly impactful day.

lately, though, i've found myself awaking with an odd subset of the dream-song-in-my-head paradigm: a specific set of lines. today it was

well they say that miracles never cease:
i've created a devastating masterpiece

from a psychoanalytastical standpoint, this is simply RIPE for deconstruction. fortunately, i know nothing at all about psychoanalysis and happen to think that all psychoanalysts are gay. so, another piece of substantial introspection narrowly averted, i am free to traipse down to my post at the coffeeshop, announcing to the world at large that

i said he's a fairy, i do suppose
flyin' through the air in pantyhose

he may satisfy you with his little worm
but i can bust you out with my SuperSperm.

20 December 2004

the big sleep.

sometimes i have a chance encounter with somebody's words, and they sum things up. when this happens, they tend to be words that carry no particularly burdensome weight, and yet they still somehow manage to point out (rather damningly) the retardation of whatever overwraught pathos i have decided to pin to my lapel that day. today, bogart's philip marlowe tactfully reminds me to stop trying to make everything so goddam complicated:

General Sternwood: How do you like your brandy, sir?

Philip Marlowe: In a glass.

17 December 2004

it's a simple calculus.

what i am after in this whole mess--at least, as i am able to quanitfy it to-day--is to be as content as i possibly can. and to continually discover new iterations of contentment. not happiness; in addition to being a transient state, happy is rather alpha-dog. or, it is effort-intensive.

and it occurs to my reluctant spirit that, most days, contentedness runs in the same stride as positive thinking.

after his jog positive thinking comes home and runs into obsessive compulsion; they are neighbors. their conversation is filled with uncomfortable backyard clichés. this week, the topic is the ability to Take Pleasure in the Small Things, which they make no effort to acknowledge is about the fundamentally subjective interpretation of what is interesting.

the next absurdly common revelation to dawn is that the things that cause me to enjoy the company of a given person tend toward the microscopic—the way her smile crooks, his honest appreciation of the muppets. when I’m able to settle into the moment comfortably enough to look at them awhile, my ability to obsess goes home early, my keel returns to even; and my metaphors co-mingle agreeably.

16 December 2004

slip of the lips.

as soon as he said it he knew he shouldn't have. his lips had not yet done the pursing needed for properly enunciating his declaration's final syllable when her head turned slightly to the right, away from him in semi-profile; her left eye wide, her sculpted eyebrow doing that parabolic thing it does where it forms a crest just below the hairline and stays there until her thought is complete.

her eye was clear and unblinking as it gazed at him, not with confusion, or derision, or pity or love -- it just watched. an observant gaze. a calculating one. time seemed to suspend itself, and likewise his thoughts were suspended; a single maverick neuron, undaunted, found the trigger mechanism and fired itself, causing nate to wonder if this is what the pope goes around feeling like all the time. and god, wouldn't that be awful. (he had more thoughts along this useless and depressive tangent, but not until later -- not until we was alone, on his loveseat, with his heineken and his chips and pay-per-view "how to lose a guy in 10 days" playing on his tv and some of the other prickly accoutrements used when one is flailing about on a friday night, desperate to stave off the trainwreck of the obvious, that one has Brought This on Oneself.) this was not the first time nate had drawn a parallel between his life and that of the pope, and probably the terrorist neuron would've machine-gunned randomly around in his dead-calm skull, setting off a series of dietary- and self-love- and lust- and other monumentally fruitful pope/nate-related comparisons.

but her finger beckoned him back to attention. her left eyebrow's arch returned to its more obtuse position -- a mark that the deduction had yielded results. the edges of her soft mouth curled, softly. and she settled the matter:

"God, Nate -- look at your deadpan face. you so completely had me going. Shit."

15 December 2004

vegetationlessness.

it was tuesday and my mom really wanted me to go with her to the eve worship service at her church (which is a smaller, guitar-player-friendly sort of deal that mom has described as 'hip' -- which is not super descriptive since 'hip' is a word she only knows how to use with a very deliberate and very misplaced over-emphasis). so i went. with both of my folks. sat in like the 4th or 5th pew. there was a lot of singing, which grooves with me. (the dude who talked had an almost-silly nervousness to him; but had just gotten back from haiti -- from a town which, a couple months back, woke up one day to see a 15-foot wall of water coming at them. he had all these pictures; of his friend standing where the school he's principal of used to be. about 225 kids in his school -- 50 of whom got carried away by the water wall. and that was just: wow. it's literally beyond the scope of my imagination. it's hard enough just to return my imagination to the crazy-lucid detail that happens in that time of kid-ness; i tried, last night, and got it there for just a second. but then i tried to imagine walking down the road and having my school not be there, having all of the vegetation around it -- not just the trees; ALL of the Vegetation -- just. not be. anymore. my head was already defunct in its efforts to conceptualize any of that, and i wasn't yet to the part where 50 kids from my neighborhood have gone away, too. and as i'm busy lightly flagellating myself for lack of compassion and such, i look up and the dude has flipped to the next slide, which is a shot of him surrounded by a dozen or so children from the town -- age 6-13 or so -- wearing all the clothes they own in the world. which is what they were wearing when the wall came. which in two cases is nothing. and they've got these f'ing SMILES happening: not pose-with-whitey weirdness kind of smiles, or even this-moment-offers-welcome-respite-from-our-hellish-lives smiles; they were to sly for that. the heads cocked with a little too much perspective. there was honest-to-f'ing-god joy that could be seen in their faces, even in a group photo, even from the 4th or 5th pew of a church 4000 miles from there.) ...huh. looks like my parenthetical aside turned out to be my whole deal, here. oh well. so, that's one thing i'll say for my first hip-service last night: it did re-align, however slightly or briefly, my stubborn precepts about how and where contentment/relief/joy are found in this mess.

14 December 2004

all they do these days is bitch, bitch, die unnecessarily, and bitch.

i hate it when a person takes some point that i've just tried very hard to express--and used a despairing number of ellipses and ampersands and parentheticals in the process--and says it, not just succinctly, but with greater force of insight than i would get at even if i had my crack squad of intellective monkeys to assist me.

...it's happened to me not infrequently of late, what with the war and the unseemly turnings of politics in general: my rhetoric gets confused. but, like john stewart and his Fake News phenomenon, a lot of times absurdity is best and most cleanly pointed to from the vantage of the absurd. from the Onion:

Last week, troops complained to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about extended deployments and poor equipment. What do you think?

"Years from now, our troops will look back at the war in Iraq and wonder why they haven't been allowed to go home yet."
- Clinton Rhodes, film editor

13 December 2004

small bits of lexicographical goodness.

i accidentally made a word today:


Myopimism -

When One's tactile sense of [oft-wholehearted] assuredness is fully dependent upon the ability to look no further than the end of One's proverbial nose, one is being 'myopimistic.'
1654 GAYTON Pleas. Notes III. vi. 108 The slave Sancho doth supra-parasite it, turnes mime, Satyr, Sarcast, yea yet also Myopimist, Hyperaspist.

12 December 2004

how about Pandora. no? then let's go with Gertrude.

i have a thing for the notion that a name plays a role in dictating character. ...really it's a cheap subset of the question as to whether fate determines character or character determines fate -- but that's not exactly a top-shelf philosophical wondering to begin with. so whatever; it's a fun thing to ponder.

especially when today i return to my phd database [am temping at the UW college of education on a study tracking the career paths of phds in certain disciplines] and set about the task of uncovering the current residence of one Gertrude Box. ah, pardon: dr. gertrude box. she has two phds.

go ahead! say it aloud a few times. gertrude BOX. gerTRUDE box.

GERTRUDE! BOX!

strangely freeing, isn't it? it took a while but i finally tracked her down; she was a tough nut to crack. box to open. whichever.

and, if your mind is anything like mine--a generally unhelpful combination of scornful and lazy--you have to wonder what kind of person gertrude box, phd is: whether she eats wheat; if maybe when she laughs her face looks the same as when she takes a shit. that kind of thing.

i looked up the acknowledgements page of her sociology dissertation, to look for reference to other family/spousal member who have more easily researchable names. and, jackpot:

"to my father, reverend harry thomas morrell, ba, bd, bph, ma, phd, and to my eight children - trudy, terry, ted, twinkle star, tom, tim, tiara and todd ... but especially to twinkle star."

well, i mean, DUH. of course it was twinkle star box who helped you, who did ALL the typing of your disseration about development of a metric for "the sociological impact of recreational parachuting." because, you know, she had the time. mark.