the significance of stop signs.

STOP, it said, and so I did, and now here I am. Stop: there wasn't a clear reason to, just the sign's declaration, a verbal command that I obeyed and figure to recover from, sooner or later. For now the word is alive in my mind, in the drastic slowness of the air and earth around me. Articulation begets understanding, and it's as simple a trick as that, isn't it? Speaking aloud—in this situation, speaking slowly, wordfully to myself—makes things more complicated; articulating a thought is its own task, then there's the hearing, and the comparing of the what you thought and what you heard. They say a picture is worth x-thousand words, and they say it a lot, often enough that their words to this effect live in the front of my lobe. Clichés have truth beneath them, and here the implicit but indisputable truth is that language is the base currency. Words are the money; an image can light up your visual cortex and get an immediate, powerful emotional response, but that response has to be translated into words if it's ever to be parsed. Or take this stop sign just off to the side here. It's a lonely road, this one, abutted on either side by narrow, yellowed horse pastures, scraggly, second-growth fir tree forests bordering them. There's hardly a reason to be up here, this time of year, and so this stop sign marks what is an intersection in only the barest sense, the crossing of a rarely used road with one that's never used, not in winter season. But the sign spoke to me, in plain, unguarded language: STOP, and so I did, and then Simone did, too—her gas gauge has given out, it seems—she just sputtered into silence, and here I am. I'd no reason to leave breakfast as I did, save for the look she was giving me. But the look—utter disdain painted over with a shabby coat of tolerance; rather than admit there was little left to say, it foretold the coming shitstorm of pitiless opinion—the look was plenty. So I dropped a bill, picked up my glass of red beer, and walked out, across the parking lot to my shabby brown car, completely alone in its shabbiness among the shiny suburban monstrosities. Simone, you sweet old bitch, I said, pulling open the door and sliding into the cracked vinyl cockpit, be with me, now. Get me outta here clean; you remove me from this parking lot without requiring a roll-start, I'll take you for a nice drive in the country. Right now. You deserve it. You've inspired some looks on her face that weren't far from the one I just got over pancakes. I've seen them—seen her look at you as though you were something my Neanderthal aesthetics led me to, now strapped me to. But you coughed to life, and I drove, just out of town, then splintered off on a silent, narrow road that slowly inclines through the pastures and eventually meets up with the 159 up on the ridge. Miles upon miles from here. Miles of silence in either direction. I've been here … a while. Not too long, but a while, long enough to now be thinking about the world and myself in plain terms, but, still, terms: I think in language, I hear as words the footfalls of my plodding ideas. Stop.

william "shooter" faulkner.

it's just a cut-and-paste from the writer's almanac, but it sets shooter's quote up so nicely i couldn't do elsewise.

It was on this day in 1950 that William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in literature. When a Swedish correspondent in New York called to give him the news that he was being honored, Faulkner was busy working on his farm in Oxford, Mississippi, and he said, "It's too far away. I am a farmer down here and I can't get away."

The man pleaded for him to go the award ceremony, and so did Faulkner's friends, relatives, publishers, editors, agent, and other American writers. But Faulkner resisted. Finally, his wife devised a plan. Their only daughter, Jill, asked for a trip to Europe as a graduation gift — she wanted to accompany him to the ceremony in Stockholm and then go to Paris. Faulkner relented.

Faulkner was a raging alcoholic at the time, and his wife came up with another plan, this one to make sure he would be sober by the departure date. Faulkner intended to drink heavily in the days leading up to the trip. He was set to leave on a Wednesday, so the Friday before, his wife and daughter came into his bedroom and told him that it was Monday, time to start sobering up. He started to space out his drinks, but that afternoon he realized that he'd been tricked, and he drank for three more days. But he did manage to quit on Monday.

He flew to New York with his daughter on Wednesday and went to a party in his honor, where he drank Jack Daniels and came down with a fever. He and his daughter
arrived in Sweden on Friday. He had continued working on his speech on the flight over. On the day of the award ceremony, he told the American ambassador that he'd never given a speech before and that he was afraid.

There was a formal dinner before the speeches. Faulkner wore a tuxedo with a white bow tie. But he hadn't shaved, and he wore his ragged, oil-stained trench coat over his nice suit. When he got up to give his speech, he didn't stand close enough to the microphone, and no one in the room was able to understand him. It wasn't until the next day, when the text of the speech was printed in newspapers, that people realized what a brilliant speech he'd given. He said,

"The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice."

out of somewhere.

i've reached a decision. i'm in a good place, a very positive place. and you know, i've put serious thought into it, done a lot of research, asked a lot of questions. and i've decided that the sleeveless hoodie is going to work really well for me, help me reap a lot of benefits, maybe. but only without a shirt! never with a shirt. that would be POINTLESS.

be yourself: cold, uncaring, distant.

up on the work blog: heroes of the job - healthcare edition - house, md.

heroes of the job - ugly betty.

the first in a dramatic new career-focused series is up on the earnmydegreeblog. ugly betty! hurrah.

obey. (progress) abide.

know what's cool? shepard fairey, the dude who did the obey giant design (it began as a street art campaign called andre the giant has a posse)



got technically ripped off when the lebowskifest dudes made the abide design (which i have on a hoodie)



and it turns out he also designed this




which is, to my humble/presumptive mind, one of the most enduring images of the obama campaign.

if you ram it just right, you can ram it all night.

do you have 5:57 you won't mind never getting back?



i like to ram it, as you can see, nobody likes ramming it more than me.

here's one from the 1985 seahawks locker room.



in a classy understatement, poorsportsblog says "the bath house/jazz lounge combo is pretty gay, especially combined with the shirtless workouts, but..." but? but the part where the player comes out of the shower room playing the saxophone while a shirtless tight end mike tice works his lats really dials it back? but?

poorsportshas a great post judging and ranking the 80s rap videos made by nfl teams. it's pretty worth your time.

outside our window the nighttime streets teem with people, energy, hugs from strangers, grace.

as he's speaking tonight, i'm thinking, he's perfect. and i don't mean my man crush for him is like the one i have/had for bird, or jordan, or salinger or bellow. i mean that it's all of those yet more; his presence, eloquence has struck and stuck to the elated me tonight with the feline grace of jordan; the sense of salinger, the layer-caked perspective of bellow. -m.

"san diego" is german for "whale's vagina."

did y'all realize that wilt the stilt coached the san diego conquistadors of the aba in 1973-1974? the tiny red text on that page is annoying, and the writing is bad; but wilt was originally signed to a 1-yr player/coach deal; the lakers sued him and wouldn't let him play for any team in ca besides them. but they couldn't keep him from coaching: so he gave contracts to his old laker friends, published a book, and proceeded to lead his team by periodically not showing up for games without telling anyone. and it's like, well ... 10,000 women, dude. that was his number and he aimed to hit that number. required certain sacrifices: there's game time, and then there's game time, you hear? now, you go out there, give 110 percent; leave it all on the floor. i'll catch up with you cats in pittsburgh. 1-2-3 win.

everything should taste like bacon.

up on the work blog: admiration for baconnaise and a new word game proposed.

does the female form make you uncomfortable, mr lebowski?

oh... is that what this is?

in a sense, yes.

fuckin' a, man.

(yes, five)

here's a bit of typographical goodness i came across reading a bit from jeff pearlman's boys will be boys: the glory days and party nights of the dallas cowboys dynasty  : 

Did he love snorting coke? Yes. Did he love lesbian sex shows? Yes. Did he love sleeping with two, three, four, five (yes, five) women at a time in precisely choreographed orgies? Yes. Did he love strip clubs and hookers and house calls from exotic dancers with names like Bambi and Cherry and Saucy? Yes, yes, yes.

..the topic there is michael irvin, the dallas cowboys superstar wide receiver of my high school and college days. what makes that set of lines so fun for me is how the parenthetical assurance in the middle (yes, five) is only two words, but it glues the whole thing together; adds a layer of perspective and connection and is by itself a kind of smug thing to write but, in its context, actually takes away the chance of smugness. (if you're unfamiliar with him, irvin in the 90s was...the curt cobain of football, in some very real ways: he was the best and cockiest player on the best and cockiest team of that decade. also, in some other ways, he was the 90s football version of robert downey (in the 90s, not now so much) for the reasons alluded to above, as well as being possessed of a messiah complex so blatant that kanye "even the song i wrote about jesus feels like it's mostly about me" west could take notes and learn something. (below is a short excerpt from chapter 1; i picked it up in elliott bay and had a retardedly hard time not buying it)

Chapter One

Scissors to the Neck 

You can do a lot of things in life. You can't stab a teammate with a pair of scissors.
—Kevin Smith, Cowboys cornerback

Michael Irvin knew he was screwed.

There, dangling in his right hand, was a pair of silver scissors, bits of shredded brown skin coating the tips. There, clutching his own throat, was Everett McIver, a 6-foot, 5-inch, 318-pound hulk of a man, blood oozing from the 2-inch gash in his neck. There, standing to the side, were teammates Erik Williams, Leon Lett, and Kevin Smith, slack-jawed at what they had just seen.

It was finally over. Everything was over. The Super Bowls. The Pro Bowls. The endorsements. The adulation. The dynasty.

Damn—the dynasty.

The greatest wide receiver in the history of the Dallas Cowboys—a man who had won three Super Bowls; who had appeared in five Pro Bowls; whose dazzling play and sparkling personality had earned him a devoted legion of followers—knew he would be going to prison for a long time. Two years if he was lucky. Twenty years, maximum.

Was this the first time Irvin had exercised mind-numbing judgment? Hardly. Throughout his life, the man known as The Playmaker had made a hobby of breaking the rules. As a freshman at the University of Miami fourteen years earlier, Irvin had popped a senior lineman in the head after he had stepped in front of him in a cafeteria line. In 1991, Irvin allegedly shattered the dental plate and split the lower lip of a referee whose call hedisagreed with in a charity basketball game. Twice, in 1990 and '95, Irvin had been sued by women who insisted he had fathered their children out of wedlock. In May 1993, Irvin was confronted by police after launching into a tirade when a convenience store clerk refused to sell his eighteen-year-old brother, Derrick, a bottle of wine. When Gene Upshaw visited Dallas minicamp that same month to explain an unpopular contractual agreement, Irvin greeted the NFL union chief first by screaming obscenities, then by pulling down his pants and flashing his exposed derriere.

fnbjgnbgjnbgjnbgjgjgjgnjgjgjjggj

Most famously, there was the incident in a Dallas hotel room on March 4, 1996—one day before Irvin's thirtieth birthday—when police found The Playmaker and former teammate Alfredo Roberts with two strippers, 10.3 grams of cocaine, more than an ounce of marijuana, and assorted drug paraphernalia and sex toys. Irvin—who greeted one of the on-scene officers with, "Hey, can I tell you who I am?"—later pleaded no contest to a felony drug charge and received a five-game suspension, eight hundred hours of community service, and four years' probation.

But stabbing McIver in the neck, well, this was different. Through the litany of his boneheaded acts, Irvin had never—not once—deliberately hurt a teammate. Did he love snorting coke? Yes. Did he love lesbian sex shows? Yes. Did he love sleeping with two, three, four, five (yes, five) women at a time in precisely choreographed orgies? Yes. Did he love strip clubs and hookers and house calls from exotic dancers with names like Bambi and Cherry and Saucy? Yes, yes, yes.

Was he loyal to his football team? Undeniably.

Throughout the Cowboy reign of the 1990s, which started with a laughable 1–15 season in 1989 and resulted in three Super Bowl victories in four years, no one served as a better teammate—as a better role model—than Michael Irvin. He was first to the practice field in the morning, the last to leave at night. He wore weighted pads atop his shoulders to build muscle and refused to depart the complex before catching fifty straight passes without a drop. Twelve years after the fact, an undrafted free agent quarterback named Scott Semptimphelter still recalls Irvin begging him to throw slants following practice on a 100-degree day in 1995. "In the middle of the workout Mike literally threw up on himself as he ran a route," says Semptimphelter. "Most guys would put their hands on their knees, say screw this, and call it a day. Not Michael. He got back to the spot, ran another route, and caught the ball."

That was Irvin. Determined. Driven. A 100-mph car on a 50-mph track. Chunks of vomit dripping from his jersey.

Following the lead of their star wide receiver, Cowboy players and coaches outpracticed, outhustled, out-everythinged every other team in the National Football League. Sure, the Cowboys of the 1990s were bursting with talent—from quarterback Troy Aikman and running back Emmitt Smith to defensive backs Deion Sanders and Darren Woodson—but it was an unrivaled intensity that made Dallas special. During drills, Irvin would see a teammate slack off and angrily lecture, "Don't be a fuckin' pussy! Be a fuckin' soldier! Be my soldier!" He would challenge defensive backs to rise to the highest level. "Bitch, cover me!" he'd taunt Sanders or Kevin Smith. "C'mon, bitch! C'mon, bitch! C'mon!" When the play ended he'd offer a quick pat on the rear. "Nice job, brother. Now do it again." Irvin was the No. 1 reason the Cowboys won Super Bowls in 1992, '93, and '95, and everybody on the team knew it. "The man just never stopped," says Hubbard Alexander, the Dallas wide receivers coach. "He was only about winning."

And yet, there Michael Irvin stood on July 29, 1998, staring down at a new low. The scissors. The skin. The blood. The gagging teammate. That morning a Dallas-based barber named Vinny had made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, where the team held its training camp. He set up a chair inside a first-floor room in the Cowboys' dormitory, broke out the scissors and buzzers, and chopped away, one refrigerator-sized head after another.

After a defensive back named Charlie Williams finished receiving his cut, McIver jumped into the chair. It was his turn.

Although only the most die-hard of Dallas Cowboy fans had heard of him, Everett McIver was no rookie. Not in football, and certainly not in life.

corduroy pants for satan.

on the flip-side of the same theme: bookninja linked to a dude -- the world of longmire -- who has singlehandedly taken a whole bunch of romance books, kept the art, and changed the titles. a lot of them are so funny; here are the ones that have made my day.

a fresh new take on book harassment.

a new post is up on the work blog, w/r/t the bookninja rebranding contest.

chop me down before i kill again.

i just took down a recent work-blog entry, after receiving word that it was too political, which, near as i can tell, means it mentioned politics and how they exist, sometimes baldly. so i was hastened to remove the post, chop chop. well a'ight, then, here we are:

our noble leaders, the mendacity index, and you.

Posted by huntsmanic 

The Washington Monthly put together a panel and created a nifty thing called the Mendacity Index, wherein each of our last 4 US presidents has 6 prominent, proven mendacities listed, and then is given an overall score between 0 and 5.
George W. ekes out the mendacity win, surprising no one.

For the Billy Madisons among us, “mendacity” can mean 1) a lie, plain and simple, but also 2) the tendency to lie. It’s a distinction worth making, because all our presidents lie at some points or others. ALL OF THEM. And, by making an index of it, we can get a somewhat dispassionate sense for where our presidents have chosen to employ untruths: how all of them have elected to weave mendacities–huge lies intended to justify people who’ve been blown up, as well as small, strange, inventive lies that smack of pathology–into their jobs.

Further, because jobs are a primary concern of this blog, taking a look at the lies our presidents get away with (and near-invariably they do get away with them), we can get a comparative sense of how we each, in our own jobs, stack up. (I’m not saying we all lie; we’re an exceedingly honest people (except, as it happens, for our national leaders and the people who work for them.))

Depressing? Sure it is. So let’s lighten the load. Below you’ll find the Reagan-thru-GW presidents, along with

A) a choice example from their 6 lies as featured in the Mendacity Index (which you can find in its entirety here)

B) a video clip that exemplifies each of them at their gregarious, mendacious finest.

Ronald Reagan.

At a press conference, a bored President Reagan spontaneously reprises his old role as Bullwinkle. Somewhere, future-governor Palin winks her approval.

“Killer Trees. After opining in August 1980 that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” Reagan arrived at a campaign rally to find a tree decorated with this sign: ‘Chop me down before I kill again.’

George HW Bush.

Anna Kournikova says, “You’re a WAY better partner than saggy Bob Dole! Bump me, Bushie!”

“Drugs in Lafayette Park. Addressing the country about the war on drugs on September 5, 1989, Bush held a plastic bag of crack cocaine before the television camera and said it had been ’seized a few days ago in a park across the street from the White House.’ In order to obtain the prop, however, undercover DEA agents had lured a teenage drug dealer from southeast D.C. to Lafayette Park. The dealer’s initial response to the request was, ‘Where the [expletive] is the White House?’”

Bill Clinton.

Buddy! We’ve talked about this! There is a time and there is a place and this is NEITHER. Oh, Buddy.

“Remembering The Iowa Caucuses. At the start of the 1996 election season, Clinton commented, ‘Since I was a little boy, I’ve heard about the Iowa caucuses.’ There were no Iowa caucuses when Clinton was a boy. They began in 1972, while Clinton was a graduate student at Oxford University.”

George W. Bush.

Supercallifragilisticexpialidocious. (Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious.)

“‘Average’ Tax Cuts. Announcing his second big tax cut package in January 2003, Bush stated that ‘These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans. Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money.’ But because the package was tilted heavily towards the very wealthy, the average tax cut for households in the middle quintile of the income spectrum was only $217, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.”

| Edit

RE: the lost lady shoe(s?) of hoboken

a company-wide (meaning 4 offices on 2 coasts) email awaited me this morning, saying, and i'm only lightly paraphrasing here,

To whom it may concern:

If you visited our Hoboken office in the last few months, you might have left or might know who left these lady shoes. Please advise what would you like us to do with them.

below is the ramble of response i sent to my fellow creatives.



where i come from, this kind of picture attached to this kind of email is, in some very definite kind of way, meant to be ironic (or, at the absolute minimum, postironic). but i'm trying to parse this photo through my usual lens and have run into a spot of trouble. please indulge me; anything you might have to say on the matter of the lost lady shoe(s?) of hoboken will be an enlightenment, i assure you. now, let's leave the message alone for now and start with the picture, in which we see the shoe: solitary, sensible, very shiny and yet, unavoidably, brown--it must be read for multiple meanings all by itself. it's actually a pretty proper taupe, isn’t it? one wonders if this lost lady shoe of hoboken isn't utterly the same color as the carpet it crosses daily on the way to the cubicle, and wouldn’t that be lonely; very sad. but then, next to it is the bag--and this is where things get lively again. are we not to assume that the shoe has been residing in the bag? also ... this is a little hard to make out, but it looks as if the garden of eden gourmet market's tagline is temptation in every aisle; and then the shoe is right there next to the bag, modestly shiny with its buffed-plastic veneer, yet so sensible with its non-slip rubber insets. its toe that is open but not too open. has this shoe walked through the aisles of eden's temptation, or is the shoe temptation itself?

fuck howard forever.

i just got notified of a free t-shirt, since i gave (apparently good) feedback on the design.

the design is printed on "heather gray, smooth as glass" shirts. get yours here.  

that old pair of jeans.

fatboy slim put out a call for people to make videos to his song that old pair of jeans. this i found out from reading the junglesmash blog, who chose one of the fan-made videos as an example of advertising they love; i love it too. love the song; and the video's enchanting.

how long have i been at this?

while smoking a cigarette after turning off the seahawks game at halftime.

with every snap of the ball i

become a little

bit more like a 

dead baby. small

increments. dead

baby steps. soon

my whole sports-

fan life will have

been an abortion.

the mendacity index and you.

up on the work blog : an in-depth discussion of how american presidents without mendacity are like cornflakes without the milk. (i'm just a squirrel tryin' to get a nut.)

everyone in bar hates bar.

the funniest single page of headlines in a long time.

includes:

obama runs constructive criticism ad against mccain

wealthy teen nearly experiences consequence

members of twisted sister now willing to take it

everything midas ceo touches turns to mufflers

palin brushing up on foreign policy at epcot

and let's all give it up one time for:

Point: Gov. Palin Has No Foreign Policy Experience, Refuses To Acknowledge Global Warming, And Supports The War In Iraq

Counterpoint: Please Keep Your Voice Down, My Poor Retarded Child Is Sleeping

Shhhhhh!

the unhappy face theory.

television tends to level everybody out and make everyone seem kind of blandly good-looking, but at montreal it turns out that a lot of the pros and stars are interesting-or even downright funny-looking. jim courier, former number one but now waning and seeded tenth here, looks like howdy doody in a hat on tv but here turns out to be a very big boy -- the “guide média” lists him at 175 pounds, but he’s way more than that, with big smooth muscles and the gait and expression of a mafia enforcer. michael chang, twenty-three and number five in the world, sort of looks like two different people stitched crudely together: a normal upper body perched atop hugely muscular and totally hairless legs. he has a mushroom-shaped head, inky-black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as i’ve seen outside a graduate creative-writing program.*

*emphasis added. this is part of a paragraph from DFW's 1995 esquire essay the string theory about pro tennis. it's a remarkable read, with more than 40 footnotes. (even other parts of this same paragraph have other, unique worth, such as wallace remarking that pete sampras is mostly teeth and eyebrows in person with unbelievably hairy legs and forearms from which he postulates a high likelihood of back hair for sampras, which makes everyone feel better. 

wallace describes agassi's superlative game beautifully and at length before asiding that he hates agassi**, and that watching him dominate his way through a match is beautiful but doesn't make me like him any better; it's more like it chills me, as if i'm watching the devil play.

**buried in the reams of contextually vital footnotes is one about how brooke shields, so beautiful on paper, is entirely nonsexual in person, such that he can readily imagine roughing up the suspect with her picture in hand, but who in the live 3d he deems unfuckable.***

***i'll stop with the spoiling. it's really interesting. if you haven't read it you should.

i love you.

so, again, mcsweeneys.net this week is putting up recollections about david foster wallace. i've been reading one or two at a time, as a) any more than that and my whole body starts to grieve, and returning from your smoke break and sploshing into your chair like a bucket of grief (4 or 5 times each day) is unhelpful and smelly, and b) every single one is so beautiful. here's a clip of the one by sue dickman -

...He was tough in workshop but not mean. He made me look at writers I'd already discovered on my own—like Lorrie Moore—in a new way, and he introduced me to writers I probably never would have discovered on my own, like Lee K. Abbott. He had us read a Stephen King story about a possessed laundry machine ("The Mangler") in conjunction with a prize-winning short story told from the point of view of a dead body ("Poor Boy") to illustrate the differences between literary and genre fiction. There were other tangible things. I used to confuse "further" and "farther," and, apparently, I did it quite often. In one of my stories, I'd confused them yet again, and in the margins, he'd written, simply, "I hate you." I've never confused them since. He once left me a note, postponing a meeting, excusing himself by saying, "I'm so hungry I'm going to fall over." While I was irritated that he wasn't there, I immediately adopted that sentence and have been saying it ever since.

the future of yesterday is right fucking now.

want help making a career change by eod tuesday? well maybe you should go to yahoo.com and read like, roughly, i don't know, the 2nd article from the top of the page. 

yahoo.com's 2nd article from the top of the page is a terrific resource for any job-uncertain persons who can benefit from helpful facts like "for instance, as a pediatric nurse, you’d work with children." 

In today's globally scphinctering economy, politicians stare into the middle distance and insist we're all going through the same thing. we're not; but we all may well want the same thing, which is to read the phrase "continued growth" not less than five times in 600 words. 

"The future," says yahoo.com's 2nd article from the top of the page, looking down at you from its perch waaaay up almost at the tippy-top of the page, "the future holds opportunities." boo-yah. 

i wish you way more than luck.

the commencement address david foster wallace gave in 2005, he opens with a little ditty. here's the opening paragraphs:

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

the whole thing is here; i've read it several times, and recently, when i've eagerly popped it in my mouth like a lozenge, something to soothe my itchy perspective, and also like a bracing shot of absinthe, to snap my eyes open and remind me i'm awake. from near the end:

The capital-T Truth is about life before death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

FORGET ABOUT THE FUCKING TOE.

some good stuff (and some goldbricking bullshit) got written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the big lebowski. but this, i just saw today, and it's tasty.

walter sobchak, neocon : the prescient politics of lebowski.

these, turns out, are the particulars of the nobility i aspire to.

-- from james wood's how fiction works --

flaubert loved to read aloud. it took him thirty-two hours to read his overblown lyrical fantasia, the tempatation of saint anthony, to two friends. and when he dined in paris at the goncourts’, he loved to read out examples of bad writing. turgenev said that he knew of “no other writer who scrupled in quite that way.” even henry james, the master stylist, was somewhat appalled by the religious devotion with which flaubert assassinated repetition, unwanted clichés, clumsy sonorities. the scene of his writing has become notorious: the study at croisset, the slow river outside the window, while inside the bearish norman, wrapped in his dressing gown and wreathed in pipe smoke, groaned and complained about how slow his progress was, each sentence laid as slowly and agonizingly as a fuse.*

*though one wonders if a great deal of time was not spent just sleeping and masturbating (flaubert likened sentences to ejaculate). often, the excruciation of the stylist seems to be a front for writer’s block. this was the case with the marvelous american writer jf powers, for instance, of whom sean o’faolain joked, in wildean fashion, that he “spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon wondering whether or not he should replace it with a semicolon.” more usual, i think, is the kind of literary routine ascribed to the minor english writer ac benson—that he did nothing all morning and then spent the afternoon writing up what he’d done in the morning.

heaven is a booze crooze, and so is hell. in each THERE IS COWBELL.

because i like it like THAT.

“If capitulation rhymed with resentment I could write a really mean blues song” : an interview with Robin

check the work blog to hear robin talk about his love of food, his nipples, his opinion of robin thicke, and so much more.

i've got two words for you; heartbreak and kid.

maybe i'd be a little more appealing if i, uh, got arrested with a hooker doing a suitcase full of blow in vegas.

calling all PIGS IN SPACE

on the work blog : an interview with capt. link hogthrob.

i don't think you have the balls.

(kidnap that fool)

i'm thinkin’ about your mother to a funky beat.

i went to your house, and she licked me on the cheek i said excuse me lady, but i remember seeing you at the palladium way back in september, 'cos you was beatboxin’ for lou rawls


in some bright red boxer drawers

you said ya moms was pretty and young, but she's old as dirt and got hair on her tongue

ya moms.

ya moms: she uses brut


and i saw her ridin’ a horsey drinking whisky out a boot. she's got the wings and teeth of an african bat, her middle name is mudbone and on top of all that

ya mama's got a peg leg with a kickstand


i, i, i i said ya mama's got a peg leg with a kickstand

ya mama, ya mama, ya mama