a pile to step in

don't say you weren't warned

2011-11-16T14:40:00.001-08:00

after the fall.

2011-09-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

(ed. note: the 10th anniversary of 9/11 has seen a slew of reflections and tributes in all manner of media, many of them wrenchingly powerful. So. How to make your 9/11 piece stand out? By posting it on 9/12, that’s how.)

Ten Junes ago I fell off my skateboard and woke up three weeks later. Wait—“woke up” isn’t quite right. I was in a drug-induced coma for a week, then my brain swelling (suddenly, miraculously) reversed course, the doctors at Harborview were able to ease up on the drugs and ditch plans to cut away a section of my skull—which is very much a cut-your-losses maneuver—and then (I’m told) I became cognizant, conversational. But my brain’s ability to make memories didn’t come back online for another couple weeks, and when it did, I found myself amidst circumstances I would’ve described as surreal, if I’d had the cognitive ability to parse the idea of multiple realities. Which I did not.

When your brain is compelled to rewire itself, relearn how to designate something for long-term memory, get it to stick, some weird shit happens. My brain had no shortage of rewiring to do—muscle memory was completely wiped, for example; I had to relearn much the non-breathing/heartbeating stuff your muscles do without having to think about it. The first memory that stuck that summer is the story of my 5-step journey from hospital bed to bathroom, and I can recall how it felt: as though I’d come awake for the first time, everything new but simultaneously familiar, comfortable. I felt completely fine, thought I was fine (and would continue to. My ongoing impression was that, man, a week ago I was messed up, but thank god I’m all good now. A week later, same deal). I shrugged off my buddy Brian’s attempt to help me to the loo, stood up, told my legs to start walking, and instead began melting into the floor. Brian caught me and we eventually resumed the trip. It all took much longer than anticipated, which sucked, because I had a bowel movement melting into my jammies. The rest of that memory is mainly—well, Brian is a very good friend. Other early memories also involve loved ones being good to me. My family was amazing, my girlfriend Erin was amazing, and tons of folks dropped by to visit—even my old friend Laura, who would become the love of my life and eventually agree to marry me. One afternoon I was sitting up in bed, talking with my beautiful, dark-haired girlfriend, when I looked over and saw my beautiful, red-haired girlfriend in the doorway. Had … had I somehow managed to have two girlfriends at once? Yes I had. Yes! I had. And they were both good with it, talking affectionately to me, to each other, enjoying each other’s company, as simultaneous girlfriends so rarely do. Of course, the red-head was my ex from college, who'd flown up to visit. But I had no sense of timeline on which to affix memories of my past; everything existed in the same wobbly present tense. On wakeful nights alone, the floor quiet and dark, I would pad slowly around the recovery floor of the hospital, trying to find the lounge area with the mini fridge with the juice boxes (it kept moving). Some nights felt wakeful even when they weren’t—I’d never had lucid dreams before, but now I did, and a few of my most vivid, tactile early memories were actually dreams, as when I commenced my nightly juice-box search, wandered down a hallway onto an (imaginary) sky bridge over a (ditto) atrium space, looked down, and saw rows and rows of fatally ill kids in wheelchairs lined up in front of a stage, where ‘N Sync was getting ready to perform a Make-a-Wish-type benefit concert. Wouldn’t you know it, there was an empty chair smack in the middle of this sea of sickly children, so I went and sat down. Recall, this is 2001; ‘N Sync ruled the land with Justin Bieber-like ubiquity. I was 26 and white and male, which meant my gathered opinion of ‘N Sync was as a pop cultural atrocity, and in my pre-brain injury life I’d spoken of them only ironically, like referring to them as New Sync on the Block or whatever. But tonight was different. Tonight was about the children. These poor kids, dying before they got a chance to live—except for tonight, because ‘N Sync was here to give them the night of their lives. A night to take with them to heaven. When the show started, I found that I knew all the words to all the songs—all of them, not just “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me” but songs I’d heard perhaps once, by extra-accident—and so stood and began to sing along, full-throatedly, while miming the top-half choreography happening onstage. A few songs in, Justin Timberlake pointed to me and beckoned me to come up with the band. Now, whether Justin did this because my talent was overwhelmingly apparent or because the loud, jazz-handed 6’9” dude surrounded by kids with cancer was too painful to watch, perhaps we’ll never know. What we do know is he didn’t regret it. I took stage right, fell in with the choreography, and began harmonizing in all the right places. This earned a few I’m-impressed sidelong glances from Justin, and eventually an invitation to take a vocal solo, which I accepted, dancing my way to front-center stage. I went off, the tiny invalids went nuts, end of dream. I spent the next day with a) multiple ‘N Sync songs I’d virtually never paid attention to running in my head, and b) the conviction that the concert had really happened. It was exponentially more tactile, more real than any other recent memory, and I wouldn’t talk myself out of it for weeks. As I said, weird shit.

On 9/11/01, I’d been out of the hospital as long as I’d been in. Evenings at my parents’ place were regularly passed much as they’d been those last few weeks in the recovery ward: watching baseball. The Seattle Mariners were my friends, were familiar faces, and they behaved as good friends should, by winning. Like, all the time. Me and a plate of snacks would retire to the upstairs TV room, put the game on, and routinely watch the M’s put the contest away in the first few innings. This began a week or so into August, when the team was 80-30, for a .727 winning percentage, which, in baseball of all sports, simply doesn’t happen—maybe for a few weeks, but not for a whole season, and certainly not for the Mariners. In case you’re unfamiliar with the pro sports pathos in Seattle, here it is: all good things will end prematurely, and will be followed by a greater number of bad things. It’s that simple. All bright dots of winning will be attached to a long tail of losing. Ken Griffey Jr. will demand a trade in his prime. Randy Johnson, the Big Unit, will demand a trade shortly after. A-Rod will flee for Texas shortly after that. The NBA will have a lockout, and when it ends, Shawn Kemp, the most exciting dunker in the game, will show up fat and on coke. Kemp will be replaced by Vin Baker, who will be fat and alcoholic. Howard Shultz, aka Mr. Starbucks, aka Hometown Business Hero, will buy the Sonics. One five-year plan later, Howard Shultz, aka Mr. Starfucks, aka Judas with a Cappuccino, will sell the Sonics for $350 million to Oklahoma tycoons, who will move the team and take Kevin Durant with them. The 2001 Mariners will win 116 games. The 2002-2011 Mariners will redefine losing, will become the first team with a $100 million payroll to lose 100 games, will set the bar for all-time woeful offensive production—where “set the bar” means “put the bar on the ground, and nonetheless manage to trip on it.” That’s being a Seattle sports fan: every brief pleasure is followed by protracted pain.

The final critical piece of sports context is that I hate the New York Yankees. Why? Because fuck the Yankees, that’s why. Granted, we’re far away from New York, and far newer to baseball—it’s not like the Mariners traded Babe Ruth in his prime to the Yankees. But rest assured that if the Mariners had a) existed and b) had Babe Ruth on their roster, they would’ve traded Babe Ruth in his prime to the Yankees. The Seattle Mariners organization is more adept at rationalizing destructive decision-making than your most boozy family member and your most controlling family member put together, and has always been so. Out here, the Yankees are the most hated team in pro sports (although the Red Sox are doing their damnedest to catch up). Another significant factor in New York’s hatability is that Seattle plays in a division (the AL West) perennially lacking teams worth hating. Do you hate the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim? No you don’t. The Angels annoy you. But they’re too boring, too Disney to elicit actual sports hate, and so it is throughout the ranks of the AL West. The Yankees, meanwhile—and this bears repeating—are the fucking Yankees, and the summer of 2001 found them still riding a wave of successive World Series championships that made them roughly as welcome around the American League as Dr. Drew is in the Lohan household.

That said, in August and the first ten days of September 2001, I wasn’t worried about the Yankees, nor any other team. The Mariners were unbeatable in a series, and six times a week they provided a three-hour bright spot in my day. I loved them all, not just Ichiro and Boonie and Edgar and Buhner, but Paul Abbott and Aaron Sele and Dan Wilson and all the rest—they were all playing out of their minds, all playing their part in making the most improbable season ever happen to perhaps the most middling team in the history of America’s Pastime, and I felt deeply connected to them. A World Series championship felt inevitable, and man, when it got here, it would be overdue. Everybody felt this way. The rookie Ichiro was a wunderkind, his every at-bat a must-watch. He was so sharply different from any other player, which made him perfectly suited to be the face of the team that in a matter of months became the face of a city that prided itself on being different. Even in my Simple Jack-like state of mind, I understood—deeply—that the recovery from my traumatic brain injury was every bit as improbable as and a good bit more miraculous than the baseball season I was getting to witness. I’d fallen off my board and onto my head on a lonely road on southern Vashon Island, and subsequently God had reached down and said not yet. Aslan had licked my forehead, and by sheer grace here I was, dressing myself, laughing at jokes, improving by the day, none of which I was predicted by doctors to able to do. I knew in my bones that I’d continue to get better, just as I knew the M’s would keep winning. This was our time, theirs as much as mine.

Baseball ground to a halt on September eleventh, you’ll remember. Games were cancelled. When play resumed, fans sang along to a string of patriotic anthems to begin every game, and there was a wholly new sense injected into the proceedings, that playing and watching baseball was a way to be together, find strength in numbers. There was a pervasive fear that any large number of people in one location was a possible target, and so just attending a game was a way to proclaim defiance, that we were alive, that we would not be defeated.

When the Mariners lost to the Yankees in the 2001 playoffs, it felt right. It didn’t feel great, didn’t make me happy, but you could feel the loss coming as the series went on, and when the last out had been made, the words I said to myself were simply yes, good. New York needed it, and more than anything else I did in the weeks following 9/11, more than waiting for hours and hours to give blood, standing patiently in line with hundreds of other folks hungry for a way to be of practical use, losing to New York made me feel that I was being helpful. By being there to experience the losing, I was letting New Yorkers experience winning. How’s that for a rationale? That Mariners baseball season—something I had zero impact on—was somehow the most I had to give, and, once surrendered, the giving felt good, a proper sacrifice; a prized animal slaughtered at the altar. The killing stroke stung, sure, but even as the blood ran I felt the conviction that it was right.

I had plans for this piece. Was going to send around different versions, each tailored for a specific audience, like Grantland (smart & sports savvy), TheAwl (smart & skeptical), McSweeneys (smartypants), etc., and see what happened. I’ve sat down to write a first draft about ten times in the last six weeks, but the words yielded by those efforts look nothing like a draft of anything except maybe a grocery list. No—a crazy dude’s grocery list. Let’s say a crazy dude starts a list of things to get at the grocery store. But he soon swerves into the broader topic of material things acquire, and then to nonmaterial things he desires—states of mind to achieve, experiences to experience—and from there it’s a short leap into the arena of things to accomplish before death, and this goes on for pages and pages, these fat run-ons with adorable bullet points in front of them, until the end result is a high-minded bucket list that also happens to say things like almond milk and bananas. That’s what the “first draft” of my essay about 9/11 looks like. So, now it’s ~~Friday~~ Sunday (~~9/9~~ 9/11) ~~afternoon~~ night, rather retardedly too late for anything to come of this list of jumbled half-ideas, and you know what? The mental acuity that birthed this late baby is a chief characteristic of how I’ve changed post-TBI, how I haven’t managed to navigate life as I did before, how I steer the ship differently now. To be clear, there are other byproducts of my injury that are here to stay, that I just have to live with: I can’t smell. I sweat unholy amounts. I get headaches in waves. I struggle with addiction. I blow my fuse sometimes—all those are parts of me that didn’t use to exist, then one day they (or the promise of them) did. All got mention at some point of outpatient therapy. But the new trait that didn’t get brought up is also the one that’s caused the most bullshit—really it’s two traits, but it happens in combination, left jab right hook—and it took me a long time to identify. I’ve yet to find a succinct name for it, but here’s what happens: I overthink my plans directly on the heels of underthinking my responsibilities. I will naturally let shit slide—bills, even when I’ve got money to pay them; dishes, even when they keep me (read: my patient wife) from cooking; writing, even when I’ve got something good going—and then, instead of doubling back directly to fix the oversight, I’ll sit down and make a list of ways to change my life so as to prevent this type of thing from happening again. And when that’s done—hey, I’ve made a list! It looks good, too, really detailed in parts. Time for bed, and then in the morning nothing will be fixed, but I’ll have this list to ignore. That’s how the underdo/overplan combination works. On a daily scale, it prevents me from writing at the pace I want, as I’m forever forfeiting momentum. On a bigger-picture scale, it can be existentially discouraging, as it amounts to one of my faults being the way I assess my faults. Ten years later, I still catch myself wanting to go back, to have never been like this.

This weekend, the episode of This American Life, Ten Years In, was a follow-up to an episode done in the wake of 9/11—they caught up with people they’d interviewed ten years ago, asked them what’s changed, what’s the same. Lynn Simpson was in the first tower to get hit, on the 89th floor where the power and lights went off at impact, and the smoke started filling in immediately. On the episode in the tragedy’s wake, she talked about how she was no longer living in New York City, and mentioned how she still had the clothes shoes and socks and hair clip she was wearing on 9/11; she hadn’t cleaned them, couldn’t bring herself to, but neither could she bring herself to throw them away. They were tied up in a plastic bag and sat in the corner of the room. I just can’t quite let go of them. Now? They’re in the little bag, but it lives on the top shelf of her closet. She just recently sold her apartment in NYC, after years of renting it out—she didn’t want to sell it, because she thought the time would come when she’d want to move back. I fought selling that apartment. But you can’t go back? asked Ira. You can’t go back, said Lynn. One day, something can happen, and it can change you permanently. It’s very hard to admit that you’re not gonna be back to your old self, she said. You’ve changed. September 11th changed me. And no matter how much I try to convince myself into the fact that I’m gonna go back to it, I will get back, I will go back to the person I was, it’s not going to happen. And once I accepted that, it’s okay.

In the aftermath of my TBI, I had a hard time with emotional complexity—I didn’t have the ability to unpack my feelings, to sort through layers, and that made having a complicated emotional response fairly impossible. I could be sitting there failing to experience a moment of sadness (via conflict with a loved one, say) or joy (via my job as best man at Brian’s wedding, say), and honestly the best I could do was to recognize that the people around me had emotional things happening inside them that were a) important to them and b) not fully happening inside me. 9/11 marked the first time I felt my emotional response was on par with that of folks around me, because while paralyzing shock is intense, it’s also defined by its lack of complicated feeling; the emotion has been shocked out of you. The emotions eventually return, though when they do, they'll feel different. You’ll be different.

your life as an online student according to cheesy stock photos

2010-05-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

i encourage you--nay! urge you--to check out a piece i wrote for the blog i run at work that's being pimped today for traffic-getting reasons. the series was fun to write, and this mashup version is spiffed out.

your life as an online student according to cheesy stock photos | greatest hits

new fake band: the cream enthusiasts.

2010-01-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

dude just left a comment on my last (and not very recent) blog post:

Hello! Just blogspotting. Great blog! I bookmarkd it.

Happy blogging!

and i was like, thanks, jez cortazo! that's nice. i think i'll take a look at your travel & adventure blog. and....it's hard for me to find words to describe his words. here's an eg:

Surfers Paradise

With a name like Surfers Paradise, it alone stands to acumen that some of the best surfing in Australia can be begin here. In fact, some of the best surfing in the apple is amid on this aboriginal bank that not alone offers abundant cream but so abundant more. Surfers paradise is simple to get to if you are aerial into the Gold Bank area. You can biking to either The Gold Bank airport amid in Coolangatta or you can access in Brisbane and appoint a Gold Bank appoint car to drive down the bank till you ability Surfers Paradise.

Once you ability Surfers Paradise, you will apprehend that this abode is heaven on earth, not alone for the cream enthusiasts, but aswell for anyone who wishes to accept a acceptable time. This is an ideal abode for vacation, for all sorts of humans – couples on their honeymoon, families with accouchement or bodies gluttonous a weekend getaway. There are abundant break options to fit altered budgets and with a Gold Bank car rental, the breadth is castigation for the taking!

Surfing at Surfers Paradise is a continued lived attitude that allows both the adolescent and old to try out their new abilities or to brightness some of their best moves. If you are new to the action and are not absolutely acquainted of what needs to be done, you could either accept to insolate on the bank and watch the professionals do it or you could appoint an adviser to advise you the intricacies. Summer is aiguille division to cream in the area, but it's aswell the busiest. Often some of the best cream is begin in the off division amid the months of May to November if it may be a bit colder but the bank is beneath awash giving you added affairs to bolt that absolute wave.

tags:Abode, Acceptable Time, Accouchement, Acumen, Adolescent, Adviser, Affluence, Aggregation, Aswell, Breadth, Budgets, Castigation, Coolangatta, Enthusiasts, Gold Bank, Heaven On Earth, Surfboard, Surfers Paradise, Surfing In Australia, Weekend Getaway

koolaid is nice to have, too, but not required.

2009-12-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

having a cult is the same as having a picnic. pick a nice, out of the way spot. lay out some blankets. bring games--the best are ones with no boards or pieces. all the rules in your head. every item you spread out has a story. talk up your jam, your pickles. this is different, see, made with hands, with love, intimate, the way it was meant to be. ordained. poor people dying in their cafeterias, queued up with their empty plastic trays, the waiting dead. why waste your life. why creep along in your wagon with the engine idling, why have your skin bleached by pool water when there's a swimming hole just over there. these bisquits are my body--already buttered. this jam is my blood, preserved for you. take and eat. you can taste how right this is. most everybody can't, they're dulled to life. babylon is so boring that folks can't see they're in it. so they wait on hold to get their lashing, and soon enough scars cover all their senses...blind their tongues, amputate their eyes. not you, though. you're different, lucky--you're here with me now. we see the truth, feel the truth, eat the truth. we're having a picnic.

the voices in my head.

2009-08-13T09:29:00.000-07:00

so. mcsweeneys had a contest for new columnists, and i entered it with what can properly if unfortunately be called gusto. i didn't win. of the 812 entries they received, they had 33 finalists, whom they notified of their finalism. i was not one of these. am i bitter about being a not-winner? it would hardly make sense to be; i not-win every day. i find mild comfort in the fact that none of the 7 winners proposed a fiction column---titles range from conversations at a wartime cafe to bitchslap: a column about women and fighting. i heart mcsweeneys, and will continue to, even though reading the columns i lost to will, for a time, cause me to hatefully deconstruct their writing. just for a time, though; after all, my first definite memory of my bride-to-be laura was her beating me in a 7th-grade halloween costume contest, and i had pretty much stopped resenting her by the middle of 12th grade. and now we're getting married! so that's positive. another positive way to look at it is that mcsweeneys was just easing me in, so that when they reject my novel sometime next year, i'll be predejected and ready to go. here, then, is the first full installment of my aborted column. (in .doc form it's all formatted properly like a screenplay; here it's approximated and hopefully still readable.)

THE VOICES IN MY HEAD LAND AN INDIE FILM
THAT'S SET TO BLOW UP AT SUNDANCE.

Little Miss Conception

CU the wan face of POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT. The camera PULLS BACK to reveal his surroundings.

INT. MESSY LIVING ROOM – DAY

He presses end on his phone and walks into the kitchen, also messy. Only the kitchen table is clean.

In front of it squats ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA, pulling bottles of liquor from boxes on the floor.

POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT
Man, I need a drink. If it doesn’t relax me, I’ll have 10 or 12 more.

From one of the boxes, he quietly removes a bottle.

ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA (not looking up)
Don’t think of drinking ONE SINGLE FUCKING DROP from my special collection.

POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT
I kill myself all day trying to get our number changed so the creditors can’t find us. They had me on hold four hours. But I waited.

ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA
I’ve been waiting to throw a party like this for YEARS.

POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT
Then call waiting keeps buzzing, saying private caller. But I pick up the pattern. The manager puts me on hold, 30 seconds pass, and boom! there’s private caller.

Pointlessly Persistent pours a tall glass of bourbon.

POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT (cont’d)
The manager wanted me to play his little game. But guess what, bucko? I don’t play by the rules. So I took that call.

ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA
I will NOT let you fuck this up for me again.

POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT
But it wasn’t him, it was a woman. One of us is apparently the father of her baby.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY has appeared in the kitchen behind Pointlessly Persistent.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
If we could all just think about this.

POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT
Mom’s being deployed. Can’t take her daughter with her. Says she’s out of options.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
Fatherhood: daily sacrifice for the sake of family.

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY may or may not have been standing there all along.

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
Someone wants to give us a baby?

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY (cont’d)
I will work to identify every possible angle from which this can be evaluated.

POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT
After you’ve hypothesized a bunch of ways to approach the problem, I’ll fixate on the one that’s futile and insulting. First, someone tell me how we got a lady named Marsha impregnated.

ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA
Marsha … Marsha?

POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT
Oh SHIT. Spill it, dude.

ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA
Wow … we’re in California. That giant party with strobe lights hanging in the yard. Bathtub punch. Pumping music. Everyone sauced…

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
That was the best party since I pledged us to those frats back in college.

ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA (cont’d)
I didn’t drink that nasty punch, so I was the last man standing. This chick Marsha was hanging on me, and…

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
And?

ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA
What, okay? We all do things.

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
What we all do is fail to put things over our penis, you dick.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
Well, it happened. And now this is happening. We have to get ready; we have to conceptualize.

POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT
There’s no money to get on a plane and fly there. But we have the gas card. If we left now and drove nonstop, in shifts, there’s an attractively tiny chance we could make it before mommy ships out.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
Whoa there, Turbo! Slow down.

Suddenly, GAME FACE looms in the back door.

GAME FACE
I smell crunch time.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
There’s an old fable called The Gerbil & the Fox’s Stocking. How about I read it aloud? Tonight we’ll meditate on it as we fall asleep, and in the morning we’ll see how the meaning of the story is relevant to…

GAME FACE
Nothing you say affects me. It’s Time To Do This.

INT. MIDSIZE SPORTS UTILITY VEHICLE HYBRID – DAY

Game Face drives, wearing large headphones. Principled In Theory rides shotgun. Unacknowledged Gay Affinity is in the middle back seat, folded in a kind of upright fetal position between the other two voices, both stretched out sleeping. In his hands is a CD.

He leans stiffly forward, like he wants to be heard over the music. But there is no music.

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
It’s kind of nice with everyone else out of it, just you and me. On the road. Here, throw on this Bright Eyes record I brought along.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
I’m suddenly tired.

Principled In Theory puts his head back and closes his eyes.

EXT. HIGH PLAINS HIGHWAY – NIGHT

The midsize SUV hybrid flies along the road, silent save for the hiss of the tires.

INT. MIDSIZE SUV HYBRID – DAY

Game Face drives, headphones on, hands at the 10-and-2 position on the wheel.

Sound asleep in the back, Anal-Retentive In Just This One Area FARTS a slow sleepy-time fart.

Principled In Theory fakes being asleep, left eye shut but right eye open.

GAME FACE
Ventura fairgrounds, next exit.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
Are we … is that the ocean? I can’t believe I slept the whole way!

VENTURA COUNTY FAIR – DAY

AERIAL SHOT of the fairgrounds. The camera ZOOMS in on the Ferris wheel, which is not moving. At the top of the wheel, four voices are squeezed into a car. They stare straight ahead, silent, bored.

ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA
Well I’m red in the face. I CANNOT BELIEVE I claimed to prefer the beer garden over this shitstorm of action.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
We’re early. What do you want? We go to the beer garden, get all kinds of drunk in time to meet a baby? No. So rides it is.

Anal-Retentive In Just This One Area pulls a bottle of rye whisky from under his sweatshirt, takes a pull, and passes it across Principled In Theory to Pointlessly Persistent, who swigs and passes it to Game Face.

Game Face takes a pull, CRACKS his neck.

The car rocks and SHUDDERS as the Ferris wheel resumes motion.

GAME FACE
It’s game time.

The camera HOLDS as the car recedes from the frame.

The next car emerges into the frame. Unacknowledged Gay Affinity rides alone.

VENTURA COUNTY FAIR – NIGHT

OVERHEAD SHOT of a grid of glass bottles.

A rubber ring lands around the neck of one bottle. Another ring finds the neck of the bottle below it, and another below that.

A CARNIVAL WORKER sets an enormous purple squirrel on the counter.

Game Face SLAPS down tickets to play a fresh round.

CU Principled In Theory – the camera PULLS BACK to show him straddling the head of a polar bear, beer in hand, smoking.

Behind him stands Unacknowledged Gay Affinity. Cradled in his arm is a teddy bear wearing a bonnet and onesie.

Littered around them is a colony of stuffed prize animals, some posed in mating positions.

A YOUNG GIRL runs over and picks up a pink doggie. She hugs it. She approaches Principled in Theory, who bends down to hear what she has to say.

Principled in Theory nods and whispers to her with a smile. The Young Girl pulls a wad of bills from her pocket, counts off five dollars, hands it over. She runs off with the dog.

Principled in Theory pockets the cash and takes a drag off his cigarette.

Five phones RING at once.

ALL TOGETHER
Yeah.

ALAN ALDA
Is there a father in the house?

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
Perhaps. Who are you?

ALAN ALDA
I’m the father. Of the mother.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
Where is the mother?

ALAN ALDA
I was sent as emissary. There’s too much heat at the ring-a-bottle. Head south to the sani-tent.

Principled In Theory strides confidently forward and then stops cold.

Unacknowledged Gay Affinity steps up behind him.

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
Keep moving.

He puts both hands in Principled In Theory’s back and leans him into forward motion.

ALAN ALDA stands next to a porta-potty painted like a circus tent.

ALAN ALDA
Those fellas at the ring-a-bottle, they’re with you?

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
We live together.

ALAN ALDA
Unfortunate.

Alan Alda points over their shoulders.

REVERSE ANGLE SHOT of Anal-Retentive In Just This One Area, who pauses dry-humping the giant purple squirrel in order to swig more whisky.

ALAN ALDA (cont’d)
That right there is less future PTA, more future AA.

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
If you’re the grandfather … how come you don’t take her?

ALAN ALDA
I don't chew my cabbage twice.

Alan Alda could be smiling or maybe frowning.

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
We didn’t ask to have this baby, okay? But now that we’re here, it’s like I was born to have this baby.

ALAN ALDA
I’m not one to get my undies in a twist over a technicality, but there is no baby per se. Tanya’s five years old.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
Five!? That can’t be … no, no, can that be … it can.

ALAN ALDA
Can and is. Time flies when you’re charging your estranged daughter five dollars for a stuffed toy you don’t even want.

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
What the F! That was her!?

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
That looked bad. But if you’ll lend me your ear for as long as I want, I’ll rationalize it for you.

ALAN ALDA
I’m too old for this. I’m supposed to be taking a cruise, not custody of a child.

Unacknowledged Gay Affinity hurls the teddy bear baby at Alan Alda, STRIKING him in the crotch.

ALAN ALDA
Ow!

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
You’re putting us through this so you can take a cruise?

ALAN ALDA
A whole year long! Clear around the globe.

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY (yelling)
Hypocrite! None of these assholes want to be a dad! But I do! And now you’re going to reject me because of them when you’re no better – a freaking cruise!

The other voices materialize in the near background.

ALAN ALDA
My job is simple. I’m here to estimate –

Unacknowledged Gay Affinity runs and leaps onto Alan Alda like a stripper mounting the pole. They fall to the ground.

Unacknowledged Gay Affinity seizes the teddy bear baby and BEATS Alan Alda around the head and neck with it.

UNACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY (more yelling)
Selfish! Selfish!

The other voices CHEER him on.

But the beating continues. They come forward, each grab a limb, and pry him off Alan Alda. They POUND his back and LAUGH.

Arms around his shoulders, they escort him away.

Principled In Theory hesitates, then turns and trots back to Alan Alda.

He offers a hand and pulls Alan Alda to a sitting position.

ALAN ALDA
Where am I.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
At the fair about to go find your granddaughter and take her home. It’s the right thing to do. The negative environmental impact of cruise ships cannot be endorsed.

The camera PULLS BACK and BACK to an AERIAL SHOT of the fairgrounds, lights ablaze.

INT. MESSY LIVING ROOM – EVENING.

Four voices sit on the long couch, conversing.

POINTLESSLY PERSISTENT
…So maybe you’re not really gay?

SEMI-ACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
Oh I’m gay. I’m also outnumbered. Every day is another day of four-on-one…

GAME FACE
You cannot stop the dribble penetration.

SEMI-ACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
Sure! Let’s go with the sports analogy. I’m always on defense – I never get to touch the ball slash balls. But maybe now that you act like you accept me, I won’t have to spend so much time hiding out.

PRINCIPLED IN THEORY
Every voice shall be heard.

SEMI-ACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
I can redecorate – I can cook! I’ve always dreamed of being a chef…

Anal-Retentive In Just This One Area enters from the kitchen bearing two serving trays.

ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA
Gentlemen and lady-man, dinner be served.

SEMI-ACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
Yay! What’re we having?

ANAL-RETENTIVE IN JUST THIS ONE AREA
Courvoisier and corndogs.

SEMI-ACKNOWLEDGED GAY AFFINITY
You’re joking.

Game Face picks up the TV remote and turns up the volume. He bites into his corndog.

GAME FACE
Game’s on.

i'm mixing business with rage.

2009-07-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

all right / turn it up now.

goddammit baby you know i ain't lyin' to you i'm only gonna tell you one tiiiiimeahhhyeah.

2009-06-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

made the rounds a while back, but this isn't my first late-to-the-rodeo: the david lee roth soundboard.

it's so much fun i don't even know what to do with myself.

UPDATE: now i know what to do with myself! litter my workout mix with the mp3 versions.

one of those things where it's like, fuck, i almost had this idea a while back.

2009-06-09T16:05:00.000-07:00

but it's just splendidly done.

SHORT TAKES ON BOOKS THAT DON’T EXIST.

eg,

Workshop
by Nick Lowey
MFA students writing—and failing to write—form the subject of Lowey’s debut, a collection of linked stories that mines the liminal space between earnest frustration and the grinding tedium of endless failure. Other writers have trod this turf with less success, but Lowey displays an enviable judiciousness and a keen eye: a box of cheap wine is described as “a store-brand Lethe, a vermillion river of solace and forgetting.”

make shaking your baby guilt AND injury free.

2009-06-04T12:17:00.000-07:00

New BabySafe Ball Makes Shaking Your Infant Guilt And Injury Free

the gospel according to pattie laburger.

2009-06-03T14:45:00.000-07:00

Pattie LaBurger : a triple bacon cheeseburger with deep fried patties as buns.

staring at the swim team gets you killed by a gang of dancing ninja men who know how to twirl. spin around, ninja.

2009-06-02T13:27:00.000-07:00

[via dipshit]

dear fat kid : a paragraph from the bit i happen to be revising today.

2009-05-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

In the absence of another party to keep [Gail, ie Mother] near sense, her taut emotional state stays linear, while any line of reason becomes a waver—a scribble of thought that runs in frantic circles and off the side of the page. And she, I don’t think, is ever the wiser. Example (from voicemail #3):

“And if you don't want to call and at least just tell us that you are all right, well. There's nothing I can do about that. But it's painful. Here I am burning up with worry and you can't even pick up the phone. I know you have been unhappy here lately. But we are not the happiest either, you know, and you don’t see us deserting you. I'm so sad, Hal. All I want is to help you. And if you are off with your fat-friend somewhere, if that's all this is and you can't pick up the phone to call—I don't know but it will be very hard to forgive you. But I will, because forgiveness is important. Just like trust is important. And right now you have not shown that you really deserve our trust. What's the word I'm looking for? Not flaky, but close to that. Flighty! There. You have just flighted and flitted away, like a little bird. Like a sparrow. Do you remember, as a boy, when the sparrows would come every spring and build a nest up under the peak of the barn roof? And the little chicklings would hatch and you’d jump up and down and beg to go out and look at them. We'd go out day after day and nothing would happen, just Mommy coming and going with mouthfuls of worms for the family. But one day the day would come! We'd get to see those little baby sparrows fly for the very first time! And it was always so great to watch them teeter and totter through the air. So exciting. And then summer would be here, and we'd pack up our basket and go down to the harbor. We would eat, and you would walk along the drift logs and play with the other boys who were there on the summer days. I'd bring my knitting. Sometimes that one bigger older boy would come down there, and I knew you didn't really like him but he had a new bike that was big and cool and so you’d let him boss you around. What on earth was that boy's name? ... Clarence! Ooo-oh, I did not like that Clarence, with his pudgy face. But you'd play with him anyway, no matter what I thought, and I wouldn't show it but inside I'd get so frustrated with you for not seeing…”

This is just a sample, a finger-snack drawn at random from the voicemail platter I had set before me. I’m not really complaining, though I am confused; my policy of avoidance coping, hitherto unblemished, is becoming entirely counterproductive.

ron mexico finishes his sentence.

2009-05-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

funny thing, this morning. the espn.com sports ticker has the headline vick arrives home to finish rest of sentence, and usually the sports media makes a big hullabaloo about vick-related stuff. but here the article read simply,

"...and that's why i'm fucked, motherfuckers. fuck you."

freedarko works a hookup.

2009-05-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

this is neat: all the figures in this bit (save for the 2 that are related to adidas products) are elements from the freedarko book's periodic table of style.

also, derrick rose is nifty.

also: i wrote the company newsletter entry about our new softball team.

2009-05-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

The Seattle RAT (Radio, Advertising & Television) Softball League started the 2009 season with one expansion team, the EDDY LeadDawgs. Contrary to expectations set by all notable Seattle sports trends [failure, extinction, expensive failure, ungodly failure], the LeadDawgs rolled onto the opening day field with bats blazing, trouncing their opponent 21-4 … and needing just 4 ½ innings to so! In the context of the Seattle sports scene, the LeadDawgs are Episode IV: A New Hope. Get on the bandwagon now before it gets crowed.

dear fat kid, random paragraph - our narrator hiding in a closet after breaking an antique at a fancy party.

2009-05-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

Important stuff is always being overheard by people hiding in closets. Also, critical things are regularly being seen from inside closets. I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. Book and movie characters reliably witness wives cheating, powerful fathers having their drink poisoned, and they do this while hiding in the closet with the door open just a crack. Know what you can see through a crack in the closet door? A thin slice of world courtesy of a viewing angle 10 degrees off the wall to your right. You can see down the dim hall and out the open doorway of the library, the courtyard palms backlit by the glowing windows on the far side. You can’t see anything that’s happening in the main part of the library. It’s very frustrating. I couldn’t see who was in the library any better than I could back through the coats and find myself in a snowy world of fauns and witches, because that’s another fallacy: you jump in a closet or wardrobe in a seldom-used room well off the main part of the house, and it’s chock-full of old furs and greatcoats for you to disappear into? No it’s not. What it’s full of is about a million empty triangles of wire and wood hanging a millimeter apart, waiting for you to twitch against them and cause a bunch of noise, such that you crouch down uncomfortably on your haunches, try to spy the action happening nowhere near your crack, nothing is happening, you’re not even doing a good job listening to what’s being said because you’re so uncomfortable crouching there with your knees together, and you end up holding your breath while doing a such an easy-now job of shifting to a sitting position that, were you being filmed, it’d be the boringest slow-motion shot on record—you’re conscious of this even as it’s happening, the soundtrack in your head an army of cellos with bows dragged across the strings in noteless misery—and by the time your butt’s on the floor there are multiple voices talking at once. One of these, the raised-in-anger one, belongs to Perry Ledhard, but who knows about the others. Hell, though, this is okay, this is better. Even though the door crack is behind your head now, you can at least listen comfortably. Then from the doorway of the library—i.e. behind you—new voices speak, male and female. You’re fucking kidding me. You recognize the calm male voice from earlier but can’t put a face to it; you were quasi-introduced to a lot of people tonight.

the hard friend in your pants will look up into the sky.

2009-05-08T09:32:00.000-07:00

found this via kottke, but it's too good for me to hide under a bushel. no! i'm gonna let it pants.

to wit: a big equipment in your pants brings big fruits for hot chicks to pick up.

the new lincoln-douglas.

2009-05-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

today found me having a bold and unnecessary political tit-a-tit with a dude i don't know in the comments section of a fb video my friend sullivan posted from back when she worked on the obama campaign. was it pointless? yes. but it made me feel good inside, like, for several years there i lost the ability to picture myself substantively agreeing with those in power, and likewise i couldn't imagine republicanites whining about how no one listens to them; but now here we are, and i tell ya it's satisfying to hear a well-spoken republican unable to construct a noncircular argument.

Dominic J. Whitham

Thank God. We're now on the road to socialism. Thanks guys. Way to go. After our government owns the banks, GM, and Chrysler, and takes more and more of our money by taxing us to death, won't you be happier? Please...if you're intelligent...attend and support as many TEA parties as you can. And, please, if we're still able to Vote in 2012, elect a President that doesn't have a far leftist-progressive agenda.

Mark Huntsman

are you...your taxes are going up, mr whitman? mine just went down last month. please be careful; i'm worried you're going to choke on your rhetoric.

Dominic J. Whitham

When there's over 9 trillion dollars in debt, someone is going to have to pay for it plus interest! Our kids will still be paying off this debt 20 years from now. So yes, someone will have to pay for it. I'm sure that someone will include myself and other entrepreneurs who are really the backbone of our economy. The more that we're taxed, the less we have to spend. That's just simple economics. If you make a 100k a year, and 35k has to go to pay taxes to the Fed, that's a net of only 65k.

As a small business owner, factor in having to pay for family health insurance at $650 / month, and other overhead expensives, and you can quickly see that ANY tax increase will kill the business. I've known for a long time that when they talk about taxes, it's not just about the Fed tax, it's about State, County, and Local taxes as well. Not to mention license plate fees, city stickers, toll roads, and all the taxes we pay for things like gasoline, electricity, and even telephone taxes.

Dominic J. Whitham

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against paying taxes for a strong defense, infrastructure, and some services. However, I am against wasteful spending in congress of our hard earned tax dollars. And at this point, our economy is so fragile, I doubt that many Americans can absorb an increase in their taxes without creating a financial burden that they simply cannot afford. At some point, a small businessman (such as myself) would have to consider whether it's better to just close up shop and get a 45k / year job instead.

Mark Huntsman

that's all well said. i just don't get why you'd want to wreck your argument by tying it to "elect a President that doesn't have a far leftist-progressive agenda"? last dude added $4.97 trillion to our debt, which is, you know, about half. not counting billions of dubloons pilfered from the social security surplus (every president has done that since the surplus was implemented under reagan, but still, it's money we're obligated to pay ourselves later).

Dominic J. Whitham

I'd have to say that as a republican, I was very disappointed by some Bush policies. First and foremost was immigration and not closing the border. 2nd was spending. Of course, wars cost a lot of money. I won't debate whether we needed to go to war in Iraq, but Bush did take the fight to the terrorists and protected us against another attack for 7 years. I'm sure that will be his lasting legacy. However, that said, the whole "blame Bush for everything" is getting very old and tired. And soon, that won't wash anymore, even with Obama supporters. At some point, Mr. Obama will be held accountable for his failures, just as other President's have been held accountable for theirs. Also, let's not forget that it was a Democratic-controlled congress for the last 2 years of his Presidency that helped spend all that money.

Dominic J. Whitham

But here's the real point. If you disagree with the previous administration's spending policies, then you must disagree EVEN MORE with the current President's (and Congress') policies. Two wrongs don't make a right. This out of control spending frenzy can only lead to the downfall of our economy. If you wanted to really stimulate the economy, then take that 800 billion dollars and cut a check to every American citizen! Roughly that's $4,000 per person or probably $16,000 per household. That surely beats spending all that money on pet pork projects. Every American family balances their own budget. Shouldn't we expect Congress to do the same? Remember, THEY work for US, it's not the other way around.

Mark Huntsman

that's some nice footwork. you're not disillusioned with your party? 5 trillion dollars in 8yrs. half. your party cut taxes, increased spending. i get that the drum you like to beat is taxes. i see what you dislike but see nothing to like.

Dominic J. Whitham

It's not footwork, it's the truth. No, I'm not "disillusioned" with the Republican party...not at all. I know that most liberals want to believe that most conservatives are disillusioned by their party, but quite to the contrary, we are more dedicated and supportive of the party than ever before. It's not just about taxes...believe me, there are many, many issues that we conservatives will be bringing to the forefront before the next election. And it's not just the snare drum that we'll be hitting, it's the double-kick bass, symbols, and toms, all in unison.

Mark Huntsman
you may well be more dedicated, but there's less of you.

that's a lot of percussion parts to hit in unison. regardless, with a fully outfitted drumset of lower taxes for the top and pricy wars and the sanctity of marriage and trimmed-down social services and deregulated markets, you and the r's will be in good shape. oh, wait.

Dominic J. Whitham

It's a difficult situation. The media bias and political correctness have engrained in many minds across this country that anyone who attempts to have a thoughtful debate on politics, whether at work, at a bar, or at the dinner table, is looked upon with scorn and contempt. Recently, while trying to have a political debate with an acquaintance in a quite informal setting (at a bar), his final statement to me was to call me a racist because I didn't like Obama. Yes, I was actually called a racist just because I spout conservative values. I welcome any open discussion on politics. However, what I see many times is that many liberals have closed their minds. They simply refuse to listen to other points of view. And when confronted with a common sense approach to the issues, they often use the old tactic of diversion. They point to Bush. They change the subject. They simply refuse to LISTEN.

Mark Huntsman

i'm not changing the subject; if anything i'm staying the subject. when you make the case that taxes are too high and my response is to say that your guy doubled our debt, that's not diversion, dude, that's me inquiring how you maintain support for a party that put us on an untenable track, got beat, and has yet to offer a mildly new idea about how to go forward. if r's need to sulk a while longer and try to figure things out, fine; but if you insist on snarling while licking your wounds you'll only bite yourself in the foot.

Dominic J. Whitham

I believe that America is good and is a symbol of hope and freedom in a troubled world.

I believe that the American Family is the backbone of our nation.

I believe in having a strong national defense.

I believe that if you break the law, you pay the price. The term "illegal" means illegal. Just because it has the world "alien" after it, doesn't mean that they're not here ILLEGALLY. I believe in a good education for our American citizens--those who came here legally.

I believe in a secure border for the protection of our citizens. There's nothing wrong with LEGAL immigration, to be sure, and unless you're native american, we are all here as a result of generations of LEGAL immigrants to this country.

I believe that the government works for me. They answer to me, I don't answer to them.

Dominic J. Whitham Thank you, Mark, for proving my point. The subject isn't JUST taxes. The subject is many issues. Now, you hope to drag me into your continued discussion on taxes and debt. But again, two wrongs don't make a right. If Bush did these things (please factor into your calculations that Bush had 9/11 to deal with and fighting a war on two fronts), and you didn't like that, then how could you like the fact that your guy along with the Democratic congress has passed the largest spending bill ever, as well as the largest budget?

Change for the sake of change is not good enough. Stop lying to yourself that we have no new ideas. What's wrong with the principals that our country was founded on? It's worked for over 200 years. Now the progressives want to come in and destroy everything we've worked, fought, and died for in this country.

Dominic J. Whitham

Understand that I don't think along party lines. I don't vote for someone or something just because they're in my party. My convictions, beliefs, and principles guide my rational when I vote. However, that said, there is NOTHING in the progressive democratic party that I believe in. So, let's be honest, say there's an issue in the democratic party that YOU don't agree with. Would you still vote that way, anyway? Would you still vote for THAT democrat even if you didn't agree with their stance on a certain issue?

Let's get one thing straight here...the democratic party has given in to the far left wing agenda, and most certainly is moving towards a 100% government controlled society. The repulican party is currently being accused of "moving too far to the right". How rediculous! We're just holding on to our convictions whilst the left-wing media tries to destroy the party by convincing America that it no longer represents us. That is a lie.

Mark Huntsman

i believe it's been a long time since i constructed i statements, and it sounds almost fun.

i remember the last time i did it, shortly afer college, when i wanted to pump myself up enough to break up with my girlfriend.

i was kind of a pansy. self-esteem was an issue.

i recall that once we got into the conversation, they didn't help at all, and because i was unwilling to drop the one that would have settled the matter

--i don't love you anymore--

i got bound up in this drawn-out disintegration process that only gradually made me despise myself enough to end it and move away.

i'd say you don't have to be like the 23yo me. your party mocks the possibility of empathy in government; you remain with it even as it compassionlessly kills your credibility.

find a new girlfriend.

Dominic J. Whitham

Ahhh...personal attacks. Confirmation that the liberal debator has been beat. Thank you. Find a new girlfriend? I've been happily MARRIED for 16 years.

'cos sheep are benign and on the young we will benign.

2009-05-06T11:21:00.000-07:00

last week laura and danielle and i went to see the live episode of this american life that got beamed into theaters across the country. one of the visual shorts was a bit by chris ware starring quimby the mouse...

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

..let my cameron gooo-o...

2009-04-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

i have metafilter bookmarked but often find that "meta" = "wading through a shitpile of nonsense." which, you know, is what i have a blog for in the first place. but kottke.org referenced this, and it's so good.

My favorite thought-piece about Ferris Bueller is the "Fight Club" theory, in which Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron's imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves.

One day while he's lying sick in bed, Cameron lets "Ferris" steal his father's car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the "three" characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day -- Cameron is alone, just imagining it all.

It isn't until he destroys the front of the car in a fugue state does he finally get a grip and decide to confront his father, after which he imagines a final, impossible escape for Ferris and a storybook happy ending for Sloane ("He's gonna marry me!"), the girl that Cameron knows he can never have.

now listen to cameron arguing with himself and then invite me over for a weekend viewing. i'll wear my cameron caduceus shirt.

i'm new.

2009-04-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

a freaking gem sent to me by coworker karl: This guy takes sample sound & video from youtube and splices them together to make new music. He has a collection of 7 or 8 that he’s done, all really entertaining, that I thought I would share with ya’ll to get those creative juices flowing. all things are connected.

irony.

2009-04-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

[here's a paper i wrote almost exactly 3ya for grad school; last evening, drinking beer in the fading sun with dalton and hughes, the cajoned genius of colbert's white house press dinner came up, and i may have said i once had something to say about it. post-beer, i'm like...eh. but here.]

of yogurts and statesmen.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Stephen Colbert during his monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner, “I believe it’s yogurt. But I refuse to believe it’s not butter. Most of all, I believe in this president.” Juxtaposition has a lot of power, but it’s inert—it’s display power. The meaning is arrayed on the shelf in front of you, sometimes beautifully, but you’re who has to decid you need it and put it in your cart.. But the presidency was not at a low point, he continued. “I believe it is just a lull before a comeback. I mean, it’s like the movie Rocky.” Colbert looked at President Bush, seated to his right up at the podium, then out at the room full of stiff-faced media reporters who looked, as a whole, like a gathering cloud, a dark, not-laughing cloud. “All right,” continued Colbert. “The president in this case is Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed is—everything else in the world. It’s the tenth round. He’s bloodied. His corner man, Mick, who in this case I guess would be the vice president, he’s yelling, ‘Cut me, Dick, cut me!’ and every time he falls everyone says, ‘Stay down! Stay down!’ Does he stay down? No. Like Rocky, he gets back up, and in the end he—actually, he loses in the first movie.” The auditorium was urgently quiet, like the opening moments of a retirees’ Bingo game. “Okay. Doesn’t matter. The point is it is the heart-warming story of a man who was repeatedly punched in the face.” I sat in front of my TV laughing, and as the cameras panned over the stony faces, I stood up, did a little dance, and sat back down. Whether the president and the body of reporters were unable to see the irony or they refused to see it, the net effect was the same: Colbert’s true meaning was lost to them. (With two notable exceptions: Judge Antonin Scalia laughed uproariously when Colbert came after him, leading me to wonder if a lifetime appointment doesn’t necessarily deepen one’s affection for irony; and the face of Laura Bush, which, behind a very fine veneer of mild disdain, was positively hateful.) What’s interesting is how the collective reaction—nonplussed, antsy, aloof—was key to my own enjoyment of the moment. It’s like my seeing that the audience didn’t get Colbert’s speech was the point of Colbert’s speech.

internal motion.

In his classic A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H.W. Fowler offers this definition: Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware, both of that ‘more’ and of the outsider’s incomprehension. This definition is sharp as a knife and broad as hell, at the same time, for it makes stipulations about both the broadcast end and the reception end of the form. We have the term “ironic intent” to remark that the success of an irony depends entirely on how it is received; the audience could be either unable or unwilling to take the two levels of meaning, and without that dual reception, it’s not irony. It might still be deft, or sarcastic or waggish, but it’s not ironic. At the other end, the broadcast end, irony has motion right out of the gate—it postulates. So right away we’re in grammatically paradoxical territory, because irony is a noun yet it has a verb’s motion. It thinks. Perceiving that underlying sense of motion is vital, literally, for if irony as a form has motion, then it has life. It has what, some years ago, philosophers called “intentionality,” which refers to the state of being aware of the contents of your own mind. Since I am not a behaviorist, I’ll quote one: Intentionality can be conceived of as a hierarchically organized series of belief-states. In this scheme of things, computers are zero-order intentional entities: they are not aware of the contents of their ‘minds’… Having a belief about someone else’s beliefs (or intentions) constitutes a second order of intentionality … Jane believes that Sally thinks her ball is under the cushion. Jane has two belief states in mind (her own and Sally’s). (from The Human Story, Robin Dunbar) Irony, then, involves a third order of intentionality: Stephen postulates that Mark will perceive that George does not understand. So irony has intent (at least in art. The modern human condition is itself meta-ironic, which opens the door for Fowler’s definition as an argument for God; but that’s a paper for another class) and this intent is complex, for it anticipates the reaction of a second party and the subsequent reaction of a third.

almost like democracy.

More than this, though, it’s the last part of Fowler’s definition that understands how everyone’s so good at recognizing irony yet bad at defining it. The two things it postulates—that one party shall hear and shall not understand while the other gets both that “more” and the outsider’s incomprehension—depend on one party’s immediate-and-no-further reception and on the other’s willingness to unpack things—to perceive rather than just receive. That irony requires layers of audience is how I’m able to know it; for when I look over and see the unfortunate first audience, I recognize that I’ve the opportunity to be a member of the lucky second group, even before I’ve begun to unpack the layers of meaning. So, then: irony involves my receiving, understanding, and making a value judgment on it. But I have to do less than that for it to feel ironic to me, because a) seeing that someone else doesn’t get it is always easier than getting it for myself, and b) once I’ve seen that another person doesn’t understand, it’s tempting to stop right there, because already I feel smarter than somebody else. I’m in the club.

Think of middle school for five seconds. If you have a smile on your face, it’s because you’re thinking of how you’re not there now. Five seconds is all it takes to remember that all you need to feel you belong to a group is evidence of someone who doesn’t. The same goes for war—all Roosevelt and Stalin needed to get them to hang out was that dick Hitler. And the same goes for brand identity—in his essay E Unam Pluribus, David Foster Wallace recalls a commercial featuring a guy who cleverly sells Pepsi to an impulsive crowd to illustrate the ubiquity of irony in TV commercials: It creates in me the sense that all these people don’t get it, but I do. All I have to get is that someone else doesn’t, and I’m connected. I’m in the club. Like middle school, when social psychology first begins to spread its many-feathered wings, the first level of ironic perception hinges on understanding nothing more complex than that someone else does not understand. However, like college, a nuanced perception of irony may require some flat-out work to reach, but once there you can hang out with your study group and tell stories about the days when you were friends with Stalin and Pepsi.

your neighbor as yourself.

I have a local friend at the local pub. (By which I mean that, at the pub just down the street from my house, there is a 30something dude who is reliably seated at one particular corner of the bar, and that he often calls me over to chat and catch up about things that are, to the untrained ear, not at all different from the things about which we have recently caught up.) Last week I sat down to talk and have a beer with him and his girlfriend. Conversation went something like this. “I tell you man, the acid Leo sold me yesterday was almost as wild as that gnarly ecstasy I was rolling on last time I saw you.” A pause. “But it was last weekend that was the real trip—I scored an enormous stash of mushrooms, they cost a lot but I got a discount ‘cos I bought a bunch.” As he continued in this vein, I raised my eyebrows and looked down the bar at the girlfriend, who I knew to be a regular drinker but one who categorically refused to use drugs. She stared off at the neon and nodded in that absent, you’ll-know-I’ve-heard-something-new-when-I-stop-nodding kind of way. The other choice topic that night was my friend’s work as a sort of rogue auto mechanic. His work had been spotty, but recently he’d had a vision—he spoke excitedly of getting his business license and building a clientele, were it not for the prohibitively expensive start-up costs. As he continued to talk about his dreams of a business and his inability to get the money together, he became increasingly frustrated by what he felt was the catch-22 of the situation. This was not self-wallowing despondency; he was legitimately unable to see how he could move forward. I’d been a willing ear for half an hour at this point, and did not expect to play any other role, so when he asked what I thought I was almost surprised. So I said what came to mind. “It sounds like the drugs are really working out for you.” He looked at me with a blank sort of disconnect, though past him I caught the face of his girl: She flashed a little half-smile at me, and she winked. I cocked an eyebrow in return and, feeling I had accomplished some small thing, I wished them well and left for home.

It’s interesting how, in the literary world, the grandest, most full-body irony inspires in its readers a sense of belonging not so dissimilar from that produced by the middle-school, Pepsi-Generation ironies which David Foster Wallace so articulately cautions against. Oedipus Rex is not a work I first encountered and personally aligned myself with—as I did with To Kill a Mockingbird or The Catcher in the Rye or The Breakfast Club—yet it holds in it something so profound and human that it nonetheless became a meaningful reference point for me when I read it at age 15 and remains so now at 30. It’s a means both of personally understanding and of talking about hubris and frailty as pitfalls we all must cross over—it doesn’t offer answers, but of course it doesn’t, it’s a tragedy, and tragedies can’t provide answers because nobody wants to see a play called 7 Ways to Win Friends and Still Have Life Run Incestuously, Murderously Off the Track. What Oedipus Rex is is a framework, for individual understanding, yes, but also for connecting, for discussing with you what I’ve just seen or read and us feeling closer as a result. And, Oedipus Rex is an irony.

Fiction has the luxury of imaginary characters that can abandon their imaginary infants and sleep with imaginary mothers. An author can aspire that his audience will perceive an irony and take something good or profound from it, but even a Faulkner-sized ego needn’t concern itself with the future well being of characters it created. When my local bar friend had asked me for my take on his predicament, he’d not been interested in the power-point of my opinion. I’d had only about a sentence to work with; I looked at him, his girlfriend, then him again, and what presented itself was an irony. In retrospect I’m almost proud of it—it was perhaps the best thing I could’ve said. Fowler’s definition is dead-on but, too, it leaves out that there’s a personal motivation behind the creation of any given irony. Even with a teensy, in-the-moment one like in my conversation at the bar, there’s a fourth order of intentionality that cycles back to the irony’s creator: Mark hopes that Girlfriend will feel less alone in her perception that Local Friend does not understand. Likewise, Stephen hoped that Mark would be comforted by evidence that he’s not alone in perceiving that George does not understand. Of course, an ironist’s aspirations for the sum effect could be negative instead of positive, but either way there is a hope there, and that intentionality drives the creation of any irony. Without that fourth order of connective intent, the other three drift apart somewhat, and we end up not sure that the creator’s true meaning is different from the literal. Which, in Colbert’s case, would consign him to the unenviable task of “giv[ing] people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.”

I'M VERY HAPPY TO BE HERE.

2009-04-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

and, since we're here, please give it up for my band sexual chocolate. SEXUAL CHOCOLATE!!

be on the lookout for an eastern european male with bad teeth who may have access to an ape.

2009-04-17T15:07:00.000-07:00

i'm just sayin'.

one man chose to question his god.

2009-04-17T14:57:00.001-07:00

i'd love to touch your heart like a waft of fragrance.

2009-04-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

a journal used for prep notes while teaching in taipei. c. 1997.

dear fat kid - random paragraph.

2009-04-14T15:22:00.000-07:00

Never before has such a laid back dude made me so impatient. I’m laid back, relatively, so in that sense it’s surprising that Patois was oil to my water, straightaway. But my modest slackerdom was crushed under his inertia, and I found myself transformed into my own ex-girlfriend—any one of them, doesn’t matter, as long as its near the end of our relationship: she’s always tense, her affection for me all but extinct—even when she intends to coo something sweet she sounds like a rooster stretching—meanwhile I’m militantly laid back about everything, which is to say detached, because it’s not like I can’t see her fun and interesting parts going up the boarding plank in a huff, leaving behind only the stepsisters Snippiness and Distress, making a scene big enough that I’d try to woo her fun parts back to shore, I really would, if I weren’t so busy chilling. I don’t fucking care. That’s where Patois was when he came over today. He was Hal in Relationship He’s Too Chill and/or Lazy and/or Terrified to End, and he played the part with aplomb. The opposite lead starred me as Fed Up Bitchy Girlfriend Hal’s Almost Done Alienating, and I went all Stanislavsky on that shit, really giving myself permission to become FUBGHADA. While I can’t say how my performance played from the other side of the stage, I can tell you that articulating negative emotion to a dude so inexorably relaxed felt exactly as satisfying as yelling at a tectonic plate for failing to shift.

pounding out the veal.

2009-04-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

dalton and i were discussing strangers with candy, and why it's awesome. for me amy sedaris' delivery is inseparable from what makes the show psychotically brilliant ... and laura does her jerri blank voice perfectly, which is a great treat for me. maybe her favorite blank line to quote is:

Jerri Blank: All you need is some TLC and some vitamin P. What I'm trying to say, Paul, is I find you sexually attractive.

Paul Cotton: Jerri, everyone in school says ...

Jerri Blank: I like the pole and the hole, and right now, I'm as moist as a snack cake down there. So, why don't you come to my crib after school and I'll make your pinky aaall stinky.

also:

Jerri Blank: Shazam. Look. Drake Rogers. Mmm, he makes me all puffy down there. I'd love to tame his blue vein swayback throbber.

Tammi Littlenut: What do you mean, Jerri?

Jerri Blank: Take him backstage behind the meat curtain, know what I mean? I'm talkin' about pounding out the veal.

Tammi Littlenut: Are you thinking about having sex already?

Jerri Blank: Does a pimp carry a razor?

Tammi Littlenut: I don't know...

Jerri Blank: Trust me, they all do.

this neded mor ball kciking.

2009-04-07T15:32:00.000-07:00

I found the journey of the protagonist both humorous and enlightening. Just kidding.

an immersive, richly detailed world where players shoot people in the face with guns.

2009-04-07T14:59:00.000-07:00

Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face

guess which one i fucking wrote.

2009-04-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

ready? a quiz! a matching quiz. and, since i'm a fan of measuring everything as either total success or abject failure, today's quiz is one question long.

it's a pattern-matching task: read 2 articles, both of which use the concept and career research i did, one of which i spent a while writing, followed by TWO WEEKs of edits with some dude--who, well, no ill will or anything, but if he were to get punched in the neck, hard, i'd feel a pleasant karmic chill run down mine--and he sent me drastic, whole-sections-deleted edits, and the next round cleverly got around commenting on my revisions by tearing up his ealier edits again, sans any of my new stuff. [because of said editing process, during which a lot of funny things got thrown out and i was obligated to replace them with tripe, the article of mine in this entry is long, a sort of greatest hits]

the other one was written by said dude's dudes after they decided to go in another direction. [for my thoughts on another direction, see vicious square]

Q: did huntsmanic write

a)

click to read

or b)
You're at a turning point in your life. You are:

A. A college graduate. Hanging out, waiting for that fabulous career you're relatively sure you'll know when you see it, maybe.

Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. I think, I think you're the most attractive of all my parents' friends. I mean that.

B. In college. Which you think you'll finish … eventually.

My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.

C. Not at all sure you’re cut out for traditional college, but know you need to go, and graduate, in order to get an even semi-fabulous career.

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold bought … or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.

In an ideal world, you have your eye on that fabulous career job before you get started. And, hey, maybe you do—if so, good for you! How nice that must be for you, to have everything worked out so well, right from the freaking start. Have fun with your perfect life. The rest of us will be here, scoping the scene.

Oy, the rest of us: we who take some time to figure out the career game. This article is for us.

Below is a list of the 11 highest-paying jobs available out of college, complete with the average salary for each, as well as the average salaries for specializations.

But every career has inherent risks. So, where relevant, we’ve added real-world examples detailing the risks and rewards with a given line of work.

11. High school teacher
What you can expect to make: $43,000
from $42,000 (Math teacher) to $52,000 (Spanish teacher)

If you’re considering teaching as your career, here’s the important thing to remember: becoming a teacher doesn’t mean you become your old teachers—it doesn’t have to mean you become someone who is

blinded by his own fanciness

Oh Captain, my Captain.

or a sadistic type with a super-creepy smile who hates everything that Judd Nelson stands for

Don’t mess with the bull, young man. You’ll get the horns.

or a dude who's so boring that you become a whole country's ultimate idea of boring, for a long time, possibly forever.

Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?

10. Nurse
What you can expect to make: $47,000
from $39,000 (perioperative nurse) to $64,000 (nurse trainer)

Death is one of life’s two certainties. Illness, so often preceding death the way it does, could be called a life near-certainty. Why so maudlin? Well, people are being born, dying, and otherwise every day.
Nursing is a rewarding career, with great opportunity for advancement. Just remember, it’s best not to put a sociopath in charge of the mentally ill.

If Mr. McMurphy doesn't want to take his medication orally, I'm sure we can arrange that he can have it some other way. But I don't think that he would like it.

9. Web designer
What you can expect to make: $58,000
from $40,000 (graphic web designer) to $88,000 (flash web designer)

Back in the day, the internets was full of crowded pages with information crammed in the borders and every other word pointlessly hyperlinked somewhere. This was not fishing without a net; this was someone handing you a big twist of tangled net and saying, here, do something. You don’t even like fishing.

Things have changed. The world of web design offers a lot of room to move—you can be a company man, or you can be a successful freelancer, or an entrepreneur.

If you choose this third option and set out to create a sweet money-making website with your stoner friends, you need to

A) make sure your idea’s not being done somewhere else,
B) try not to get women you just met pregnant, and
C) be aware that your stoner friends are, in fact, stoners, and sooner or later you’ll have to give them up and go it alone.

It is, like, the best medicine. 'Cause it fixes everything. Jonah broke his elbow once. We just ... got high and ... it still clicks but, I mean, he's OK.

8. Pharmaceutical representative
What you can expect to make: $59,000
from $55,000 (pharmaceutical sales representative) to $73,000 (pharmaceutical specialty sales representative)

True or False: We're going to put some precocious, pointless Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas-type of reference here, a warning, telling you something like

WARNING! Do not go into the accessible and lucrative field of pharmaceutical representative if all you want to do is fill your car with drugs and drive around with your friend Benicio del Toro.

Well, guess what: FALSE.

Because we’re not here to dance around with “warnings.” You need to be told, straight up: DO NOT DO THAT OR YOU WILL REGRET IT FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE WHICH MIGHT SUCK.

These snozzberries taste like snozzberries.

7. Financial analyst
What you can expect to make: $66,000
from $57,000 (financial operations analyst) to $97,000 (strategic financial analyst)

6. Internet marketer
What you can expect to make: $67,000
from $43,000 (internet marketing specialist) to $124,000 (internet marketing sales executive)

It's in the computer, everything! … It’s like I’m not even me anymore.

The Net is the #2 most-dated movie of the past 15 years, according to ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons, who bumped Sandra Bullock’s tension-free thriller from the top spot because American Pie has surpassed it:

A group of high school seniors desperately trying to lose their virginity before they graduate? Really? For that movie to make sense in 2008, they'd have to remake that plot with eighth graders and hire Miley Cyrus for the Shannon Elizabeth part.

Today, some internet marketers get to push quality stuff. Still, a lot of them are dandies who won't be exposed until after they get punched in the neck and the dr. avoids performing surgery by discovering their adam's apple didn't get crushed because they don't have one.

5. Network systems administrator
What you can expect to make: $69,000
from $62,000 (network systems engineer) to $99,000 (network systems administrator)

4. Engineer
What you can expect to make: $72,000
from $69,000 (engineering geologist) to $67,000 (electrical engineer) to $123,000 (VP of engineering)

Were would we be today, as a society, if we didn’t have engineers to design and build things?

Right, exactly: behind a horse, with only a harness and a poop bag to separate you and it. All of us would be. And we’d be terrible at living this way, we’d be fakers, hardly better than Woody Harrelson pretending to be a one-handed alcoholic bowler pretending to be Amish.

I'm unable to have children. Nasty cheese-grating accident as a boy.

3. Actuary
What you can expect to make: $79,000
from $65,000 (enrolled actuary) to $93,000 (life actuary)

Being a successful actuary comes down to successfully managing risk. At the moment, you might not be in a rush to become the brains behind an institution’s financial safeguards; on the other hand, there are … openings in the field, let’s say. If you’re a natural innovator with a mind that thinks in probabilities, the door’s wide open for you to step in.

11:15, restate my assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.

2. Software developer
What you can expect to make: $84,000
from $52,000 (internet software engineer) to $93,000 (software engineer/developer)

In the various corners of the software world, there’s lucrative work to be had—the field continues to grow despite the recession. But be careful out there, okay? Just take care that you don’t

A) Keep working for a company that treats you so anonymously for so long that you have nowhere to channel your anger except toward an inanimate object like, just for example, a printer

No, not again. I … WHY does it say paper jam when there IS NO PAPER JAM!?

or B) Get so twisted up in your own self-esteem issues that you end up redirecting all your impotent rage towards an inanimate object like—you guessed it—a printer.

Mm, yeah, that’s it, that’s exactly what I need. Uh-huh. Yeah, give it to me!! Come on, you little fucker, let’s go! That’s what I need! Let’s do that—let’s do EXACTLY THAT.

1. Investment banker
What you can expect to make: $112,000
from $73,000 (associate) to $116,000 (investment banker)

Whether the markets are bullish or, as today, extraordinarily bearish, a career in the ever-moving world of investment banking requires an almost supernatural level of energy—a pitiless persistence. If you naturally possess these traits (or are motivated enough to develop them) you'll do very well for yourself.

If you do make the Wall Street jump, be warned that taking cutthroat advice from Michael Douglas might lead to you starring in a string of outstandingly unfunny sitcoms. You could end up with only the stories of your cocky drug-fueled behavior to distinguish you from that one guy on Two and a Half Men. Oh … oops.

Power Corrupts. Absolute power is pretty neat, though.

These are things to keep in mind.

once you're drunk it's hard to coagulate things.

2009-03-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

drunk history, episode 2.

if the streets were paved with pricks, your mother would walk on her ass.

2009-03-13T11:48:00.000-07:00

slate's explainer column has a tasty little summary of the global history of motherfucker and its various mom-poking variants. to wit:

The nastiest Greek curses, for example, are gamo ti mana sou, gamo tin Panagia sou, and gamo to Khristo sou—"fuck your mother," "fuck your madonna," and "fuck your Christ," respectively. According to G. Legman's classic Rationale of the Dirty Joke, "Go fuck your mother" (Idy v kibini matri) is the "Russian ultimate-insult." Other cultures that venerate motherhood use variations of the phrase as well. Mexicans like to hurl the invective chinga tu madre at their rivals. During the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese exclamation du me—literally, "fuck mother"—morphed into the popular American military slang term doo-mommie.

sleep well. study well.

2009-03-04T15:25:00.001-08:00

i haven't been linking to work blog posts so much because (well, because i've started to feel it's pretty f'ing gratuitous to begin with, but also because) a lot of the ones i write for it are more serious/boring. but this one's about sleeping, which i know for a fact a lot of my friends like to do. also, there's a picture of a sleeping cat [let it lie, too?]. sleep and study.

do NOT fuck with mr. zero.

2009-03-03T16:39:00.001-08:00

pc load letter ... WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?

2009-02-27T09:11:00.000-08:00

better than a poke in the see-through head with a sharp stick.

2009-02-25T11:47:00.000-08:00

he's squatch with horns.

2009-02-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

ladies and gentleman, please welcome: squmble.

..he misses his first two dunks badly.

also keep an eye out for the varied clapping ability of the cheerleaders.

this is my current favorite shot of laura & me.

2009-02-18T15:40:00.000-08:00

rowdy rachel ray vs. fightin' flayer flay.

2009-01-23T15:00:00.000-08:00

up on the work blog, for unclear reasons, is a wee bit of cheftainment.

down with homework / up with hopework.

2009-01-20T11:35:00.000-08:00

up on the work blog (newly invigorated and most-times serious and with other not-me posters but now w/ my scribbles 3x per week for the new aught-9 year): imagine a future with no homework.

how about a few things to hope for this year...hunts, you start and weep away.

2009-01-16T11:28:00.000-08:00

right, weep away about some fucking hope. bitch about some goddam laughter. all aboard the night train and let's make ourselves a bit of sunshine. of course, weep -> hope isn't nearly as oppositional a juxtaposition as all that. if weeping is one pole, crying with joy must be the other; as one who has at least twice reached way, way down in search of good things, found nothing, then looked up with eyes shut tight and straight-out begged for a meaningful thread of hope--nothing more than help me, help me help me help me on my lips or in my beleaguered body--i know that the surrounding proximity of hope is weeping. gnashing of teeth. and our understanding of true joy is so tarnished, anyway, it's by nature ethereal, ephemeral, and (i believe) brought to you (oftentimes) by the holiest of spirits, and then when we're away from joy and its emotional zeitgeist, we yet again think of it more and more as happiness... maybe that's my whole problem. wait, watch, let's see if i can feel my way out of what i just said about which juxtapositions, now that i'm just a sentence or two removed from having paused and worked to call up the deepest desperation i ever felt--now that my intellectualism isn't the one with a hand on the wheel. let's find out. come quickly with me here to this place a few years back, not so far at all, really, to this precise moment when the withered me has found a petal of hope on which to rest. however i choose to look about me, things are ugly; the petal of hope, it's floating on a pond of despair, of blackness. nothing consequential has changed; only that i've found this lily green life raft on which to sit, to stave off my sinkingness for a moment or more--i've no way to tell how much life this hope's got in it, partly owing to its being the close to a passage from paul that's as near a cliche as a bible verse can be, what with all the weddings we've heard it at. 1 corinthians 13: paul writing about love. i memorized it as a kid and recited it and got a whole bag of fun-sized baby ruths, but now thank you god, now thank you, it's just the close that appears in my head. and then these three remain: faith, hope, love. and the greatest of these is love. that was my lily pad, my thread of hope: my faith had been supplanted by entitlement; my hope by a capacity to distract myself--my throat and nose and hands and cock--that began as a way to not think or feel and eventually more or less prevented those; but i knew i was loved. i did not, frankly, have much of an inclination to extend myself in any significantly loving manner; but i knew i was loved through and in spite of this shit-pile of my life, and i knew i could return love to those who loved me still. and then i could work my way back into it. i could remember to pay attention, maybe even to be the guy who notices when things aren't good for you--the guy people talk to for a while and feel better. the guy people want to hug when they're sad. i had a piece of hope just big enough to let me remember that hope is secondary to love, and joy started to spread down from below my ears and out to my shoulders, arms, fingers: i'll go love some people. i'll make it my thing, starting right now. so how about that. you want hope? here's some fucking hope: you are loved. humanly and deeply and hugely imperfectly. you are loved. fall into it, not back on it but into it; find your bearings, find ways to love people. the greatest of these.

what part of ___ do you not understand.

2009-01-09T12:43:00.000-08:00

- some of google’s faves -

What part of Hamfatter do you not understand?

What part of "Internet Quote" do you not understand?

What part of Ben Kramer is coming home do you not understand?

What part of I COULD DIE IF I EAT MAYO do you not understand?

What Part of 'Do Justice and Love Mercy' Do You Not Understand?

What Part of We Don't Trust You Do You Not Understand?

Mexicans Want to Know "What part of illegal do you not understand?”

What Part of Representation by Population Do You Not Understand?

What Part of The Old Man is Dead Do You Not Understand?

What part of shall not be infringed do you not understand?

What part of fan forum do you not understand?

What part of whites only do you not understand?

What part of I WILL SHAKE THE WHOLE EARTH do you not understand?

ten of the day.

2009-01-05T15:12:00.000-08:00

today on the website of my new favorite radio show, too beautiful to live, i made the cut: i'm the ten of the day. ha ha. i feel included and ain't that nice.

the significance of stop signs.

2008-12-10T21:35:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-12-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-11-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-11-21T14:54:00.000-08:00

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

heroes of the job - ugly betty.

2008-11-18T10:50:00.000-08:00

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

obey. (progress) abide.

2008-11-17T15:22:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-11-11T09:58:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-11-05T00:43:00.000-08:00

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."

2008-10-31T12:30:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-10-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

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

does the female form make you uncomfortable, mr lebowski?

2008-10-29T11:19:00.001-07:00

oh... is that what this is?

in a sense, yes.

fuckin' a, man.

(yes, five)

2008-10-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-10-24T11:28:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-10-21T17:49:00.000-07:00

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

chop me down before i kill again.

2008-10-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-10-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-10-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-06T15:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-10-03T14:08:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-30T10:17:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-17T09:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-09-09T13:32:00.000-07:00

-- 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.

2008-09-05T10:27:00.000-07:00

because i like it like THAT.

2008-08-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-19T16:04:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-08-13T11:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-12T16:33:00.000-07:00

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

i don't think you have the balls.

2008-08-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

(kidnap that fool)

2008-08-11T12:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-15T15:03:00.000-07:00

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

a new post is up on the work blog -

2008-07-14T13:10:00.000-07:00

“You don’t do a sequel 27 years later because you’ve suddenly learned to communicate your feelings” : an interview with Marion Ravenwood

no, wait, this is actually EXACTLY how i feel:

2008-07-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

x-man, you're a prophet.
a force.
a gentleman.
a beast.
a scholar.
what my fingers would give for the right throat to close around.

when they tear down a useless key arena, maybe they'll find the wmds under there.

2008-07-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

adjusted for 2,000 years of inflation, 30 pieces of silver translates to 40 million. fucking exactly.

oh, play that thing, seymour, and raise high the roof beam, sir! so we can get superbad.

2008-07-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

Seymour, an Introduction by JD Salinger Oh, Play That Thing by Roddy Doyle Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by JD Salinger Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames Superbad by Ben Greenman

I’d like to dedicate this bloggytation to Voice. Right at the outset, where a proper dedication goes. And, having done so, I’d best jump into Salinger straightaway, since my debt to him is twofold: the elegant pleasure of reading and rereading his characters, falling for them, taking pleasure in the deepening subtlety that reveals itself through the patterns of and pauses in-between words as well as the words themselves. Salinger made me want to write dialogue, which is to say, to write at all, first, and, to this day, in a more concrete, or at least verifiable, way than any other writer has. But I wrote about this in the Franny & Zooey annotation. Furthermore, I wrote about Seymour: An Introduction in my theory of mind & narrative critical paper, and commented at some length about how it is a formless mess of a narrative, almost entirely absent of coherent structure beyond the whims of Buddy, the house/cabinbound writer. Thus, the current state would seem to call for me commenting further on Salinger’s effect on the whole and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters specifically, talking at some length about why it’s my favorite novella (it’s about Seymour’s wedding, yet takes place almost entirely outside of and before and after it; given its short length, Roof Beam was the first piece to instruct me explicitly in the ways of anchoring character-driven action around a piece of prominent physical action; for this reason and many others, I love it dearly), or how it’s got a thick strain of wit running through it—a very particular, observational wit conveyed to us by the eye of Buddy, our narrator, as often as not by means of juxtaposition of things—and stack of old letters read in the bounds of a new, unfamiliar bathroom—or of people, as when he’s in a cab with two people he doesn’t know and who are very different from each other, in age, gender, inclination.

Wit, then, is the thing to talk about. The real thing. So now I’m changing my dedication. Sorry, Voice; now you must co-chair this bidness, because I’m extending a second an equally weighty dedication to Wit. and I don’t’ mean that in a professorial TRAGEDY + COMEDY kind of way, nor even a way that accords closely to the Twainian and/or Marxist equation of comedy = tragedy + time. For my purposes, and for our purposes right now, comedy = funny + interesting. I want to be interested in what makes me laugh. Within the realm of books, and it’s astonishing to me how rare funny is in anything that approximates a serious book. (Or, for that matter, a funny book; as discussed earlier, Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea by Chelsea Handler is funny but forced—and, as its thin memoirish/narrative thread exists as a framework for its wit, every lazy or even somewhat obvious joke takes twice the toll. Clever is why I was reading the book at all, and every failed attempt at clever had me muttering “24-freaking-95. Goddammit, I can’t even give this thing to anyone I want to think me smart.”) So, then, according to funny/wit-having books I’ve read this quarter, let’s start with Jonathan Ames, move to Roddy Doyle, and finish with Ben Greenman.

Jonathan Ames comes first because I wasn’t surprised by him. I mean I was, at first, but my initial encounters came by way of online essays and excerpts I read and marveled at, in terms of their lilting verbiage and extraordinarily self-doubting tone. Wake Up, Sir! is about a dude who has a butler, and lives in New Jersey with his aunt and uncle. We come to find that he was hit by a NYC cabbie years earlier, got his settlement, and decided to hire a butler, named Jeeves, naturally. (It’s a family name in a long line of proud butlers.) Our narrator and his butler have various journeys and endure various levels of small scandal. It’s a very funny book, but now (I’m writing this in the summer) months removed from it, the characters resonate only thinly, and the reasons for this, what with me not hanging my attentional hat on a given type of action or flow, boil down to theory of mind. We don’t see our character’s mind change in particularly substantive ways on a consistent basis—although, when we do, it’s exactly those moments that are best-coordinated, and most finely tuned and memorable from the whole story.

Jeeves is always funny, though.

Roddy Doyle’s Oh, Play That Thing is set on this side of the water, in America, during the twenties and thirties. Louis Armstrong is a prominent character. It’s thicker than other, earlier Doyle books I’ve read—and, come to find out after it’s been handed to me and I’m into it, the second part of a trilogy that began with a book called A Boy Called Henry—and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. It’s a reinvention of sorts from Doyle, whom I love more than I can actually account for, what with me not having read all his books, or even a simple majority of them. While his style is relaxed, it’s also insistent in a way that demands more of you than a reliance on passing or juxtapositional wit, and once he’s pulled you in, you’re in—readership, fan, family.

A while back, Ben Greenman gave a radio interview on Wisconsin Public Radio that talked about the piece in his book Superbad entitled Blurbs. Greenman, a writer, Mcsweeneys contributor, editor at The New Yorker, makes up to my mind as tightly wound a rope as can be woven from the three strands of witty and insightful and obtuse. In the interview, he describes Blurbs—and it is, after all, exactly that: a collection of blurbs about a piece composed entirely of blurbs, which is to say, itself. That’s the whole bit. Greenman talks about how he wanted originally to make a book called Blurbs that was packed with blurbs on the back cover, and then have the pages glued shut. Ultimately, he said, he decided to not alienate a lifetime of readers in one fell swoop, so he went another way.

Superbad is another way. But, really, not by much; it constantly plays with form in such jolting ways that it preordained itself to the funny and aware and postirionic literary crowd, which is an invisibly thin slice of the overall crowd. If you’re working at home today and would like an accompanying visual, take a pencil, a blank piece of paper, and draw an empty circle on it, as well as a thin line representing the radius of the circle; then erase the line, and what’s left is the size of Superbad’s audience.

I’m hoping it’s too early for itself, like Arrested Development was. There’s a lot there—the content is so steeped in knowledge of form and narrative that, you know, he’s actually saying something in Blurbs. As one Mcsweeneys reviewer put it, Blurbs “reads like a Mobius strip tied around Jorge Luis Borges's finger.”

Greenman goes the places he does, with the primary formal/thematic thread being the libretto fragments from musicals interspersed throughout the book (Microsoft! The Musical, Elian! The Musical, The Death of the Musical! The Musical et. al). Let me tell you something: if we ever get to talking and I act like I know the first goddam thing about Jorge Luis Borges or his finger, I’m lying. My road back to any good regard for literary criticism been a long and winding one—with so much further still to go—and actually Mcsweeneys, who published Superbad, has been a main motor for me since I was made aware of its New Enthusiasmesque ethic (slogan: be more awesome). The point is that it doesn’t much matter that I’ve never said Jorge Luis Borges’ name aloud, that in my head I pronounce it Boorgeez. There’s so much there, all of it interesting and fun on its own merits—they’re recipes, in a manner of speaking. Detailed, brightly rendered recipes for linguistic, thematic, wit-tastic spelunking.

baron davis changed his mind and is going to the clippers.

2008-07-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

"i just took what was best for me," he said, right after saying that going home to la will be important, because he can help people in the community.

welp. you can only tell a man to stop contradicting himself so many times. less times if he's an elite point guards in the nba. and less times still if the bearded wonder decides to strap on his skates and f'ing groove, man.

his dark materials.

2008-06-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

the golden compass & the subtle knife & the amber spyglass -- by philip pullman

you may have noticed by now that i’ve a thing for list-making. by hook—eg, a first-person narrator who likes to chunk up his story with lists and quizzes—or by crook—eg, a short riff with a central analogy around which features are listed—i’ve managed to work in my affinity for listing throughout my grad school program. here i’m going to be absolutely overt; my normally top 5 all-time format (borrowed, you may or may not know, from nick hornby’s high fidelity) has been further pared down:

top 2 all-time literary trilogies
2. his dark materials
1. the lord of the rings

and that’s it. turns out, i like thinking about trilogies more than i like reading them; i thought i’d read several, but last night i combed through my memory and my shelves, and was astonished to see that i haven’t read nearly so many as my brain presupposed, and never mind the dystopian parlor trick involved with my mind presupposing its own memory. that’s what’s happened.

the good news is that i’m not going to compare and contrast the two items on my little list; that would be tiresome. what i’m going to do is simply talk about why the trilogy works as a whole, and, at the end of the day, that comes down to two words: lyra belacqua.

the main character of this trilogy, all of age eleven at the start, lyra is stuck to more or less closely throughout the trilogy, and, frankly, the sections for which her perspective and emotion are off the stage don’t have the same luster. or, rather, they do—the subtle knife, for example, opens with the introduction of will, a boy lyra’s age who lives in one of the countless world’s parallel to hers (and quite possibly in ours), undergoes the trauma of his home being invaded and some goons coming after him, and, since he so closely parallels to lyra, and will in fact turn out to be her budding love interest, will’s tale is definitely compelling—but for all the delicious verisimilitude and the terrifically extractable social implications of the books, the heart and blood and meat of the trilogy is lyra, and the meta-parallels and human themes i was most eager to extract all had their starting points with her eye and ear, her stubbornness, temper, utter lack of pretention, and, via the alethiometer (golden compass), her ability to peer through eons of confusion with a distinct clarity.

the amber spyglass, the concluding title in the trilogy, is necessarily big in its own britches, as the grand metaphors must all come to a conflictive head, and the individual lyra’s story must turn out to be not only a metaphor for eve’s descendent returning to the garden and re-encountering the serpent, but also for the grandly unnecessary evil of organized religion, and for the shattering of its biggest presuppositions. those things are neat, and pullman renders and points to them with a high level of craft and care; i look forward to returning to them. but it’s lyra i keep thinking of—her irascibility, her clever boldness, her persistence; her as eve, her as holden caulfield, her as frodo baggins; her as me; her as us.

let's both get undressed right here.

2008-06-24T09:52:00.000-07:00

an interview with boba fett

2008-06-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

..is up on the work blog.

WHAT NARCISSISM MEANS TO ME.

2008-06-18T16:54:00.000-07:00

Tony Hoagland’s book has a great title, there’s no doubt. That it’s the title of a poetry collection, rather than a bramble of youthful, quasi-confessional memoir, cements it as such.

Hoagland is exactly my speed of poet, and, given my inconsistent but undying aspiration of writing dialogue that fits within the Jesus paradox--fully human and fully literary--it’s difficult for me to imagine a set of poems coming any closer to clearing its throat and saying ahem, this is for you, hello. Hi. Example One:

COMMERCIAL FOR A SUMMER NIGHT

That one night in the middle of the summer
when people move their chairs outside
and put their tvs on the porch
so the dark is full
of murmuring blue lights.

We were drinking beer with the sound off,
watching the figures on the screen--
the bony blonds, the lean- jawed guys
who decorate the perfume and the cars--

the pretty ones
the merchandise is wearing this year.
Alex said, I wish they made a shooting gallery

using people like that.
Greg said, That woman has a PhD in face.

Then we saw a preview for a movie
about a movie star who
is having a movie made about her,
and Boz said, This country is getting stupider every year.

Then Greg said that things were better in the Sixties
and Rus said that Harold Bloom said that Nietzsche said
Nostalgia
was the blank check issued to a weak mind,

and Greg said,
They didn’t have checks back then, stupid,
and Susan said it’s too bad you guys can’t get
Spellcheck for your brains.

Then Greg left and Margaret arrived,
and a breeze carried honeysuckle fumes across the yard
and Alex finished his quart of beer
and Boz leaned back in his chair

and the beautiful people on the tv screen
moved back and forth and back,
looking very much now like shooting gallery ducks.

And we sat in quiet pleasure on the shore of night
as a tide came in and turned and carried us,
folding chairs and all

far out from the coastline of America

in a perfect commercial for our lives.

That one’s great and I love it. It’s so easy on the ear, yes? Deceptively so, you might say. The stories he paints in his poems are very much scenes, drawn so precisely they seem entirely casual. ..And that’s largely what I have to offer, in terms of insight about Narcissism. I’m not super good at talking about poetry. God, though, this was a nice switch, to just have this slender book to pick up now and again, read a poem, and feel immediately comfortable.

Honestly, that’s my full analysis; and I don’t want to fall into a stumbling praise of his lines and themes and the sounds of his words, because I admire all those, but why would I talk about it when I can just show it here. Maybe the MFA poets can show me some annotations and I can see how it’s done. Until then, let me leave you with Impossible Dream, which I’ve read many times and have yet to hit the summit of adoration for it. (One thing I love, again blatantly relevant to my own tiny world, is the tense-shifting.)

IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

In Delaware a Congressman
accused of sexual misconduct
says clearly at the press conference,
speaking
right into the microphone
that he would like very much
to do it again.

It was on the radio
and Carla laughed
as she painted, Die, You Pig
in red nail polish
on the back of a turtle
she plans to turn loose tomorrow
in Jerry’s back yard.

We lived near the high school that year
and in the afternoons, in autumn,
we could hear the marching band rehearsals
from the stadium,
drums and off-key trumpets, brass
smeared weirdly by the wind;

a ragged Louie Louie
or sometimes, The Impossible Dream.

I was reading a book about pleasure,
how you have to glide through it
without clinging,
like an arrow
passing through a target,
coming out the other side and going on.

Sitting at the picnic table
carved with the initials of the previous tenants;
thin October sunlight
blessing the pale grass--
You would have thought we had it all-

But the turtle in Carla’s hand
churned its odd stiff legs like oars,
as if it wasn’t made for holding still

and the high school band played
worse than ever for a moment
as if getting the song right
were the impossible dream.

Bobby Fischer Goes to War

2008-06-17T11:09:00.000-07:00

Imagine you’re a shy, quiet boy growing up in a large quiet place. You have among your biggest heroes men of physical action, both real and not real—Robin Hood and Aragorn; Larry Bird and Dennis Rodman—but you know in your gut from early on that what sets you apart is your mind. You’re content there, can always find things to do in there, where others seem to not. Going into the woods with a long stick, a pen knife and a dog doesn’t cease to pass the time well as early as it might, because you can make the forest a frontier, an escape, a place to lay a trap.

That’s enough empathetic exercise—it’s not a particularly difficult or rare one. My point is that this is the kind of boy I was, and, though I had no tremendous affection for chess, Bobby Fischer became on of the most intriguing heroes I had almost from the moment I first heard his story. Bobby Fischer Goes to War concerns itself with the war that was Bobby Fischer versus Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972. When I heard stories about this ’72 battle, with the variety of big, unblinking demands made by Fischer—his refusal to play, his demands for more money that, coupled with his disallowance of TV or film coverage for the event and the revenue stream that went with along with it, practically bankrupted Iceland—I struggled to make sense of them, to find some noble ethic of resistance that was consistent, and would’ve failed at, but for the fact of his disappearance. He was in hiding.

Hiding, see, was where the best kinds of heroes went—the misunderstood men who had to bide their time and lay low, waiting for their moment of redemption. I knew of these themes even as I loved them—I enjoyed finding the common threads in my heroes, and one thread that ran through all of my most highly held characters was that of being thrown out, excommunicated, on the run.

So Bobby Fischer took a seat in that pantheon of mine, and stayed there for some time, until he unavoidably showed himself to be something not at all like a hero, or a relatively sane person. Now, years later, that hasn’t ended up being a bad thing for my idea and estimation of him — Hunter S Thompson’s body of work and life practically demanded his eventual shotgun suicide, if you know what I mean.

here comes the gravy pipe.

2008-06-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

(from patton oswalt's first stand-up album)

..and i like the high end steak houses like lowry's and ruth's chris. but i'll also go to the shitball steakhouses like outback and black angus. i'm there. it's steak. not so much black angus though, 'cause remember how friendly the ads for black angus used to be? they were, c'mon in have a steak! how about a baked potato?

and you're like, fucking how about yeah!? see you tomorrow night. table for two, 7:15.

..we'll start you off with our appetizer platter. featuring five jumbo deep fried gulf shrimp, served on a disc of salted butter with fifteen of our potato bacon bombs, and a big bowl of pork cracklings with our cheese and butter dipping sauce.

um, we're all gonna split that...

oh you'll each get your own! Then, we'll take you to our mile long soup and salad bar featuring bacon and cream soup and our fine iceberg lettuce he-man salad, served in a punch bowl, with 18 pounds of ranch dressing, pork stuffed deep fried croutons and what the hell, a couple of corn dogs.

uhhhh hey man, i tell ya what. i'll just get a mixed green salad.

hey! i'll suck a cock on the golden gate bridge before i'll bring ya a mixed green buddy!!
then we'll wheel out our bottomless trough of fried dough!

what? wait a minute, am i gonna get a steak?

oh you'll get a fucking steak!!! cause then we'll bring out our 55oz. las mesa he-man steak slab, served with a deep fried pumpkin stuffed with buttered scallops and 53 of our potato bacon bombs.

ohhh dude i don't think...

and then bend over abigail mae, 'cos HERE COMES THE GRAVY PIPE!!

what?!

black angus, doors are locked from the outside, faggot!

at black angus your name is peaches.

we'll do it live. FUCK IT! WE'LL DO IT LIVE!

2008-06-11T12:01:00.000-07:00

if you ain't seen the lately-uncovered clip of bill o'reilly blistering his own sausage (as they say in the infoporn business) behind the news desk, well, please do.

what can you say; the man knows how to pepper his sauce. FUCKING THING SUCKS.

the point: go here and have a listen to the remixes that one dude has made. my favorites are DO IT LIIIIIVE!!! and Fuck It (Revolucian Mix), which are now on my workout mix. really brilliant stuff.

bitch kneed my nuts.

2008-06-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

#4 on the top 5 all-time monologues list.

eel down, repeat, we have an eel down : a eulogy.

2008-05-21T16:14:00.001-07:00

[i was asked to write a eulogy to honor the office eel, found this morning on the floor, dead. i did, and co-worker alana pulled together a nice design. snowflake bin laden, i can only hope i've honored the call as your eugoogolizer.]

EXAAAAAAACTLY.

2008-05-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

the money quote from the wiki entry for the new sincerity -

"My position is irony is dead (...) but at the same time, just to return to old-fashioned sincerity, and particularly the kind of sentimentality that that draws in with it...we don't need it. So that's why we've created the New Sincerity. A perfect example of the New Sincerity is Evel Knievel. There's no way to take Evel Knievel literally. It's impossible. The man has a leather jumpsuit and he drives a rocket car. The leather jumpsuit has red, white, and blue stars and stripes on it. It's absolutely preposterous. On the other hand, there's no way to appreciate Evel Knievel ironically. He's too awesome. He has--I don't know if we've mentioned this--a leather jumpsuit with the Stars and Stripes on it and a rocket-powered car. That's why we appreciate Evel Knievel with the new sincerity."

marion images

2008-05-14T12:53:00.000-07:00

i drink beers and write a letter to espn's bill simmons.

2008-05-02T20:17:00.000-07:00

I'm not an emotional man, Bill.

But I’m in Seattle and love the Supersonics, and have spent the last year and a half feeling some unhealthy mixture of anarchistic and resigned. I’m actually looking forward to the lawsuits. I want the city of Seattle and Fay Bennett to really square off. I want Howard Shultz's Flux Capacitor of a lawsuit to really have balls, in the litigational sense.

We've had some of the most shit-talkingly awesome ball ever played up here.

But of late there’s been very little to keep us afloat. Kevin Durant, in spite of PJ Carlesimo's jaw-dropping, poopy-pantsing badness, has been a real lift, man. In his rookie year he gave us the things that make family: humility, shyness; promise, struggle; grace, and, most recently, clutchness. In the home stretch of the season he was a feline force, an utter joy to watch. You like KD, so I bring the quandary to your feet.

I read on Wages of Wins today the breakdown of why Kevin Durant didn't deserve RoY over Al Horford. Okay, I think: Horford was freaking awesome in the Boston series. Let's hear the argument.

The argument is two charts, one for the Hawks and one for the Sonics, listing the WP48 (wins produced per 48 minutes) for each player on the rosters. And there it is: Horford has an '07-'08 WP48 of 0.176; Durant's rookie WP48 comes in at -0.017. Whaaaa-at? Al Horford was just a hair over ELEVEN TIMES BETTER than Durant? In terms of wins, that’s what they’re saying. And they’re saying that wins produced is what matters. Then I look at the charts again, and it registers that Horford was next-to-first on the Hawks this year in terms of WP48, while Durant was next-to-last on the Sonics.

Luke Ridnour was almost two times more valuable to the Sonics than Kevin Durant this year. Wally Szczerbiak. Donyell Marshall, Mouhamed Sene … Kurt Thomas, in his sacrificial time with the Sonics, was more than 16 times as valuable as Kevin Durant.

The sunshine is gone up here. We’re in the candlelight-vigil stages of this thing, and my main-man candle is Kevin Durant.

Hide it under a bushel? No! I’m gonna let it shine.

I know this letter is insanely long; it’s Friday and I’ve had a few beers and I have to study after this. So … anything you might have to say about WP48, how it is that Nick Collison is amost exactly as good as Horford, which makes him more than 10x as valuable as Durant, that’d be great. But were you to give a RoY shoutout to Durant, that’s what I think dudes need to read about. After one season, it’s impossible to remove KD from your thinking about the future of this team. He’s become the center point of pride for anyone here who’s paid any attention.

coming at business from a new angle, with your host karl hungus.

2008-04-17T12:08:00.000-07:00

open your mouth and close your eyes and you will get a pediatric surprise

put the mouse in his mouse hole--and we'll do the rest

making major changes while they're minors

open your mouth and say "aaaah, yes! harder"

[the pics: from a beneficient memo to the creative team from manager stebbins]

i don't need you guys to have a good time.

2008-04-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

a quick study in high-fiving yourself, presented by andrew "all hot to party of one" bogut