Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

Parades and cigarettes.

So I wake up just the other side of sober, and my best green suit’s a wrinkled puddle at the foot of the bed. It reeks of cigarette smoke, and I’m remembering enough to be obscurely glad that gin doesn’t stain wool. When I stumble into the bathroom for some clumsy ablutions, I see in the mirror I’ve still got an earring in one ear. Leaning forward does alarming things to various internal systems keeping track of such stuff as balance and pulse rate, so I swallow three prophylactic Advils and blink until everything settles.

It was one of those nights.

“Jemiah’s having a party to celebrate her second book coming out,” said the email invitation. “It’s ‘dress code fabulous.’” So Kevin dyed his hair red and Jenn (“his” Jenn, and not “my” Jenn, and let’s not get into all that right now) had red streaks and rhinestone piping, and I had the aforementioned green suit and the walking stick from Guatemala, and Sara bleached her hair bone white and then washed some nameless sunset color into it, and my God, you should have seen Steve’s underwear. Fabulous? Oh, yes, my friends. Fabulous. —So: off we set for the Mallory Hotel, a ten-minute drive from the Lloyd Center, tops; maybe another ten minutes to find parking if we weren’t lucky. Or twenty minutes by MAX. If that. But—

See, we’re all plugged-in people. We smirk (or groan) at how W’s written up in the Guardian and we listen to NPR through our computers (though we’d really prefer it if they used Quicktime) and we’re flinging links back and forth to the decision on CIPA hours after it’s made and a whole day before those lumbering newsprint dinosaurs can get their summaries on the streets. (And let’s take a moment to note that that’s my local library on the front lines of this good fight. Yay!) —Television? That’s for watching DVDs on, right? Radio? What?

Problem being that us international elite knowledge-workin’ webheads somehow missed—the lot of us—the fact that Saturday, 1 June, was opening night for Portland’s annual Rose Festival.

“There’s an awful lot of traffic,” said someone.

“Oh, yeah,” said someone else. “It’s the Rose Festival, isn’t it?”

We tried to cross at the Morrison Bridge, but it was going up. Kevin (who was driving) pulled a deftly illegal U-turn, and we cut north to the Broadway Bridge. Much clearer. No one was on it. Other side of the river, we found out why: Broadway was blocked off and all traffic being routed up Hoyt.

“Is that a parade they’re setting up?” said someone.

“I thought the Southwest Airlines Grand Floral Parade—the signature event of the Rose Festival, or so I’m told—wasn’t till next week,” said someone else.

And they were right. This was the Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines.

So we routed ourselves up Hoyt. All we had to do was cross 405 and double back to the Mallory. And we’d be fine.

“You know,” said someone, brightly, “we could just duck back to the Lloyd Center, park there, and take the MAX in. It does run right past the Mallory, you know.”

“Nah,” said someone else, pragmatically. “We’ve already come this far, let’s stick it out. It can’t be that bad.”

Roughly 45 minutes later, we were parking Kevin’s car by the Lloyd Center and climbing out with much groaning and stretching. (This is how the suit came to be wrinkled. “If you wanted,” offered Steve, mischievously, “you could nip into our place and borrow an iron…”) —“You know,” said someone, pointing to the Lloyd 10, “we could just be evil and bag the whole thing as a lost cause and go see Star Wars.”

“There’s no booze in Star Wars,” said someone else. Grimly.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll be booing up a storm, myself…”

There was more like that. —The MAX, of course, was terribly crowded, since we weren’t the only ones to note the difficulty of maneuvering an automobile through downtown. It pulled away from the Lloyd Center stop and everyone already crammed onboard glowered at the people waiting at the 7th Avenue stop who shrugged and squeezed on anyway. At the Convention Center stop, the conductor got on the loudspeaker and said something no one could entirely make out about how the MAX wouldn’t be going all the way and anyone who wanted to cross downtown could mumble garble squawk.

“You have got to be kidding me,” said someone we didn’t know.

But he wasn’t. The MAX trundled across the river and shuddered to a stop outside Pioneer Place, end of the line, everybody off—almost as close as we’d gotten yet, but still with many blocks to go. Though not so many we couldn’t walk it. (Despite the fabulousness of some of the shoes being worn.) So we surged ahead and—

Oh. Right. The Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines.

You ever try to cross a parade with that many corporate sponsors?

“Well, shit,” said someone.

“The Skybridge!” cried someone else, brightly.

The Portland General Electric/SOLV Starlight Parade, presented by Southwest Airlines, was trundling its way down 4th, between the two big blocks of Pioneer Place. Which are connected by a third-floor Skybridge. Saved! We dashed into Pioneer Place and clattered up two flights of escalators (okay, we stood impatiently still in a horde of people who’d had much the same idea as the escalators jerked us up too slowly) to find the doors to the Skybridge shut and locked.

“You know,” said someone, as we were jerked back down two floors, “there were people on the Skybridge. I wonder if they got locked in there somehow, or…”

“Not really caring,” said someone else.

None of us at this point were too terribly into the whole people thing. But: we were fabulous, dammit. We had our goal; it was a simple one, easily accomplished. We were bright. Resourceful. Thirsty. And it was only a few thousand people between us and our Excelsior. We’d tried ignoring it, going through it, going over and across it…

We ended up walking around it, and got to the Mallory in time to hear Jemiah finish her first reading. And put in a drinks order, but really, the important thing was to be there to support the book and the reading and what the hell was taking those drinks so long?

This, then, all of it, perhaps goes some way towards explaining why I threw down martinis at a steady clip, and perhaps also why I’m glad gin doesn’t stain wool. And why I am stingy with details as to the witty and amusing things Johnzo said and Victoria said and Kirsten said and Jemiah her own dam’ self and I’m sorry, I can’t find a link for Ralph the Chiropractor (it was Ralph, wasn’t it?) and if I did realize suddenly (or was told) that the reason Brandon had been naggingly familiar was that she’d taken some photos for Anodyne (yes, I’d been the managing editor, but it was only for a few months and I was always misplacing memos), or that vampires are (yet) big in the Zeitgeist not so much because of the linkage of blood and sex and disease and death (though yes, of course, that’s there) but because they are all of them so very tired and jaded and numb and laden with ennui (not such a bad thing to pretend to be when everything’s moving so far so very quickly), or that Portland doesn’t have a Cleveland (but it does have a Clyde), or that the rhetoric of cane gestures bears some intriguing similarities to the rhetoric of cigarette gestures which it might well be worth exploring when less impaired, and there was something in all that about tall redheads, wasn’t there? —Well. None of that is important enough to go into any of the details that are anyway thin on the ground, today. But that is, perhaps, enough to give you a taste. Oh! And Steve was able to inform us all that eating a torched M&M was rather like nibbling a chocolate chip cookie that had been in the oven a wee bit too long. There.

The cigarettes, though—

See, none of us smokes. But quite a few of us smoke, from time to time. Socially, you know. At parties. If someone else is. That sort of thing. I’d brought along the packet of cloves I’m working on this month; I’d had maybe two or three of the 20. There’s now just the four left, and that doesn’t count the pack of regular smokes someone nipped out and bought when I wasn’t looking.

So that, see, explains the whole reeking of smoke thing. —And I didn’t even tell you about the bar full of bitchy Rosarians. Or the Commodore. (Which wasn’t the bar that was full of bitchy Rosarians.) And did anyone ever figure out what the hell those big guys on the TV set were doing, with those giant rocks, and that wall? I wasn’t imagining that, was I?

(Jenn? “My” Jenn? Though she regretted missing an opportunity to wear her ball gown, it wouldn’t have had much fun on our trek, and anyway, there was the whole ankle thing from last week, and besides all that, she’s getting close to getting the first chapter done, so she stayed home and drew and made merciless fun of me when I staggered in at what, 2:30 in the morning? —Thanks to a bucket brigade of rides organized on the fly by people who’d had less to drink than I. Anyway, go, look, see!)

—Filed 8651 days ago to Indulgences; .

That quality of being cheesy,
or, Suspicions confirmed.

Before I get into this, I feel the need to affirm that yes, what follows is, indeed, true—in every important particular.

We—me, and Jenn, and Chris Baldwin—were cruising the Gorge, looking at waterfalls. Our second stop of the day was the impossibly picturesque Vista House, perched rather cheekily at the very lip of Crown Point’s precipitous plunge into the Columbia River. (A small plane flew by; we looked down on it.) Now, I feel the need to point out that, while I was nattily dressed, we were doing an old-fashioned outing in the country—and really, a straw porkpie such as the one I was wearing is, perhaps, not quite the thing to wear with tweed. So it wasn’t like I was being a stickler or anything. (I want to make sure you grasp this: we were all wearing tweed.) —Still, I was the only one with a tie, and a vest; perhaps it was this that singled me out for their attention.

“Excuse me,” said one of four (or perhaps five?) scruffily clean-cut young men. “Could you—?” He was holding out a small digital camera.

“Of course,” I said. Instructions were given—peer here, yes, hold this until it clicks, simplicity itself. The four (I believe it was four, and not five) of them arranged themselves, arms about shoulders, jockeying a bit to sort themselves out. I didn’t have to suggest that the tallest of them ought to stand in back. They knew the drill. “Horizontal or vertical?” I asked, as a formality; we’re in the Gorge, for fuck’s sake. “Horizontal,” said the one who’d handed me the camera. —Landscape it was. I framed them nicely (if I do say so myself), lower rightish quadrant, with the arc of the river and the deep, deep ditch of the Gorge, thirty miles or more of it, over and out behind them.

I should perhaps relay at this point my uncertainty regarding their clothing. I seem to recall that one of them wore a sweatshirt with the logo of some gym or perhaps a sports team emblazoned on the front; I recall some stylish corduroys. A half-zip polarfleece pullover, perhaps, on one of them (though that might be the sweatshirt, reduplicating oddly in my memory). —But surely the hearty salmon chamois shirt I insist on draping around the shoulders of one of them is some odd cross-referencing error from my days writing copy for Norm Thompson. (It couldn’t have been that obvious.)

Poses struck, smiles plastered, camera set, I poised my finger over the shutter release. “Say something cheese-like,” I said. Ever the droll one.

“Something cheese-like,” cried three (or perhaps four), all of them quick and game.

“Smegma,” said the fourth, quickest by far and droller than I.

(I’m pretty sure there were just four, come to think of it.)

—Filed 8686 days ago to Indulgences; .

An attempt at sketching in prose what goes through my mind when Robyn Hitchcock begins to ramble in that engagingly undrunken monotone about the Isle of Wight before starting to contort a guitar in his own unmistakable, beautifully ugly idiom.

I don’t like to point at someone and say, hey, that person right there, that’s my best friend, but looking back, I’m starting to think maybe Kim was my best friend in college, for most of it. Easily as tall as me and big, a black belt in aikido—the first time I ever met her sister was when I agreed to take Kim to a Moody Blues show in Cleveland, because Zak was out of town and Kim’s mother really thought it best that a man should accompany Kim to the concert, you know, for safety, and geeze, I felt safer with her around, and that was what was so funny, see? (I met her sister then because, you see, Annemarie was going to the concert too, with her boyfriend at the time, but let’s not get sidetracked. This isn’t about Annemarie.)

There was the night we were hanging out on the Memorial Bandstand thingie, the atrocious affront to undergraduate sensibilities put up my freshman year that Rob had the brilliant idea to hang a Fotomat sign off of in a prank that misfired at the last minute. (Would I have been caught by Security, had I gone that night, like that guy who was too stupid to do anything but run when it went down bad? —Who cares?) Me and Zak and Kim, and Zak had a theatrical rapier, light and flimsy, just the thing for wearing under your cloak on a cool autumn night when you’re a romantic college student (strike that; let’s go with Romantic, instead); I had the cane that had been an integral part of the costume (there is no other word for it: tails, top hat, white gloves, cane) that I’d worn to my senior prom and still carried from time to time as an affectation (I’d also worn zero-prescription stage glasses the first couple of weeks at college, because I don’t need glasses, but they’re cool to play with—until a friend who did need glasses gently pointed out it was kind of, you know, dorky) and Kim had nothing at all but her bare hands and, well, her aikido; anyway. We staged this mock running sparring Erroll Flynn donnybrook up and down that stupid pomo gazebo, all for none and your ass is mine: rapier on staff, click clack, and Kim reaching in every now and then to grab a hand or an arm or something and twist and send one or the other of us scuttle-rolling across the floor. Enormous fun.

There was the night, and this one I’m having trouble placing, because it took place in one of those gorgeous upstairs lounges in Asia House, and I didn’t live in Asia House until my disastrous third year (second-and-a-half, really), and by that point Zak and Kim were married and living in Kent, or maybe it was one of the towns near the place where Kent State is, I dunno. —Annemarie and I saw The Mountains of the Moon in a theater there—or was it Kim and I? And Zak? (All I really remember about the damn thing is when Speke kissed Burton.) So I’m thinking this pretty much couldn’t have happened that year, the year—semester, really—I was living in Asia House. But I’m hard-pressed to explain exactly how we came to be there otherwise, or why. But there we were, me and Kim and a boom box and a tape of the soundtrack to The Mission, and for whatever reason—whenever it was, my second year, or my second-and-a-half, there was stress and to spare—we were, well, dancing. Not together; not even to the music, per se. The music was a catalyst—that oboe, the chanting, those drums; the movement was, well, something else. But we did it. And never really spoke of it. (Did it have to do with Zak? Liz? Not Annemarie, no, not then, which would place it in my second year, and it doesn’t really matter why, really, not so long after the fact; whatever it was we were upset over or worried about is long gone, and all that’s left is the memory of what we did about it, which was striking and inexplicable and oddly haunting. And I still have no idea why we were in Asia House that night.)

The odd games she ran, the uncategorizable intersections of role playing, improvisational theatre, performance art and encounter group—geeze, that makes them sound terrible, which they weren’t. Chas, Zak, Liz, me, her: I’m thinking, say, of her vision of Eden: the room was dark, and Bach was playing, terribly loudly (organ fugues, but it could have been a Goldberg; my memory is lousy, ask anyone), and she as God was pelting us all with stuffed animals and fig newtons. Zak (Leviathan) sat in a closet and said things I couldn’t hear, and Chas (the Serpent) kept tempting Liz (Eve), but I (Adam) wasn’t following any of that; I was taking up the stuffed animals and naming them, pretty much. Just focussing on my job, what I’d been told to do, and when the whole thing went down bad it took me desperately by surprise. The music, the darkness, the animals, the food—all gone, and why? Why? —An image of Adam (it’s far from the only one, of course) I’d never have found myself, and always liked. (What of Eve? The Serpent? Leviathan? God? I don’t really know. Thus, the inherent limitations of the medium.) (In Boston, there was a Greek myth, with [sort of] masks; but that’s more complicated, much, and I don’t want to get sidetracked.)

I can still see her, in my mind’s eye, for all that it’s been years since: almost a parody of the Teutonic milkmaid, a Valkyrie in muddy boots, big blue eyes and ruddy cheeks (yes: ruddy) and a disarming handful of childlike expressions—fierce determination, glum disappointment, gleeful wonder—that could cross her face in alarmingly sophisticated ways, and all I have to do to smile is think of her tossing back her head and belting out “Ja, ja, ja, ja!” like Madeline Kahn. I can hear her still, too—not so much her voice exactly as the music of it: the pitch, the timbre. The rhythm. (Zak is harder to hear. Chas is here in town, so. Liz? Almost gone—a faint hint, the flavor of it, yes, but I told you: my memory is lousy. Annemarie—but no.) —We only ever slept together the one time, but it wasn’t like that, not at all: we were both trying to be fair to other people. Thinking back I can’t say for sure that this was the first time she’d ever slept with someone she didn’t love, didn’t long for, yearn for, need, but it was the first time I ever had, and it was—fun. Relaxed. We laughed a lot.

But it was Eva, not Kim, who gave me Hitchcock. “You’ve got to listen to this,” she said, and played me “Heaven,” and then the whole of fegMANIA!, start to finish. Eva, whom I took to my senior prom: me in that get-up, tails and top hat, white gloves and cane, and her in a white creation of lace and satin and silk, and white fishnets underneath. (I can see her easily enough, and hear her, too: she had an adorably goofy laugh, like Jenn does. Kim, too. Which is not to say Liz didn’t, per se.) Eva’s LPs I taped: fegMANIA! and Black Snake Dîamond Röle and Element of Light and I Often Dream of Trains and Invisible Hitchcock and Groovy Decoy or Decay or whatever it was called and yes, I found my own copies later and bought them all, and more besides, which is something the record companies claim they just don’t understand. Eva who was hunting for a copy of “Bones in the Ground” off the impossible-to-find Bells of Rhymney EP. (It was later included in a reissue of I Often Dream of Trains that I have on the shelf, over there.) And it was Eva I was trying to conjure up that achingly lonely night in my dorm room freshman year, the corner room I shared with Kevin in the cornerstone dorm of the main campus, and the windows were open and I had Element of Light in the tape deck cranked up high (Kevin was out) and when “Bass” stumbles to a halt, it’s then that the backwards guitar starts crawling out of the speakers and lofting up suddenly swooping into the sky with the drums and bass clattering after it, oh—

—and when it’s over, I look over at the door and there’s Kim, whom I’ve met maybe once before (Zak introduced us; there’s a whole story about how they got together, but I’d get it wrong, and anyway, I don’t want to go into it). It’s Kim leaning there on the jamb and that gleeful grin is lighting up her face, and I’m standing there blinking, slow on the uptake me.

“I heard the music,” she said, “and I thought it might be you. And then I looked up and saw the top hat bobbing around in the window and knew it.”

—Liz never liked Robyn. Jenn doesn’t much, either, but it’s more like she’s never really acquired the taste; Liz actively disliked him. (Still: the one time I saw him in concert—with Kim, and Zak, and Chas, and Annemarie and her boyfriend at the time were there, too, weren’t they—I bought a T-shirt [“One Long Pair of Eyes”] and when later that summer I bussed out to see Liz [Cleveland to Philadelphia over the Pine Barrens to Atlantic City and down the coast to Toms River] I gave it to her, which says a lot about how little I knew of what I was doing, then.) But that isn’t really why last week when I stuck my head into Movie Madness and poked around until I found Storefront Hitchcock I waited until a day when Jenn was at work and I wasn’t to pop the tape into the VCR and sit down and watch it.

But that is why—all of it, mind, every bit, and the stuff I’ve left out, too—that’s why when he started to talk about the Isle of Wight, I felt the floor drop out from under my feet, and I hung there, shivering, waiting—

“Every year I can walk along that beach,” he said, or something like it, “a little bit grayer, a little bit fatter, just walking through the same pools. And the thing is, the sand erodes, the soil is very soft there, it crumbles away; every year a few meters of that beach is just lost into the sea. So you can imagine that where people walked three centuries ago is now far out to sea, and their ghosts are literally walking over the sand dunes.”

And then, oh God, that guitar—

—Filed 8693 days ago to Indulgences; .

The pause that—

“Hey, Kip,” said Kevin. “You want a Coke?”

“What?” I said.

You had to have been there to see what was mildly fucked about his question: he’s on the ground, scratching his dog’s head, and I’m some fifteen feet up in the air on a neighbor’s ladder, caulking the top of a window frame and an ineptly drilled hole where someone fed the television cable into an upstairs room. I’ve been meaning to fix it for a while now, but a) had no ladder and b) it’s been raining a lot, so. But here I am, wrestling with a caulking gun, a tube of caulk that’s recalcitrant at best, and rising gusts of wind, and Kevin’s asking me if I want a Coke. Sure. What the fuck.

So I get the caulking done, and he brings me a Coke, and I climb down off the ladder and carry it back around the house and set it down on its side and step back and take a deep breath. I don’t think I like heights much, or ladders. But really, it’s best to figure that out after you’ve gotten down, than otherwise.

Chore done, I take the Coke inside and sit down to take back up the task of writing that bloody introduction, and every now and then I sip some Coke. I don’t drink soda or cola (or, as we call it generically in the South, “Coke,” as in: “What kind of Coke you want with your burger?” “Root beer”) all that much anymore. I like beer and wine and seltzer water and a little sugar in my coffee which I drink by the pot, but me and pop parted ways some time ago. Still. Every now and then. You know?

But what I’m noticing is, it’s been an hour or so, and I’m halfway through the 20 oz. (250 mL, apparently), and I’ve still got this racing tension in my chest, you know? Little jitters running down my arms and into my fingers, like my nerves are nervous, firing at shadows. And I’m thinking it’s maybe an after-effect of the ladder and the height and the stupid bloody caulk, but no, it’s been too long for that.

No—I think it’s actually the Coke. Geeze.

Plus my teeth have that weird dry filmy feeling, now.

(What? I have to get back to writing the other thing? Aw, c’mon. I can stretch this out for another joke or three. Honest. I could. —Geeze. You never let me have any fun. Bastard.)

—Filed 8750 days ago to Indulgences; .

Ghosts.

I keep my hair cut short, these days. It used to be quite long. But it’s too thin to look good like that, now, and it’s ebbed back from my face like a low spring tide. So I keep it short, quite short, buzzed short for long, hot days.

Of late, though, I’ve been at home, at work on the web and ’net; I talk on the phone to most of those I work with, and I have a dearth of cash. I’ve not gone to get my hair cut for some time. It’s now as long as it has been for months.

At the end of this past week, as I walked through Old Town, the wind blew up in strong gusts, and my hair was now so long that it tossed on top of my head, a brief wild dance held fast by the roots, and I felt the ends of my hair prick my ears, and the skin of the back of my neck. It was a thing I’d not felt—I don’t want to say “for years,” but it had been a long time, a long, long time. I stopped there on the curb and felt my skin crawl down my back, down where my ribs curl in to meet my spine, pricked by the ghosts of my hair, my long hair, tossed in a long-gone wind—

(And now I stop and fret: “ghosts.” Is that one sound, or two? At first blush, one would think one, but say the word out loud, and hear it, where the “t” breaks the flow of ess to ess, and turns the breath of the word from one gust to two, or one and a half, but more, I think, than just one. And what of words that have been joined by a dash? Does “long-gone” count as two words, two sounds, or is it one word, one thought, but two sounds, joined by that small line?

(This game is hard; more work than it might seem, at first. But fun.)

—Filed 8757 days ago to Indulgences; Comments.

Epiphanic mathomry.

So I think it goes that Shmendrick showed up a couple of days after everybody else, and the innkeeper was sweeping out the stable. Schmendrick asks him if there’s been a man and a woman, pregnant, stopping by. With a donkey. Maybe some shepherds. And these three other guys, dressed kind of like me, camels, Balthasar, Casper, Melchior, ring any bells? There was this star? And the innkeeper says oh, hey, you just missed them, nice guys. Good tippers. And Schmendrick’s like, oh, gee, really? Did they maybe leave some kind of forwarding address? I’ve got this stuff for them, see, the guy and his wife, the pregnant woman, I mean, except I don’t think she’s pregnant anymore, that what the star was about, you know? And the innkeeper shrugs and leans on his broom and says, you know, they said something about Egypt. And Schmendrick, he says, Egypt? Geeze. I mean, I can’t keep going all the way to frickin’ Egypt. Well, damn. And he kicks the dust and then he says, hey. You wouldn’t want some cinnamon and pepper, would you? Spices, you know, from the East? They’re good for if you’ve got some meat that’s gone a little gamey, you sprinkle it with a little of this, takes the edge off, very tasty. And I don’t really remember how it all ends, but anyway, that’s why we don’t celebrate Epiphany on Jan. 6.

As to why we celebrate Epiphany at all—

The first one was in Boston, and even though most of us had dropped out of college for one reason or another at that point (most of us would eventually go back, don’t worry), we were still on enough of a college schedule—and enough of us were still making Yuletide trips back home—that we couldn’t get everyone in the same room for a gift exchange until early January. So what the heck. Epiphany. And we’ve been doing it ever since, though now I think it has more to do with taking advantage of post-holiday clearance sales.

So: some pear brandy, and Ken MacLeod; a silk shirt in some lovely nameless harvest color; some plates with Warhol’s Monroe on them, a perfect fit our Hindipop kitchen; a fountain for the library (as soon as the library gets new paint and a new ceiling and new shelves, we’ll have a place to put it); some Poe, who is worth Becca’s hype (her squeals of delight at receiving Tomb Raider on DVD aside: remember, she can be cheerfully pragmatic about her entertainment), and whose brother all unknown to me is the guy who wrote that book, or assembled it, more like; a lovely Kahimi Karie EP from Spain, the jetset cosmopolitanry of which pleases me inordinately, and anyway, there’s a killer version of “Giapponese a Roma” on there; and ganged up and dropped in my lap, Taschen’s gorgeous reproduction of the Nuremberg Chronicles, and if I’m a little quiet here in my corner, well. —And if I miss the days when Barry used to wrap his presents in glass bottles and duct tape, I don’t so much miss the days he wrapped them in dirty socks, which was, all told, pretty much the same day. (It was a conceptual piece.) Still: books; music; software (pirated and otherwise); cheerfully useless toys, trinkets and oddments; a 20-gallon aquarium; services rendered or coerced; a copy of Plotto and a cast-iron lamp shaped like a giant housefly. You know: mathomry. But lovingly so. Epiphanic, even.

—Filed 8769 days ago to Indulgences; Comments.

So it’s been slow.

I did some laundry. I downloaded some Cowboy Bebop and Tegan and Sara and that Nico song Wes Anderson used in The Royal Tenenbaums. I’ve been avoiding the news. (I haven’t been doing such a good job at avoiding the news, but my intentions are pure.) I walked all over downtown to a bunch of third-string temp agencies and dropped resumes off with people who all said, well, right now, you know, but hey, we’ll call you. I’ve written so many cover letters I’m getting writer’s block staring at my own letterhead. How many ways can you say “Give me the fucking job already”without, you know, seeming desperate?

But this wasn’t supposed to be about that. Any of that. —I could tell you about Wil Wheaton. You know how he looked in Stand by Me? Especially that moment in the swamp or whatever, they’ve just done something exciting, and he leans back against the tree and closes his eyes. I looked just like that when I was that age, or maybe a little younger. Even had that striped shirt, except it was the ’70s and not the ’80s pretending to be the ’50s. None of which really means much of anything except I’m curiously touched he’s still, you know, keeping it real, or whatever you call it. Not doing anything that’s likely to land him on E! anytime soon. And if he isn’t as funny as I sometimes think he thinks he is, who is? He’s managed to retain some small scraps of dignity,which is an impressive feat in this day and age. —So you’ve probably read his blog before and everything, and the line about the 50,000 monkeys is pretty good, but you maybe didn’t know he swept his categories in the 2002Bloggies (hey, I didn’t know till five minutes ago),and you probably haven’t read this amusing article about his blog. And yes, the bit about who would win, Anakin or Wesley, is pretty much exactly as funny as I think he thinks it is.

Hey! The only other thing I could think of was this joke from a humor magazine somebody I knew or maybe it was the brother or cousin of somebody I knew, or ex-girlfriend or something, the linkage is unclear to me now, but anyway, they went to Emory, and maybe they sent it to my roommate (who looked like a young, scruffy Billy Joel, so), and anyway, I thought it was so funny I scribbled it on my dorm room door froshling year. It’s a poster for a late ’80s superconcert:

Squeeze
The Firm
Hooters
INXS

—with—

XTC

See? Like I said. Slow.

—Filed 8771 days ago to Indulgences; Comments.

Elephant dung, not cow dung.

What? We went with John and Becca and Chris and saw Brotherhood of the Wolf which is (impressively) the closest thing to a Hong Kong historical action flick I’ve ever seen take place in 18th century France, and then cooked dinner for Steve and Sara (asparagus with egg and cheese, right out of The Moosewood Cooks at Home, and kukkakaalialaatikko, and bread-machine bread), and then it snowed, I mean it actually frickin’ snowed for the first time in like two years, and the cats hated it, and anyway, whatever; none of that is really worth talking about, because people enjoying themselves and laughing and cracking off-color jokes over chopped cauliflower and laughing (and yelling, but laughing) at the antics of people who can’t remember how exactly it is you drive in this snow stuff, none of that makes for gripping literature, precisely. Schadenfreude, that’s what puts butts in seats.

So: without further ado: some highlights from the New York Times’ corrections over the past 30 years or so.

(PS: Don’t tell Jenn I told you, but she’s working on some character art and I’m writing some copy for her for Dicebox that should be going up soon. Prepping to spread some word of mouth at APE—or at least, to have some lucky friends who are actually going spread it for us. But mum’s the word, for now.)

—Filed 8776 days ago to Indulgences; Comments.

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