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Requirement
Posted 9:25 PM, Feb 28, 2005 |
I suppose I should give some sort of update. I don’t feel obligated to update this site, but it’s been a few days, so at least a little memo.
Yes, I am still here.
My fingers hurt from guitar.
I’m trying to compose a CD, but I don’t even know who it’s for, and I don’t even have any blank CDs, and it’s just a ramshackle collection of songs that have nothing in common. Maybe they’re in the same key or something. You’d know better than I would.
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Get Smart
Posted 8:07 AM, Feb 25, 2005 |
I’m, like, the youngest person in my office, almost, and so I have to be all, like, talking like this because I’m so young.
I’m sort of tired of people assuming that, since I was born in 1978, I don’t know anything about Get Smart, The Ed Sullivan Show, and disco.
Sure, I can’t tell you where I was when JFK was shot - just a glimmer in my separate parents’ eyes - and I wasn’t at Woodstock, but that doesn’t mean I’m a total idiot.
People assume, since I’m educated, that I know about Jane Eyre, Mark Twain, the year 1066, and John Maynard Keynes (maybe not), but that I don’t know anything about pop culture.
I’m sort of rambling now.
Grr.
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Vocabulary
Posted 11:58 AM, Feb 24, 2005 |
People should not be lambasted for having expansive vocabularies. Just the other day, I was criticized for using the word amenable in an email. Why advertise your own poor vocabulary by coming over and critizing me for using words like that, saying things like, ‘Who talks like that?’ I’ll tell you who talks like that:
I do.
Fo shizzle.
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A List for the Child
Posted 9:49 AM, Feb 24, 2005 |
My sister-in-law is due to have a baby in a couple days. The child (gender as-of-yet undisclosed) will make me an uncle. I’ve decided I’m going to be the cool, crazy uncle by doing the following:
1) Making the child call me “T-Money.”
2) Making sure that the child’s first word is, in fact, T-Money.
3) Teaching the child to play Grand Theft Auto (any version) by age 6.
4) Teaching the child to play guitar and make it clear that, while playing, the cigarette the child is smoking should be tucked under the strings near the pegs and allowed to slowly burn, spilling ash on the carpet.
5) Introducing the child to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, and Tupac.
6) Letting the child drive my car the moment the child is tall enough to see over the steering wheel.
7) Letting the child operate the pedals in my car the moment the child is ambulatory.
8) Encouraging the child to go into the arts.
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Thursday Derivation
Posted 8:40 AM, Feb 24, 2005 |
Today’s Factoid:The word Thursday is derived from two Greek words: day meaning day, and thurs meaning tired, long, and really long.
Also, 8:40 in the morning is really no time to be making posts like this. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, because I’m certainly not. Just observing.
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Airport Endings
Posted 2:27 PM, Feb 22, 2005 |
the long, vaulted ceilings, wireframed
with massive steel curved with slow fire,
play host to the quiet moment between
you and i, like two honeybees in a greenhouse.
put us in a time lapse photograph and we will be
focused, we will be a crisp silhouette, a human median
inside traffic patterns of pilots and rolling luggage,
running past us in blurred navy blue and floral patterns.
airplanes leave in wide, white swaths,
all fuselage and contrail, their paths narrowing
to a point the size of us, small but filled
with thousands of tiny, movable parts,
before disappearing into the blue meadow
of the sky.
we disappear, too, among the streamers
of people. our bodies fold into each other
and we curl together into the past, a moment
together that disappears like a burnished
penny sinking in the atlantic.
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Wrestlers
Posted 9:06 AM, Feb 22, 2005 |
in the smoky haze in the back of the bar,
grayscale wrestlers emerge like ghosts
from a fog, their muscles hardened
like a pile of aged rubber bands.
they wear their hair cut close, their preserved
scalps showing through like empty spaces
on aged canvases. they are bent into
wrestling poses, their arms curled,
leaning forward to find an ancient
opponent to hurl to the fading mat.
the wrestlers recognize bar patrons, old athletes
who wear their football jerseys as nightshirts now.
the men stand and walk towards the back
of the bar, fitting loosely between
the wrestlers’ arms as if the gray ghosts
were plastic action figures, stiffly posed.
for a moment, flickers of recognition cross the wrestlers’
determined faces – they appear to smile, quickly,
before their mouths snap back to seriousness,
as if afraid of giving away their secrets.
i open the door to leave, turning backwards and pressing
against the cold glass with my spine. the men huddle
with the wrestlers, reminiscing with their still
faces. i step onto the sidewalk and a single gust
of iowa wind snaps into the bar with the sound
of a snug bedsheet and the ghosts blow away,
their outlines hanging briefly in the air like the ash
of an aged cigarette before they evaporate completely.
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Iowa City Redux
Posted 5:11 PM, Feb 21, 2005 |
I’m back from Iowa City, and it’s a good thing I had today off from work. I spent the whole day thinking about Presidents. I feel more in tune with my country than I did before, which is, of course, why we have holidays like Presidents’ Day, Veterans’ Day, and Arbor Day.
Iowa City featured a few bars, some tasty food, a most-excellent production of The Vagina Monologues, a little Ali G, and bookended by long, prairie-filled drives. Iowa sure is quiet when you stop in those little towns and refuel.
I can’t remember the last time I laughed as much as I did over the weekend. This is both a good sign (for the weekend) and a sad sign (for every day that is not part of the weekend).
Tomorrow, back to work. That’s ok - the weekend will be here sooner than normal.
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Juiced
Posted 11:50 AM, Feb 18, 2005 |
Here’s a review of Jose Canseco’s Juiced, a book I’m not going to read. I’m also going to spend the rest of the day just recycling the excellent work that the folks at Bookslut are doing.
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Fascists
Posted 9:20 AM, Feb 18, 2005 |
Bookslut said it best: meet the enemy.
What a bunch of fascists.
Kansas is one fucked-up state. What a screwball state, second, perhaps, only to Texas in their screwball quotient. Okay, maybe some of those deep South states. But Kansas is definitely in the top 10 for screwiness.
No Toni Morrison for these kids. No J.D. Salinger, either.
I like how they confuse ‘poor quality’ with ‘offensive’ (even though the books in question aren’t offensive, unless real life is offensive). As if something that says ‘fuck’ is automatically of a lower quality than something that, instead, uses ‘darn.’
Their ‘recommended’ reading list isn’t all bad, though, although it’s a little heavy on the inspiration, from JFK’s ghost-written Profiles in Courage to My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. by Coretta Scott King. However, both of these books are not great literature - that isn’t to say they aren’t important, but they aren’t on the same classic level as Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse Five, or Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
I’m going to start a petition that all of Kansas be removed from the union because of its poor quality. Bunch of fascists.
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Yesterday’s List
Posted 11:20 AM, Feb 16, 2005 |
A list of things I either learned or confirmed yesterday, divided into two convenient sections:
Things I cannot do:
1) Sing in tune.
2) Clean up dishes every single day.
3) Stand Dr. Phil.
4) Look away during medical dramas when they perform surgeries or other medical operations that I know I don’t really want to see, like putting a needle into someone’s eye.
Things I can do:
1) Play guitar and “sing” (see above) at the same time.
2) Answer the Final Jeopardy clue.
3) Prove the Angle-Angle Similarity Theorem using only the Law of Sines, proportions, and the fact that the sum of the measures of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees.
4) Microwave leftovers.
5) Microwave leftovers.
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Contra Code
Posted 12:52 PM, Feb 15, 2005 |
I just emailed someone from work to their workplace to find out exactly what the Contra code was for NES. The reason I was forced to do this during my workday was because I read a humor piece at McSweeney’s that mentioned the code, but I was pretty sure they got it wrong.
I think only people who grew up in the 1980s really give a shit about anything I’m saying.
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Larry David vs. Haruki Murakami
Posted 10:26 PM, Feb 14, 2005 |
After watching a lot of Curb Your Enthusiasm on Saturday, I began to feel like I was viewing my whole day from outside of myself, like I was in an episode. I could imagine all these things happening, these things that seemed to make sense at the time, but also seemed outlandish.
Side note: What a great word, outlandish, as in, ‘from the outland,’ like Spanish. Sometimes the English language is really swell, and sometimes it throws things at you like expecting that you are to understand why fiery is spelled the way it is instead of firey, which would make a lot more sense. Right?
And so anyway, my point is that Curb Your Enthusiasm was sort of screwing with my head. I can watch 15 episodes of Arrested Development without it having any sort of impact on my psyche. I can turn it off and not think of it again for days. It sort of makes my whole life seem surreal.
And the same kind of thing happens every time I read a Haruki Murakami book. It seems normal, and everything seems, for lack of a better term, landish, or maybe inlandish, but when you wrap it all together between two covers and consider all these seemingly-independent events dependently, it sort of changes things.
See, it’s because your life is normal. Your life is a collection of these normal moments, these average experiences. But what if — yes, I’m really getting at the heart of it here — but what if? What if when you add all these things up, whether it’s at the end of the day, or the week, or maybe even your whole life, what if they add up to something miraculously good?
Or what if they end up incredibly bad, or sad, or just plain retarded?
So this entry isn’t really about Larry David vs. Haruki Murakami. It’s more about Larry and Haruki, say, shoveling snow together, or enjoying a frappucino.
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Afterstorm
Posted 9:36 PM, Feb 13, 2005 |
bicycling past the bowling alley,
i always looked at the white house
that sat next door, my eyes following the long driveway,
coming to rest on the house, staring
at me with its hands on its shingled hips.
my great-aunt lived in that house,
her husband killed in a hunting accident
the day my father turned seven. i imagine
my father upset that his birthday had been overtaken,
as if he had finished second in a spelling bee.
she sat for forty years in that house,
peering out from behind thick, canvas curtains
that only let in the moonlight.
she kept her hair pulled tightly around
her head, snug like gift wrap. i bet
she was beautiful, the sun warming her hair
as she pulled weeds from the gardens
that framed the base of the house. the sun made
her skin slowly darken as if she were turning
into the dirt in which her hands were buried, her sweat
smelling like the fifteen minutes
after a thunderstorm.
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Four Times
Posted 11:01 AM, Feb 13, 2005 |
Well, last night we ran into Adam and Sara again, at Grumpy’s. We all took a week off from bizarre coincidences last week, but it’s nice to see we’re back to the usual random meetings. I also apparently crossed paths with Sara the night before at the Chatterbox, except that we live in a world of 4 dimensions, that 4th dimension being time.
And so but then.
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Blinker Etiquette Addendum
Posted 1:42 PM, Feb 10, 2005 |
If you’re already turning your steering wheel, it’s really too late to put on your turn signal. See, the turn signal is supposed to do just that: signal, like, ahead of time, that you’re about to turn. I’d say your Cadillac Escalade veering in front of me, I’d say that’s a pretty good signal all by itself. Adding a turn signal is like stacking a cinder block on top of Mt. Everest.
But seriously: what is wrong with you people?
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Tough Love
Posted 5:38 PM, Feb 8, 2005 |
Today I caught what I think was the first episode ever of The Cosby Show. They live in a different house – it’s still the same exterior shot, but the interior is quite obviously quite a bit different. I’ve seen the episode before and it’s the only episode I’ve seen that takes place on that particular set.
Cliff is still a doctor, but I think Claire is a housewife; that’s how it appears, anyway, with her cooking breakfast and dinner and basically taking care of the kids while Cliff is out.
It’s funny how it’s really a totally different show. To start with, they specifically mention that they have 4 kids, and Rudy is in the episode, along with Denise, Vanessa, and Theo. Sondra is completely unmentioned and has been erased from existence, or, more accurately, not created yet. I guess.
Also, the house is a total disaster, with toys and tennis rackets and a baseball bat in the living room, completely unlike the usually-immaculate house in which the family lives later.
The parenting approach is much more of a tough-love approach, too. In the episode, Theo brings back his report card with 4 Ds on it. Claire sends him and the rest of the kids upstairs after they start a small food fight, and then Cliff comes home. Claire tells him he has to deal with his report card because if she has to go upstairs and Theo says, “Hey, no problem!” she’s going to kill him. The later Claire Huxtable would never have said she was going to kill any of her children.
And on the way upstairs, jokingly, Cliff picks up a baseball bat. I don’t think he’d do that in later shows, either.
It’s a funny episode, but almost like watching a different show. I can’t imagine that they were only on that set for one episode, but this is at least the third time I’ve seen parts of this episode, and it’s clearly very old, and I’ve never seen the set anywhere else. Strange.
Last minute update: So it actually was the first episode of The Cosby Show ever, and the second one I saw today was the second episode ever. The second one, in which Rudy’s fish dies and they hold a funeral, takes place in the “new” house with a fair change in style. So I guess it was just that first episode, then, for which they used the old house. No word on why they made the sudden change.
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Thirteen
Posted 11:40 AM, Feb 8, 2005 |
the last twelve poems i’ve
written have been about sleeping
with a girl next to me, blankets
bundled around us, her body
a fireplace, smoldering.
we never have sex in my poems.
we just lay there; she’s always asleep
and i’m awake, sometimes reading,
sometimes staring at the wall behind her,
painted with shadows of her hair,
a jungle of silhouettes.
her skin is just a container for charcoal,
her armpits and the insides of her elbows
are awake with sweat. i look at her and watch
the heat rise like water running uphill.
when i wake up in the morning, she is always gone,
but the faint outline of her body
is on the bedsheet next to me, a freehand
drawing with a pen that has almost run out of ink.
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Turning
Posted 9:26 PM, Feb 6, 2005 |
the ice in the glass of water
on the nightstand shifts slightly
at the same moment you drape your
sleeping arm over my chest.
your arm brushes the spine
of my book and the ice
creaks like a small glacier. i watch
the ice quietly revolve in the glass,
turning like the moon in the dark.
the off-white of my book’s paper
melts with the bare skin of your
arm. i put the book aside and turn
out the light. the ice settles and melts
and combines seamlessly with the cold
tap water as you turn and wrap
your arm comfortably around me.
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F’ing Racist
Posted 7:35 AM, Feb 4, 2005 |
So a group from work went to Tonic in Uptown. After a while, I took a walk outside, and then decided to call a cab, as I hadn’t drove. So I’m walking to the corner to look for a cab - the corner of Hennepin and Lake, if you’re keeping score - and this tall, tall black man dressed in a nice-looking tan wool coat, brown scarf, and brown felt hat, comes up to me. He tells me this story about how he came in from Kansas City, and he’s been waiting for his ride to pick him up for, like, an hour, and they aren’t here, and he needs money to get to the Salvation Army or something.
But this guy looks nice.
So anyway, being slightly buzzed after two beers, two Captain & Cokes, and a quick shot just before I went back outside to call the cab, I tell the guy, “You know what, man? You help me find a cab, and I’ll help you out.”
It immediately becomes this guy’s mission in life to find me a cab. He’s looking up and down the street, muttering, “We’ll find you a cab, man… Where are you going?”
“St. Louis Park.”
Then there’s these two girls walking by, and so this guy flags them down. “You ladies, can you give this guy a ride to St. Louis Park?”
Of course they can’t. Which is just fine.
“Can you at least call my man a cab?”
So this girl calls a cab, gives them my name and her cell phone number, and this tall black guy is talking about “…people coming together, unifying…” and whatnot. (By the way, if you’re the girl that called the cab for me, I’m sorry I didn’t stick around to get it. I hope they didn’t call you back.)
So these two girls walk on, and this guy looks at me expectantly. I did say if he got me a cab, I’d help him out. So I look in my wallet, and I realize I have no idea how much a cab ride will cost to St. Louis Park. I also have no idea if they take credit cards. I have about $25, which seems like it should be enough. I figure I can spare $2, so I give the guy $2.
He looks at the $2 (after he takes it out of my hand), looks at me, and says, “Man, we had a deal. I helped you out.”
“I’m helping you out. I gotta save money for the cab ride.”
At this point, it’s like talking to a tape recorder. The guy just goes on and on: “We had a deal. I helped you out.”
I try explaining to this fucking idiot that I need money to get home, and that if I can’t pay the cab, then he may as well not have gotten the girl to call it.
“You said you were gonna help me out,” he says. And I look at this guy, and I’m getting sort of pissed. There’s a fair number of people around - it’s around 11:15 or 11:30, so it’s certainly not dead quiet. And this guy’s a fucking idiot.
“I helped you out. I gave you two bucks.”
“You said you were gonna help me out.”
I look at the guy and say, “If my two bucks doesn’t help you out, why don’t you give it back to me? If it’s no help.”
“I’ll give you your two dollars back,” the guy says.
Now, I’ve read a lot of stories and lots of them talk about somebody ‘looming’ in front of you. Well, this guy was a loomer.
“Fuck,” he says, and then turns his body so he’s directly facing me. He pulls himself together, seeming to add mass and height, and looks down at me from under the brim of his hat.
My heart takes off down the sidewalk, and I briskly chase after it. I’m not running, but my heart and I are moving down the sidewalk, back to the bar, at a rapid pace.
I go up to the valet guys at Tonic and ask them to call me a cab. They tell me there’s a cab stand just down the street, which is precisely where I just was.
As an explanation of why I’m not walking down there, I relay my story to them, and as I’m telling them, the tall black guy walks past us, says something to me that I can’t understand, and then closes with, “Fucking racist.”
Man, you know what, pal? You wanna talk some jive? I’ll talk some jive. (Just kidding.)
But that guy was a fucking asshole. I hope he uses that $2 to buy a bottle of knock-off Listerine, pounds it, and passes out in a back alley somewhere and a stray dog craps in his nice little hat.
What a fucking jerk.
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The Search for Kinky Friedman
Posted 11:50 AM, Feb 3, 2005 |
Someone just told me, in the last week, that their favorite writer was one Kinky Friedman. That’s a name, not a description.
We were talking about books and writers and favorite authors, and I said, “Who’s your favorite author?” and they said, “Kinky Friedman,” and I shrugged.
And then today I see that Kinky is running for governor of Texas. And so I start to think to myself, ‘Self, who was just telling you about Kinky Friedman?’ but I can’t remember.
If it was you, please tell me. And if I think of it, I’ll let you know.
Kinky.
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Under Construction
Posted 10:15 PM, Feb 2, 2005 |
So today I’m sitting in the dentist’s office, waiting for my name to be called, and reading a copy of Smithsonian magazine. I was a little rattled because the office was different than the last time I was there. It was under construction, long pieces of transparent sheeting hanging down, and white sheet rock upright where new, actual walls will be. And so I’m sitting there, reading Smithsonian, and I hear the sound of a drill.
Just for a moment, I’m not sure if it’s a construction drill or a dentist’s drill.
If you ever grow up to become a dentist, I recommend that all construction drilling is done after business hours, for the sake of your customers. I nearly left.
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Turn Signal
Posted 8:24 AM, Feb 1, 2005 |
I’m going to stop using my car’s turn signals.
1) Nobody else uses them, and if they do, they forget and leave them on, so you can’t really trust them anyway.
2) Some people on Highway 169 North think it’s funny when you indicate a lane change into their lane and they speed up really fast to try to make it so you can’t get over into their lane, as if it were actually their lane, i.e., you should be paying rent if you’re going to use it.
3) The same people think it’s appropriate to honk when you do exactly what your turn signal said you were going to do, which is switch lanes anyway, and they have to hit their brakes to reduce the acceleration they made just to try to screw you over.
A turn signal is basically like telling a boxing opponent that first you’re going to jab left, then uppercut right, and if at any point he’d like to punch you in the crotch, he should feel free.
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