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Relative
Posted 2:33 PM, Nov 30, 2005 |
Now that my brain has been pronounced “normal,” I find I have little to say. What can possibly be as important, interesting, or sitcom-like, cliff-hanger-ish than wondering whether my brain is functioning properly? Has this site jumped the shark? It seems possible, with the rest of the site’s posts involving subplots where I drop a Christmas pie on the floor and have to clean it up before the maid comes in and finds it, and things like that. Not very interesting or exciting. Funny, but only just barely. Or not at all. Probably not at all.
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Just What Is Normal, Really?
Posted 1:25 PM, Nov 28, 2005 |
The woman in the medical records department said they had my MRI results and, while she qualified her statement by saying, “I’m not very good at reading medical reports,” she did say that the report read, “The brain appears normal.”
At this point, you can insert your own joke from the multitude of possibilities.
Where does this leave me, besides with lingering headaches and a medical bill? Pretty much back at square one, although I will say the headaches have slightly subsided. They’re still there, and I’ll keep checking, ha ha.
A message is being relayed to my doctor to send me the report, and hopefully he’ll be a little more pro-active and prescribe something, some sort of anti-Viagra, even.
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Linkatorium
Posted 11:02 AM, Nov 28, 2005 |
How Sarah Silverman is raping American comedy.
Sarah Silverman on religion, Zoloft, and softball.
The Top 40 Bands in America Today
Sex and Chess
World Chess Beauty Contest
Quick ways to bypass automated menus and access an actual person for customer service.
Danny Gregory’s excellent Peanut column, about the months immediately surrounding the birth of his son, Jack.
Danny Gregory’s blog, Everyday Matters.
A game where you have to balance a bunch of things, which sounds lame.
Late addition: I once wrote a poem, which I guess was never posted on this site, where I joked about kissing an girl who was allergic to peanuts immediately after eating a Snickers bar. It was a funny idea at the time, but apparently not as funny as I thought.
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He Said, She Said
Posted 9:36 AM, Nov 28, 2005 |
Man, does it make me tired, relating conversations to other people.
“And so I said, ‘Blah, who cares?’ and then she said, ‘Well, blah blah,’ and then I said, ‘Well, you don’t know,’ - not you, but her, you know, and then she said, ‘Well, my friend… blah,’ but again, it’s like, her friend, not my friend, because that’s what she said, and does anyone really care to follow all of this?”
I thought all of those kind of conversations would be left behind in high school, but no, now I pay someone $20 every couple weeks to sit around and listen to me slog through confusing stories about people she’s never met and never will meet.
It’s actually quite amazing, as she can follow most of what I’m saying, and she doesn’t even take notes.
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Vision
Posted 2:48 AM, Nov 26, 2005 |
There’s this passage in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis when he talks about his dad, meeting this friend of his dad’s at his dad’s wake or something (I’m probably misremembering the shit out of it right now) and this guy, this coworker of his dad’s, says that his dad had vision driving, that he could see “three or four moves ahead.”
I can sort of drive like that. I’ve been known to drive erratically, “hosting” TV shows in my high school car called Fun With Cars, and initiating sessions of crazy driving even now. There’s a reason I own the car I do. I can afford to drive a little nutty sometimes, or what seems like a little nutty, because I don’t drive out of my control - it might seem like it, but I feel like I have a pretty good sense of what is too far, how much I can push things, etc.
I can see three or four moves ahead. I look in the rear view mirror and memorize the cars that I see so then I can change lanes, later, knowing that all the cars I saw a couple minutes ago in my mirror are still behind me, in my mirror, and so there must not be anyone next to me. I keep mental tabs on where people are on the road, moreso than most, perhaps, and that lets me have vision.
The weird thing is, I have no vision in anything that’s actually important. In pool, I can see two or three shots ahead (that doesn’t mean I can always make all those shots, but that’s a shortcoming of skill, not vision). When I bowl, I can envision where pins will go, where I need to hit one pin in order to knock down the other three or four, and so on. I have good vision for unimportant things.
I have shitty vision for anything that really matters. Ask me what I know about anybody - what I really know about them, and I’m stumped. Ask me if I could ask person A to be a groomsmen in my wedding, ask me if I could ask person B to attend a wedding with me, ask me if I could ask person C to sit in the hospital with me, and nine times out of ten, I swear I’d get it wrong. I don’t have vision when it comes to where other people will be, emotionally, to me, at all. I suck at it. I’m terrible at it.
I don’t have a point.
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I Had an MRI and All I Got Was This Lousy Weblog
Posted 5:55 PM, Nov 21, 2005 |
One MRI down, hopefully none to go.
It reminded me of Spock’s casket from Star Trek III, except from what I remember, Spock’s casket didn’t buzz and hum and clang around. If that had happened, they probably would have cracked it open to see if Spock was alive.
I kept my eyes closed the entire time (another similarity to a casket!), partially because they recommend that when they’re imaging your brain. I guess if you have your eyes open, you have more of a tendency to move your head to look around (precisely what there is to look at wasn’t clear to me), and you must keep your head perfectly still. If there’s one thing I learned, it was that.
The machine also reminded me of one of the walkways at the Detroit airport, which is a semi-tubular tunnel with all these lights and stuff.
It banged around a lot. I imagine it would sound much the same if you put a metal pot on your head and someone tapped on it with a wooden spoon.
Actually, ha ha, just to show you how much of a pussy I am and how I’m all, like, totally honest on this website, the worst part was getting the IV for the contrast solution. I don’t like needles, so that wasn’t cool. But no problems - I only felt like passing out. I didn’t actually do it.
The guy that was running the show, he told me they were going to do one more scan or image or whatever before taking me out to put in the contrast fluid. They did one, and then he said they were going to take me out, but I laid in the machine for what seemed like 5 minutes and nothing happened. Then he said they were going to do another scan before taking me out. Um, okay. I’m going to assume that’s just because they were alarmed, like, “How can his brain be that large?” or something like that.
So I have to wait a few days, probably into next week due to the holiday, before any results are reported back to me. We were joking at work today that I would know if something wasn’t right because when I came out, I’d be able to tell that the technicians had been crying. Or one of them would be holding his hands to illustrate a circle about 6 inches around and the other technician would be saying, “You think the tumor was that si—” and then they’d all look at the floor, embarrassed.
Neither of those things happened.
Also, they had the outline of maple leaves imprinted on the ceiling tiles so when you’re waiting for them to slide you into the machine, you can think about how it’s the autumn of your life.
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Thank God It’s an MRI
Posted 9:15 AM, Nov 21, 2005 |
Today is the day I get my head examined. Yes, today! Apparently the pre-Thanksgiving period is not a big time for head-examining, so they were able to fit me right in at 2:45 this afternoon.
The place I’m going to is right behind a TGI Friday’s, which I’m really excited about. I hope it’s more than just some back-alley MRI operation, run with a Dumpster and a blacklight and some caricature artist from Six Flags.
The lady on the phone said, “No food or drink for 4 hours prior,” to which I asked, “Can I have water?” That seems like a legitimate question to me, but her response was, “No food or drink. Duh!” Okay, she didn’t say “Duh!” explicitly, but she said it with her tone.
I bet you’d get one fucked-up MRI if you drank a lot of Gatorade beforehand. Think of those commercials where all the atheletes’ sweat is all neon and colored, and then put all those sweet colors in my brain. Man, it’d be a wild ride.
I suppose there will be an update later today or tomorrow or something, too, although I won’t get the MRI results for a week or so.
Oh, and I’m getting a “contrast injection,” which I want to sound dirty, but can’t quite get there.
See you on the flip side.
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My Brain is a Bar Code
Posted 9:40 AM, Nov 19, 2005 |
For those of you playing along at home, I’m going to get an MRI done sometime next week, hopefully - I haven’t made the appointment as I only got the referral yesterday afternoon. I, for one, am very excited about being put in a tube and having doctors throw magnets at my head, or however that works. Or not.
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Getting My Head Examined
Posted 8:37 AM, Nov 18, 2005 |
So I told my boss I have a doctor’s appointment at 2:30 today and she said, “Oh, is it for your eye?” to which I gave her a quizzical look. “Your eye is all red.” Awesome. I’m falling apart. I’m probably going blind from inducing all these headaches.
So, off to the doctor at 2:30. We’ll see what happens. If nothing else, since I’m downtown, maybe I can have a nice dinner, a last meal, if you will.
Oh, dark humor. It’s ok.
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Headache Headache
Posted 8:17 AM, Nov 18, 2005 |
I spent about an hour yesterday curled up in a fetal position, holding my head. Joy. I guess I should make a doctor’s appointment, based on this and this. This article suggest that just abstaining for a couple weeks is all that’s needed. I guess I could try that, but honestly, where’s the fun in that? Or maybe I have a brain hemorrhage. Based on the fact that this has happened before, probably not.
I guess I’ll go see my doctor, even though he’s a dope and I really need to find a new one. I don’t much feel like it right now.
I’m okay with, like, CT scans and MRIs. Those sound interesting enough. But that last article says maybe a spinal tap? Oh, I think not. I saw The Exorcist, when the girl gets a spinal tap and there’s blood shooting all over and the mother is in tears. No thank you.
That last article says I need “emergency evaluation,” but I don’t think so since it’s happened before.
And boy, the “One Reader’s Experience” sure puts my mind at ease, no pun intended.
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Experience, Ha Ha
Posted 3:06 PM, Nov 17, 2005 |
Hey, look. I’m writing some stuff that’s on this website, some stuff for you to read. Unfortunately, it’s a total fucking bore.
I’m still breathing, still experiencing headaches, ha ha, you know what I mean, nudge nudge, wink wink.
I’m listening to Abbey Road right now. It’s a pretty neat record, for lack of a better word.
In other news, look, around the corner — here comes Thanksgiving! That should be exciting. I hope bars are open on Thanksgiving.
You might ask yourself why I’m writing this particular post in such a peculiar fashion. No reason. Why ask why? Just experience it, ha ha.
I think this weekend should be filled with a lot of sleep and mental recovery. What am I recovering from? Other than my recent experiences, ha ha? I wish I knew.
Okay, yeah, so that whole experiences joke got old, if it was ever funny in the first place.
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Monday Morning
Posted 9:50 AM, Nov 14, 2005 |
it smelled like funnel cakes
in my cubicle this morning.
between typing pockmarks,
i thought i heard a calliope,
buried somewhere in the gray
maze, over by the exercise room,
which would be the perfect
place to hide it.
in the cafeteria, the chairs
slowly circled the round
tables, employees quietly spinning,
glazed looks in their eyes,
cotton candy stuck to their fingertips,
toner smudged on their cheeks.
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To Top It All Off
Posted 8:39 AM, Nov 14, 2005 |
And then this morning the zipper on my backpack refused to zip, as it does from time to time, but it refused for 10 minutes, so I had to put my sandwiches in my jacket pockets, along with my mp3 player. Yes, I’ve had the backpack for 9 years and it’s been a good backpack and stuff, but still, it could have at least chosen to cooperate on a Monday morning.
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Objects: Classical Guitar
Posted 3:21 PM, Nov 10, 2005 |
 I have a classical guitar that I seldom play now. It’s the guitar on which I first learned to play guitar, and, not coincidentally, is also the guitar on which my mother first learned to play guitar. It doesn’t strike me as a particularly good guitar, musically speaking, but that’s not terribly important.
Now, I play a regular, acoustic guitar (i.e., not classical) that is far better for playing from a musical point of view. (It still sounds disorganized and only half-musical, but that’s not its fault – it’s mine.) But I still take some time, on occasion, to play the classical guitar. I play the same music on it in precisely the same fashion, and it sounds worse but feels better.
The classical guitar is one thing I know the story behind, although I learned it from my grandmother – I don’t recall ever having any serious interest in learning the guitar before a few years ago. Before then, it was just a mess of strings and frets and wood and plastic. I could make funny sounds by sliding my fingers up and down the frets, but that’s where my fascination ended. It’s like being entertained by a television because it’s made of molded plastic, ignoring its real purpose.
According to my grandmother, my mother came home from school one day with the idea that she was going to learn to play guitar. I don’t know where she got this idea, but she was stubborn and insistent that she learn. In the middle of winter, in heavy snow, my grandfather and mother took the bus to downtown Duluth to a local music store. They returned with the guitar that is sitting in my living room. My mother never got really into the guitar – I imagine she noodled around with it for a few weeks, little guidance and no lessons, and gave it up. She never played it, at least as far as I know, anytime after that initial excitement and interest.
In fact, for most of the time I was growing up, I couldn’t have told you were it was. It has a hard, black pebbled plastic case lined with blue felt; the hard case let it get stored in closets and under the staircase and other unintentionally hard-to-find places.
The case has a plastic handle and the whole thing closes with four metal clasps – two on the side and one on each end. Inside, under the neck of the guitar, there’s a little compartment that contains guitar picks and a pitch pipe.
When I inherited the guitar, it also came with a heavy piece of light blue yarn in place of an actual guitar strap. I remember first learning to play it, a few years ago, and the yarn pressing tightly into the back of my neck.
Now, I listen to lots of music with acoustic guitar; with fingerpicking; with intelligible, obvious guitar playing. I didn’t listen to that before, necessarily – in fact, it’s no surprise to me, thinking about it now, that the first musical artist I really, really listened to was Billy Joel, but that’s a story about a piano, not a guitar. For now, let’s just say that we had a piano in the house when I was growing up, and the piano belonged to my mother, who played it on very rare occasions. So is it any surprise that when we got rid of the piano and I found the guitar, my musical interests changed accordingly?
I never really understood the music my mother listened to. I couldn’t tell you two artist’s names, and the cassette tapes she listened to are long gone. But I do remember that I didn’t get it. She owned a bunch of Beatles records, and then right alongside those, some Johnny Mathis. Neil Diamond’s greatest hits (better than you think), and Barbra Streisand.
It’s not a big surprise to me, either, that as I’m writing this I’m thinking of about a hundred other memories that have to do with music. I’ve become a real music lover in the past five years, buying CDs constantly and absorbing as much music as I can (I have headphones in my ears right now), and I thought it was a new leaf, but it’s pretty clear it’s all wrapped up in my blood.
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Gymnasium Memories: Two
Posted 2:35 PM, Nov 10, 2005 |
Picking up from where I left off before:
Two
At some point, someone decided to give me a tennis racket. It was a cheap metal and plastic thing, just barely better than the wooden ones that went out of style and usefulness ten years earlier. Also, there was no place to play tennis near where I lived, especially as a relatively immobile 6th grader. In later years, I could bike a half-hour to some tennis courts, and after that drive, but when I was 12, I wasn’t going too far on my own.
Sometimes my brother and I would volley back and forth over the clotheslines on the north end of the house. We couldn’t let the ball bounce because of uneven dirt, rocks, mud, and so on. (As a result, I’m most comfortable playing tennis at the net – why wait for the ball to bounce?)
Sometimes I’d practice by hitting the tennis ball against the inside of the garage door. I’d close the door when there were no cars in there and hit around for a while, trying not to knock any hand saws or cases of drill bits off the wall. It was a pretty small area, and lobbing the ball higher than about 10 feet wasn’t really an option. Plus, I was always afraid I’d run into the table saw or the counter in which my dad stored can after tin can filled with nails and screws.
The best place to practice was on the concrete apron in front of the garage, against the outside of the garage door. Lots of space; good, solid, uncracked concrete; lots of room to run. The only problem was that the driveway slanted down and so was seemingly always muddy due to rainfall and runoff. Once the tennis ball hit the driveway, each successive time it hit the white garage door imprinted a small, dirty brown circle. Needless to say, this didn’t go over well with my parents, even though I figured, as a 12-year-old, that the garage door was outside where mud and rain and dirt abound. What difference does it honestly make? (I’m still not sure I can answer that question.)
Back to the gymnasium:
For one afternoon each year for three years, I stood on the stage in the gymnasium in early spring, just as the ground was melting into mud, and participated in spelling bees. There was this kid, Scott, who was some sort of spelling guru, and the first year, when I was in 4th grade, I finished in 3rd place. Scott won, and I don’t remember who placed 2nd. The next year, I believe, Scott and I finished first and second, respectively, and when I was in 6th grade, I won. I remember getting this trophy with a bee on top – this plastic trophy with a gold-colored bee wearing a mortarboard. Awesome.
My parents were there – I don’t think my brother was; he was at the middle school already – and we went home after the spelling bee, at the end of the day. I climbed out of the car, trophy in hand, and started to walk into the house. Instead of getting to go inside, though, I had to get a bucket of soapy, hot water and wash the garage door, pockmarked with tennis-ball-sized circles of dirt.
I can’t remember if my mother protested at my dad’s crossness about the dirty garage door or not. In my memory, she did, but I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. But, in any event, I do remember my dad insisting that I clean the garage door immediately – now, not later.
I also remember the hot embarrassment and indignation at being made to do such a task. My feelings were multiplied by the fact that I had just won the spelling bee, this high for my 6th-grade self, and now here I was, washing a garage door for a reason I didn’t really understand other than the notion that something which is dirty must be cleaned. That was the only reason (and not a good one) that I could come up with. I couldn’t come up with any reason that it had to be cleaned immediately. I still can’t come up with a better understanding to explain the necessity of the immediate cleaning.
Sure, some of my embarrassment hinged on the fact that I had been caught, for lack of a better word, doing something I wasn’t supposed to do. It wasn’t that I thought I could get away with it – obviously, a connect-the-dots of dirty circles on a white garage door won’t go unnoticed forever. I knew someone would notice, but I thought I could talk them out of it. “See,” I would say, “It’s no big deal. It’s been like that since yesterday, and nothing bad happened. We can just leave it there.”
Stories like this make me sound like I was a precocious 6th-grader. Maybe I was.
Anyway, so I cleaned the garage door and then the spelling bee moment was sort of ruined. It’s not like it’s something I think about a lot – hardly ever, in fact – but I thought about it a lot in the weeks after.
Ultimately, I’m not sure what I was supposed to learn from that lesson, other than the obvious “Don’t play tennis against the garage door.” And, in all honesty, that may be the last time I ever did play tennis against the garage door. So maybe I learned the lesson – I guess you could say I did. I think, more than that, I learned that there are more effective ways to teach someone something.
In the grand scheme of things, like I said, it’s not a big deal. As an adult looking back on it now, though, it’s one of the first times where I think my questioning of my parents was, perhaps, justified. It’s one of those moments where another part of my brain opened up, even though I didn’t realize it at the time, and I was able to evaluate what happened and how everything played out and disagree on both logical and emotional grounds.
Or maybe I just got lucky by being indignant at the right time. Sooner or later, I had to actually be right.
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Family History (Not So Much)
Posted 11:21 AM, Nov 10, 2005 |
My family has never been much for family history. I don’t know a lot of stories about my parents before I was born, or as adults before my brother was born, let alone as children. I don’t know how my parents met. I’m left to fill in the details of their courtship, and when that happens, everything comes out wrong, implausible at best, like a piece of magical realism – but not “magical” in the mysterious, beautiful sense of the word. More like off-kilter realism.
It’s more accurate, I suppose, to say that I can’t even imagine a courtship at all.
I can’t imagine my father as a kid, playing checkers with his twin brother. I can only imagine my father as a kid with dirty hands and an industrious look on his face, my grandmother sighing contentedly while cleaning his face with a washcloth. I can’t imagine my father in elementary school and can barely imagine him in high school, but it’s no high school I ever went to. (It is, in fact, the same high school I went to, but I swear it can’t be because… well, because such a thing can’t be possible. It’s complicated.)
I can do a little better at imagining my mother as a child. I’ve seen pictures. I inherited (or took because nobody else wanted) her classical guitar. I’ve seen the room in which she grew up – I’ve spent a significant amount of time in it, playing video games and writing stories on an antiquated Commodore 64. It’s a real place for a real person.
I can imagine my mother in my school (the very same one), reading, walking the halls, laughing, with a hairstyle that has long since vanished. I’ve seen her high school yearbook. I can’t imagine her going to college, though – that part is an empty void. It’s not that she wasn’t smart, or that I can’t reconcile her with the fact that she went to college. I just can’t see it. While not as monumental of a task, it’s like the idea that I can accept that Hillary climbed Mount Everest, but ask me to envision him actually climbing the mountain and I can’t do it.
I can’t imagine my parents bringing my brother or me home from the hospital. Sometimes I can’t even imagine that my brother and I actually grew up (and maybe we haven’t, really).
I can’t imagine my parents doing a vast variety of things. The things I can imagine are because of little snippets of family history. You don’t have to show me video of my mother growing up and going to high school. Just show me the bedroom she grew up in, a high school yearbook picture, an old guitar, and I can go about filling in the details, at least accurately enough to keep me satisfied.
Maybe that’s the reason I write – most of my writing isn’t far off from my personal experiences, in some way. If my father had written a short story in 5th grade and mailed it to me today, I like to think things about him would become much clearer.
My family has never been much for family history, which is a shame.
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Gymnasium Memories: One
Posted 1:58 PM, Nov 9, 2005 |
My dad still lives in the same house I grew up in, and it isn’t more than three miles from my elementary school. As a result, I still see the boxy little building, the front recess playground long since paved over for a parking lot, almost every time I visit Duluth. I haven’t been in the building for a long time – 10 years, maybe. Probably more than that. I can’t help but imagine it as the same as it always was inside, even though the outside has changed drastically.
The gymnasium must still be the same – I remember it as a tangled mess of lines and marking tape, all sorts of boundaries and indicated regions for a vast dictionary of games I still don’t think I understand. I have at least two-and-a-half memories of that gymnasium.
One
There was this Disney movie, Gus (It’s funny, this isn’t the memory I was going to start with, but then that first sentence crept out there, and there’s no turning back.) I was in fourth grade, and they were showing Gus in the gymnasium.
The title character was a donkey who could kick field goals. (Now, of course, the sport-playing animal is a tired, tired genre – we’ve even gone as far as sport-playing cartoon characters, now – but at the time, Gus was brilliant. Check out this cast list: Ed Asner, Don Knotts, Dick Van Patten, Johnny Unitas (yes, that Johnny Unitas), Dick Butkus, Tom Bosley, and Dick Enberg.) They had set up a giant screen in the front of the gym, on the stage, and all the classes were brought in to watch Gus – I suspect it was on film reels and the projector actually had to be changed in the middle. I suspect it had to be rewound and everyone in the gym could hear that familiar click-click-click of the loose end of the film reel slapping against itself as it finished rewinding.
Man, though, Gus was funny. I haven’t seen it since – I should, though.
Gus was so funny that this girl, Ryann, laughed so hard she had to lean her head on my shoulder, and she left it there. I still go just a little bonkers thinking about it. Man, that was it.
I try to think about either of my parents having this experience, that first thrill of the opposite sex actually, maybe, even just a little bit, being interested. I can’t do it.
I didn’t have a crush on her, at least not before that moment, but that was enough to make any fourth-grader crush. I think I could walk into that gymnasium today, make my way across the mess of colored arcs and lines, and point to the tile I was sitting on. I could cross my legs and tell you about Gus making a mess of a grocery store, a gymnasium laughing hysterically, a girl putting her head on the shoulder of a shy fourth-grade kid, and part of me, part of every kid that hasn’t been there, waking up like a calf opening its eyes. I could tell you all this, and you’d understand what I was saying, but you’d really be thinking back to that moment, your own gymnasium, your own warm shoulder. You’d be far away from what I was saying, my words making the bones in your ear vibrate, but your crush making your heart swoon and open and melt and break, all at the same time.
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7 to 11, 4 to 7
Posted 11:33 AM, Nov 9, 2005 |
That’s pretty much my sleep schedule from last night. Nothing like taking an early 4-hour nap, then wandering aimlessly for approximately 5 hours, and then back for another little nap.
I hear Einstein slept for 20 minutes a time and never really slept all night. He’d just nap, then explain the universe a little, then nap, then explain the universe a little more, and back to napping. And explaining. And so on.
I managed to write some email and play a video game and listen to Billy Joel for an hour and a half. So it isn’t quite explaining the universe, but it’s a good start.
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Election Backlash
Posted 11:24 AM, Nov 9, 2005 |
So now we all went and voted and now everything’s different, right? Nah, not so much. I mean, Kansas redefined the word science, so that’s different, but not surprising, anyway. Texans are bigoted about gays (to say the least) by a more-than-3-to-1 margin, while Maine rules. Results everywhere else are being spun as we speak, spun until they’re completely meaningless.
On a more important note, today I was unpacking a box of books and emptying out those white, s-shaped popcorn peanuts, and I was faced with the same question as always: why, when I try to throw little pieces of the sytrofoam in the garbage, do they repel and float away, invariably ending up stuck to my pants?
Kansas should pass a law saying that kind of behavior is unacceptable.
America’s sort of dumb sometimes, you know.
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Catch-7-and-a-Third
Posted 10:14 AM, Nov 7, 2005 |
So I made it one-third of the way through Catch-22, approximately, which is further than I’ve made it the last six times, but also the furthest I’ll ever make it, since I reached the conclusion it isn’t the book for me. Sure, sure, you love it. It’s your favorite book. Best book ever, man. But oh well. Different strokes for different folks.
The real reason I’m writing this is because I don’t care much for the poem I just posted, so I don’t want that to be the first thing you read.
And to tell you that I didn’t really “get” Catch-22. If you want to explain it to me, go ahead. I got:
1) War is crazy.
2) To write a book about war being crazy, the book must be crazy.
3) Crazy books are no fun to read.
4) People want to write books that other people will read.
Logically, statements 1, 2, 3, and 4 imply that nobody can ever write a book about war that I will want to read. Maybe, maybe.
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On Buying a Weight Bench
Posted 10:02 AM, Nov 7, 2005 |
there is a circle of weight
benches and barbells.
i stepped into the circle last week,
classified ads and internet auctions,
and bought myself some plastic
and steel. pretty soon, i’ll
sell it off, my arms not a whole
lot bigger than they were,
my chest still narrow, my
determination set down like coming
in third in a marathon for which
i hadn’t really practiced.
i’ll sell the bar and kilograms
to an aspiring college student
who has just enough room beneath
his pulp fiction poster to better
himself fifteen minutes a day
for a week or two. he’ll do reps
and sweat out all his will and drive
in under four hours, just like i did,
and the equipment will orbit the twin
cities like man-made space
telescopes whose pictures
never quite come into focus.
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Sitcoms About Dumb Husbands
Posted 10:41 AM, Nov 2, 2005 |
Allow me to just ramble on a bit more. Someone please provide the name of a sitcom about a married couple in which the husband is not a complete idiot and every episode is predicated on the premise that the husband does or says something stupid and then spends the rest of the episode correcting his woeful male blunder while the wife stalks around the house rolling her eyes.
Here are some sample episodes for you:
Home Improvement - Tim spends the money he had saved for Jill’s anniversary present on a chrome exhaust pipe for his hot rod. He spends the middle 15 minutes of the episode running around the house, making sounds like a car engine revving and blowing cigar smoke out his ass. Jill takes the chrome exhaust pipe off the car and melts it down into a diamond.
According to Jim - Jim gets caught looking at pornography on the Internet. Cheryl decides to get even by posing for pornography herself. After the kids find out, Cheryl blames the entire incident on Jim, claiming she had to take her clothes off just to keep him interested. Jim burps loudly and then makes a sandwich.
George Lopez - George has been sending emails to a coworker that are filled with innuendo. Angie finds out about it and confronts George. After sleeping on the couch for a week, George decides to get even. He gets a fake Hotmail account and sends flattering emails to his wife as if they were from another man. One day, George comes home and finds a letter from Angie. She’s left him for this fictional man. Over the ending credits (no pun intended), George hurls himself in front of a bus, totally ignoring the fact that he needs to give his kids a ride to soccer practice.
The King of Queens - Doug constantly wants to have sex with Carrie because she’s hot, but Carrie is repulsed and left wondering why she ever got married to such a pasty, ignorant oaf. Carrie becomes a lesbian, which Doug thinks is great until Carrie leaves Doug at the end of the series. The last shot is of Doug using the wooden end of a toilet plunger to swordfight with a dusty Christmas tree.
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I Don’t Know You
Posted 10:18 AM, Nov 2, 2005 |
I just spent five minutes looking at someone’s Halloween party photos at flickr. I don’t know this person and don’t know anyone in the photos, but look, there they are, for me to see and comment on if I choose. (I did not choose.)
The Internet is a creepy place. Everyone’s a voyeur and an exhibitionist.
If you don’t know me, why are you reading this? I mean, feel free, but why? Why do you care that I still can’t sleep (true!) or that I dyed my hair blond two days ago (true?) or that I watched “Rodney” on ABC last night, a show I didn’t even know existed that is based on an unfunny comedian that I didn’t even know existed, let alone had his own television show (true, definitely true)?
I suspect you read this, you, gentle reader who doesn’t even know me, for the same reason I want you to read it.
We’re both completely bonkers and you’re madly in love with my Internet persona, which is about 65% fabricated.
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