Haven't You Heard?

1/7/2011, 7:59 AM


Friday morning. Epiphanies are so yesterday.


Were I at the helm of a class, I would use my fescue apparatus on a wall-mounted calendar to signify that "Here  [THWACK!] is where we commence the vertiginous slide into sub-Arctic delirium." 


The storm windows are covered with frost; this saddens me, as I've got a 9:00 meeting, and it's outside of the house. I will adopt an apocryphal optimism that will sustain me for at least the first 5 outdoor steps that I take.


In any case, I've chosen to post a poem here. It's old, but we're all aging irreversibly. At least winter ends, although it won't leave until you're absolutely certain that it's your fate to suffer eternally beneath its frigid thumb. And it's short.


Oh, shit--it's trash day. I gotta go. But first, the poem. It's called "Haven't You Heard":

Haven't You Heard

My memoirs are three sentences long. 

At least they're not two.

At least they're not four.

The Future Was Then

1/4/2011, 9:47 PM


Yikes. Sorry for my protracted and unexcused absence (inferring that it was notable, which is a mite presumptuous), but all of my fingers have been, and are currently, crossed about the possibility of having work. This makes a dreadful mess of typing; I am quite sure that you understand.


Welcome to 2011! This, my first post of this year, should tell you all that we are officially now living in a time to which I'd devoted no advance thought, at all. I mean, it was fun to speculate about the future when it was still the future, but my vision of life essentially ended around 2010—not because of death or anything, but because it became hazy and/or I grew sick of thinking about it. 


As a youngster, the future bored me in ways that I could never explain, despite that I knew a lot about explanations and how to make them. As I've seen it (and I love being wrongheaded), one of the more frustrating qualities intrinsic to having been born fairly recently (I was born in 1978) is that my personal experience is, to some degree at least, inextricable from zeitgeist and cultural memory that wields roughshod authority to trump the subjective textures of my experience.  (Like, "Hey—that's not what this horrid slab of Hollywood tripe says you were doing.") 


Romanticizing in retrospect is easier than Sunday morning to do, because borne of the aforementioned trumping is a failure to recognize that the evolution of situational dynamics since that point for which you're pining has irrevocably altered the context of your saudade. When I was 16, I went to a show by the Dog Faced Hermans. They were, at the time, one of my very favorite groups, and I knew that they would be disbanding after their tour. Their show was mesmerizing, I say now, and I suppose that my feelings were largely consistent with that at the time, but I had this gigantor canker sore in my mouth that hurt like absolute heck. Subjectivity.


As I stood there, I made it a point to always remember that sore, because I suspected that the outcome of something so trivial (yet pivotal) would bear some amount of retrospective influence. (One of the openers, Helios Creed [formerly of Chrome], will probably remember that show as the one during which an audience member fell asleep on the lip of the stage. [If you ever read this blog, Mr. Creed—I'm sorry. I have Narcolepsy, but nobody would've guessed it at the time.]) 


And perhaps it's always been that way/this way with memory and its inordinate elasticity, but when people begin (as they have) to self-identify by way of the media that they consume (or the things that they acquire), we're in for some lame-arsed vicarious nonsense in which very little is decipherable between people. The interval between an event and its imprint dwindles to the point at which we shit as we swallow. 


It seems that 2011 begins and ends more or less instantly, in accordance with news cycles and natural disasters that dare the collective disunion that is humanity to live at its pace. I'm too lumpy to consider trying, but I feel really good about that. So there, future—you'll have to make your way to my present.

Matter vs. Matters

12/31/2010, 1:32 AM


This is a trifle,
just because it's late and there's some information that I've been wanting to divulge since "good ideas on paper" began. Regrettably, my tendency to prattle has precluded my doing so up to now, but it remains centrally important.


Ready? Right, then: I have a superhero entity that I concocted (well, he has always been among us, but was not one to muck about  with taxonomy or what you will [or won't]). 


He appears when he feels like it, which is a lot less often than his presence is requested (or, heaven forbid, demanded). He also doesn't fail to appear on certain occasions on which his assistance is actively unwanted—this, also, is difficult to predict. 


Part of this creature's appeal lies in the fact that his abilities are reflected in his name. 


* Upon reflection, this doesn't happen in most cases. This business of naming superheroes tends toward a bog-standard enterprise in which the primary identifier is either an entirely perspectival adjective (like "Superman" or "Mighty Mouse"—both of which, as handles, convey to you absolutely zilch about anything that these creatures actually do, focusing instead on how they [might maybe, perhaps] seem to us mere people—even the archest of their enemies concedes to their Chosen Title of Herohood. [Without delving recklessly into this quicksand, I doubt that Superman's myriad of nemeses see a surfeit of "super" qualities in him]), or an ill-fitting evocation of something perversely abstruse (in what ways is "Batman" truly "like a bat"? What does that even mean? He can't fly, he's not visually impaired, and I'd have to wager that he doesn't sleep inverted from rafters in the Wayne Mansion). Anyway, my superhero is different from all that. 


What is his name? I can guarantee that you either guessed it or didn't:


Whatever Man

I'm telling you, this guy is legit. Unlike others among us busy proclaiming themselves as not caring when at least some part of them does care, ambiguities do not arise in dealings with Whatever Man. He well and truly does not care.  At all. You don't have to believe him; nor do you have to disbelieve him, or do anything else, for that matter. Ever.

If this sounds funny to you, then that's fine. But whenever I am in a position of being unduly fretful about some-or-other trivial matter (which happens a lot, as involuntary pauperhood and a devastating neurological disorder [Multiple Sclerosis] conspire to both shrivel me into nettlesome uselessness and distort my sense of priorities in accordance with sometimes-real-but-often-imagined-though-always-perceived expectations, be they internal or external), my one and only love (Molly Fitzgerald, who has long been aware of the information that merits this blog trifle) will look at me knowingly and kindly suggest:


"This looks like a job for Whatever Man."


She's always right, even if my attempts to summon him in the moment yield no result. Still, I carry his unique skill with me always, lodged in an unremarkable somewhere like an utterly benign, though inoperable, mass of disputed composition. Maybe it's a pearl.

Reprisal

here, i am reprising an earlier post, because all sorts of flowerpots&safes&anvils are descend from the heavens unlike clockwork, but often enough. And besides, we're nearing the actual, old-school (pre-1752) New Year and  am nothing if not a lifelong "april fool" (that term, by the way, originated as a lame-ass swipe at those that chose to continue observing the year's change with the approximate arrival of spring); as such, a New Year post is apter than otherwise.

12/28/2010, 8:10 PM

O, everybody. It's been forever, and I would apologize but I've been subsumed by factors.

This keyboard is kinda busted, so you may see the odd juxtaposition of "b" with "n"; I have yet to stumble upon a way to make that entertaining (less-than-successful examples: narbes & bonle, the neatles, barbia, narack onama, get thee to a bubbery), so I try to catch it. Apologies in advance for any confusion created.

So much of this whole adulthood rigmarole is turbid with limitations. There is a painful plenitude of factors, all of which receive attention from me that is overwhelmingly undeserved and rancid with the residue of other factors.What's more is that factors seem expertly calibrated in ways that I defy others to understand (any attempts to do so are justly resented). There's some part of this human's mind that thinks (before the grisly collision of impulses and factors):

YES! I am a GROWN-UP!
I can eat crappy food!
[and... develop all kinds of nasty-ass health problems that make people not wanna sit near me.]
I can drink booze!
[and... go broke and be hungover and grow progressively stupider, utterly oblivious to my decay.]
I can have SEX whenever I want!
[and... not really. No, seriously.]

En toto, being an adult is remarkably similar to being less of an adult—only now, evidently, I'm responsible for providing the effing structure. Which would be fine if people that mean something to me (my own self very much included) didn't have to live in that suspect structure.

And the people that always made day-to-day life capitally unpleasant (COPS, for instance, in the Boss-Hog bastion of family-value putrescence where I spent most of my childhood) are now your contemporaries! Are you joking? I got scolded by a police officer (not for anything seeeeerious) a couple of years ago, and he was visibly younger than me; I wanted to tell on him. Or say, "Get back to class."

I should be plotting resolutions right now, but it's kind of a woeful condition, having to choose which promise(s) you'll definitely, definitely break. Better to be flip about it, I suggest, but with an understanding of the tragicomical plight that is self-improvement in the face of inexorable finitude.

An example here would be helpful, and I'll give you one. It's more hypothetical than anything, and is certainly not a "finalist" for me (I say "finalist" as a picture of Susan Boyle looks at me from the sidebar of this very page. A good resolution might be to be grateful that Britain's Got Talent. But that won't work.) For now, and this is all subject to change:

In 2011, I resolve to successfully run away from my own bottom.