I just wanna fuh! I just wanna fuh! I just wanna fuh-get you!

Happy Self-Referential Day, everyone! It's September 30, which means music exists again. Autumn's coming through this year with some serious dreariness, and thus there is some hankering for Mazzy Star and old Beck (although the old Beck is also triggered by the need to remember the word "libertine," which I first learned from "We Live Again," from Mutations, because I was looking for the word that perfectly described my opinion of Other when he came home from the grocery store soon after we started dating with whipped cream cheese. Whipped. Talk about (I thought at the time) crazy luxury. Follow the bouncing ball: I was reminded of this when the damn grocery store was out of all shapes and forms of Philly cream cheese other than whipped, and I bought it.) Also enjoying some Radiohead, Wilco, and a random mix of stuff available on the network, much of which isn't even named, but sounds a lot like Jane's Addiction.

I haven't stopped talking about The Illusionist yet, which gives Other ample opportunity to skewer my uhm, interest, in Edward Norton*, as well as pass on some good links to me. If you care, check out this very nice essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum (spoilers abound).

Finished Aloft, by Chang-Rae Lee yesterday, and very much enjoyed it. The problem with reading books, though, is that I tend not to look up while I'm walking or do anything else (quilt, knit, sleep) while engrossed in one. I suspect I'll lose much of next week to A Gesture Life.

*va-va-voom!

Do I look like I'm looking to kick it?

I was walking along today thinking about how dashing Mr. Norton was in that movie yesterday, and really the whole movie around him - it was so warm and yellow with rich, deep reds and blacks, whiteness rendered the color of hay. There's something so painfully alluring about worlds of fiction that are so clean and real (why real? I don't know why I wrote that, but I'll leave it) and carefully put together, where the leading man is quiet and clever and in control of everything. Is this what happens when one leaves the latent stage with John Galt in the mind? Perhaps, but this is getting off topic.

My point is, when I went to select a word for that feeling, the expression of appreciation for such a sight, I fished weakly around in the old vocab and after several tortured and confused seconds (having rejected that growling-in-the-throat sound for it both being not really a word and also something that I've never been able to do, even though I can roll my Rs in Spanish) selected: hubba hubba. Hubba hubba.

What am I, born in 1915, in uniform in a mess hall in 1941, having laid eyes on a busty nurse? What am I, on the Flintstones? (They said that on the Flintstones, right?) What am I, Sideshow Bob? ("Capital knockers, madam.")

Is this part of my vocabulary completely atrophied, or is it true that the only thing a woman can use to express this particular idea isn't even a word?

just a word real quick

I should've been in bed 20 minutes ago at least, but I just had to tell you this: Go see The Illusionist. I was like, yeah, I like Edward Norton, yeah, I know who Paul Giamatti is (and, yeah, totally was thinking of someone else, but I did like American Splendor). I don't enjoy movies as much as the average person, so I hope you'll heed my words and understand that this is entirely worth leaving the house for. If you want to enjoy a little storytelling and escapism, get thee to this movie.

i hear you crying on the sloth parade

Does anyone remember those Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books? Which one had the "I-thought-you-said-ers"? I had a conversation awhile back with a friend who'd re-read some of the Madeline L'Engel books and was floored by how religious they were, and we talked about what other books we'd like to go back to and read. Some of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stuff would definitely be on my list. I wonder what all that would sound like to me now.

creepy pencil hooves.

Would it be weird if I started signing all my personal correspondences with "Pray for rain"? I cannot think of what else to say. I've never "owned" a signoff. This is a whole other thing, really, but I've always felt like once I don't own something, I will never own it. For example: Grease. I didn't see Grease, and in probably about 9th grade, I realized that I'd never seen this thing called Grease, and lots of the songs at homecoming were from it, and that's where everyone knew those dances from. But instead of thinking, hey, I'd better see this Grease thing and get up to speed, I just added that to the (mental) list of things I'd missed and would never understand.
That list contains lots and lots and lots of pop-culture references.

I've been pondering this new signoff, because it may or may not be what Cat Power is saying in one of the very pretty songs on her new album (see aforementioned bit on I-thought-you-said-ers), and then Garrison Keillor said it and I was like, hell, there it is.

New new it will be great.

I am cooking up all kinds of things, things for you to read, and look at, but nothing's really coming to fruition at the moment.

Good story: the best part is when he bobs his head up and down.

Filled to the brim with CONTENT

fables & morality tales
-----------------------

1) Jane and Lou are like the ant and the grasshopper, or they would be if the ants' only motivation for socking food away all summer was to lord it over the starving, whiny grasshopper's head all winter.

2) The weather today is like that story where the sun and wind have a contest to see who can get a man's coat off his body, and the wind is all trying to blow it off and the sun just smugly warms the man up enough to get him to want to take it off. Except that the sun and the wind were both working in opposite directions at the same time, leaving the humans feeling confused and ill.

miscellania
----------------------

1) I recently, in a celebration of sloths, purchased a lovely sloth pendant from Happy Owl Glassworks. How odd is it that when I decided I'd like to buy a neclace with a sloth on it, I already knew about virtually the only place on the internet where such a thing was possible?

Anyhow, the pendant is lovely, as is Tracy.

2) If I wrote you, and then you wrote me back, and then I never wrote you back, it might be because you did not write from the eddie bauer, democracy for america, or circuit city e-mail address and were thus determined to be spam by yahoo.

3) Shrooms!



4) It is nice to be reminded, after many years of scrupulously avoiding people in real-time and thus ever opening my mouth, that I still have a capacity for making a jackass of myself.

5) In honor of this excellent (I mean, wow) piece of spam I just received, I bring you installment #4 of Spamku.

I set to be destroyed, with the mouths of the home planet and if nuclear

Hi, midden mavis;
meant comforting; bellicose;
reformer unseen.

Your Body is an Abandoned Theme Park

Hey, have you seen my civil liberties? I swear to god I left them right here a minute ago.

I'm surprised and heartened by the widespread support for International Talk Like a Pirate Day

The best part of this is that it's international. Our love of imitating pirates in manner, speech, and dress transcends the bounds of nationality. Seriously, if I'd known we were all going to be observing it, I would've celebrated properly. Next year.

Spamku 3: Wow, it has been a long time since I treated you to Spamku. I have been collecting.

He was biting TRADE + NEWS
your money, night chair;
your future, pariah kite;
your health, pauper-bred.

Oh, google mail, that is sooo two months ago.

In third grade it was my turn to go outside to clap the erasers, and I got locked out. All I remember is having these big spongy erasers (as long as your (3rd grade-sized) arm, chamois cloth on three sides and chalky grey on the last) in my arms, and the complete unmovingness of the door, which might as well have been part of the wall. It was the same industrial brown as the building. I, being a meek child, could not assert myself by knocking (horrors!) or peering in the window, shading my eyes against the glass until one of the other kids noticed me. I stood on the little square of concrete outside the door and imagined the bus stopping by my house and my mother phoning (not calling, phoning -- people phoned in the '80s, when you were little) the school when I didn't get off.

The teacher realized at some point that they were a student short -- probably the next time she needed to erase something -- and let me in.

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Hey, that's just how I read the New Yorker! (Link via Arts & Letters Daily.

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Because of the name of my .org, whenever people say "doing stuff," I giggle to myself. Tee-hee.

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Oh. The bus. Bad bus luck today, all around. Missed the first bus of the day, because it was by my count a full two minutes EARLY (who has heard of such a thing?). The last two of the day were bad for different reasons. It happened to be raining persistently, so there was the issue of what to do with the dripping umbrella (a girl said to me, "I like your clear-bubble umbrella," and I said "Thank you.") on the new bus with cushioned seats. For some reason, the air conditioning was going full blast, which is great for those of us clad in damp cordoury. The first driver subscribed to the Mouse-Stomping School of Ac- and Deceleration. Oh my. The second driver thought it would be appropriate to listen to Sean "Puffy" Hannity's radio program at deafening levels (so you can hear the hatey goodness over the a.c.).

Luckily the Hannity Hatery (like a bakery, only for hate) serves up bile between two nice big Texas-toast slices of commercials and sensationalistic local news, so my delicate, liberal, raccoon-crying-over soul was only subjected to one batch of hatepuffs. Today we were baking up the hate for whoever said that John McCain & co. are better patriots than King George & the Chickenhawks on Fox yesterday. There wasn't really an argument put forth as to why such a jerk deserved The Hate, just mutual scoffing between Puffy and a Real Big Fan from small-town U.S.A.

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Re: "The Program." [Borg voice]: I am convinced. That the. Professionals. Need the. Pro-gram.

Hannity is love. Peace out.

A whole new level of bleach? What does that even mean?

I have nothing really to say, and I recently decided that I can draw on my long and fascinating personal history to entertain you, instead of leaving the last post up for days and days and days.

So: When I was probably about 10 or 11, my family went to Washington D.C. (There's supposed to be a comma there, in between the Washington and the D.C., but I don't like it. So it's out.) While in D.C., we visited the Jefferson Memorial. My Dad had a nickel to flip and we had some sort of disagreement, so we flipped it and it totally landed on its edge. Came to a complete standstill balanced on its side, neither heads or tails. Right in front of the Huge Freaking Statue of Jefferson. It blew our little minds.

Maybe the ghost of Thomas Jefferson was teaching us about the unknowability of Truth.

I guess I do have stuff to say - the coin-flipping thing reminded me. I just finished reading White Teeth. And I highly recommend it. Other got it for me for my birthday, but after the whole Glamorama tragedy (the tragedy being that I read the whole thing and that it's not actually possible to scrub your consciousness with bleach, whole new level or no) I wasn't ready to read novels again for a while.

The opening page talked about an idea I'd had -- namely, the place that only exists so that people can get to other places. The no-place. So I was hooked immediately, and didn't mind when the bus took 50 minutes to go less than 2 miles (due to the willy-nilly closing of roads around here) because I could read, read, read.

My only complaint about the book is the ending. I don't need a big happy Hollywood ending, and I especially don't need a lecture about how I probably want a Hollywood ending, but some kind of something remotely resembling and ending would be nice. There were all kinds of interesting questions about the characters to be answered and instead the pages stopped coming. Gah.

I am looking for books and blogs to read. Drop me a line if you have suggestions.

In which We Bear Witness to the Great Suffering of the Raccoon

In the roadway this evening was a hit and dying (dead?) raccoon.

This is why I don't like the drive - for fear of seeing, or causing, such a scene. Earlier today I'd been thinking about sacrifice and suffering, and how hard it is to do when direct orders come from all around to avoid any such of the sort. Buy now don't wait run don't walk limited time only. And it's really really easy to avoid. Suffering will get you, sometimes, what with the tenuous hold that everything has on existence, the dark will come up and grab occasionally. But sacrifice, hell.

I've thought, for months now, about how unthinkable it would be to stop driving. Anywhere. First off, it would completely suck, for I drive places a lot - to be alone in public, to see people I love. To get many pounds of groceries about a third of a mile. Secondly, though, it would be regarded as totally fucking insane. Who does that? Who living anywhere other than New York City does that? Nobody.

I have feelings about gas consumption and the environmental and political issues surrounding that, but I have compulsions about animals dying because I'm driving a car. That's a tacit but accepted inevitability about driving: you might kill something, and the risk of killing something is outweighed by the necessity of going longer distances than it's possible to walk or bike. Everybody who drives anywhere believes that.

Faced with a twitching raccoon body, alone in the middle of a busy street, I can't bring myself to believe that. I can almost bring myself to believe in a God to pray to ("Beloved God, please relieve the suffering of this raccoon") but I can't believe that this is worth the cost.

But what can you do? What can you really do about it? You can pray to an uncaring universe and believe for a bit that you can go be with the raccoon; it suffers, but I am there with it, witnessing its suffering and being sorry; maybe that will help.

Imagining this particular raccoon's life: Did she visit certain trash cans having learned to expect things she liked? Where was she heading? What do her raccoon companions think, now that she's gone?

Empathy is nothing but a chain of logic; you ask, what is the difference between this animal and my dog? What is the difference between this animal and me?

See? Punctuation.

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE:

Other: Hey, I thought of a new band name, guess what it is.

Me [thinking, then]: The Poop-Chutes?

Other [looking really surprised, then pointing underhand; gleefully]: Butt-fuck Hernandez and the Poop-Shoot* Crew!


*this is how it's spelled

king, pen

Quick, I need to know! Are black corduroys lame?

I like: making the pants-wearing ladies dance!

I don't like: when entities (companies, mostly) "congratulate" me on things like saving $4.50 on a pair of pants. Save it for when I propagate the human race, would you?

Family Vacation

Interesting that when the President tells the truth it makes headlines.

SLOTHS!

The three-toed sloth has stolen my heart. Sloths, widely associated with the sin of laziness, have gotten a bad rap. Sloths move slowly in order to conserve hard-to-come by energy; they're not lazy, they're conservationists!

Their nose is about half of their face, and when they smell something interesting, the whole thing contracts and expands. When they blink, they blink with the whole half of their face that isn't their nose. And they have toenails/claws that look like 3/4ths of one of those plastic rings you hang shower curtains with.

The big 5-0. 0.

This is my five-hundredth post. God damn!

Five things the rest of the world likes that I don't (meme ganked from midwest grrl)

1) Coke/Pepsi
2) Beaches
3) Coffee
4) Medium-point pens
5) Beer

Hmm, three beverages on that list. Hey, is the root "bev" related to the latin "beber"?

I just recently heard that if you are about to sneeze but can't quite, really, that you should look up at a light. So I just tried that, looking up at the bare bulb above my desk, and a) that really hurt my eyes, and b) I was too distracted by the thoughts, "Damn, that really hurts my eyes. Am I supposed to keep staring at it? I can't, it hurts too much to" to actually sneeze. So.

This is my five-hundredth post on what was original like a rose trope and is now doinstuff.org, and it rolled over, and I am sure as hell counting it. I like milestones, even if they're completely arbitrary in the grand scheme of things.

Yesterday, I did the equivalent of picking up the phone and matter-of-factly dialing the number of a person I've not spoken to in years. The metaphorical equivalent. I signed into the account I used for the blog that I kept before OlaRT, remembered the password and everything, and there it is: a bunch of stuff I wrote four years ago. WEIRD. I abandoned it because it had just stopped working in a way I didn't understand. It wouldn't publish. My last post is sad, it says "This isn't working. I don't know what to do." And it never got published. My archives never worked, and because on more recent blogs they have worked, I thought, well hell, I'll just try to make the archives work, so I changed the archives setting and went to publish, and, "There was an error." When I clicked for more information, it said "Template is empty."

Indeed that does sound like a problem. So, anyway, I'm going to dig through the (somehow functional - I don't understand how any of this is working) old posts accessible to my account and try to get it saved somewhere.

Woohoo.

apple pie in the sky with diamonds on the soles of her shoes

When I'm singing along to "I am trying to break your heart," by Wilco, I sing "bandage" instead of "band-aid." This is because in my genius mind, I reason every, single, freaking, time that you can't say "band-aid" without paying up. It's trademarked. Like when people say "flying disc" instead of "frisbee." Wilco must be sending some wicked royalties to Johnson & Johnson.

Or I am wrong about this.

The guys done gone copy-writ it.

Here, I point you in the direction of some good
reading.

pedagoggery

Through my humming and wobbly headache, on my way home, I saw one of those preacher guys with a circle of yelling undergraduates around him. At State, we were on the circut of at least two religious wackos, including the well-known Brother Jed and a woman who wore a long denim skirt every day and yelled at each passing female "WHORES!!!" and had her definitely school-aged kids with her, also clad in denim. The only people I've ever seen around here actively pushing religion are the guys in suits who accost you on street corners with bitty green Bibles. I'm glad we're getting some more interactive nutjobs around here.

A time to refrain from embracing

This Labor Day Weekend found me face-to-face with the very sweet and cool-on-her-own-terms younger sister of my previously mentioned defunct BFF. (I know that technically it is incorrect to say that my non-friend is defunct, that I should be saying that the relationship is defunct, that my non-friend is not a website founded in 1999 and since abandoned, or a punk band that split when Doogie got clean. My choice of words is a little psychological dig at my non-friend, because I'm actually still pretty fucking hurt over all this.) Anyhow, cool younger sister volunteered information and expressed the idea that it's "too bad" that we haven't talked for a while. (Two years, one month, and about 3 days at that point, if you're counting.) Yeah. I guess that's what it is.

Heady!

August, if you didn't know, is a vicious knave. We were almost in the clear, but, as usual, the door to August hit us in the ass on the way out. This happened when we found what was either a tumor or cyst on the underside of the Lou Dog. After two days of tenterhooks and two nights of poor sleep, we found out this morning that it is a benign fatty tumor that will not even need to be removed unless it gets unwieldy. We have a significantly smaller amount of money than we did this morning, but I would seriously rather have nowhere to live than a sick Lou Dog.