9/30/08

It's important to have priorities

In the last 24 hours, I've written 800 words on Emerson's "Self-Reliance," for a paper due tomorrow at 8 a.m., and 4,500 words on how and why Demolition Man is the greatest movie ever made.

It was so worth it.

PS -- if anybody buys me this for Christmas, I will be their humble and grateful serf for life, and they will be my liege lord, and I will work their fief, and plant and tend to their soy crop, and just generally be good merry company and a shining, loyal sidekick.

9/27/08

Hey... I'm back!

I was pissed off at first when I found out that Paul Newman died. Then I thought about it, and I tried to think of anybody who's ever lived who was or is cooler than Paul Newman was, and continues to be. And I couldn't think of anybody. He was, and is, the coolest person I've ever heard tell of. And I just couldn't stop thinking about how cool Paul Newman was, and is. And I wasn't mad anymore. I was just kind of in awe of how amazingly cool Paul Newman was, and is. What a cool guy.

9/25/08

Vorpal sword

One time, my friend was hitting on a girl with a glass eye at a bar. I came up to them and spanked her with a ten dollar bill. She was kind of offended. I said, "I'm really sorry I just did that, and the fact that I'm apologizing means, I need another beer." She had a glass eye.

9/23/08

MOTHER FUCKER!!!!!!!!!!!

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks:

10-23 Calgary, Alberta - The Warehouse *
10-24 Edmonton, Alberta - Starlite Room *
10-25 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan - Amigo's *
10-27 Winnipeg, Manitoba - Pyramid Cabinet *
10-30 Madison, WI - High Noon Saloon *
10-31 Iowa City, IA - The Picador *
11-02 Columbia, MO - The Blue Note *
11-04 Omaha, NE - Slowdown *
11-05 Lawrence, KS - Liberty Hall *
11-06 Denver, CO - Gothic Theatre *
11-08 Salt Lake City, UT - Urban Lounge *

* with Blitzen Trapper

9/22/08

Very, Very Jones - bundled with - Maximum Buddhism

I've invented a new religion. I call it Maximum Buddhism. It's for Buddhists who like to party. Tenets of this religion will be forthcoming.

I'm in a seminar with Terribly Important Critic A. I mentioned a passing interest in the life of a colorful character named Jones Very, a 19th Century poet who thought himself, at various points, to have achieved a total correspondence to Shakespeare, and then to Christ, as in "I stand here before you today the greatest of poets and the son of God." He would go to meetings and such, and argue with people, and when they argued back, he would say, "your argument cannot be correct, because I am Jesus Christ, and everything I say is ordained by God." Once, when a manuscript of his was returned with a spelling error pointed out, he insisted that the error could not be corrected, and was not an error, for it was dictated to his hand by the Divine Muse.

Jones Very had one of my favorite sentences ever written about him, by A. Bronson Alcott: "I received a letter on Monday of this week from Jones Very of Salem, formerly Tutor in Greek at Harvard College — which institution he left, a few weeks since, being deemed insane by the Faculty." Jones Very was swept off to an asylum, but no one was able to clinically diagnose him as a madman. So, they let him go, and when they did, the inmates thanked him profusely.

So this guy's pretty awesome, and there's a touch of the ghost story about his life. But the upshot is, Terribly Important Critic A sent an email to Dreadfully Significant Critic B, and recommendations were doled out, in case I want to delve further into the life of this slipshod prophet of Concord; and not only that, but Terribly Important Critic A wants to know what I think. On the one hand, this is more work for me, and I loathe doing work. On the other, I am either 1 degree -- or 15 years of backbreaking reading, writing, and toil, more than a dollop o' remarkable luck, and a renewed ideological interest and financial commitment from the upper echelons of the US Gov. in higher education in the field of the humanities -- away from the inner sanctum. I feel more or less the same way I did opening for bands that opened for the Dismemberment Plan and Built to Spill. Right on the fringes of something that some people care about, and are impressed with. And even though nobody thinks I'm important, or is particularly impressed with me, I'm closer to the people that they're impressed with than they are. This is the part of my personality that badly wants to become a limo driver, or a Hollywood assistant. I believe this aspect is also known as shameful self-aggrandizement. I ride swanker coattails than you!

Worship me, tiny men of the world, for I am your Lord God!

9/16/08

Valedicktardian

Think about everyone you know.

Got it? Good.

Now think of the person who has the highest, evenest ratio of smarts : terrible personness.

Say you have a friend called Nancy Smalls. She's a lovely woman, not too bright. She can read without moving her lips, but she has to concentrate. She drives her kids to the mall, and she enjoys M&Ms. She loves her husband, and while she gets exasperated sometimes, she's never dour. She gave money to the Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina, and then again when the Tsunami hit. If you eyeballed Nancy Smalls, she might have a smartness in the .55s (out of a possible 1), and a terrible personness of .13 (again, out of a possible 1).

Nancy Smalls -- .55 : .13

Not that good.

Now let's say you have a friend called Flowbear. He's faking his way (with flying colors!) through a prestigious humanities department's graduate program. He loves to put plastic bags full of shattered bottles in baby carriages, and then wait across the park so he can relish the screams. He pokes holes in every condom box he comes across with a needle he found in an uptown alley. He carries discs of frozen piss in a cooler so he can slide them through cracked car windows. He filled every washing machine in a Laundromat with smashed-up packing peanuts and barbecue sauce, and then ran loads with stolen quarters. He once epoxied a sleeping guy's nuts to his comforter, epoxied the comforter to the radiator, turned the thermostat up all the way, and stole the poor bastard's every pair of scissors. He would love to throw up in your freezer. Say Flowbear's got a smarts rating of .79 (out of a possible 1) and a terrible person rating of .83 (again, out of a possible 1). He would have a pretty solid, though indubitably improvable smarts : terrible personness ratio.

Flowbear -- .79 : .83

Not bad.

Now think of the person you know who has the highest, evenest ratio. The ratio most closely approaching the holy 1:1.

That person is your Valedicktardian.

That's the punchline? Yeah, that's the punchline.

Congratulations, Valedicktardians!

9/15/08

Future of the Left is the best band in the world, and fuck you


This year in music, for me, has mostly been characterized by sissy whiteboys with acoustic guitars crooning about their pain pithily and with aspirations to literariness. It makes me feel like I'm getting old. So it's some small consolation that I'm still able to reca'nize that the greatest thing in the world is Future of the Left's album, Curses.

"I don't need a point! I don't need objectives! I don't need a purpose! I don't need a prison!"

People tend to complain when artists browbeat them. I read this all the time re: Nabokov. People can't stand it when artists are assholes to them. Me, I can't get enough. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing I loathe more than idle provocateurism in art. I hate it when somebody does something a schizophrenic diva might do just because people are watching (or, even worse, just to make them look), and screams "free speech and boundary-pushing!!!" as a authenticity signifiers. This mentality, if I might be allowed to sound pretentious, still toils away under the auspices of progress, and who needs progress? I just want catharsis. So did this Greeks. This is time-honored shit, right here, and nobody since Medea has been more cathartic than these insufferable Welsh hard-ons. I imagine it's sort of analogous to how I can't stand it when people make scenes, but I love it when people fucking fight. Not to call attention to themselves, just because they want to fucking fight. I love it when my best friend is looking me right in the eyes and poking me in the ribs with a sharp stick just to make my face flush so much I want to choke him out, and I go for his throat, and he pokes me in the eyes, and we hate each other intensely for three-hundred seconds and then share a handshake and split a milkshake, still wearing each other's sweat and rug-burned from glancing-blow headbutts.

"Ran out of limbs on our big day! We left our thumbs in the hotel!"

It's indicative of something in human nature -- or at least the degenerate substrate of human nature which I inhabit -- that the greatest band in the world, to me, is not one that makes me want to donate a bunch of money to UNICEF or put a few coats of fresh paint up in the inner city. It's a band that makes me want to throw a mason jar full of piss, pus, and cum at some dumb cunt's head just for having the bad taste to exist. And then stand over him Ali-Liston style, just so he knows -- I'm a fucking lion, and you're a fucking pussy.

"Colin is a pussy, a very pretty pussy, Colin is a pussy, a very pretty pussycat!"

We're talking about unchecked aggression here, Dude.

There's always been talk of "glee" in anarcho-punk, but I've never seen it before. Not before Future of the Left. Anarcho-punk, sure it tried to seem like it was gleeful, but it was really dour, even when it was yowling "I am the antichrist!" It never enjoyed the fact that it wanted to burn down the system, and it never enjoyed trying to burn down the system, because it was too busy trying to do something. It never had time to play. Even Jack Rotten was a dull boy. Trying to blow up Parliament with a powder-keg isn't nearly as much fun as shooting a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

"Why put the body where the body don't wanna go?!"

Which is why Future of the Left's is such a brilliant gambit. It loves the system, because it can revel in hating it so much. They are, if you'll forgive me for it, the most Zizekian band in the world. If they got rid of everything they loathed, they'd have absolutely no reason to exist. If utopianism wasn't as empty an impulse as ever breathed into man by God -- if Zion neared completion, if everybody was invited to rollerskate around the hallowed halls of Xanadu, these motherfuckers would get into such a funk. When they're happy, they're bored, and when they're bored, they need to fuck something up. So destroying stuff is really the only option. Not for any reason. Just because whatever. Happiness and agony are the same thing. As long as you have something outside yourself to hate, you don't have to think about hating yourself.

"Tories! Tories! Thanks for the Tories!"

The Future of the Left is the only name this band could possibly have. The future of the left, it turns out, is risibility, misanthropy, and hatefuckery. You need help? Well, fuck you. I sympathize. Only Future of the Left matters! Except they don't even really matter that much. Fuck this band! The logical conclusion of socialism is hating everybody equally. That's the only way to be really honest.

"Violence solved everything!"

Future of the Left used to be, more or less, mclusky. At least insofar as Andy Falkous occupies the frontman position of the bulk of both groups. And what's weird is, mclusky was a better band. They were even more pissed off. They were less tired. They buzzed more viciously, like a hot-pink chainsaw assfucking primetime-era Pixies songs. They had catchier songs with less fat, better bridges on more fire, sharper hooks, scathinger one-liners. ("All of your friends are cunts, your mother is a ballpoint pen thief," indubitably my favorite couplet in the history of lyric poetry.) There is absolutely no question that mclusky Do Dallas is a much, much better album than Curses, in any proper sense, like where you give an album some bullshit letter grade or numerical ranking, put it in your "best albums of the decade" list that never means anything, except insofar as it can fuel people to spit spite at you, whatever. But I've listened to Curses maybe three times as much. I don't understand it. And I don't want to. It's an ugly, messy thing, and it's overly ornamented, and it's overthought, and it's agonized and precise and it ought to be depressing. But it's the most exhilarating music, man. They're like the fucking Music Man.

"Open wide for sudden folk song."

I love Future of the Left so much that I wanted to buy a Future of the Left t-shirt. And I found an awesome one. It's got a guy on it, and all his fingers are thumbs. But it's only available in women's sizes. Fortunately, I know my size in women's sizes, because I'm the kind of guy who knows his size in women's sizes. So I've got a women's shirt coming at me, and I'm like "damn, why couldn't this be a men's shirt? What woman in the world would want to wear this shirt?" But you know what? I wouldn't be at all surprised if they knew no women would buy it, and they just think it's hilarious that fanboys like me will debase ourselves buying women's shirts, and scold us for compromising just to become advertisements for them. Then when we criticize them for exploiting gender norms, they'll kick us in the balls, spit in our Activia, call us cunts, and make out with the girl we're in love with while we wheeze in pain. And we'll love it, like please sir can I have some more.

9/14/08

Foreign crack addiction, ass vs. pachyderm eugenics

If you had an addiction -- say, an addiction to foreign crack -- and you wanted to kick that addiction, not necessarily because you don't like the feeling you get from having a nice, relaxing smoke of crack, but rather in the interest of furthering the safety and independence of your own sovereign body, and freeing yourself from the depressing, dangerous, and economically lopsided jaunts to 110th street on a Saturday night, it would make a ton of sense to go to your local pharmacy and demand that they give you home-fried crack safely, cheaply, and preferably mined from the Alaskan wilderness, until wind-, solar-, and bio-crack are made available and cost-effective to the general consumer. Right?

In forty years or so, someone will make a movie, and in that movie, a crowd of thousands will start chanting "drill, baby, drill!" like a bunch of Bacchic orgyists. And it will be absolutely fucking chilling.

For the last couple weeks I've wanted to do a sort of controlled physiognomic study wherein I take sample groups of, say, 1,000 Democrats and 1,000 Republicans, and then show them screen-shots selected at random of individuals in the crowds of the respective national conventions. They would then have to answer one question, either in the positive or negative: "Just to look at 'em, does this person creep you the fuck out?" I would be you shotguns to pot-stickers that there would be a noticeable lopsidedness in the results, on both sides. Because Republicans are just fucking creepy.

Infinity minus one (RIP DFW)

My brain won't stop telling me that David Foster Wallace wasn't supposed to die like this. I've always had something against David Foster Wallace. I think it's because I think of him as having everything I've ever found lacking in myself. Or if not lacking, just not superabundant. I think of him as being me, only moreso. Which I imagine is the way a lot of people feel about him. Us, only moreso; the logical conclusion of a type, an extremity, a limit-case, a Representative Man. Me as me as I could be isn't as me as David Foster Wallace managed to be, only moreso. And being moreso is supposed to be a good thing. But I guess sometimes it's not. Or maybe it is, I don't know. Who am I to say?

Hey you.

You'd be better if you were a better athlete. A prodigy. A virtuoso. Not just with your body. With your brain, too. You'd be better if you were better at math, and philosophy, and where they coincide. You'd be better if you had a head for the witty rejoinder. You'd be better if you would just write a book. You'd be better if you wrote a great book. You'd be better if you wrote a bunch of great books. You'd be better if you had the respect of your peers, and the disdain of those who envied you, just because they envied you. You'd be better if you had all the potential in the world. You'd be better if you'd fulfilled your potential, and still managed to come up with more potential, still gave Them the sense that They had something to wait for from you.

You'd be better if you were constantly under the pressure of following your own headlining act. An anointed genius, baptized with praise, with nothing left to prove, and only life to live. On leave for the semester. And feeling pretty alone.

I'm sorry I didn't like you, David Foster Wallace. I'm especially sorry I didn't like you because you were too much like I wanted to be or wished I were, thought I could be under different circumstances. Now it couldn't seem more absurd. I'm sure it wouldn't have helped just to be liked more unequivocally, less ambivalently by me. I'm sure it would have changed nothing if, whenever your name came up in conversation, I hadn't scoffed a little and compared your writing to a clever riff on a terrible joke, or a pretty good cover of a pretty bad song. I always said that like it was a bad thing, when it was really all I've ever wanted to do, and all I've really ever admired. So why did I say it, about you, like it was a bad thing? Home improvement, self-improvement, taking a chainsaw and painting it pink.

Everything about life is so scary and hard, and a velvet hammer can still break your heart. I guess I feel guilty, but I don't know what I did. I think back and wonder, did I actually try not to like your books when I was reading them? Why would I do that? And then I think, why can't I like more things better, why can't I give up want and ambition and just love? Why can't I be me, only moreso? And then I feel ashamed. Because I'm right back where I started, wanting to be what I thought you were. And you were just like I thought you were, only moreso. God damn it. Maybe I just didn't want to be one of your characters. Maybe you didn't want to be, either. Maybe I have no idea who you were: you were different from anything I can possibly imagine.

We are here on earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different. But it doesn't make any sense when the person you most want to be in the world can't take it anymore. It doesn't make any sense.

9/13/08

Loverdose

I am what the Belgians call l'overwhelmed.

(I've always wanted to start a synth-pop group called Loverdose, and call the first album L'Overdose. I think this concept has some legs on it. Which gives me ideas for the album art: see below.)

So I went to that shitty party last night that I warned you about, dear reader, and I listened to assholes talk about "Palestinian liberation" and say things like "dude, I've been to Palestine and I've talked to Palestinians" to lend credence to more or less inscrutable statements about the state of the national will. So that was no fun.

(The party-proper actually was pretty fun, but these guys were terrible, and I'm attempting a quasi-literary disjunctive framing device, so just go with me on this.)

So then I was on my way home, and I ran into my ex-stripper friend (meaning, my friend who used to be a stripper), and she said, significantly, "you're coming with us." So I went with them. "Them" being my ex-stripper friend, whom I will call Shamiqua, and her friend, whom, for reasons the hilariousness of which I cannot properly express, I will call Xena.

Some months ago, I had the strangest date of my life, by a good margin, with Xena. It was 72 hours long, and made us kind of hate each other. But not really, because we totally love each other. And it wasn't really a date. But really it was; but then it stopped being after we watched Rookie of the Year, The Mighty Ducks, D2: The Mighty Ducks, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Superbad, and Wedding Crashers consecutively over a 13 hour span. That'll take the motor out of pretty much any structured social engagement.

But this is just back story. The point is, there's nothing quite like walking despondently home from a Party For the Right to Fight (for the Sovereignty of Palestine, If Deemed Ideologically Tenable and Economically Sustainable) and being rescued by two frantic, insane, bafflingly uninhibited women.

Xena takes this sort of retarded Wordsworthian joy in taking off her pants and running around in the street at night. We're talking flesh to sky, as naked as your mama made you. No mediation. A Catholic Christ-cookie on the tongue conveys immediacy no more immediately than do her naked haunches, tromping through the streets of one of the most dangerous cities in America, at 2:30 in the morning. It's fabulous, too, because there's really no more awkward-looking clothing configuration than a hoodie, with the hood up, and a totally bare ass, especially when the person in question is conveying herself in a way that can best be described as a gambol. If you went to a tailor, a haberdasher, a department store, a boutique, and said "dress me in the outfit that will confuse everyone who sees me as much as possible," they could do worse than to take away your pants and drape a hoodie on you. She got about a block before she said, "I wish I had worn panties today so I could just go the rest of the way like this." But she had no panties. Because, you understand, she was naked from the waist down.

What was even stranger, though -- so much stranger than fiction that it's actually stranger than stranger than fiction, so that even if I say it with my word of honor attached, the only response the reader can possibly plausibly have is to say "that's a lie," only except but it's not a lie, it's the truth -- was when Shamiqua, ex-stripper nipples exposed over the top of her tank, asked bare-bottomed Xena to stand stock still. When inquired why, "why stand still?" the response was, "because I'm going to motor-boat your ass."

And then she did. She got on her knees, took a couple of ducksteps forward, and did just what she said she would do.

And then Xena said, "Nobody's ever motor-boated my ass before! Let me do it to you!"

And then she did.

And then we watched The Never Ending Story. The motherfucking Never Ending Story. And argued about whether its resemblance to The Princess Bride were significant or merely superficial. Xena did interpretive dances with blankets, and hooded herself, as if for a little red riding. When you put it all together, it was way too comfortable to be awkward, but way too uncomfortable to be to not weird me out, and possibly scar me for life. But in a good way. It's a dashing scar. Like a 16th-century Spaniard with a rapier injury, and then he's like, "you should see the other guy." DeberĂ­a ver el otro? Whatever.

More importantly, though. I have no money. I should have moved. My car is dead. I'm starving. I have to grade and read stuff. I'm watching football and not really enjoying it. And if you know me, then you know, that the fact that I'm watching football and not really enjoying it is scaring the shit out of me.

9/12/08

Contrarianism: The Great and Unified Theory of Beer - OR - how to, by claiming not to, act superior to people who like some things better than others

I just stubbed my fucking toenail clean off my fucking toe. It's really painful. It's my tiny toe, so it was just a tiny toenail. But there are many nerves in the toe. A google search for "how many nerves are there in a toe?" yields results such as, "Many times there is no known cause for lesser toe deformities," and also, "Each toe has three phalanges, except the big toe which only has two."

But moving on.

Have you heard?! I'm a teacher! I teach a class. But I actually mean, I lead a discussion section, which is really a much different kind of thing, but who are you to argue? You're not a teacher. Or if you are, then you know what I'm talking about!

It's weird. I sit there and look at 18 inscrutable 18 year olds and ask them to say things and then they say things and then I ask them what they mean and they tell me something else and I ask other people what they think about what that person just thought and they tell me something else and then I ask them what they mean. It's pretty great, because it's a process that can go on pretty much forever, thank you very much différance. Somebody told me, "A 50 minute discussion section is 1 point and 2 jokes." I made a joke about crack, and a joke about a Jesus, and told them narrators are unreliable. It took 50 minutes! I'm a teacher!

I threw a party at my apartment last night, and if the greatness of a party can be judged by the drunkenness of the three drunkest people at the party, I had one of the greatest parties in the history of parties. Somebody told me to punch him in the face and, when I demurred, began to punch himself in the face -- and he has no memory of it. Somebody physically threatened me for a reason I wasn't clear about, locked himself in the bathroom for many hours, vomited many many times, and wouldn't come out -- and he has no memory of it. A backpack was lost, and never recovered (seems to have fallen into the black hole of Narnia or equivalent). A purse was left on the lawn outside for 18 hours, and went mysteriously unstolen! I bought a tiny Hieneken keg, with the intention of doing the world's tiniest keg-stand, but the logistics boggled the mind, and the tiny kegstand went unstood.

Grad school people and townie intellectuals are funny, and this I say with the warmest fondness and greatest admiration. But they truly are a ridiculous breed. They play on the affections of the mind as does the Welsh Corgi, nature's most baffling, yet truly and easily its most lovable mistake.

We grad students have, for instance, arbitrarily provincial -- but knowingly and smirkingly provincial -- tastes in things. I bought a 30 pack of Miller Light, and right at the beginning of the party, before any of the Miller Light had been drunk, several fellow grad students and townie intellectuals went on a beer run. They came back with a 12 pack of Stella Artois, which I swear to god tastes indistinguishable from PBR but is more expensive and has a swank, expensive-seeming filmy covering on its bottleneck, and a 12 back of National Bohemian, which is exactly like PBR except cheaper and without the sophisticated can design and award-winning pedigree of Milwaukee's Pabst company. This morning, there remained in the fridge 22 Miller Lights, 1 Natty Bo, and 0 Stellas. There was a full Natty Bo in the freezer for some reason, but I threw that away. So call it 24 leftover beers.

So, quantitatively, the overall need for a beer run comes through the mathematical ringer thus:
30 Miller Lights
-8 Miller Lights
+12 Stellas
-12 Stellas
+12 Natty Bos
-10 Natty Bos
=24 beers left over.

Which, for those keeping track, is, minus the one wasted beer, exactly the amount of beer that is left over due to the largess of the beer run. But all the beer that was left over is Miller Light. Which, despite tasting more or less indistinguishable from all other kinds of lager, isn't made in Europe or Baltimore, and is brewed by an ostensibly More Evil Corporation that runs lots of commercials during shows that grad students don't watch, and therefore tastes much, much worse, though indistinguishably so.

(This is, naturally, leading up to my Great and Unified Theory of Beer, which I feel will ultimately be remembered, by those who deign to remember me, as my greatest contribution to the field of aesthetics, and the theoretical discipline of the gustatory arts. The Great and Unified Theory of Beer runs roughly thus: people who claim to like expensive beer are vainglorious assholes and liars and particularly self-deceivers (cf. the Calvinist Elect), and those who like certain kinds of bad beers over others are charlatans or under the sway or charlatans (cf. Scientologists), and should be liberated into the fundamental fact of beer: it all tastes pretty much the same, and none of it tastes any good, but it happens to get you fucking drunk (cf. miserable, sad-sack, bad faith-addled, existentialist, morally crippled, and otherwise ineffectual atheists who pretty much have things right about the world and just want to get fucking drunk (cf. me)).)

I do love hip young Baltimoreans, because they, in general, skew Baltimorean in their purchase and appreciation of things (Yuengling and Natty Bo over Miller Light and PBR, The Wire over Deadwood, Dan Deacon and Beach House over any other music that's better than Dan Deacon and Beach House, Spiro Agnew over Walter Mondale, David Hasselhoff over Lorenzo Llamas, Montel Williams over Ricki Lake, etc.). You'll often find people walking down the street humming the lesser known tone-poems of Francis Scott Key while robbing each other and smoking crack. I'm sure it's the same in most other places. I'm sure Portlanders mutter about rain while ironically chopping down trees in ironic t-shirts and ironically nuthugging jeans. But most places have better stuff than Baltimore, such as irony.

Except we have The Wire. That's pretty sweet.

Since somebody was locked in my bathroom for 7 hours, I had to pee in a wine bottle and then wash it down the sink. I contemplated pouring it out the window, but being on the 15th floor, there were just too many gravitational and dynamical, sheer-force related x-factors. I couldn't calculate such things as the yaw, tilt, and roll of half a bottle of wine's worth of piss as it falls 200 feet, and so couldn't come up with anything like a definitive final resting place. I was, as such, forced to assume, in the great spirit of Occam, that the final resting place would ultimately be the worst possible resting place (for example, the water dish of a Welsh Corgi), and decided on the kitchen sink. I ran the garbage disposal afterwards, but I'm really not sure what I thought that would do. In retrospect, I probably just should have re-corked the bottle and waited for the bathroom to open back up, right? But who can look that far ahead. There were pills in there. It could have been days, and who remembers a bottle full of pee when you've got an overdosed corpse behind a door to which you don't have the key to deal with?

I'm going to another party tonight. It's not going to be nearly as good as my party, because my party was amazing. But you know what? I'm going to go to this party tonight, and I'm going to drink beer from Mexico, and listen to Detroit techno, and wear shapeless and ill-fitting clothes, and take all corporate advertisements at face value, and also take them very, very seriously. Because, you understand, I'm such a free spirit.