Kiss-Cam

The best 1:51 I've spent all day. The Kiss-Cam was always one of my favorite inventions, because you don't have to have a sense of humor to be funny on Kiss-Cam. You just have to be on Kiss-Cam. (from The Big Lead)

Deacon Blues (this is the day of the expanding man)

So, loved ones, monkey puppets, onlookers, gyrating marionettes and avenging disco godfathers: I have what I don’t want to refer to as writers’ block because, for one, I can’t stand people who call themselves writers without really being writers. My go-to dictionary has two definitions for a “writer.”

1) Writes (books or stories or articles or the like) professionally (for pay)
2) A person who is able to write and has written something

First of all, I have written for pay, and I felt no sea change within myself that would have allowed for self-redefinition. Certainly not in the way a lawyer gets through law school and passes the bar and starts, through no fault of her own, referring to herself as “lawyer.” Secondly, I think those two definitions should be switched, and that the sentence, “A person who is able to write and has written something,” should fester under our skins like a tiny horde of itinerant pigmy savages, parading through our vesicles and pausing only to throw parties that involve playing drums made of skin and gnawing on our insides, rapt in primal and orgiastic bloodlust. A tiny tribe sticking us with flint spears and jagged daggers, a bacchic brood that’s partying and pissing on and scorching our veins and our ligaments and our muscles and marrow, making us cry out, “god, why can’t I write right?” It gives us something to shoot for.

Call it elitist, but I think labeling somebody “a writer” should be contingent on being able to stand back and say, “hot damn, that boy can write!” much the same way being able to say, “that boy can sang!” should be a basic criteria for actually calling somebody, without qualification, a singer. This holds true for poets and philosophers, too. If an impartial observer can’t stand back and say, “sufferin’ succotash, he sure can philosophize,” or, “merciful cayenne pepper, white wine vinegar and butter smothered on chicken wings and braised under a broiler for ten or fifteen minutes with plenty of salt and ranch dressing, that boy surely does versify up a storm,” then whoever is self-applying the terms “poet” or “philosopher” should be variously afflicted with pointy objects in the nether regions, such as the feet.

I have what we will term bloggers’ block, since that term carries with it all the things I mean to imply about myself. Righteous, histrionic over-writing, self-indulgence of all sorts, thin skin, and just generally laying it on pretty thick.

Shockingly, and contrary to everything I know about freeing yourself up to bray shrilly at the top of your lungs ad nauseum (spellcheck suggests “ad museum,” which sounds like a place I would want to go to), not even hitting the bottle – and I mean hitting the bottle hard, like going down to the corner store and buying one of those half-sized 375 ml. bottles of Jack Daniel’s Old Time No. 7 Brand Quality Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey and pulling off of it, straight from the bottle like a seedy little ersatz fuckwit Faulkner trapped in a room of his own with nothing but a typewriter and a blank piece of paper and a sheaf of frustrations to take out on those instrument – not even this has helped me put so much as a word to paper for a few weeks. It’s funny, though, that whenever you can’t write, the one thing you can write about is how you can’t write. Much in the same way that people who become happy can’t write about anything other than the fact and means in which they are happy, and they become these insufferable loads of metahappiness, detailing and adumbrating the ways in which they are happy and the reasons why they are happy about being happy in those ways, until you just want to put one shotgun barrel under each o' their their nostrils (or, as Cormac McCarthy would say, “noseholes”) and click that satisfying double-click of a double-barreled shotgun, click-bang, click-bang.

That’s all I’m going to say for now. I’ve got to go watch Six Feet Under, and pretend like it’s helping me to learn how to cope, even though it’s just a way to waste time watching attractive people wanting to have sex with each other, and ultimately having sex with each other. God bless HBO, they just love it when hot black guys make out with other guys.

But I’ll try to come back tomorrow and write about how I got conned out of ten bucks in Davenport last week, and how and why I’m trying not to let it turn me into a racist. Click-bang, click-bang. "Learn to work the saxophone and I play just what I feel. Drink scotch whiskey all night long and die behind the wheel." Steely Dan forever.

"much like the beans and small toys children of this age like to put into their noses and ears."

I'll bet you can't read, without smiling, this medical article about toddlers masturbating. Try.

Shocking confessions of a nervous nelly.

Thanks to everyone for the congratulations. They have added up and meant much. But here the wheel meets the road like the wizard meets the toad (lightning in his eye suggests the magic that's to come). You have been a gangbusters gaggle of supporters, the sexiest, cleanest scrum this side of the Mai/Dix. I really am overwealmed by all your warm words and well-wishes, and I feel I owe you all a little something back. This will require meditation.

I'm going to Baltimore tomorrow to meet with a billion Johns Hopkins professors to talk about something. I'm not sure what, exactly, but it's not indie rock, college sports, or action movies, so I'm treading water. I'm pretty nervous.

How fucking perfect is We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes for this kind of situation?

Fucking perfect. How often do you really find yourself posing, as a question, "Should this be allowed to survive?" Well, I'm glad this is alive.

Back on Tuesday PM. Let's hang out. Wish me luck. I'm so full of love for you, and all the things I know are still there for me. Bless you all on this saintly day.

Jocund, Jocose... Jaccuse!!!

I cannot believe the phrase "J'accuse" has not permeated the American language’s slang skin. It would be the most useful phrase for Americans. One simple, elegant, gorgeous word – Xhakyoos! – to call everybody on every lie, every hypocrisy, every suspicion. I accuse you!

Also: I just read that Jean Baudrillard died. "The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning." Time marches intractably on. J'accuse!

Mostly about colleges and shit.

Dear Washington Irving,

I yearn for you tragically,
Irving Washington

Hold your tongue and say...

You know what commercials drive me crazy are those Tic-Tacs commercials where the two women with the great haircuts, the one with the platinum swoop and the other with the brunette spikeatechture, do acrobatic things with their tongues and Tic-Tacs. They just drive me fucking crazy.

From the wiki entry for "prostitution"

I've been a drag racer on LSD

I’ve started just downloading movies instead of using Netflix because I find it inconvenient and surprisingly difficult to go to the mailbox to get the movies, undo the envelopes, take out the movies, watch the movies, repackage them in the envelopes, walk back to my mailbox and put the envelopes back into it, without forgetting to put the tiny white flag up (I surrender!). So, if money is doled out proportionately to the amount of time people keep them, the producers of Wild Style, Crush Groove, and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, all three of which I have had in my possession for pushing two months now, have got to be rolling in it.

It took me three and a half hours and two individual viewing sessions (with lots of short breaks) to watch Borat. Every time I sensed something uncomfortable coming, I had to get up and take a lap around the house to steel my wool for the impending humiliation, anchorman, fratboy, and dinner party guest alike. Of course, this is coming from a guy who used to get uncomfortable watching episodes of Sister, Sister and wondering how the twins were going to get out of another sticky situation that always involved 1) lying to cover up something nefarious they had done and 2) getting caught and “learning a lesson” that lying is wrong, only to be right back at it in the next episode, lying and cheating their way out of trouble and then feigning contrition when it came back to bite them. Where’s the morality? For the children?! FOR THE CHILDREN!

This is seriously the third time I’ve made reference to Sister, Sister in as many weeks. I’m so fucked.

It's the rope, it's the rubbing

I have a serious thing for ethics. It’s art for analysts and science for daydreamers and all that shit, and it’s a great way to prove that whomever you are, in fact, you’re pretty stupid. So I contributed my share to the study of justice and right acts at 2 this morning when I stumbled, wasted, to my car and drove half a city block from where I was sleeping to McDonald’s. Sadly, you cannot go through the drive-through on foot. And I was really hungry. Oh, the undecidability.

My dad just got Lasek eye surgery done today. He’s laid up in bed wearing ridiculous little goggles. He can’t open or touch his eyes, and he’s pretty miserable. He’ll be miserable until… tomorrow morning? Seriously, it takes less than 24 hours for somebody’s eyes, upon being burned and gouged and sheered basically into sections like a sausage by a high-powered laser, to go from requiring 70s wire-rims that are the stuff of mockery lore, to being perfectly see-worthy. It just ain’t natural.

Not content to sit idly by and watch as my dad outpaces me in the race to ocular Valhalla, I’m thinking of getting some contacts, and, more importantly, some hipster-doofus black plastic rim glasses sometime next week. I’ve never had hipster-doofus black plastic rim glasses before, and have at times spoken out against them with the fire and fistpumpery of a red-state Bolshevist. But, I guess I’ve gone about long enough trying to keep my “individual character” and “sense of identity,” and figure it’s about time to let my defenses fall and the rest of me fall in line.

Eh? EHHHH?!?!

So this is one of my favorite anti-pop songs. But it’s anti-pop like the antichrist is to Christ or antimatter is to matter, instead of, say, the way anti-contraception is to contraception. It’s not against pop songs. It’s just the MF Doom mask the pop song sometimes wears, because if it didn’t it would go crazy. A photonegative of a pop song. Hitler said “The artists who paints the sky green and the grass blue ought to be sterilized.” Well, the Archers of Loaf ought to be sterilized. (If you’re Hitler.)

What Did You Expect?