"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?

Doin' Dumb Shit

Guided by Voices - (I Wanna Be A) Dumbcharger
"To seek the blood from precious stones is blasphemy. The perfect angels who monitor your intentions. God keeps his famous children. Be respectable."
Guided by Voices - Game of Pricks
(I once heard Bob Pollard refer to this song as "the reason why I'm better than Pavement and the Sebadoh and all those other bands" and "the song that bought my house." It was awesome. And sort of true.)

Some days you’re just stupid. You talk to people and you know you oughtn’t say what you’re about to say but you can’t think of anything else to say, much less anything better, and you’ve got to say something, so you just go ahead and say it. I’ve been stupid all day. And that’s fine with me.

Though I did get a call tonight from a very nice English professor from Johns Hopkins with a very charming Australian accent, to whom I made a crack about Berkeley Cal being full of “dope-smoking trustfund hippies in Rasta hats,” and it was impossible to tell if he found it amusing or not, in that way of professors of the arts. You can never tell if they have anything resembling a sense of humor. He really sounded happy to hear that I was leaning towards Hopkins and coming to visit in March, but seemed to think I would have a lot of debating to do with myself, because I was in store for a shitstorm of acceptance letters from competing universities. It was very flattering, and I felt like it should have boosted my self esteem, but it really didn’t. It just made me feel like it shoulda. Sort of like the girls I hit on seem to feel. Sort of like how I try not to eat meat – not so much because I feel bad for the mistreatment and horrific deaths of animals as because I feel bad because I ought to feel bad for the funny little beasties. Sort of like what that old interchangeable Russian shortstorian said about war – you’re outraged not so much because you’re outraged as because you can’t muster any outrage.

I’ve taken to calling it “JHop,” because that sounds more like the International House of Pancakes and less like Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I far prefer the one to the other.

I re-herniated the disk in my neck on Friday as the big ice storm was sweeping through town. I was doing pushups and I heard and felt something in my back pop and I collapsed on top of myself. It was sort of filmic, I imagine. Places in Northern Iowa will be powerless until some time in early March. I, on the other hand, didn’t lose power until Saturday evening, and got it back Sunday morning. My parents got a hotel room at the Marriot for the night and left me in charge of their dogs, which was kind of fun, even when the temperature in my rickety house with no insulation to speak of dipped into the upper forties. I fed the dogs, Copper and Chloe – who as a duo remind me very much of the hench-stooges from the animated 101 Dalmatians movie – Pringles, and the more Pringles I fed them, the more feral they got. It’s odd to think that one thing that’ll make a dog regress towards the state of nature is heavily processed pseudo-potato “food product” fed to them from a tennis ball can. Just like God intended.

Speaking of. That 22 week old baby drives me crazy. So after five and a half months in the womb, the baby was delivered, and it’s the youngest baby ever to survive. Which, in itself, is fine. It’s a very cute baby. It came out at like 10 ounces, but looking more or less in other respects like your average baby, and we all know that babies are cute, and we all know miniature things are awfully cute, and there’s no reason to think that a miniature baby wouldn’t be cute as a Puggle.

What drives me crazy is the unilateral way right-wingers are willing to selectively use science to prove their point. Reading this shit, you’d think that the baby popped out, shriveled and wet and sobbing, and they just wrapped it in a blanket and took it on home. It drives me crazy that, rather than pointing to the generic and widespread worthlessness of life, this proves that God in his majesty chose to begin life at conception rather than birth. Let’s face it, life is the grayest area we’ve got. The bacterium that eats our corpses are alive, and the viruses that eat our blood cells are not. Nobody’s sure about the crystals that grow in caves. It all feels pretty arbitrary to me. And not particularly sanctified.

Which isn’t so much the point. The point is, this baby is a little trophy for smug little people to hold up and use to proclaim the benevolence of the creator and the evilness of those who would choose to terminate a pregnancy. This baby was put into an incubator – an artificial womb, for those keeping track, a terribly, terribly complicated machine meant to replicate the state of the child in the womb and without which the baby would instantly die, in the manner of a geriatric who would instantly die without his Pacemaker – and given care that cost in the neighborhood of a half-million dollars per month. So, in the five months it spent in the early-birth ward, it racked up 2.5 million dollars, which is like half what Steve Austin cost before it was technically even ready to be “born,” and ended up going home with its family just a scant couple months later than it would have if it had come out normally. The point is, this is a miracle of medicine, and I don’t see what God has to do with that. People are saying, “How could you want to KILL this baby,” when, if not for tens of millions of dollars worth of machinery, the baby would have died on its own, inevitably and with absolutely zero hope for a miracle. Because we’re, again, in one of those inestimably vast gray areas. It would, one gathers from the sheep and pig and cow evidence, be pretty easy for scientists to clone a human being. But this is not life because it was not created procreatively in the normal way that we understand life to be created……… not unlike Jesus, our personal and cumulative savior.

Jesus: clone?

The point is not that I dislike Christianity, because I like it very much in its Jesusesque, if not necessarily its Pauline form. I just can’t stomach the way “natural” and “holy” have come to be equated as terms. I don’t know if these people have noticed, but the American Religion is stuffed to the brim with highfalutin mysticality. Stuff almost as weird as a complicated series of wires and tubes and domed glass receptacles that mimic a woman’s innards in function.

“This water, you understand, is holy water, as differentiated from regular water by the blessing of a Priest who can trace his ordination all the way back to the apostles. It’s a very natural thing.”

I propose a new definition of idiocy: “one who is not God yet believes he or she knows precisely what constitutes a sin.”

Whatever. I’m having a stupid day. It’s a sin.

The Pearl of the Mohair Goat

The thing about the Oscars in-memoriam montage for those dead whose deaths are noteworthy enough to be noted is, it’s a pretty shitty acid test for the worth of a life. Because, obviously, it would suck to be in the movie industry and deemed “not important enough” to be recognized in the Oscars ceremony. Just imagine that deliberation process between the producers.

-“Sammy Gallagher, the gaffer from that noir The Pearl of the Mohair Goat… he died last month.”
-“Yeah, that’s a classic. God damn, he was a good gaffer. The electrical wiring on that set was a joy to behold! But we’ve only got ninety seconds. Let's get our heads in the game, people!”

But also, it’s like one of those wet t-shirt contests that are judged by applause. The people that the audience knew and loved especially get rousing ovations (Don Knotts or Robert Altman), while the Japanese director who was active in the late 50s and is considered an important influence on Ozu or whatever gets only a polite and rote smattering. It’s kind of depressing.

That said, Don Knotts and Robert Altman are way better than those other guys.

Frankly, though, I hope nobody applauds when I die. Irony?