Chicanery

Shit has been bananas even as it creeps along at a narcoleptic snail's pace.

I am back from my yearly sojourn to Chicago's Pitchfork Music Festival, and its attendant 5-day bender. Here's my stolen press pass.

It scored me exactly 1 (one) free Fuze. I had to walk up to the press tent, wearing my stolen press pass, and walk up to the tables full of press-type people, and reach under the table into a bucket full of ice. I was just loaded enough to have the requisite bravery, but I also crept past that point of loadedness into the jittery, delusionally hyperselfconscious loadedness that makes you think every time you do something wrong SWAT is going to crash in through the windows and Mace you in the nuts. It's the first thing I've stolen in a while -- since I didn't actually steal the press pass, somebody else stole it and then gave it to me, and that shit don't count -- and, all things considered, a Fuze was the perfect choice. I got my heartrate up -- especially when I made eye contact with the pretty girl in a staff shirt who I thought was going to bust me, which brought back blood-curdling memories of the time I spray-painted "Center School Sucks" on the brick facade of my elementary school, and then was caught by a lady teacher because I wore cowboy boots and skidded on some gravel during my getaway -- and then I soothed myself with an icy, fruity, absolutely free beverage. Why am I not sorry? Because they stopped selling three-day passes, which "sold out," so I had to buy passes for all three days separately, which came all connected, almost as if they were a single, three-day ticket. So, if you want to get technical, that Fuze ended up costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $40, which means Pitchfork should get down on its knees and kiss my Mace-burned balls. Though, a photographer friend did steal me quite a bit of beer from the backstage area. So maybe it's a wash. After drinking said beer, I was drunk, which caused me to do things like try to take candid shots of unsuspecting girls who I thought may or may not have been pretty and were walking ahead of me towards the train. The result is a surprisingly realistic depiction of what I felt like after seeing Animal Collective (and drinking free beer).

This is the only one I took, because an overpowering wave of creepiness washes over you when you take a picture like this. You look at yourself, and you say "Really? Really?"

I'm going to try to start writing more short posts. I've been psyching myself out with the blog lately, looking at it as a commitment. And the thing in the world I least like to perform are commitments. So I am artificially cutting this one short, with the best intentions.

Meat Howitzer

Sweet Jesus, I really, really, really want a cheeseburger.

The fast food in this city is epochally, apocalyptically terrible, though. If I had to guess, I'd say they only make new food on Tuesdays, and they only serve you the stuff from last Tuesday, which they have left to rest on top of a dehumidifier to make sure that, if bacteria is going to fester, it's not so much bacteria. I always feel like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, when he goes into the fast food place with the Mac-10 and complains that his burger doesn't look like the one in the picture. Except I don't have that haircut, and I'm not being directed by Joel Schumacher (thank Christ).

Otherwise, I'm more or less just like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, and Robert Duvall won't stop stalking me.

The only place that's given me a halfway decent dead animal is Burger King, and I've only gone there once. I tried to go there again, but some bastard in a '79 Granada was taking up both lanes of the drive through entrance, and then I thought I though the next street was one-way but it actually wasn't, and before you know it, just like that, I was on the interstate like whoa, how did I end up on the interstate? And I'm fiddling with my GPS thing, trying to turn it on and program it to take me to "Points of Interest: Burger King" with 94% of my attention span, the rest being devoted to not sideswiping yourself or someone like you. (Shoutout to Matchbox 20!) But somehow, in the twists and turns of the streets of this city -- which I swear to God was laid out by an autistic monkey with a broken copy of Sim City DS -- I ended up in the parking lot of a grocery store, and left with, like, romaine lettuce and sprouts and made a salad with expired bleu cheese and a small army of those fake soy bacon bits. Which is so fucking disappointing when you're looking to get a hot injection of concentrated fats and salts in your mouth from a patty-shaped fleshcannon, a regular meat howitzer. I don't want to be the asshole who walks into Ruby Tuesday's alone and sits down at a booth and doesn't even act like he's waiting for somebody before finally breaking down and ordering a Triple Prime Burger (three different kinds of cow!). So there's really no alternative to shitty fast food, and none of it's even within walking distance.

But you know what? I'm going to fix up, look sharp, and go get myself a wad of pounded flesh that's been ripped from the corpse of a soft-eyed, headless beast while it hangs by its ankle from the ceiling of a death-factory that takes up a whole city block, then fed through a machine with teeth and gears that pulverize it into a lumpy paste, before being frozen and driven across the country and fried by a teenager who probably hasn't washed his hands since getting his girlfriend pregnant earlier this afternoon while trying out that new KY his 'n' hers.

Fuck me. The things I'm willing to do for a cheeseburger. And I don't even really want one anymore.

Under Siege 2 and tennis. The perfect day? You decide.

(I don't want anyone to ever know how long this took me to make.)

I woke up this morning at around 6:30, because my body knew I had something to do today. (Breakfast at Wimbledon! Watch Wimbledon!). I finished watching Under Siege 2: Dark Territory for the third time in two days. This movie features a seventeen-ish Katherine Hiegl, baby fat included, getting hit on relentlessly by a a twentysomething Morris Chestnut, who still had a geeky rap-star high top fade.

(Note: photo may not accurately represent the geeky high-top fade of Morris Chestnut.)

It's rare for a movie to feature two actors (Hiegl and Chestnut) who would become so much more attractive when they rounded the 30s.

("Hi, I'm Morris Chestnut, and I'm hot as balls.")

Throughout the movie, Steven Segall does that deadpan cocksure snark delivery that only he can do. It's a strange effect. He takes a trad, uninteresting line of dialogue and delivers it in such a way that it seems he's enormously satisfied with himself and absolutely demolished the other conversant in a game of one-upsmanship, but trying hard not to let you in on the fact that he's enormously satisfied with himself. He single-handedly ensures that any chemistry that threatens to burgeon between the (so-called) professional actors falls flatter and limper than a drag queen in a Shirley MacLaine wig after three hours at Comic-Con. It's so wonderful.

There are, like, three things in my life that I love unequivocally: televised athletics, pop music, and bad movies. (Good movies suck so hard compared to bad movies, I don't even know where to start.) But god damn if I didn't hit all three of my sweet spots today.

So I tune in to Wimbledon, and I watch two incredible but heartbreaking sets get carried by Rafa Nadal, who is a possessed evil demon of athleticism, against Federer, who I'm convinced is some kind of seraph avatar implanted on earth by God to make us remember that everybody else is comparatively pathetic and needs some help if they want to get saved. Except Federer looks so humble and mortal, and he's clanging unforced errors into the net and past the baseline and I'm starting to get frustrated.

Then, I fall asleep.

I wake up furious at having fallen asleep, and am startled to learn that the angelic light of Federer has smiled upon me, in the form of a rain delay, and they're just now coming to the end of the fifth set. A mad dash to the tv that results in a bruised shin yields up five more minutes of agony, as Rafa, in all his damnable good humor and warm, humble competitiveness, aww-shuckses his way to his first Wimbledon final. Federer, in the post-match interview, calls him "the worst opponent," cracks a melancholically classy Swiss smile, and manages to convince me that I want to take one for the team and jump his bones to console him.

It's been a tough year for me as a casual tennis fan, because I've had to pick between my all-encompassing Underdog Complex, and my hatred of presumptuous "you heard it here first" bandwagon croneyism. I liked Rafa, when he was still my little well-kept secret, the Roland Garros juggernaut who turned into a bumbling, Clark Kentishly inept misadventurer on grass and hard courts. But now everybody's jumped all over his hot Spanish tip in that way that is most infuriating. He's still "the underdog." But everybody is so fucking quick to point out, it won't be a surprise if he wins. What good is that? So I've decided that I heart Roger Federer, because there's nothing more infuriating, on a human-interest level, than somebody slipping past his prime in the public eye. It is, in a way, the ultimate underdoggedness. This is, of course, presumptuous, because he's still the best all-around player in the world. But it really hurt to watch him get ripped up on his turf. It was like watching a peace-loving Athenian statesman get speared through the thorax by a rampaging Visigoth usurper, all the while intoning philosophical maxims about democracy and beauty. It was like watching the temple burn against a backdrop of mass cattle rape. Federer walks on water, but Nadal runs through concrete. If Bruegel the Elder had painted a war-torn tennis-scape about the triumph of evil, it would have looked like this.


Also: Why is it that the good people at Campbell's, in their infinite wisdom, deign to release oodles of soups with one hundred calories and eight hundred thousand percent of your daily sodium requirement? I wonder what grocery store soup would taste like with no added salt. But that's sort of like aspiring to do a line of blow off your own tit -- food for thought, sure, but odds are nobody's going to be around to be impressed.

Disco Rick and the Dogs - I Know a Bitch

I strongly advise you to download and listen to Disco Rick and the Dogs - I Know a Bitch




When I was ten years old, I bought one of the worst albums ever made.

Having earlier that year been freshly enchanted by the sultry spell of Snoop Dogg's debut album, which prominently featured a more-or-less unknown quantity/entity known as "The Dogg Pound," I could have perhaps been forgiven, in my enthusiastic adolescent idiocy, for being taken in by The Dogs... featuring Disco Rick.

My dad, who had days before passed on an ultra-fast Mazda RX-7 convertible in favor of a sensible, hunter green 626 sedan (four doors for two kids), was these days feeling himself gracelessly sliding into the throes of the kind of middle-age that is no longer questionable. (You're no longer a "young 39." You're just an old guy.) Here's a man who can't even put his mid-level hospital executive opulence to work for himself the way he wants to. I may have used this psychological spike in my favor when I asked the man, in the parking lot of Sam Goody, whether I could buy a cd with the dreaded sticker on the cover. With his money.

I'm pretty sure he said yes right away, but, not wanting to waste a good thing, I mounted a tightly-wound soliloquy in defense of profanity in art -- the first of many to come. I actually bemoaned the state of the music industry. The fact is, dad, they just don't make 'em like they used to. Sure, there's music without swearing, but it's cut-rate, made by hacks just looking to make a buck since so many children out there don't have uber-hip young fathers who divvy their disposable incomes to sons for albums with that sticker. Fascists!

I told him -- and I remember this sentence almost word for word -- "sometimes I love Maria Carey, but sometimes I just need something else." Something that says fuck. We walked through the record store, and I spotted the ugly orange packaging with the familiar canine appellative, and I was drawn in, inexorably, inevitably. Like a needle into a diabetic after a whole thing of candy beans. When he bought it for me, I hugged him, just like I hugged him after he bought me my first Playboy. I suppose I reserved the most awkward and touching means of conveying my appreciation for the things that he did to corrupt me.

Having learned my lesson from shredding the wrapping and popping an Ice-T album into the car stereo on the way home from the same record store with my mom months earlier (she bought the album for me, then bought it away from me for $20, to preserve my aural virginity), I gripped the tiny Goody bag in my sweaty fist and waited, breath bated, to get home. Safely shored up in my room, I put the cd into a the carousel tray of that great lost piece of novelty-arcana, the three-disc changer, and waited for its gears to grind and whir the disc into place. I pushed play, volume low, my head pressed up against the speaker, and tried to relish in the cursing. But the fact was -- and I knew it already -- this was garbage.

I didn't have "Miami booty bass" in my vocabulary yet. I couldn't have told you that it was "a ninth-rate 2 Live Crew cheap rip." I couldn't thrown critspeak at you -- "rote Roland 808 polybreaks, mangled by wack rappers." I didn't even have hipster dismissals like "epic fail" at my disposal. But the instinct was there, and I remember thinking -- what a waste of great song titles.

Seriously. Pretend you're ten, and check out this motherfucking track list!
1. Intro
2. Talking True Shit
3. Radio
4. Get Down
5. Fuck All Night
6. Life About Crack
7. Sexy's Got Beef
8. Nasty Dance
9. Work That Ass Baby
10. Got That Spirit
11. I Know a Bitch
12. Hyped Up
13. Dogga Mix
14. Fuck You All III

Fuck You All...... THREE?!?! What could that possibly mean?

But, as I say, the album was largely a disappointing experience. I would listen to it at night, song blurring into undifferentiated song. But there was always a glimmer that I couldn't put my finger on. A diamond in so much dogshit. It took a while to discover why.

By outlandish chance, this album happens to hide, buried as a deep cut at track 11, one of the greatest songs ever written.

It's called "I Know a Bitch."

The song is this call-and-response thing that turns itself inside-out when it turns out the guy with the Flava Flav voice is the lead, and the guy with the Chuck D voice is the hype man, even though the low-voiced guy kicks off the song. It's essentially a three-minute, semi-rhymed heart-to-heart conversation between these two guys.

And it's about how these two guys know a bitch named Charlotte.

It starts with one of the most shocking exchanges I've ever heard in a pop song. The hype-dude barks, "I know a bitch!" and we're rolling.

(I know a bitch!)
What bitch?!
(She's number one!)
Number one?!
(I told the bitch to lick my ass with her tongue!)
Did she do it?
(Yes she did it!)
God damn!

Now, on paper -- and on record -- this'll throw you off. (Was it really so ambiguous that he needed to specify which organ he told the bitch to lick his ass with?) But let me assure you. The best metafiction in the world can't fuck with the bizarre, uncontrived, honest-to-god bullshit genius that spills out of this song's ears. And you realize it right when the riff enters. Buried under waves of shifty, corny, boom-bap drums, there is discernible an eight-dollar guitar plucking out a one-bar, Special Ed. version of the Sanford & Son theme through a rickety old chorus pedal. Our hero takes over. Things start happening. Everything's happening!

Here's the breakdown: the song's an absolutely tortured, virtually cubist narrative that folds itself in half like a man fellating himself, then spins his head around like the Exorcist girl and spits it at you. It ping-pongs from wanton sexual braggadocio to homicidal cautionary tale with an almost Twainian flair.

So this guy got this girl to lick his ass with her tongue, and he's pretty excited about it. He wants to tell his buddy. He's bragging, talking Big Willy talk, and his friend is impressed. "God damn!" But then it turns out, shock of shocks, the other guy knows that bitch too!

Mannnnnn, I know that bitch!
(You do?!)
Her name is Charlotte!
(That's right!)
She sucked my dick and licked my balls last night!

And the only information the narrator needed to make this Holmesian deduction was 1) the aforementioned rimjob and 2) that his sidekick "grabbed that stupid bitch and started slamming." The "ming" becomes "Mannnnnn" and the perspective shifts, like a fucking virtuoso Altman one-shot, and we're swept magically away to the Projects, where the narrator had taken Charlotte the night before -- "I took her home... but not my house." And, he laments, "Just lookin' at her house just broke my heart." To which his companion replies, "Oh shit!"

I went inside!
(Man you crazy?!)
I didn't care!
(You didn't care?!)
I got all tangled up in them spiderwebs!
(God damn!)

And then the story turns, brilliantly, from wretched griot pathos to Laurel & Hardy hijinks.

I sat down!
(Where you set?!)
On the couch!
(On the couch?!)
Somethin' bit me in my ass and I said ouch!
(Oh shit!)

So the braggadocio of the sidekick has been swept away, and we're fully inhabiting the narrator's, our hero's strange yarn. He's recounting last night, when Charlotte, we recall, "sucked [his] dick and licked [his] balls." But the tale, my dears, is about to take a hard left into experimental fiction, atemporality, and what Frederic Jameson would call "the Absolute."

Charlotte, telling our hero to "sit tight," retires to her bedroom. The sidekick has grown concerned by the shoddiness of the place, and, fearing the worst, he urges the hero to "leave that room!" But it's too late. Well, it's gotta be too late, because this is last night, when Charlotte "sucked [our hero's] dick and licked [his] balls," remember? But the claustrophobic feeling of looming danger is becoming too much to bear, and soon it's not just schoolmarm worrying anymore -- it's prophecy fulfilled.

She came out!
(What she had?!)
She had a knife!
(That's your ass!)
I grabbed my hat and my keys and I ran fast!
(Haul ass!)
I ran fast!
(How fast?!)
I didn't stop!
(You didn't stop?!)
When I got to the door, the shit was locked!

Notice how the narrative subverts itself, turning and slipping, like an eel contorting itself into a Mobius Strip. We've been set up to expect a relatively standard romantic dalliance. A little dick sucking, a little balls licking. But what the fuck? The bitch they know... she has a knife! So, like any sane man, our hero does what you'd expect. He runs. He runs fast. He doesn't stop. He runs and runs. He calls a good deal of attention to his running. How far does he run? All the way to the front door. Which is locked! Curse that vile woman, that tricksy spirit! But we don't know, yet, how tricksy she is. We don't know anything!

I looked around!
(Where's that bitch?!)
The bitch was there!
(Oh yeah?!)
She was so damn bald she had no hair!
(God damn!)
I said god damn!

This is what our one-night stand has come to! It was just two men, civil, mutually appreciative, having an intimate conversation. They brag, they strut, they relish their (in some ways shared, in some ways even homosocial) conquest of Charlotte, the woman each of them "knows," and each has known in the biblical sense. But the confessions have taken water, now. Charlotte is crazy. Not only is Charlotte crazy, Charlotte is "so damn bald she [has] no hair." The men have let their guard down and fessed up to the fact that they have both been serviced by a variously wigged black widow spider of a woman who seduces only so that she can kill. They had both represented themselves, like rounders bluffing aces with deuces, to have annexed a piece of prime real estate. But it turns out, "just looking at her house just broke my heart," and all that heartbreak and property entails. So, in this situation, what is a player to do? That's what the sidekick wants to know.

(What you do?!)
I tried to fight!
(Alright!)
She grabbed me by my neck and the bitch tried to bite!
(Oh shit!)
I pushed her back!
(Ok!)
Bust her in her eye!
(My, my!)
Knock the bitch down on her back and said goodbye!
(Bye bitch!)
Bust down the door!
(God damn!)
Break out in the street!
(Yo, aye! What you should have done was called the police!)
Fuck you!
(Fuck you!)

A lovers' quarrel has turned into a brothers' quarrel, as the two men relish the ass-whupping our hero has administered to Charlotte. But then the sidekick, perhaps fearing for his friend's safety, perhaps even touched by a patina of guilt over the potentially excessive brutality of our hero's savage attack, endorses a less vigilante justice. Though he is vigorously rebuked by his friend, he stands his ground. "Fuck you!" The story, you may have noticed, has changed tenses. It's now operating primarily in the present. It's a colloquial device, of course. It lends immediacy and urgency to the happenings, it heightens the feeling of imminence, it makes the flesh crawl. And it is the avenue through which the story takes its strangest turn yet.

I know what!
(Yeah, what?!)
Ummmm... I just turn and kick the bitch in her butt!
(Good luck!)
And if I win!
(What if you don't?!)
Just help me out!
(Fuck that shit!)
I just beat the bitch down with my dick!
(That's it!)

We've gone through a wormhole! Our hero is back. It's last night! He's improvising! His fight with his friend has thrown him back into the fracas! It's a 'Nam flashback with the added ontological heft of Doc Brown's Delorean! He's running, experiencing fight or flight, and second-guessing himself. "Ummmm," he ejaculates, as a placeholder to make way for extemporization. Perhaps run is the wrong response! Perhaps I should fight this bitch! I should "turn and kick the bitch in her butt!" His friend is supportive, but not entirely convinced. "Good luck!" he snarls, equally supportive and dismissive of his friend's chances. He plays the voice of reason, almost pleading -- What if you don't beat the bitch? What if you don't?! His friend, our hero, pleads in turn -- help me out! I need your support in this most trying of times. But his sidekick is having none of it. Fuck that shit! But then, in an inspired burst of confidence, our hero decides to apply a basically indisputable fighting tactic. The ol' junk beatdown. Now his friend is starting to come around! And we're there! They're there, together! Our hero, fighting Charlotte, calling out to his friend from the ether for advice, for an arm to lean on. Be the wind beneath my wings, he almost cries! None of this happened last night -- now it's all happening tonight! Judgment night! It's all happening! And out of this night flashes the pursuing Charlotte, presumably still hairless and wielding her knife with the spastic, flailing limbs of a Mel Brooks vampire.

Oh, here she comes!
(You better run!)
Fuck you! I ain't the one! I'll just turn and shoot the bitch with my gun.
(What gun?!)
I got a gun!
(What kind of gun?!)
A Mac-10!
(A Mac-10?!)
I'll just shoot the bitch once and once again!

I don't think I've ever heard this part of the song without laughing. "I'll just shoot the bitch once and once again!" It's just a really funny line. But for a long time the yucks obscured the metafictional gambit. We're back! We're there again, and Charlotte is hot on the trail. So what to do? Like Eddie Valiant, our hero digs through boxes of Acme products and comes up with, not a crooning sword, but a Mac-10! And he knows what to do! Ratatat! And his sidekick has come through the wormhole with him! He didn't even know he had that gun! He's Neo in the Matrix, and he needs the programming to fly a helicopter! He's talked the world into being, and now he's got to live with it! Bang bang shoot shoot.

We'll jump that bitch and then we'll bail!
(We goin' to jail!)

A phallocentric Thelma and Louise! On the run for the murder of a vile, villainous woman! No doubt scarved and sunglassed, our heroes make off in a drop-top Bonneville, persecuted for the very act that lends them empowerment! Ahhh, but our hero, while not having passed the Bar, knows a little bit.

No we're not!
(Why not?!)
It's self-defense!
(Yeah, bet!)
If she die, that bitch will never come back!
(B'leedat, b'leedat!)
And if she do?!
(What do to?!)
Run fast!
(Run fast?!)
Pack all our shit and let's haul ass!

Our men, clearly rattled by the paranormal happenings that have so wrenched the joints of their lives in just a few moments, are willing to doubt even the certitude of the corpse of a bitch that has been shot "once and once again." Look. Did they shoot Charlotte? Did they not? Was it last night? Was it tonight? Are they going to shoot Charlotte? How did our hero get away? Was his sidekick with him? Did Charlotte suck his dick and lick his balls? Did she not? Did she not suck anybody's balls, not even the sidekick's? And here's the real curveball... does Charlotte even exist?! Charlotte, the French feminine of Charles, meaning "free man." She's a free woman, unbridled, unmoored, unkillable, so free she's not there, so free she's everywhere at once. Is Charlotte Kobayashe? Kevin Spacey playing cripple, the devil who convinces the world he doesn't exist? Were they blown by a ghost? Did they manage to shoot the devil in the back? What if they missed? It all evinces the Cold War paranoia of an arms race. If we've gone this far, how far is too far? Once a hail of gunfire has solved a problem, who's to say you won't become the problem to solve? Riddle me this, I'll riddle you with bullets, motherfucker! You never bring a knife to a gunfight, that much is clear -- but is it really any better to bring a gun to a knife fight? These men have clearly violated an ethical imperative, but they know that the universe -- perhaps Charlotte herself, the free woman who is evil through and through, the fabric of whose freedom seems to be constituted by her aggressive and liberated ("free") female sexuality, which clearly intimidates our heroes, and is perhaps the very reason she signifies evil to them -- Charlotte is the great equalizer. They've shared her, and now they'll both meet their fate at her hands. Even if they win, they lose, and they lose by winning. These men will always be haunted, not only by their journey through the Stargate to a new past-present-future, and the all-to-real possibility of this deadly living woman becoming the living dead, but also by what she symbolizes: The kneeling proletariat, the femme on her knees, an endless sea arranged on each other's backs in a pyramid, making a staircase for the socially mobile -- those with the cars, the guns, and the butter. You look over your shoulder, climbing this great wall of limbs and minds and souls, and you see nothing, you're in the cave of the open air, an omnipresent, Lacanian manifestation of the vagina dentata, just waiting to chomp down on you. They're all beneath you, slipping out of view even as it parallaxes. But they are there, always ready and waiting to rise up in a tide and swallow you beneath them, to even the ground and trample you with their bootsoles -- to take your boots, the very boots you've been trampling them with, and to return the favor. You reach the top of the pyramid, and you stare off the plateau into the canyon below, and you realize that escape is exile and freedom is irrelevance. To "haul ass" is to evaporate. You -- like Thelma and Louise -- have only one choice.

You have to hold hands and jump. Only then can you end the song with satisfaction.





*note: I've never been clear if the concluding vignette -- "I was fuckin' this hoe, she was suckin' my dick" -- is about the same bitch, Charlotte the free woman, or a new bitch. I can't help but feel, though, that if this song were a performance by Marceau, or a film by Godard, or a story by Artaud, or a piece by Duchamp, one would be roundly scorned for asking such insignificant, sophomoric questions about the exegesis. Either way, it significantly alters the moral content of the story, perhaps simply reflecting the irreversible, unstoppable, even mechanical repetition of bourgeois domination in the age of late capitalism. Plus, it's hilarious. "He kicked in the door and shit on the floor and I shot him in his ass with a .44!"

The return of automatic writing

The idea is stolen from Sisyphus, who totally came up with it for the first time ever it ever got came up with ever, but I don't have the readership to make it a quiz, so I just thought I would see what happened, and what happened was weird. Diagnoses: 1) God is telling me something 2) I need some music that departs from a peculiar, particular couple of themes.

The first lines of 25 random songs.

1. Girls don't want to play like that, just want to talk to the boys
Talking Heads - Girls want to be with the girls

2. Last night I dreamed that I was dreaming of you
Tom Waits - Watch her disappear

3. Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth
David Bowie - Rock 'n' roll suicide

4. This overgrown boy in a paper crown
Burning Airlines - Paper crowns

5. Got a spirit in my house and I know it ain't no mess
Joey Ramone - Spirit in my house

6. Locked inside the bedroom looking at the pictures at the wall
Angry Samoans - My old man's a fatso

7. I am the only one searching for you, and if I get caught then the search is through
Pavement - Frontwards

8. Caught up in a repeat, you think I oughtta know how it goes
Bluetip - Anti-bloom

9. Sitting in the morning sun, I'll be sitting when the evening comes
Otis Redding - Sitting on the dock of the bay

10. All I need is a little time
Air - All I need

11. Thank you very much, I've got to blow my nose
John Fahey - Fahey blows his nose

12. Gettin' on my nerves
Organized Konfusion - Interior car night

13. Come with me, wading in the sea
Apples in Stereo - High tide

14. I got my coat, I got my keys, I got my head down to my lungs and move my feet
Devo - Clockout

15. That'd be cool if you could eat good food with the bad food and the good food would cover for the bad food
Mitch Hedberg - Lynn

16. I can't seem to make you mine
Ramones - Can't seem to make you mine

17. Spanish songs in Andalucia, the shooting sites in the days of '39
The Clash - Spanish bombs

18. You can do what you wanna do, you can say what you wanna say, you can think what you think you want, it doesn't matter anyway
Husker Du - It's not funny anymore

19. I was burned in the heat of the moment, though it couldn't have been the heat of the day
Led Zeppelin - Hots on for nowhere

20. Here's room 546, it's enough to make you sick
Nico - Chelsea girls

21. Can we control this dream? Make amends with lovers' constructs?
Doug Marsch - Dream

22. Narrowing his eyes, god only knows what she'd try
Jawbox - LS_MFT

23. I was hanging with my friends and they said I looked peaked
Mustard Plug - Mendoza

24. Motorbikin'! 1-2-3-4. Motorbikin'!
Dee Dee Ramone - Motorbikin'

25. I never felt magic crazy as this
Nick Drake - Northern sky

Don't push me cuz I'm close to the edge, push a Push-Pop, OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!!!!!!!

I don't really have anything to say. I just wanted to post that as a subject line. I'm really busy!!!

And that's why it really hurts

The Wednesday / Thursday workload vortex is pelting me with hail-hard, cigarette-sized words like "ontophenomenological." They screech in, do their gnatty-needly damage, and retreat back into the obscurity from which they came. This is, I suppose, what one gets for saving Aristotle, and Derrida's magisterially impenetrable commentary on Aristotle, for the last minute. Can you die from ten-thousand mosquito bites? A bird is chirping.

A nationally-ranked procrastinator who refuses not to get everything done, I find myself in this situation almost every Thursday morning. (That's totally how I'm going to start my first WM seeking WW light BDSM personal.) I have to be on campus in four hours, and I have a little more than four hours worth of work to do between now and then. Green tea + ginseng bounces off me like bees off a bullet proof vest. All four of my classes -- nine hours in all -- are concentrated within a 27-hour span, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. the next day. I'm pretty sure my teachers think I'm high. But I'm just really tired, is all.

I think of Friday as me-time. Time to decompress, relax, unwind -- shake off my usual rail gin hangover. Lose all the luggage I shoved into my short-term memory's overhead compartment. The weekend? It's the weekend. Nobody works on the weekend. Work for the weekend, dummy. That's how the Loverboy song goes, and Loverboy is never wrong. This leaves me, every week, with two days to prepare, at my leisure, for three classes -- and then the sturm und drang blitzkrieg of Wednesday night, which is so abrasive it can only be described in German. Or possibly Japanese, but I don't know any. Sing it.

Hey, you know what's awesome? I live on the 15th floor. And I'm a holy cow! Thanks, boys.

Fuck you, bird.

That don't make no sense

Don't get excited. We'll get to Total Recall in a moment.

I've had a trouble concentrating for the last month or so. I blamed a dopamine deficiency. I blamed cabin fever. I blamed a sedentary lifestyle, a bad diet, ill-fitting shoes, barometric pressure, antisemitism, the Jews, the disconcerting worldwide indifference in contemporary discourse to the possibility of the religious correctness of Orthodox Judaism -- what if they really are God's chosen people? -- and my abject lack of a Posturepedic bed.

But I'm done blaming my problems on other people. Because who's to blame? Henry James is to blame.

Late-period Henry James comes at my brain like a scurvy dervish and pelts it into submission. I am infrequently, literally driven into a fetal position on the bed while I piss and moan and wail softly to myself about the prospect of trying to read a few hundred more three-page paragraphs that are about as sequitur as a Monty Python skit. Henry James makes me piss the bed. Good thing it's not a Sealy.

His books have the same effect on my interpretive faculties as this picture, minus the giddiness.

Which is to say, they pummel them into submission. What the fuck, WHAT THE FUCK. This can't be happening!

In a desperate bid to concentrate harder, better, faster, stronger, I have been driven to read articles on the internet about brain enhancement. Memory enhancement. Concentration exercises. Breast implants. Did you know that there was a study wherein people were directed to think about exercising their biceps for 15 minutes a day, and, 3 months later, their arms were 13% stronger, sans exercise? I didn't, but then I did, because I read an article about it that sapped me of 10 valuable minutes that I could have spent reading two pages of Henry James. All in the service, you understand, of reading Henry James more efficiently. I've smoked 9 cigarettes in my non-smoking apartment because smoke-breaks are, in a very real sense, a way not to read Henry James.

Here's how bad it's gotten. I've romantically reminisced about the times I've watched Total Recall. Sat there, thinking, I remember watching Total Recall.

I want so badly to watch Total Recall, but I can't, because that's valuable time I could be spending in more active pursuit of avoiding my responsibility to read Henry James.

I tried to fall asleep to Total Recall last night, but I couldn't because I was too captivated by it. I had to turn it off. Henry James cost me even that. My last shred of dignity? Perhaps.

Total Recall is one of the more impressive movies ever made, says I, because there's not a single sequence that goes by without the least plausible thing that could possibly happen, happening. "We've got another schizoid embolism!" screams a lady doctor. Schwarzenegger tries to smuggle himself onto Mars in an old lady fat-suit, but it can, for no reason that could possibly be justified by the plot or anything else, only say "two weeks," so it has a seizure and reveals this hysterically unpassable animatronic version likeness of Arnie.

It's like somebody left the wax dummy in the back seat on a SoCal summer day and it melted and flowed four inches downhill before an intern found it. Probably cost the poor bastard his job. But that's might not even be as bad as it gets. Total Recall features some of the all-time worst movie magic, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Do you see what Henry James is keeping me from? I have six (6) pages of The Ambassadors to go. Before I'm finished. If it were any other book I hated this much, I would be ecstatic. I would be standing on my hands in front of the Washington Monument, which is what I always do to celebrate -- as seen here.

But I'm not. I'm not standing on my hands in front of the Washington Monument. Because I'm the longest half-hour of my life away from having stared the devil in the face and come away. Oh, sure, I'll come away. But you don't come away from something like that without something in your soul twisting, corrugating, turning green and septic. I am killing myself to live. I am killing myself back to life. My brain is dying so that my body can be free of this unutterable burden. My heart is being gnawed away like so much fox leg caught in a bear trap. I want to live! I am the resurrection, and I prove only the horror of that which is to come. To come, to come, l'avenir -- The Golden Bowl and Wings of the Dove. I must away, I must piss the bed and gnaw off my leg.

Henry James is Keith Olbermann's Worst Person Ever. He fucking should be anyway. If he were still alive, I'd burn his house down.

A mouthful of cheese

Today, my paper clip came alive. It flew to me and alighted on my desk. We instantly fell in love.

We had a baby, and named him Jean-Wayne Chikatilo Flowbear.

When Jean-Wayne got older, he became arrogant and spoiled. He felt himself entitled to our undivided attention. He began to take us for granted. We couldn't get a moment's peace, much less a single word of appreciation for all the sacrifices we made for him. So we had another baby to spite him.

We don't quite know where Jean-Wayne spends his time anymore, but we have reason to suspect he's killing neighborhood pets burning the bodies in firing barrels.

The end.

I went shopping today for the first time in forever, and then I made one of those salads. The kind where the balance is a little off, you know, so you get in there with the fork without looking down and you end up with a mouthful of cheese, three olives, and a firecracker. But I'm eating salad, lately, because I'm feeling tugged by this vague but nagging urge to self-improve, which manifests itself in eating greens and fruits and roughage, and working out with half my heart and half my ass. Drinking sickly-sugary green tea instead of pop, which, for the fourth time in my life, I have to learn to call "soda" again.

I want I want I want a cigarette. I don't even really smoke, but I want to squash this trajectory or I might actually start feeling good, and could anything be more dangerous? From the first time I heard the Sebadoh, I started associating contentment with adequacy, adequacy with selling out, selling out with middle age, and middle age with irrelevance, which is tantamount to death. But, the intractable aging process continues, and I now own a potato masher, an apple corer, and a "Euro peeler," which is like a normal peeler, but more expensive.


I bought my first rug last week. I bought a fucking rug. From Target. I'm 99% of the way to being halfway to 50 years old. Body by Stouffer's. Rug by Target. The bourgeoisie is calling me, and I'm starting to resent poverty. Like the first time you think of somebody you used to be in love with and you realize, not only are you not in love with her anymore -- you don't even care how she's doing. "Wow, you went to Siberia? How'd that go? Welp, see ya later!" That's how I feel about being poor. I could be making 28 Gs and tucking my Oxford in every day. Wearing sock-suspenders and shit. But instead I make slightly less than that, wear whatever I want, and wake up at 2 in the afternoon. Misery, thy name is Flowbear.

We found out, recently -- us grad students -- that we don't get summer funding in our first year. This is the difference, for me, between a cartoony, Kanye West-esque break full of video hoes and summer-fun snow cones on the one hand, and grinding it out on my fucking leather ass, to quote Worm from Rounders, on the other. This news hit me two days before the lady who manages my building told me the garage fee isn't included in my rent, which is exactly the opposite of what she told me eight months ago, which means I owe garage fees for the last -- let me do the math real fast in my head -- eight months. I'd never before wanted so badly to fight such a powerful-looking woman. I was furious, but summoning all the c'est la vie I could, I said, "what are you gonna do." One thing that happens when I say this -- and it always blows my mind -- is that people actually think I'm asking them what they're going to do, and not just saying, you know, fuggedaboudit.

"The question is," she says, "what are you gonna do?"

She didn't really say that. I can't remember what she said, but whatever it was pissed me off. If she had said that, though, I'd be force feeding her spinach soufflé somewhere where they'd never find her, poking holes in her moles to see if they'd bleed. Running up and pushing the button on a dunk tank and, when she floats -- because, you understand, she's so fat -- yelling "She's a witch! Burn her!" over and over for eternity.

Not really. Is this mean-spirited? I don't pretend to have the answers to these questions.

I'm going to write a novel with an old wise man-type character named Phantom Smokeballs in it. He's going to dole out sententious, unhelpful advice to people just like me. "Roll with the blows, young'un. One day pain will make you a man." Then, one day, somebody's going to stab him, and when he doesn't bleed, a thousand ravenous English majors are going to set him on fire.

I keep having these daydreams. I'm talking to faceless professors, and I'm telling them, "I've hit a bit of a wall, mentally." They don't care. They stare at me, nonplussed but unimpressed. "I'm fatigued," I explain. Their black-hole eyes burrow into my heart and lay eggs. "I don't care at all about this shit I have to read." They gyrate against their wall-to-wall bookshelves, each filled floor-to-ceiling with broke-backed volumes, each cover-to-cover with blank pages. "I've memorized them," they say. They dip cotton-wrapped clubs in oil and light torches, like the mob in Frankenstein. The movie, not the book. "I fucking hate books," I say. They put the torches to me, and I go up like an inky paper doll. Burn words burn.

It's kind of amazing how mental fatigue can turn into emotional and even physical fatigue. I'm generally hyperemotional and spastic, one minute raving like a tazered monkey, the next a sulking, taciturn, grudging tool. But lately, I just feel kind of... withdrawn. And I think it's because I feel persecuted -- literally, persecuted -- by the workload of graduate studentry. At the risk of calling privilege poison, there's a certain irony one feels whilst feverishly and compulsorily studying the ethics of oppression.

Read Foucault! I SAID NOW, FISH! FISH! FISH! FISH! FISH! FISH! FISH!

To misquote that great author Stephen King: "I wish I could tell you that [Flowbear] fought the good fight, and the [Professors] let him be. I wish I could tell you that. But [graduate school] is no fairy-tale world. He never said who did it, but we all knew. Things went on like that for awhile. [Graduate school] life consists of routine, and then more routine. Every so often, [Flowbear] would show up with fresh bruises. The [Professors] kept at him -- sometimes he was able to fight 'em off, sometimes not. And that's how it went for [Flowbear]. That was his routine. I do believe those first two years were the worst for him, and I also believe that if things had gone on that way, this place would have got the best of him. "

Every Wednesday, I feel this deathcold wave hovering over me, threatening to break and crash on me like it crashed on Swayze at the end of Point Break, minus the Christlike undercurrent of self-sacrificial redemption. It's almost impossible for me to like any Henry James novels when I have to read 10 of them in 13 weeks. It's impossible for me to like books, period. And I was already on the fence. But it's not like they didn't warn me. Kids, don't go to grad school in English unless you really, really like to read.

"There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who [applied to graduate school]. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone and this old man is all that's left. I got to live with that. [Educated]? It's just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, [Professor], and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don't give a shit."

Oh, of course, I'm being self-indulgent, and pathetically self-regarding. In six weeks, I'll be free as the wind blows-slash-grass grows, and it'll be fantastic, and I'll be glad. I'll marvel at how much I learned. I'll joice at my treasure-stuffed brain as it leaks its overflowing wisdom onto everyone that rubs it, and the queue to touch my throbbing noodle will be long, indeed (TWSS). The gauntlet will be run. The crucible will hang fire. The alembic will have made gold. The carcass bubbling in its own fat will have turned, not unlike Cindarella, into a delicious fried chicken.

But right now, goddammit, I'm exhausted.

10 or so people I like better than Henry James:

1) James "Buster" Douglas
2) Buster Keaton
3) Michael Keaton
4) Michael Douglas
5) Kirk Douglas
6) James Douglas Morrison
6.5) James T. Kirk
7) William James
8) James Jamerson
9) every famous Jim Jones, including the poison Kool-Aid one
10) Jim Jarmusch
11) O. Henry
12) Jim Henson
13) Yoda