Rick Horstarr

Significant Things with the Madonna of Conflagration

2009-09-17T07:18:00.000-04:00

“I’m no longer interested in significant things, okay?”

I never know how to respond to the Madonna of Conflagration when she says something like this. There’s usually an edge in her voice, a light in her eye and a hand on her hip. A Momentous Decision Has Been Reached and It Is Now Time to Talk About It.

“Um, how are we defining significant things here?”

“Anything that isn’t, like, minutiae. Matters of life and death. Matters of import. Matters of great moment. That stuff. I am no longer paying attention to it. From now on, I am going to sweat the hell out of the small stuff. I am going to take care of the little things and let the big things take care of themselves. Actually, the big things can do whatever they want. The big things can get fat and start smoking again for all I care. They no longer exist for me. I'm totally through with significance.”

She stands and starts pacing up and down the sidewalk. The very first of the autumn leaves are falling and a light wind is blowing them around her feet. There aren't many other people around, as it's one of the first colder days of the season and most everybody else has rediscovered how much they hate the cold. Even the traffic going by on Rawson Avenue seems slower and lighter, squeezed down by a bridge construction project going on a few blocks away. They're racing to finish before the first snow. They're not going to make it. I find that comforting for some reason, perhaps because poor public works planning is one of the few constants in this world.

The Madonna of Conflagration loves the cold. While the season itself often brings her down emotionally, the weather invigorates her mentally and physically. For most of October she's a blend of moping and extravagant gesticulation, hopeless sighing and vigorous pacing. Things usually reach equilibrium by the end of November, but these early weeks are often quite trying.

“Maybe I'll start collecting something,” she says. “I bet you can get really mired in the details if you collect something. That's pretty much, like, the definition of being a collector. There's rituals and conventions and message boards. Filing and labeling and organizing. All that shit.”

“Sounds like a clerical job. Are you looking for a hobby or are you thinking about temping?”

There's nothing quite like the thrill of a beautiful woman giving you the finger. This particular finger goes flying by as her pacing has intensified.

“This is bigger than a hobby, motherfucker. This is a philosophical thing. This is me readjusting how I interact with the world. It is heavy heavy business, is what I'm saying."

I nod, but her pacing has carried her too far and too fast to see it, sending her up the block and away from our bench. I watch her almost vanish from sight, but she abruptly swivels around and comes marching back benchward.

I’m going to collect antique bottles!" she declares. "I’m going to get really into collecting them. I’m going to have price guides, and a tool box full of instruments specially designed for antique bottle cleaning, and solvents that have been approved for use on old glass. I'll subscribe to a quarterly magazine about antique glass, and at least two glass discussion news groups. Maybe more! I'll go to antique stores and flea markets. Every weekend! After a while --and sooner than you would think-- I'll be able to identify and describe a bottle just from a little fragment of glass.”

“Like an archaeologist.”

Another finger goes whizzing by. “And…and….and…I’ll specialize. I'll be, like, the country's foremost expert on one particular kind of bottle. Bottles from the northeast! From dairies! If someone is making a movie about an old eastern dairy, they'll totally consult with me to get the bottles right. But I won't know all the bottles. I'll specialize in one specific kind of dairy bottle. And not milk bottles either!”

“Did they bottle anything else?”

“Butter bottles. I'll be the country's, no the world's go to source for the history of butter bottles of northeastern dairies. From 1919 to 1925.”

“Pretty sure butter didn't come in bottles.”

“It didn't?”

“Little crocks, I think. I'm almost positive it came in little crocks.”

She suddenly stops pacing. I realize the cold breeze I had been enjoying was entirely generated by her. The weather almost seems hot without it. She flumps back on to the bench.

“That’s sorta taken the wind out of my sails,” she says. “I’ve got no interest in collecting crocks.”

“Are you sure? It would be pretty, uh, minutiae-y? Minute?”

She frowns.

“No, it’s like, I dunno, trying too hard? I want to get involved with organic minutiae. Something small and real like, trainspotting or botany or...” she looks around and her eyes light on my shoes. “Or people's habits. Their weird little things. I could investigate that. Like that fucked up thing you do with your shoe laces.”

“Huh?”

“They don’t cross. Why don’t they cross?”

“These are dress shoes.”

“And?”

“Proper dress shoes are straight-laced.”

She stares at me.

“It’s, you know, traditional. It’s where the term ‘straight-laced’ comes from. It...presents a neater appearance than, uh, crossing the laces.”

She continues staring at me. She leans in, keeping eye contact, further and further, until our eyelashes nearly touch. She has found some minutiae clinging to my soul and is giving it a good scrutinizing. In the scales of the universe, the Madonna of Conflagration's desire to study people's habits is sitting in one pan. In the other is the reality of things like straight-laced shoes. She sees that it's only the tip of the iceberg, hinting at a great frozen mass of banality beneath.

“My god,” she says, “I think you’ve cured me.” She stands up, gesturing for me to follow. “C’mon, c’mon, let’s go find something significant to do. Right now.”

I follow (of course), idly wondering what significant thing we'll find to do, and how many more weeks life will be like this, and whether I really want it to stop.

The Anarchist, the Saint and the Foreign Visitor

2009-09-09T07:30:00.005-04:00

A purple cloth, made from cheap and badly dyed material, is draped across the stone. Through it, one can see the outlines of a cross, perhaps a crucifix. Those lumps could be the agonized limbs and countenance of our savior, or could just be folds and imperfections. Who knows? Who knows?

The anarchist stands bowlegged before the saint's grave. It is he who has covered the memorial, as a sort of insult in drapery. His apocalyptic eyebrows follow a blasphemous arc across his buttery forehead. They are worms of corruption swimming in this wrinkled pool of pale ichor, whose wellspring must surely be his cancerous brain. He drinks a mixture of absinthe and mercury from a silver flask (the mercury as a vain attempt to cure his syphilis) and thinks about how terribly decadent and transgressive he is. How the saint would squirm if he knew the cloth had recently been the bed upon which the anarchist had violated a depraved prostitute in the most abominable way imaginable. She (she? Is he positive? So young, so young...) was vacant eyed and ready for anything. He is enjoying a private and sinister chuckle about the whole thing when he hears the voice.

"Wow, is this place classy! I mean we've got nice graveyards back home, but this place is just another....It's like a museum. Boy I tell ya, they do everything up real nice and beerokey over here."

The anarchist turns and has his senses immediately attacked by a lime green track suit that must surely be a representation of everything he despises.

"Oh HI!" says the creature inhabiting this crime against humanity disguised as a garment, "this a friend of yours?"

The anarchist smirks.

"A...friend? Ah, who can say? Our deepest enemies, somewhere within the crucible of our loathing perhaps become friends, perhaps through that alchemy that men call hatred, perhaps-"

"Only I'm not from around here, and I was wondering if you knew anything about this place. Figgered if you knew the departed here you might know the lay of the land so to speak."

"The gentleman who rests here was known to me, yes."

"Oh that's great, cuz I- Oh geezum, listen to me puttin' my foot right in it: I don't mean it's great that your friend is dead and all, but it's great that you know the place. So, this place is pretty old right?"

"It is the oldest cemetery in the country madame."

"See that's what I thought, but I wasn't sure cuz I couldn't find a info desk."

He allows himself a small smile. "Such things are not our way. We find them...lacking in respect." his glance wanders briefly to the purple cloth. "But yes, this place is very old indeed."

"So who's the oldest?"

"Do you regard that basalt monument there?"

"Basalt? What's that, hon?"

"A type of volcanic stone, famed for its tendency to be found in strangely regular fields of geometric forms. That large gray column is a fine specimen of the stone."

"Oh the tall one. Wow it's big!"

"Fix it in your mind. Beneath that column are the remains of a tribal chieftain who lived 2500 years ago."

"What, before Jesus? Goodness, I didn't know things over here got that old!"

"Indeed. What we know of his behavior shows he came before the gentle savior: the chief was know as Ludovico the Black-Blooded Kin-Rapist. By his friends."

"What did his enemies call him?"

"'That bastard who cut my tongue out and then used it do unspeakable things to my children while making me watch'."

"So he was a terrorist?"

"He was a sculptor whose medium was terror. He used the meat of humanity and the rivers of fear that course through it to create strange and eternal works, ones that echo down the centuries and millennia to bring their depravity and sublimity here to this spot, today, here now."

The track suit looks at him puzzled, smiling politely.

"Here madame. These feet in these blood red boots, support the spiritual heir of Ludovico. These legs, in these black velvet trousers, lift those feet above the faces of the innocent. These shoulders, off of which hangs this black silk cape with lemon yellow lining, go up and down when I laugh at the torments of the helpless. The sight of this profile, including this hair piled high into dizzying shapes using only the most costly of pomades, destroys the goodness in any soul and leaves it comatose in a puddle of its own fluids."

"Now is that your job, dear, or is it a, a, 'lifestyle choice'?"

"Madame, I am only as I have made myself."

"Well good for you! Everyone admires a self-made man! But look at me, jawing away, when you're here to pay your respects to your friend in peace."

The Anarchist looks at the covered grave of the Saint, remembering the look on his milk white face as the velvet rope pulled ever tighter around his throat, even as the detailed arabesques lovingly carved onto every inch of his flesh bled out a new alphabet of scarlet betrayals. He had seen peace there, a peace that said "I forgive you." He had rejected that peace, spitting in the Saint's blue eyes as light faded from them.

"You have a good day now. It was awful nice of you to point out that old grave."

"It was my pleasure."

Yes, yes, yes, it was his pleasure, as were all things in life. All was pleasure to him, from the deepest pain, to the sublimest ecstasy, from the gray mindlessness of a tedious afternoon, to the most violent cocaine-spattered wild night, all was pleasure, all was pleasure, all was-

"Oh, before I leave you in peace could you point me to the, well, um, facilities?"

He pointed a foppish finger towards the mausoleum of a family well known for decades of charitable works.

"you may do your business in there madame. I apologize if the fixtures are a bit...European for you, but I'm sure you'll adapt."

Two Named Women Taking Shelter From the Storm

2009-09-02T07:50:00.011-04:00

Flashing and frightening, the lightning comes down around them. Nancy and Andrea huddle by a puddle, under a tall tree, childhood lessons about storm safety forgotten in the rush for shelter. Fate will smile upon them this time, but there will be adjustments to be made later. In the end it will be one more bad debt to pay off, when they least expect it. But for now they are dry.

"God damn is this wet," says Andrea, looking up with furrowed brow.

"Yes, rain usually is," says Nancy, looking down at her glasses as she tries to dry them off with her soaking wet shirttail.

"Yeah but this is like, extra wet rain. Like it's got more hydrogen in it or something, you know? I'm pretty sure I read about that."

"I...can't say I've ever heard that myself."

"Yeah, no, it's a thing. They call it 'super rain' and it's because of jets or something. Maybe missiles. Anyway there's like chemicals in the atmosphere and they get in the water and make it more hydrogen-y, which makes it more wet. It's a real problem. You haven't heard of this?"

"I haven't heard of this," says Nancy. She puts her glasses back on and finds them unsurprisingly streaky.

"I can't believe you haven't heard of this, Nancy. You have got to start living. In the real world." Andrea taps herself on the side of the head with her index and middle finger. It makes a tiny splashing sound that is somehow audible over the sound of rain falling. "You spend way too much time up here, in your head."

"Do I? I didn't think I did."

"No, yeah, really you do." Andrea looks up. "Still raining. Cripes. Anyway, some people think it's a good thing that we've got more hydrogen in the rain now. Because hydrogen can be used for fuel, right?"

"I've heard about that."

"Sure you have, everybody has. So if the rain has more hydrogen in it, and we collect the rain, and then get the hydrogen out of it-"

"How's that done?"

"Chemicals and electricity I think. So like if we get the hydrogen from rain instead of normal water we get extra hydrogen. It's a bonus."

"Everyone likes a bonus."

"Of course they do. And it's more efficient and environmental too. Because you're using water that's been contaminated in the first place, yeah? It's totally sound."

"It certainly sounds sound." Nancy tries to clean her glasses again. "I think it's letting up a bit."

"How can you tell?"

"I can almost see out of my glasses now." Lightning flashes across the sky, turning everything briefly to day. "Still pretty wet though."

"Still pretty extra-wet."

"Extra-wet, right." Nancy frowns. "Andrea are you absolutely sure that's a real thing?"

"Positive. Just because you don't know about something doesn't mean I made it up."

"No, that's true."

"You don't pay attention." Andrea taps vigorously on the side of her head again.

"Guilty as charged."

Lightning strikes the tree across from them, shattering it into fragments and filling the air with the smell of vaporized sap.

"Huh," says Andrea.

"Indeed," says Nancy.

Life at the Mountford Institute

2009-08-31T19:39:00.016-04:00

"The problem was-"

Mountford smashes him in the face with a coffee mug. Blood and teeth seem to be everywhere, but this is no doubt an exaggeration, and a good example of how we often mistake the personal for the universal. It's a way of insulating ourselves from an unfeeling and random universe. The sort of universe that's populated by arbitrary and unpleasant types like Mountford.

He'd been in a mood lately, the kind that was difficult to get a handle on, but probably boded ill for all. He'd taken to wearing straw boaters and oversized college sweatshirts. At first there had been hope that this was an endearing quirk beginning to manifest itself, a sign that maybe Mountford was some sort of human thing at heart. But a few weeks went on and Mountford remained his deeply unpleasant self. It came out that the sweatshirts had been trophies collected by a particularly perverse serial killer —they called him "the Lord of the Islet of Langerhans"— and had come into Mountford's possession via an unsavory private auction. They had never been washed, and everybody suspected they never would.

The hat was much more insidious. Apparently one of the interns had had the temerity to compliment it. Mountford went berserk, pelting the poor serf with slaps from his bony hands, and nearly drowning him in a torrent of spittle and abuse.

"This hat? This hat, you shit-steeped primate? [slap] You think this hat is nice, you placenta-fed ectomorph? [slap] You want to compliment it [slap], you workshy syphilitic? [slap] You think I wear this hat to get compliments [slap], you boy with bats in his bowels? [a backhanded slap here, with Mountford's spurred knuckles used to full affect] You couldn't be more wrong, you droopy foreskin of a half-man. I wear this hat to make me look like an asshole. So when someone compliments me on it [slap], I know for certain [slap] just how much of a craven [slap] vermiculous [slap] toadying [slap] urinal cake of a man I am dealing with. [another vicious backhand here, hard enough to draw blood] You disgust me."

The intern was in the grip of what would later turn out to be the first of many grand mal seizures. Mountford, never one to waste words (or invective anyway), delivered the rest of his rebuke in the form of kicks and spit, eventually muttering "Get it out of my sight" before stalking off to his office.

After that the illusion was broken, and Mountford's sinister aspect rose again. He roamed the hallways of the building for hours, glowering at everyone. It wasn't unusual to find him napping ostentatiously in the men's room, pants around his ankles, stall door open. The yes men on staff nodded sagely and pointed out how this was just like LBJ, but they were a minority. Everybody else was unsure. More than one person whispered that they had caught Mountford stealing small and valueless personal items from their desks. Often he made no attempt to hide his crime, as if daring them to call him on it.

Pain was also the order of the day. Beyond the poor intern, Mountford had begun to make physical abuse his go-to management technique. The top level of executives were constantly dealing with bruised and broken coccyges as he handed out literal ass-kickings left and right. A stream of admins came and went, rarely lasting a day in the face of mistreatment. Even the overnight cleaning staff felt the effects. Beyond the strange stains they had to deal with, there was something palpable and depressing hanging in the air.

So when Mountford smashed yet another subordinate in the face with yet another coffee mug knocking out yet more teeth and spilling yet more blood it was hardly a notable event. Even Mountford himself was finding it all a bit much, though of course he'd never admit it out loud. A new tack was needed.

"I'm sorry, I don't know what came over me. You were saying something about a problem?"

It was a noble effort but all he got in return was a stunned stare and silence. He realizes that pulling back from the historic levels of unpleasantness exhibited in the past few months is not a simple thing. The course of things can't be changed that abruptly. He's going to have to play this smart if he wants things to get interesting again. And in a moment of inspiration that could only be called Mountfordian, he remembers that delegation is the heart of leadership. He summons today's admin into the office, using the old fashioned intercom that he refuses to decommission.

"Hold this," he says, handing her the boater. She takes it with sweaty hands. He pulls the sweatshirt over his head and hands it to her.

"Put it on."

She wavers for a moment, horrified by the unwashed condition of the garment. But Mountford is imposing and times are tough, so she puts it on.

"Now put the hat on."

She does so.

"Not at an angle, you animal. It's a hat for civilized beings." She adjusts the hat so it sits perfectly straight on her head.

Finally he hands her a fresh white coffee mug. She compulsively tries to drink from it, but it's empty. Mountford shakes his head.

"Now then. You, on the floor," this to the bleeding man who hasn't moved since Mountford's apology, "I want you to know that things are going to be different around here from now on. Times are changing. So stand up. Now why don't you tell this innocent young lady the thing you were going to tell me. Something about a 'problem,' I think?"

The man is terribly uncertain. His eyes move from Mountford's to the admin's. She looks terrified and unreal, like a paper doll in a tacked on hat and sweatshirt. His eyes move back to Mountford, who nods encouragingly. He even adds a toothy smile and a double thumbs up.

It's the most horrifying thing the man has ever seen.

"Go on, tell her!"

"We, uh, we found out what the flaw with the Waterloo project was, The problem was-"

"Stop there!" Mountford shouts. He grasps the admin by the shoulders and pushes her towards the man.

"Now then sweetie, bash this loser in the face with that mug. Do it for me."

She feels Mountford's breath on her neck. She worries that it will leave a scar.

"Mr. Mountford, I-"

"Do it!"

She shrieks and flings the mug away from her, only incidentally towards the desired target. It grazes the man's forehead. No obvious physical damage is done, but the shock of this new attack is too much for the poor man's system and he slumps into unconsciousness. The girl bursts into tears and runs from the room.

Mountford goes back to his desk,contemplating this new tactic. Done right, not only would the staff be terrified of him, they'd be terrified of each other too. It's a marvel of efficiency. And honestly, he can't be everywhere at once. Not yet, anyway.

Interim Post: Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed

2009-08-24T20:30:00.004-04:00

-24 oz. bottle Durian juice
-Sanford and Son: The Best of Grady
-Oscar Wilde wig, size 7 3/4
-Cock Deep In Coeds: My Erotic Life and Adventures by Harold Bloom
-Asst. flavor Chiclets (case of 400)
-Sengoku Style Home Ohaguro Tooth Blackening Kit

(Proper updates to rickhorstarr.blogspot.com resume on September 1st! In the meantime be sure to check out the Summer issue of Vex, which features my short story "The Taste of His Own Mustache"!)

(Wait, September 1st? Crap, I gotta start writing again!)

Interim Post: A Terrible Idea

2009-08-14T06:36:00.003-04:00

A terrible idea I once had was the time I got a load of old dog booties and then used a hole punch to repurpose them as sweaters for rats. I didn't know about the notorious cheapness of rat owners at the time. Eventually I ended up putting the sweaters on wild rats, just to get rid of the damn things. And that's how I know what a course of rabies shots feels like.

(Real updates to rickhorstarr.blogspot.com resume September 1st!)

Interim Post: Test Results

2009-08-12T08:23:00.004-04:00

Every time I take the Meyers-Briggs it comes back INRI. I think this has something to do with my messiah complex.

(Real updates to rickhorstarr.blogspot.com resume September 1st!)

Interim Post: We all Make Mistakes

2009-08-09T10:16:00.002-04:00

Just the other day I was trying to find the "NASA Image of the Day," but I accidentally typed "NSA Image of the Day." Embarrassing, but at least I know what my neighbor looks like naked now.

(Real posts to rickhorstarr.blogspot.com resume September 1st!)

Interim Post: Doesn't Scan

2009-08-07T23:12:00.005-04:00

The wheels on the bus go round and round,
Round and round,
Round and round.

The wheels on the bus go round and round,
So if you're wearing a long flowing scarf be careful
Or you'll end up like poor Isadora Duncan.
I hear her head popped clean off.

Allllll over town.

Real updates resume September 1st!

Interim Post: My Most Shameful Googles

2009-08-05T19:22:00.003-04:00

Hugo Award sex act
stamp collecting incontinence
Mr. Opportunity fanfic
Miranda July snuff film torrent
aviary defacement penalties Michigan OR Pennsylvania OR Nevada OR Colorado

Real updates resume September 1st!

On Approaching 36

2009-08-02T15:34:00.001-04:00

In a tight white t-shirt
I look like a weisswurst.

Regular updates resume September 1st!

Twelve Simple Rules for Leading a Consequence-Free Life

2008-12-06T07:34:00.004-05:00

-Get rid of those fingerprints! They're like carrying ten little snitches with you everywhere.

-Nod and smile, until you get to a position of sufficient power. Then frown and shake your head.

-In any group of five people or more, never speak the same language as more than two of them. Failures to communicate are failures to be responsible!

-Diversify your greed! Gastric bypass surgery is easy to obtain when you're rich.

-Cultivate two signatures: a legible one and an illegible one. Use the illegible signature for any documents of consequence. When you inevitably need to get out of one, claim it's a fraud and present documents with your legible signature as proof.

-Having non-powerful friends with no influence is like having an umbrella that can't keep you out of jail.

-If you're a woman, cry publicly whenever things don't go your way. If you're a man, punch walls and mutter to yourself in the same situations. If you do this enough times, people will make sure things go your way!

-When arguing, it doesn't matter if you're right, it only matters if you're loudest.

-No one ever went broke by arranging matters so that someone else always pays.

-Be known for being brilliant yet unpredictable! This allows you to walk away from anything (artworks, political careers, relationships, pets) whenever you're bored with it, while looking like you're following your passions.

Aldred Up a Tree

2008-11-23T07:47:00.009-05:00

There's a frame of reference that would be useful to have here, Aldred imagines. Its absence is leaving perception a jumbled mess, like a Cornell box that has been given a good shake. He has a few facts to deal with:

He is up a tree, a gnarled and ancient affair.

He's holding on to a branch for dear life, but this seems to be unnecessary, as the afghan is still wrapped around him, now transformed into a sort of sling. The knotted ends are on top of the branch, and Aldred hangs beneath.

He is currently facing the sky. It's bright blue and calming, and part of him wants to relax and leave well enough alone. But another part of him can't resist a turn of the head to see what the whole situation is.

The branch sticks out over a cliff.

It appears to be a long way down.

It is morning and it is cold.

He pulls himself to the side a bit and looks down at the foot of the tree. Mercury and an old man (oh yes, Kliet, that was his name) are there. Mercury is wearing a bright red cloche hat with an ostrich feather pin. The hat and pin don't really go together, making her head a smaller jumble within the jumble.

Kliet is holding a large yellowing map of the continental United States, mounted on plywood.

Mercury has an old fashioned cheerleader's bullhorn to her mouth, and is slowly overpronouncing the names of American cities through it. Her accent is the sort that only comes from elocution classes at a young ladies finishing school. A disreputable one.

"NEEEUUUUWPOOOHHHRRRRRRRT."

Aldred takes his hands away from the branch and rubs his face. A wind comes up and he starts to swing gently. Aldred glances at the knot. It looks solid and reassuring. He lets his arms flop back and now hangs in the sling, staring up into the sky.

"AHHHNCOOOOUUUUURRRRAHHHHGE."

There's something infuriating about that.

"SHEEEEEEECAHHHHGUUUOOOOOO."

That's slightly better. The wind picks up and he begins to swing with more vigor. He resists the urge to wrap his arms tightly around the branch, ignores the screaming voice in his head, and concentrates on the sky, willing his eyes to stay open and take in the blue when all they want to do is clamp shut.

"TOOOHRAAHHHHHHNNNTOOOOH."

Oh for heaven's sake...

"Mercury?"

"FEEEEEEEENIIIIIIIIIIICKS-Yes, dear?" She gestures to Kliet, who adjusts the angle of the map.

"That's very irritating."

"What is, dear? SEEEEEEEECAAAAAAHHCUSSSSSSS."

"You naming cities that aren't on that map."

"No it isn't. BAAAAAHSSSSTUUUUUHHHHN."

"Really, it is."

"No dear, it isn't. It's annoying, not irritating. FEEERRRRRAAAAHHNKFOOOOOOHRT."

"The difference being?"

"Irritants just happen. Annoyances are there on purpose."

"I wasn't aware of that-"

"HOOOOOHNOOOOOOOOELUUUUUAHLUUUU."

"-particular distinction."

"Well, that's something for you to think about then, isn't it dear? But I wouldn't spend too much energy on it as-"

The sling swings to the right and he feels a sickening lurch. His eyes snap to the knot, the twists and turns of which are now in motion. Rapid motion. Aldred grabs the branch with his arms and as much of his legs as his gut will allow. The afghan falls away, and he hears Kliet mutter something about cavalier treatment of family heirlooms.

"FAAAHREEEEEEHSSSSNUUUOOOOOO."

Aldred begins to inch his way down the branch, towards the trunk. He hasn't gotten very far when a definitive cracking noise tells him what the immediate future is going to hold. The branch is still partly connected to the trunk, and Aldred's weight causes it to swing in rather than simply fall off. The far end of the branch arcs towards the foot of the tree, carrying Aldred with it, gaining speed like a wrecking ball. At the last second Aldred lets go. The forward momentum hurtles him towards Kliet who seems to be expecting this. He takes a quick step to the side and swats Aldred with the mapboard, deflecting him into a conveniently placed (if dew dampened) haystack.

Aldred closes his eyes, and, though partially winded, breathes in as much of the smell of damp hay as he can. He is greedy for it, in love with all things that stay near to the ground. The impact has driven him halfway towards the center of the stack, and for a moment he considers burrowing in. Instead he pulls himself out and collapses onto the ground, his back resting against the hay. Mercury wanders over and points the bullhorn down at him. He can see up it, all the way to her pursed lips. He thinks he reads some satisfaction on them. They slowly part and one last name comes rolling down the cone of the bullhorn.

"GUUUUUAAAHHHHHHMMMMMMMM."

Aldred considers.

"That's not even a city."

"Does that annoy you?"

He shrugs.

"Right," says Mercury. "I think we've made a fair bit of progress here this morning."

The Reichstag Follies is Real?

2008-10-18T15:15:00.006-04:00

So somebody got here in the past week or two by doing a Google search for "Reichstag Follies", which lead them to this old entry. The odd thing is now Citysearch is showing results for performances of something called "The Reichstag Follies" at some place called Cinema Classics in NYC, throughout October and into November. I can't find any references to this title on the IMDB or elsewhere, just these Citysearch listings and my old post. Any of my NYC peeps faimiliar with this Cinema Classics place? I'm a little worried that parts of my brain are dripping into the real world.

Books for Buddhist Players

2008-10-16T22:25:00.000-04:00

Getting A Piece is Every Step

Zen Flesh, Zen Boning

Living Buddha, Living Hefner

The Tibetan Book of the Laid

Be Here Now, With a Girl

Successful Lies I Have Told

2008-09-30T19:20:00.010-04:00

"I'm sick of productions of Waiting for Godot where they cut out the car chase."

"I don't know how all that blackberry jam got in your car."

"During the summer I'm the substitute mayor of a small Ukrainian village. So of course I can officiate at your wedding."

"LASIK gave me x-ray vision. But I only use it for good."

"I used to work as a house painter, but I quit when it got too commercial."

"A childhood injury rendered me incapable of giving change to the homeless."

"Reading is a wonderful town and I wish I still lived there. I especially miss all the outlet malls and Klan rallies."

"I love it when you talk about bacon."

"Of course I know what an ostinado is. Asshole."

"I wrote that book you're reading."

"I haven't really cared about anything since 1992."

"I don't know how all that blackberry jam got in your safety deposit box."

"I'm late because my chemo appointment ran over."

"See that building over there? It's made of Lego."

"I know the guy who invented silicone bakeware."

"I'm scared of clouds, especially the pretty ones."

"I was born with my bones on the outside."

"I was the voice of the pets.com dog puppet. The puppeteer was Colin Farrell."

"I collect pictures of abandoned drug stores."

"I don't know how all that blackberry jam got in your mouth while you were sleeping."

"I lived in a storage unit in Metuchen for eight years."

"Here's how you make a real Mojito: take three ounces of Triple Sec, muddle it with shredded carrot and serve at slightly above room temperature by warming it with your hands. That thing you're claiming is a Mojito? Real Cubans call that a Batista."

"Carol Channing died."

"This blog updates 4-7 times a week."

Two Named Women Participating in Our Culture

2008-09-21T06:57:00.006-04:00

The other day I went to a political rally in Elmire Park. I was unclear as to what it was for exactly, but I felt the need to engage with the democratic process. I was surprised to see Nancy and Andrea there. At first I thought they'd had the same impulse, but when they mounted the speakers' platform, I realized they were there in a more active capacity.

Andrea spoke first.

"My friends...Jesus, 'my friends,' how can I say that? Calling someone 'friend' is a big deal. There's like what, eight hundred of you here? Maybe a thousand. I know almost none of you, and the ones I do know aren't exactly friends of mine. They know why. Oh boy, do they ever know.

"I'll start over. My strangers: we live in a time of great upheaval. That means shit is fucked up. Way fucked up. It's all broken and scattered. It reminds me of the trash in our awful streets. That trash is evidence that something is going on, but you ever tried to put it together into a coherent picture? I have. I've spent whole afternoons dong it. What I'll do is pick up a bottle, a glass one, and some newspapers. Then I'll wrap the newspapers around the bottle, good and tight. When I've got that done, I look for the dirtiest part of the sidewalk. then I roll the bottle down that patch of sidewalk, pushing hard. I do this for about a block. It's a hard thing to do, because people will stare at me or call me crazy or try to mess with me. A lot of the time I end up getting into a fight and have to use the bottle as a weapon. Usually if that happens I have to get a new bottle and start over. I have to do this five, six, seven times some times. Often there's a hold up, because glass bottles are getting harder to find these days. But I keep it up, because this stuff is important.

"Anyway, when it works out right I get to roll that bottle all down the block. At the end I'm left with two types of evidence. I'm no egghead, but I know it's good to have more than one kind of evidence if you're investigating shit. The first type of evidence is the crap that's been pushed in front of the bottle. Usually this is what you'd call 'powder based,' because there's usually a nice sized heap of powder and bits by the end, all mixed together. Some of this stuff in the powder is pretty identifiable: grit, dust, ash, bits of dried tar from the road. But there's other stuff in there too, stuff that just confuses me. Like the purple stuff. You guys know about that?"

She paused, looking out at the crowd. She wiped one of her large arms across her forehead, joining the individual beads that had been sitting there into an even film. The pause went on, and Andrea started to look frustrated.

"Okay, I guess not. That wasn't a rhetorical type question by the way: I was really hoping that somebody here might know what this purple stuff is, because I think it's probably important. It's usually a good ten percent of the 'powder based' evidence, and it freaks me out that I can't identify it. It's this really dark shade of purple. The bits are usually no bigger than a match head, but sometimes they're as big as a pea. One time I found one that was the size of my thumbnail. I've got it here in my pocket, if anyone wants to have a look later. I thought maybe it was gum at first, but it's kinda more like stone, and it's got little holes in it.

"My point is, something's going on.

"The other type of evidence is all the liquids picked up by the newspaper. I know you're thinking 'Gross! Liquids!', and yeah, you're right. Pretty gross. There's always spit, there's always piss, there's always something sticky, and there's always something that smells really rank. And of course it all mixes together, into one thing, so I can't look at the individual liquids. But let me tell you something: that blend of liquids means something. Because the thing is, liquids evaporate, right? So even if these things are separated out on the sidewalk, they eventually get up in the air and blend together. I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Do you see what I'm saying? This is in the air we breathe. You can't tell me that's not bad. Or at least important. It's gotta be doing something.

"So, in summary: something's going on and I've got evidence. Uh, thanks."

Andrea left the platform to a smattering of applause. Later, I saw her talking to a couple of old black guys in matching pork pie hats. She had her hand out in front of her, so I assumed she was showing them the purple thing. One of the guys was nodding really slowly. The other was shaking his head. Andrea looked irritated.

After a few more speakers it was Nancy's turn.

"Hello," she said. "It may be of interest to you to know that not far from here, in this very park, when I was a child, I used to come and feed the ducks in the pond. Around the age of fourteen I stopped. I don't know why. Then I went away for a bit. Then I came back. When I came back I was a different person. I think now I might be the kind of person who feeds ducks as an adult."

Here she started rummaging in her handbag, eventually producing a surprisingly large bag of breadcrumbs.

"Today I intend to find out. Thank you."

No one applauded as she left the platform, but there was a murmur in the crowd that lasted a surprisingly long time.

Recent Acquisitions II

2008-09-18T06:06:00.009-04:00

A silent 8mm film of Orson Welles sitting on the toilet and drinking scotch. Possibly filmed by Peter Bogdanovich.

A stack of loose pages, apparently from an old dictionary, stapled together at the top right corner. Not in any discernible order. All entries for adjectives have been crossed out with a ballpoint pen.

A wooden box full of yellow and white glass marbles. Weighs approximately 60 pounds.

A poster for a regional theater production of Equus. "MATINÉES CONTAIN NO NUDITY" printed across the bottom in large red letters.

A pair of ceramic clogs, painted with flowers. I believe these were meant to be sculpture, but there's evidence that the previous owner wore them at least once (see below).

A "set" of four mismatched antique wagon wheels.

A red enameled gooseneck lamp with some very faded Pac-Man stickers affixed to the base.

A mostly empty photo album. A few Polaroids are stuck in haphazardly: a blurry shot of Mount Rushmore, A blurry shot of a man's arm featuring a heart tattoo with an indecipherable name in the middle, and a blurry shot of a woman in a flowing blue dress who appears to be wearing the clogs mentioned above.

Some WWII era blackout curtains. The bottoms are weighed down with what appear to be hand-stitched sachets of lead shot. Most of them are leaking; a few are completely empty.

A printer's job case, filled with a nearly unreadable Gothic typeface. Appears to have never been used.

Aldred and Enforced Hospitality

2008-09-15T20:13:00.013-04:00

There's something ludicrous about a rocking chair, thinks Aldred. They're meant to be so cozy and homey and relaxing, but the reality doesn't measure up. They creak in a way that refuses to take a proper rhythm. They require far too much effort and attention to keep rocking, distracting you from fully devoting your attention to woolgathering. The ones with arms (as is the case with the model he's currently stuck in) are never built with the portly gentleman in mind. Worst of all the wicker seats are puritanical in their lack of cushiness and have a tendency to poke one. Intimately.

He's been here for six hours now, waiting for Mercury to return with the promised drop of something restorative. Rogue bits of wicker have firmly embedded themselves in his person. He's almost too distracted to worry about infection, or becoming permanently affixed to the rocker, but manages to devote a small part of his mind to this idle fretting. Mostly he's wondering what's become of Mercury. It wouldn't be the first time she's been gone longer than expected (her disappearance for the entirety of 1998 springs to mind), but she usually has the graciousness to not leave him bound with an afghan to an infernal device while she's off and about. He hopes that nothing has happened to her.

The door creaks open and a quaint and ancient man comes hobbling in, holding a trembling tray in his hands. He gives Aldred a carefully composed quizzical look that doesn't quite hide the fact that he knows, if not exactly what's going on, enough to not be as innocent as he's pretending.

"Ah, Mr. Aldred?"

"Yes?"

"Miss Mercury called. On the telephone. Says she's been unavoidably detained. At the, uh, antique mall. Looking at antiques." The man gestures with the tray. "She said I should maybe bring you something. Said you were indisposed. Stuck in the room. Resting."

He looks over the afghan, lets a little more of his wry amusement slip out.

"Comfy?"

"Okay."

"Not too warm? I hope?"

"Yes, fine."

"Rocker treating you alright?"

"It's lovely."

"Great. It's a terrific old chair. Handcrafted."

"It shows."

"It's for sale. If you're interested."

"I'll have to get back to you on that."

"Just say the word. We can come to a price easily."

"I'm sure. You'll excuse me, Mister-?"

"Kliet."

"Mr. Kliet, but as Mercury mentioned I am feeling under the weather and I'm afraid I don't have the strength to discuss this wonderful chair."

"That's real Belgian wicker-"

"Not. One. Second. More."

Kliet can see that he's pushed the doddering a shade too far. Aldred notices the tray has stopped trembling, is in fact now deadly still.

"Right you are. Well, there's coffee here for you. And some cookies too. They're from an old family recipe. The wife-"

Aldred looks a polite amount of poison at him.

"Okay, okay. Cripes, can't an old fella have any fun?"

"Have your fun when you total up her bill."

Kliet snorts as he lays the tray across the arms of the rocker. He carefully untucks just enough of the Afghan to free up Aldred's right arm, leaving the rest of Mercury's sigil or combat origami or whatever it is in place. His movements are deft and professional: Aldred doubts Mercury had to tell him what to do. Crafty old bastard.

Aldred reaches for the mug of coffee, spilling a bit as the rocker follows his shifting bulk. He gulps a good half of it down. It's strong and hot and perfect, the definition of perfect in this case including a generous portion of very good rum. He can feel it working immediately, blotting out the accumulated irritation of the last six hours and making a dent in the enervation that led him to this point in the first place.

"That's...very good coffee."

"She said to give you the good stuff. Said you'd be needing it. Said it was an apology of sorts. Said she won't be back for a bit longer. Said probably not until tomorrow morning. Said-"

"Said 'keep him tied up'?"

"Said that too."

Aldred sighs, but he can't find it in himself to get too angry at Kliet, who is certainly going to follow her instructions to the letter. He knows how persuasive Mercury can be. Confining him to a chair for a day will hardly by the worst thing she's ever put him through. And the rum is very, very good indeed. "Breaking the embargo" good. Maybe even "smuggled out of Fidel's private stock" good. Raoul's, anyway.

"It seems a pity to mix this with coffee."

"It does indeed sir."

"And to drink it alone."

Kliet gives him yet another complex look. He has quite a repertoire.

"Well, I imagine there's no harm in a friendly drink or three with one of our guests. I imagine."

Kliet leaves the room. Aldred hopes he'll be back soon. He doesn't begrudge the man his calculating suspicions, but really, he has no intention of trying to escape. He's just terribly, terribly bored.

When Mercury returns the next morning she's greeted by a very hungover Mr. Kliet. Aldred's snores come rolling down the stairs and play about the room like drunken puppies. They don't cause the pictures to rattle on the walls, but it's a near thing.

"my god," she says. "This is going to cost me a fortune, isn't it?"

Kliet nods, then winces.

Desperate to Get Into Prog

2008-09-12T14:40:00.005-04:00

Run from the nightmare dwelling thing of fear
That drips with dread and creeps so near
To perch on your shoulder on its feculent rear
And speak the unspeakable into your ear.

(ANYBODY WANT TO START A PROG ROCK BAND?)

The thunder of the morning
Was the new age boldly dawning
While the giants were still yawning
In their castle down below.

(I CAN'T PLAY AN INSTRUMENT, BUT I SING OKAY AND CAN WRITE LYRICS.)

The alphabet of sorrow
Wrote the story of tomorrow
And the ghouls down in the barrow
Gnawed the bones of Mia Farrow.

(I'M THINKING WE COULD BE SORT OF MODERN LIKE THE MARS VOLTA.)

Across the singing galaxies
The stars crowned a new king
To challenge mankind's fallacies
And stroll on Saturn's rings.

(OR MAYBE MARILLION.)

A million bright green changes were brought forth by Father Time
To push the evolution of the primordial slime.
But devilish Death was waiting by the ocean with a scythe
To fight his endless battle with the living host of life.

(WE COULD DO SOMETHING MORE OLD SCHOOL THOUGH.)

Earth turns in flagrant beauty
From cold to tropical and back.
Each man will do his duty
To keep the sun from turning black.

(I KNOW A GUY WHO OWNS A COUPLE OF KEYBOARDS.)

The swordsman swings his weeping blade
Through the tears of Guinevere
Each one a diamond in the glade
Of Arthur's horned and cheated fear.

(BUT ONE OF THEM'S BROKEN.)

Bored in Dreamland

2008-09-10T19:31:00.013-04:00

Hopefully, by the time you read this I'll have been found. I seem to have gotten lost in a dream, and I have to say it is not at all what I expected. For a start, it's terribly dull. I always assumed that being lost in a dream would be an exciting and vibrant experience, if at times a little harrowing. Turns out it's a bit like having an anxiety attack and being very sleepy at the same time. I imagine it might be like spending too much time in a country where you don't know the social mores and eventually get tired and frustrated from constantly doing the wrong thing because you simply have no concept of what the right thing is, or could possibly be.

That's not to say there aren't some nice things about it. I can summon up a talking penguin anytime I want, for instance. Unfortunately the only thing it wants to talk about is how disappointed it is that I never went to grad school. Which I guess means the penguin is a manifestation of my father. Except my father is here already. In fact, there's several little clones of him milling about, and all they want to talk about is fish and how frightened they are of polar bears. Which suggests that my father is just a manifestation of a flock of penguins. This is precisely the sort of thing that I don't know how to properly react to. It's pissing me off. I get enough of this in real life.

Then the other night I had a lovely dinner with Gurdjieff and Mamie Van Doren. But again, it was terribly frustrating. Gurdjieff's English is dreadful, and he overcompensates for this by bugging his eyes out a lot and gesticulating wildly with a forkful of spaghetti Bolognese. It's unhelpful and messy. Then I managed to derail things entirely by asking Mamie what it was like to be dead. Turns out she isn't. This cast quite a pall over the proceedings. Gurdjieff told me "you verra bad man," and then they both ignored me for the rest of the meal, carrying on a completely unintelligible conversation between themselves. I would have made my excuses and left, but it took me hours to figure out how to get out of the insanely complicated chair I was sitting in. There were straps and buckles involved.

After that, I tried to keep to myself. I couldn't find much to do, so I ended up spending a lot of time napping. Except of course that would just put me back in the dream world. It was a bit like walking out of the front door of your house and finding yourself back in the hallway, in that it was equal parts fascinating and irritating. I suppose if I was a mathematician or a psychologist I would have something insightful to say about this sort of folding of reality, but I'm just a schlub with a BA, so all I could come up with was "Whoa, that's kinda trippy." The penguin was terribly disappointed.

I tried all the touristy things one does in dreamland. You know, the classics: flying, going to class naked, being chased by an unknown assailant, being the president and starting a nuclear war. The usual stuff. It was all fun, but rather unsatisfying, like I was just doing the things so I could cross them off the list. Oh and consequence-free sex with whoever I wanted turned out to be a disaster. Like anybody would, I tried it with myself first and apparently my technique is really lacking. I thought that I knew what I like, but when I caught myself checking my watch, well, it was emasculating to say the least. I lost the taste for experimenting after that.

Eventually I decided to concentrate on asserting normalcy. Perhaps I could escape by turning the dream world into the real world. I created a passing simulation of my house and office, and tried to follow the same routine I do in the waking world. I'd get up in the morning after lying in bed pretending to be asleep for what I judged to be eight hours or so. Then I'd make myself a cup of coffee and feed the cats. This took a long time as the house was populated by every cat I'd ever owned or wanted to own. Then I'd have a shower, get dressed, kiss my wife, explain to the penguin why an MFA wasn't for me, and head out to work.

Work was always a blur. I mean, literally. I couldn't get it to come into focus at all. Vague walls, ill defined cubes, shadowy co-workers who made sounds like papers rustling and keyboards clacking at the bottom of a well when they spoke...None of it resembled reality in the least. Well, maybe it resembled my reality, but now that I was paying attention to it, it certainly didn't resemble real reality. I managed to keep this up for what felt like a few days, but the passing of time kept slipping away from me. I suppose a few months must have actually gone by, because I eventually ended up having a midyear review with my shadow boss. Overall, my performance had been "rustleclickrustlerustle ," but I needed to concentrate more on "clackclickrustleclack" if I ever expected to make "clickityshufflerustleclack." I promised to do better, and then let the whole thing evaporate into thin air.

And now I stand on a flat white plane that stretches to infinity in all directions, a white, perfectly hemispherical sky overhead. If you happen to see a place like this in your dreams, please do stop by and see if I'm still there. I'd love for someone to lead me out of this boring place, or at least explain to the penguin why an MBA isn't the guarantee of success it used to be.

A Private Moment with Mountford

2008-09-08T20:34:00.011-04:00

There are tears all down the front of his dirty undershirt, because as is often the case Mountford is upset. There are also tears down the front of his dirty undershirt, because he believes in getting as much wear as possible out of a garment. The tears leave wet and salty spots and release a strange animal scent from the fabric. The tears allow a surprising number of hairs to poke through, and expose sad patches of sallow skin.

He cares on some level of course, for he knows that a man who has made an enemy of...well, everybody, is never truly alone. There's a terrible risk of exposure, that some cunning paparazzo with a telephoto lens will capture those deep underarm stains when Mountford stretches his apish arms above his head while standing in front of the french doors; that this man who never leaves his palatial estate without a hat will be caught showing his true colors (a sort of sickening yellow). True, said paparazzo would be swiftly and fatally dealt with, but if even one person saw such a thing the damage to Mountford's psyche would be incalculable.

Perhaps he courts this exposure and subsequent pain as a masochistic act. Or perhaps he is simply tired and wants to unwind in a horrible t-shirt and boxers. As a sort of human being and a kind of American, doesn't he have the right to his slovenly leisure? Isn't that what we all aspire to? Stained undergarments and threatened dignity?

Mountford limps over to his favorite recliner. The hamstring injury he suffered in Singapore has been playing him up again. For the thousandth time he curses the aim of his doublecrossed business partner, feels the spiky durian slam into his back and send him tumbling over a second floor balcony at the Raffles. Fifteen years later he still can't eat the damn things though he has several crates flown in at great expense during the season. It's a point of pride.

The recliner receives his slight body. His bony ass nearly pierces the well worn seat. His fingers reflexively scratch the armrests, pulling up flecks of cheap and cracking leather. It's something of a miracle that there's any left to scratch away, but Mountford has always had an instinct for pulling the meat from a carcass.

The tears have stopped flowing now, and the ones that made it to the horrible undershirt have begun to dry already. The upsetting thing has passed from his mind so quickly that he is having difficulty remembering what it was. He's almost certain it had something to do with money, but all he remembers now is the petulant rage, the deep but transient sense of loss that comes with losing .0000001% of his fortune.

He reaches for the television remote and begins to flick through channels, pausing at any black and white image, trying to turn it into a rerun of Sergeant Bilko with the sheer force of his will. It was his favorite program, and airings were once plentiful. Now it never seems to be on. A newly hired assistant once suggested he watch Top Cat instead, claiming it was the same thing but "better, because it has cartoon cats instead of that weird guy with the fake glasses." Mountford attempted to drown him in the bidet, only pulling back at the last minute because the paperwork involved with an accidental death of this sort was more trouble than the deep satisfaction would be worth.

But again today Phil Silvers remains elusive. A fantasy begins to form in Mountford's head. He goes into broadcasting, creating a cable network that resembles the UHF channels of his youth: F Troop, Bowling for Dollars, a sea captain who hosts an afternoon cartoon show on the weekdays and a monster movie double feature on Saturday, a farm report every morning, a prayer at sign off, and of course his beloved Bilko. It would be a relic from the past brought lovingly back to life in the present age. it would be his cultural legacy.

For a moment it shines before him like a tawdry and pathetic jewel. Then it winks out, Mountford's interest having abruptly ended when he realizes that most likely there would be no money in it. He's through with labors of love. Labors of avarice are so much more rewarding.

He continues to flick through the channels for another twenty minutes, but finds nothing worthy of his attention. Eventually he dozes off, awaking an hour later with a stiff neck and a foul taste in his mouth. He rises and lopes upstairs, where a very fine suit awaits his attention. Enough of this lollygagging.

Things I No Longer Do

2008-08-21T20:57:00.011-04:00

-Fry Daddy Roulette: Like Russian roulette, but involving your hand and six Fry Daddies, only one of which is plugged in. The main reason I'm now left handed.

-My hilarious Jonathan Richman imitation. Turns out it's not that funny.

-Write the scenarios for Hungarian porn films. You can only see the note "NEEDS MORE SYMBOLISM" so many times before you begin to question whether these Magyar bastards get where you're coming from artistically.

-Sneak into Philip Roth photo shoots and shout "Come on, love! Give us a smile!"

-Take banjo lessons. I was good, but I was only in it for the aesthetics and not the music, and that's just not genuine, no matter how good you look in overalls.

-Drink any clear liquid without first asking the person offering it what it is.

-Send care packages to Matthew Friedberger of The Fiery Furnaces. They were addressed to YOU, Matthew. Your damn sister can find her own supply of homemade gorp.

-Rescue non-fly insects from the twists of fly paper hanging off our porch. I had to face the fact that my OCD was not an excuse to play God. Insect God, anyway.

-End my signature with "Esq." Apparently even if I had completed the course and become a Notary, I still wouldn't have had the right. Madness.

Aldred Comes Out of the Fog

2008-08-19T18:41:00.016-04:00

The darkness is overpowering. He imagines it as a layer of moss growing between his brain and his skull. He ignored it for too long, and now the space between the soft and the hard is packed tight, and he is blind. Coherent thoughts and sensations that once moved freely between the inside and the outside now burrow halfway through the mossy darkness before being stilled, stopped and suffocated.

"What are you thinking about? Hmm?"

He wishes he knew.

"Oy, Aldred. Oy! Yo! Hello? Hello?"

Fingers snap beneath his nose. The sound comes to him through the olfactory center, synesthetically hitting his brain as the mixed smells of vinegar and burning moss. The smell overpowers the darkness, lightly, but enough that thoughts and sensations begin to move again.

The needy face of a small dog.
A sunny morning in Crete.
A heap of green oranges and orange bell peppers.
Mountford, in a tattered undershirt, yelling something about "foul cologne-drinking Portuguese ruffians."

"Oh lord, I remember that! They completely ruined his bootlegging operation and flipped him to the Guardia into the bargain. He was furious. He ran out and bought an atlas, an expensive one too, just to rip out the page with Lisbon on it to wipe his ass with. Appallingly childish gesture that, but that's Mountford all over, isn't it?"

It's a woman's voice, a voice he should know.

"I saw him recently," Aldred mutters. He is blinking, trying to see anything other than grayness, but his eyes are apparently a few minutes behind his nose and ears.

"And?"

"It didn't end well."

"It usually doesn't." He can see a bit of motion in the gray now, and her voice seems to be coming from there. "Frankly, I don't know why you continue to have anything to do with him. Or he you for that matter. You're both terribly terribly bad for each other, and you're both terribly terribly aware of that fact. Yet you persist in getting in each other's way."

There is shape now to the movement.

"Couple of latent homosexuals if you ask me."

There is now sharp outline to the shape.

"You ought to let him tup you and have done."

There is now color within the outline.

"Or you him, whichever. All I'm saying is that it would do the universe a world of good —or maybe just the world a universe of good— if you boys would give in and get your silly repressed lusts out of your systems."

There is now a gray haired woman in her mid-fifties in the outline. She wears a smart tweed suit, a muted green check affair. She has the air of someone who has practiced at being clever long enough that it has become a near substitute for wisdom. A lit cigarillo is in her hand, an affectation designed purely to distract people by getting them to ask themselves the question "Where on earth does one even buy cigarillos in this day and age?"

"Did you say 'tup'?"

"I'm afraid I did."

"You do know it's the 21st century, right? Has been for a while?"

"I realize you're coming out of a bit of a fog and might feel a touch grumpy, but try not to be too much of a smartass, dear."

"Sorry, I don't know where my manners are. Hello Mercury."

"Hello Aldred."

"Pardon the cliché, but where am I?"

"Would you believe Bucharest?"

"I would not."

"Good. We're in Bethlehem."

"The Jesus town or the steel town?"

"The latter. You were found wandering around downtown Philadelphia, waving a reindeer antler in a threatening manner and shouting something about geometry. Spheres, I believe."

"Oh dear."

"Mmm. Luckily, I happened to be in town, attempting to clear my own head with a bit of history."

"What, the Liberty Bell and all that?"

"Don't knock it. Lots of strength to be drawn from an object like that, if one knows how to approach it sensibly. At any rate, I found you and instantly knew that you needed to be taken someplace quiet yet industrial."

"That's a very specific thing to know instantly."

"You're quite easy to diagnose dear. Oh, and I was already planning on coming out this way for some antiquing anyway. So things had lined up nicely. They often do."

Aldred is finally able to make sense of the room. It appears to be the sort of oppressively tasteful space that she has always favored. Probably a bed and breakfast, probably owned by an old married couple, probably banal and deadening and far too cozy. He's never understood why she favors places like this, but he can't deny that she draws a certain energy from them. Her witchery has always been a clandestine thing, disguised with tweeds and doilies. Aldred finds it baffling, but he's respected it ever since he saw her garrote a man four times her size with an eyeglass chain.

He tries to stand, and the room lurches sickeningly, gray pouring back into his field of vision. She grasps his shoulders and pushes him back down into what turns out to be a rocking chair.

"No dear, I don't think you should get up just yet." She tosses an afghan over him, binding him down with a series of sinister tucks and folds. "You stay right there. I'll just go and see if they've got something pleasant yet medicinal for you. Tomorrow we'll see about getting you back in...alignment, shall we say?"

Aldred smiles vaguely and watches her leave the room. As soon as the door closes he struggles against the afghan, but it's no use, he's bound tight to the rocker. He tries to resign himself to his fate, but the last time Mercury used the word "alignment" at him it resulted in a three month physical and metaphysical training course and a near psychotic breakdown. He'll have to start planning an escape soon , but for now there's nothing to do but let the accursed cosiness cover him and try to mend.

Movies I Have Hallucinated

2008-08-13T20:54:00.010-04:00

Stabbing the Day Away: The Louisa May Alcott Story (Nutmeg): A heartwarming family oriented biopic about the author of Little Women and her lifelong secret passion for murdering transients.

Reichstag Follies of 1933 (Peyote): It was sort of like Triumph of the Will, but it had W.C. Fields, a very blond kickline, and several songs by Eddie Cantor. An extremely wooden comedy sketch featuring Der Führer and Olsen and Johnson was a particular lowlight (seriously, what''s funny about him saying "Vas ist dis HELLZAPOPPIN'?" over and over again?). The ghost of Keith Moon told me this was his favorite film, but he was pretty high when he said it.

Muppet VALIS (Mescaline): That special Jim Henson magic brought to bear on Philip K. Dick's thinly fictionalized account of his Gnostic experience/psychotic break. The scene where a beam of divine pink light pierces Kermit's forehead and fills him with cosmic knowledge is beautiful, though somewhat marred by the fact that you can totally see the top of the puppeteer's —sorry, muppeteer's— head for most of the shot.

Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland (LSD): 40 hour film consisting entirely of shots of helicopters flying over "The Forest City" and dumping buckets of brightly colored sand on it.

Jackie Chan Hits You in the Face With A Hammer While Laughing Hysterically (DMT): I think this was in 3D. Or maybe I hallucinated Jackie Chan actually stopping by and hitting me in the face with a hammer, instead of just hallucinating a movie about it.

On the Counting of Legs

2008-08-11T06:22:00.014-04:00

The strangest thing came out of the woods a few weeks back. The thing was kind of hard to focus on but we all agreed that it had long dirty white fur and an odd number of legs (though no one could agree on whether it was seven, nine or eleven). It limped into the town square and squatted there, just howling and whistling and clicking. Carl thought it sounded like someone swinging a burlap sack full of bobolinks over their head. Larry wanted to know precisely how Carl knew what that sounded like. Carl turned red and started to stutter. This of course led to Esmeralda rushing to his side and checking his temperature, supposedly because she's a medical professional. Now, none of us thinks that being a transcriptionist qualifies you to practice medicine, but none of us wants to point that out either. The last person to try to tell the truth to Esmeralda was Kathy Torkbeck, and none of us wanted to be stabbed in the throat with a ballpoint pen and then be left lying on a rented trundle bed in the middle of the High School gymnasium.

Poor Kathy. She only came here because she wanted a taste of small town living. One of these days we really ought to finish carving that gravestone, but nobody really knew how old she was and anyway, it's not like she gets a lot of visitors. Wish we'd spelt her name right though; but when the only stone carver for miles around is a mental deficient from Montreal "Torkbeck" is going to come out "Torquebecq." That's just the way things go.

Can't say what she expected life in a small town to be like, but we speculated that she was thinking "like a city, but smaller." She tried to settle in, but there were plenty of signs that she was going to have trouble. Her tendency to get mail from places more than fifty miles away was a problem. The way she cried when she found out the only readily available sweetener was birch syrup didn't sit well with anybody. She blew her social standing with her refusal to accept the mayor's gift of a hand stitched gingham anklet. And of course the way she cozied up to Carl pretty much painted a target on her back. Or on her throat.

Carl himself always appeared ambivalent about the attention he got from Kathy, but this may have been out of regard for Esmeralda, if not fear of her. Nobody liked to talk about it, but we knew that Carl was missing his right pinky because he once forgot to say good morning to her; and his left because he later joked about it being a "lover's spat". Don't recall him ever making a joke about anything after that, though that may have been because his stutter came in around the same time. He really had only himself to blame: he knew that Esmeralda regarded him as her property, but in a pure and uncarnal way, like how you own a fridge or a timeshare. If you're going to acquiesce to having that kind of role in life, you need to be awful careful how you joke about it. You should certainly never use the word "lover." It was a hard learned lesson for Carl, but sometimes those are the best. That stutter makes him damn hard to understand sometimes though.

Anyway, Kathy's tendency to smile at Carl was basically a criminal act if you understood how things work around here. The fact that she didn't understand simply compounded the criminality of it all; and while none of us condone murder, nobody wanted to bring in Esmeralda for doing something that was her natural right. We do all wish she'd been a little more discreet about it —and it's downright tasteless the way she wears the cap from that pen on a lanyard round her neck— but decorum and the law don't always go hand in hand.

When you saw the genuine tenderness she had for Carl in moments like this, where she stroked and slapped and pinched and scratched his cheeks while he sputtered and turned redder and redder, you knew everything was going right. A big dumb thing like Carl needs to be controlled and kept on the right path. No telling what he'd do otherwise, though you can imagine it might involve burlap and bobolinks. He's unwholesome at heart and if his life needs to be bounded by a woman who's more ministering wolverine than ministering angel, well then so be it.

Carl eventually calmed down and we all turned our attention back to the thing. It had stopped making that racket and was lying on its side. There was no sign of it breathing, though maybe breathing wasn't a quality possessed by this kind of thing. Anyway, it's been there for five weeks now and doesn't appear to be rotting. Funny how it's been perfectly motionless this whole time and we still can't agree on how many legs it has.

It's a mystery all right.

Two Named Women Not Talking About a Man

2008-08-06T16:28:00.002-04:00

Nancy and Andrea are standing in an open field, surrounded by barrels. It is a beautiful, slightly breezy day. Perhaps it is April. Perhaps it is not.

Nancy has been looking at the sky, the ground, the scrubby trees. Occasionally she wanders over to one of the barrels and has a look inside. She would like to be seen as one who is interested in the world around her. In actual fact, she is simply trying to avoid talking to Andrea.

Andrea has noticed this.

“They’re all empty you know,” she says as she stares at Nancy, who returns her gaze for a split second.

“No,” says Nancy, “I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, use the past tense okay?” Andrea stretches her meaty arms above her head, turns said head to the side, yawns, spits, and lowers her arms. “I’ve been watching you. I’ve been watching you, and I know for a fact that you have looked in every single one of those barrels. So in the past you didn’t know that. But now, here in the present, you know.”

Nancy adjusts her thick glasses, a move that’s all about the comforting feeling of a bakelite bridge sliding up a greasy nose and not at all about seeing. She glances at Andrea, considers –for a moment– trying to stare her down, and then looks away again.

“You make a very precise point. If an aggressive one.”

“Aggressive?” Andrea takes a few steps towards Nancy. Her big arms are a bad match for her petite frame, giving her the appearance of some sort of gorilla/ballerina chimera. “Are you calling me aggressive?” She steps closer still, sticks her head out like a turtle, her nose nearly touching Nancy’s barely existent chin. “What exactly do you find aggressive about me ?”

“Well,” says Nancy, surprised that in this moment of personal invasion, this moment of undeniable attack, that an unexpected calm is seeping into her “well, I think it might have something to do with the fact that you felt the need to correct me about something that is really none of your business.”

She gives Andrea’s shoulder what would appear to an outsider to be a gentle shove. Andrea falls over, quietly thudding into the ground, landing between two barrels. Nancy looks down at her.

“I’m sorry, was that aggressive?”

Andrea glowers up at her and doesn’t say a word.

This piece was written so that I would have something in my portfolio that passes the Bechdel Test.

My Abandoned Hobbies

2008-08-05T11:54:00.002-04:00

-Making my own glass using sand and matches

-RC frog racing

-Collecting cheese labels (I actually loved the hobby, but couldn’t hack the politics)

-Learning to stutter in Turkish

-Knitting phonebook cosies

-Constructing tiny villages out of acorns (basically just turning acorns upside down on a plate covered with glue)

-Amateur phone sex

-Moonlighting cosplay and reenactment (got sick of always having to be Allyce Beasely)

-Falling down the great staircases of the world

Horrible Popcorn With the Madonna of Conflagration

2008-07-30T20:36:00.015-04:00

I open the door to a huge black bag, encircled by the arms of the Madonna of Conflagration.

"This is..."

"Fifteen pounds of caramel corn."

"In a trash bag."

"Technically it's called a 'yard bag', if that makes you feel any better."

"It doesn't. Do you know what outgassing is?"

"Yes. It's something that assholes spend far too much time worrying about when they could be eating caramel corn. Now are we going to the park or what?"

Of course we go. I can't say no to her. I don't want to say no to her. It's usually to my advantage to say yes to her (eventually, anyway). Though maybe not this particular time. She's been in a mood for weeks now. The year is drifting into autumn, and the Madonna of Conflagration always takes the end of summer hard, and has for as long as I've known her. When we've settled in at the park, an uncomfortable bench beneath us, the huge black bag of sickly sweet popcorn shared on our laps, I ask her why this is.

"God man, I don't know. Maybe it's hormonal. Maybe it's something to do with astrology. Maybe I don't like the cold. Maybe I hate football. Maybe I don't like school buses. Maybe it's that Seasonal Affective Disorder thing. Maybe I'm clumsy and I don't look forward to icy sidewalks. Maybe the smell of burning leaves sets off my allergies. Maybe I hate that fucking parade with the balloons, even though I end up watching the whole fucking thing, usually while getting drunk alone."

"I've offered to watch it with you."

"It's important that I'm alone for that one. It's like a ritual."

"Fine."

"Aw, come on-"

"No, seriously, it's fine. It's fine. Go on."

I shovel handfuls of the terrible popcorn into my mouth while I wait for her to continue.

"Look, forget about that. This thing, this summer thing, I don't know okay? It's just weather right? I'm an intelligent person. I've made some tragically stupid moves in my life, but I'm not, like, inherently stupid right?"

"Of course not."

"Right. I just...Shit, I just, I have a lot of regrets okay? And mostly, for the most part, right, that's fine and everything because everybody does. Everybody. I mean you do, right?"

"Some. Sure."

"You've got caramel all over your face by the way. Where did you learn to eat? Could we bring up the tone here a little, please?" Like a low budget magician she pulls a wet nap out of the air. She hands me the unopened packet then looks away, as if I were about to do something terribly private.

"So yeah, most of the time it's fine. And sometimes it's not. And that's how it goes. And around this time...it's bad."

I'm shocked to see a few tears roll down her cheek, and even more shocked when they stop almost immediately. She still isn't looking at me.

"It's really really bad. And that's all I want to say and all I want you to know. Okay?"

"I...yeah, okay."

"Cool."

"Right. I'm lemony fresh now by the way."

"Oh thank god." She looks back at me. "Yeah, very presentable." She looks away again.

We sit there for a while, saying nothing as the sun goes down (so early now), and the dusk comes in. I have no idea if this is what she wanted or not, or if I screwed up. Eventually she stands up, slinging the bag over her shoulder.

"You look like Santa Claus."

She smiles.

"Come on. I'll buy you a drink and we'll talk about what the hell I'm gonna do with the rest of this popcorn."

I stand up. On a whim I link arms with her. It's some kind of statement I suppose, though I couldn't tell you precisely what it means. Anyway, she accepts it gladly, and we walk out of the park, in step and looking downright jaunty. Something has readjusted itself, some equilibrium has been regained. Neither of us knows what it is precisely, but we take a great deal of comfort from it. There's a lot of things we share that could be described that way.

I poke the bag with my free hand.

"Where did you get that crap anyway?"

She shakes her head and puts a finger to her lips.

"It's a secret."

Portraits of Statisticians: Ostilio Ricci

2008-07-27T07:05:00.005-04:00

"Hey, hey Ostilio!"

"What?"

"Like, what's your deal man?"

"My deal is that I roll with The Footnote Posse, man."

"The Footnote Posse?"

"The Footnote Posse."

"Man, what's The Footnote Posse?"

"It's a gang for all the great people of history who have become overshadowed by a 'more important' associate or are just remembered for some damn thing that got nothing to do with what they were doing, if you follow."

"I guess. Flesh it out a little."

Well, take me: you know what my role in history is? 'Galileo's Mentor.' That's it. Not 'brilliant natural philosopher' and 'fearless scientist possessed of unbounded imagination.' The best I get is 'had a pretty good eye for fresh talent.' What the fuck is that? It makes me sound like a goddamn guidance counselor."

"That does suck. So who else is in the Footnote Posse?"

"Let's see: there's literary dudes like Max Brod, who's basically only known as 'the guy who didn't burn Kafka'; and Cyril Kornbluth who 'wrote some books with Frederick Pohl.' Politicians like American president William Henry Harrison-"

'The shortest serving president, the one who died after 31 days?"

"That's him. What else can you tell me about WHH?"

"Man, not a damn thing."

"That is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Taft's here too, on account of people only remembering that he was a fatass.Who else? George Lazenby, Joseph Priestley, Rosalind Franklin, Jack Lescoulie-"

"Who?"

"He hosted the Tonight Show between Steve Allen and Jack Parr."

"So he's like a footnote to a footnote?"

"Hey you watch your mouth about Jack Parr!"

"Sorry man, but like, all anybody knows about Jack Parr is that he hosted before JC."

"Yeah, I guess. Hey speaking of JC we got Mithras and Simon Magus rolling with us."

"I meant Johnny Carson."

"I know you did man, it was an association of ideas. Like how rolling reminds me of logs and that reminds me that Jim Messina is with us."

"Who? Wait, Logs, logs...The other guy from Loggins and Messina?"

"You got it."

"Motherfucker I am done talking to you."

My Tattoos

2008-07-24T06:36:00.010-04:00

Right bicep: A pigeon peeking over the edge of a bucket. It holds an envelope in its beak.

Inside left forearm: A mayonnaise jar full of fireflies.

Back of neck: A plot summary for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, including spoilers for the ending.

Across back: group portrait of the Marx Brothers, including Gummo.

On right knee: A crude sketch of a boulder, imperfectly remembered from a series of recurring dreams I had in the late 90s.

Down left calf: A section of PVC pipe, slavishly copied from an illustration in an industrial catalog.

Right ankle: Eeyore (Disney). I lost a bet.

Over my heart: a British soldier's helmet, circa WWI, upside down. The helmet has been filled with soil, and a daffodil has been planted in it. The helmet rests on the steps leading up to the Lincoln memorial. A little girl in a gingham dress sits next to it, a single tear rolling down her cheek. I have no memory of getting this one.

Pickaxes

2008-07-19T14:46:00.011-04:00

A pair of pickaxes, crossed like legs, is sitting abandoned on the living room floor. They are completely out of place, and the incongruity is making the whole room vibrate. Reality is looking like a loose film. If there was sound here, it would be helplessly garbled and an affront to the ears. It's a small mercy that the room is deadly silent. Still, it's impossible to focus on the white walls. It's known they'll stop moving at the lightest touch, but something makes this a blasphemy beyond compare. This is felt not known, a revealed knowledge that it would be a supreme ingratitude to ignore. There is ritual in this vibratory reaction: something in this room is worshiping something else in this room. This is no longer a space to be inhabited. Perhaps it's no longer truly a space at all, but rather the sacred given form, a demonstration of energy becoming matter. That it resembles a room for people to live in is mere coincidence.

The head of the topmost pickaxe is caked with dirt. The dirt is bone dry and cracking in places. Flecks of mica are embedded in it. They are catching the light, twinkling from the vibrations, making the head of the pickaxe into a stellar map of an unknown sky. In some places the cracks and flecks are working together to show the lines of new constellations. New to the viewer anyway. The lines and points are ancient, though perhaps still waiting to be named. It is unclear whether this is a right of discovery to be taken, or a celestial favor to be granted. However, it is clear that determining which is the case is not to be taken lightly.

The handle of the topmost pickaxe is worn from use. Strange piebald patches give evidence that the handle has been painted and repainted, varnished and revarnished, stripped and sanded, over and over again. The lines of the handle are no longer straight. Palms and gripping fingers have created curved indentations, suggesting that this is a tool with a very specific balance point. It must have been held exactly the same way for decades upon decades. Perhaps inheritance of the tool was determined by the shape of the beneficiary's hands rather than a more traditional accident of birth, so that the grip could be preserved and enhanced.

The bottommost pickaxe is immaculate and has clearly never been used. head and handle both shine. In fact, the head appears to have been chromed, an extravagance that suggests that not only has this tool never been used, but perhaps also that it is never meant to be used. The handle is glossy and black. It is impossible to determine if this is paint, black varnish, or if the handle is naturally made of a black wood that has been polished exactingly. Blurry reflections of the room can be seen in it, merging with the woodgrain. It's possible to imagine that a simulacrum of the room exists within the handle, inhabiting a lathe turned wooden universe that will remain forever unreachable.

The vibrations continue and build in intensity. Items fall off the shelves lining the walls, falling noiselessly to the carpeted floor. The vibrations grow and grow, until the point is reached where the room is no loner identifiable as such. All that can be determined is that something that may be room-shaped is in violent motion. It's individual features can no longer be distinguished. This continues for a period that may last minutes or may last years. Eventually though, the vibrations begin to recede, slowly dropping to their original intensity, and then continuing to slow even beyond that frequency.

When the vibrations cease entirely, the pickaxes are still there. however, they have switched positions, the unused axe on top, the worn one underneath. As the light begins to fade in the room, the distant sound of a single pair of booted feet approaching can just be heard.

Recent Acquisitions

2008-07-15T20:13:00.005-04:00

A small stone statuette, depicting either a man shaped like a key or a key with feet.

Twenty yards of velvet, brushed against the nap and sprayed with a fixative.

A rubber mallet with a handle that was broken and badly repaired with electrician's tape.

A Philco television set, circa 1954, filled with goldfish bones.

Five taxidermic shrews, posed in a standing ring around a cup filled with very sharp red pencils.

A scrapbook full of clippings about Egyptian railway disasters. Marginalia in what appears to be Armenian.

A long playing record of hog calls, badly scratched.

An oil painting of a woman in a hoop skirt being menaced by a water spaniel.

A ten gallon glass jar. Empty, but smells of cucumbers and cinnamon.

A complete set of National Professional Soccer League cards from 1986, in uncut sheets (one per team).

A gold pocket watch, partially dipped in what appears to be creosote.

A bag of flaky black powder, certified to be the decomposed remains of a nitrate stock print of London After Midnight.

Aldred and the Pond

2008-07-13T18:15:00.000-04:00

Aldred can't decide if it's somehow respectful or utterly tasteless that they've turned the bomb crater into a koi pond. Given, it's the perfect shape and saves the effort of digging a separate hole, but still. He's been feeling superstitious for a few weeks now, actively trying to avoid bad omens or anything that could conceivably turn into one. For an imaginative person like Aldred this is a difficult proposition. The day before he left America he passed a pile of new phone books that had been left outside a condemned apartment building, apparently in error. They were already fading and warping, the plastic wrap proving ineffective at keeping out light or moisture. Aldred's scrying mind was compelled to read signs of a fractured future, perhaps involving an injury to the leg (his?) before he forced himself to look away. It didn't help matters that he almost immediately afterwards barked his shins on a badly placed planter. In his experience it isn't usually this simple to connect the dots.

He's finding it irritating that the unseen is proving rather visible lately. Besides the perilous situations it ends up putting him in, it's boring. And cheap. Aldred wants to be teased by the universe, led on with tantalizing glimpses from behind a twitching veil, lifted up by spikes of intuition and buffeted by the unexpected, caressed by tendrils of mystery while he tumbles through that which is sensed and that which is known in other ways...

Good lord, he's getting an erection. That's no way to behave at a garden party, even in one of the more decadent corners of Montenegro. Ill-advised as it may be, he'd best focus his attention on the pond.

The crater is a relic of WWII. There's some debate as to which side brought it into the world, but the Countess prefers to blame Mussolini. Aldred pictures the dictator striding into the garden, kneeling on the lawn, and cracking the earth with his proud and powerful head. More conventional munitions were probably responsible in reality. The perfect circle of the pond makes the image hard to shake though: he keeps seeing Il Duce's giant skull displacing the earth, over and over. The pond water pours from his eyes and koi spawn drips from his mouth, growing to full size carp before hitting the surface. They swim off in tightly organized schools, the aquatic equivalent of the fascist ideal: opulent and regimented and fast, so fast.

It's hardly fair to the koi to indict them with the man's ideology like this, but fairness isn't at the top of Aldred's mind at the moment. All in all, he's not thrilled to be here. The estate, the garden, the pond, his hosts: it's not the atmosphere he wants and needs at the moment. It's all too 20th century. While he's currently terrified of omens, he's also obsessed with the future. It's an untenable position, but it's one he can't come to grips with in a place so mired in the past. he was hoping to find a forward flow to grab onto, here in one of the world's newest republics. Instead it's imported titles, gossip about who did what for Milošević, and wreckage from the 1940s. His disappointment is in turn making him feel childish and paternalistic. He's being an ungracious guest and an ugly American.

He decides to concentrate on the fish. There's a couple dozen of them. They're beautiful as they swim around, but they keep breaking his contemplation, by coming to the surface flapping their lips and making him think of Mussolini again. Two dozen bald dictators, declaiming from the pond, urging him to go faster, go forward. They want him to march into the 20th century, modernizing everything he touches. It's a completely irrational responsibility to place on one man. At any rate their notion of modernity is already hopelessly antiquated: Aldred hears them burbling about tail fins and six lane highways and the need for long distance air travel. History has passed these fish by and they don't even know it. They don't even to know what year it is. He wants to pity them, but he finds himself getting angry instead.

When the Countess wanders down to receive his compliments on the pond, she's rather surprised to find Aldred hopping up and down, shouting about the dead ends represented by futurism and fascism, and occasionally giving the finger to her koi. She thinks he's rather crossed the line from colorful to garish. Once Aldred calms down, he'll agree with her, but by then he'll be back in the states, boldly walking under ladders and daring black cats to cross his path. Omens be damned: he wants the future now.

My Product Testimonials

2008-07-11T21:15:00.007-04:00

Back when I was famous —before the accident forced me into retirement and obscurity, living out my days in a rundown villa on Mauritius, where my nightmares are eternally haunted by flocks of skeletal dodos that are only kept from stalking into my waking life through liberal application of the vile local rum— I was often invited to lend my face and words to endorse products for a nominal fee. I thought you might enjoy these examples from my scrap book. Perhaps they'll remind you of a simpler time, when men shaved only their faces and women wore tennis shoes only if forced to at gunpoint.

Bon Ami Cleanser: It redefines harsh. Don't let the fluffy little chick on the label fool you: Bon Ami is serious business. I've used it to polish the very flesh off any man who slights me, not stopping until his bones are glowing white under the noonday sun. It works great on Formica as well.

Goodyear Tires: The culmination of the industrial spirit. No tire is more finely made. No round object is rounder. I don't need an automobile to drive: I just need four of these and my iron will.

Lucky Strike Cigarettes: People often ask me (their voices trembling) to what I credit my enormous strength and Herculean endurance. My answer is always the same: every morning I start the day with a bowl of crushed Lucky Strikes, swimming in warm buttermilk. They provide me with the essential nicotine and tar I need to stride through the day, crushing my enemies and grinding their legacies to powder while their widows look on, gasping with fear and arousal.

Tootsie Rolls: A single Tootsie Roll held firmly under the tongue has seen me through treks across the full length of the Gobi desert on several occasions. To bring any other sustenance would be an act of pure effeminacy.

Hanes Underpants: Putting a pair on is like being ravished by a depraved Danish courtesan made of the finest combed cotton.

The Zondervan Publishing House Edition of Today's New International Version of the Bible: A manly and robust translation that has often been of great solace to me. I only regret their decision to print the words of Christ in red, as they tend to disappear in the bloody haze so often before my eyes.

A Memo From Mountford

2008-07-09T20:46:00.014-04:00

To: Humanity

In re yours of 27 April 20--, a Hymn to the sun and a rising feeling of the spirit, like a child's balloon going up up up from the surface of the earth...

Well, I hardly know where to begin. There's certainly an expansiveness that you all desire...that we all desire, I should say. Far be it from me to set myself apart from humanity. Some of my fondest desires are human. At least I think they're human. You tell me: when they're obscenely biological; when they drip with blood and spit and semen; when they crack bones and burst organs; when they set the nerves to shrieking and the skin to peeling; when they pith infants and liquefy the elderly; when they're sick and shameful: those are human desires, aren't they?

Surely we're not talking about something merely animal?

But where was I? Oh yes: a hymn to the sun. I still hardly know where to begin. The surface of the earth is yours. Nearly two million miles to desire. Yes yes yes two thirds of that is under water, but really, you've got submarines and Dutchmen. It's only a matter of time before the whole thing is available to you somehow. I have full confidence in your industry. I only wish you felt the same way. When I get a whiff of this horrific sun worship, this retrograde Egyptian perversion, this simple ingratitude to millenia of sophisticated and supplanting theologies —spiritual and material— I weep for you. I also feel whithering contempt for you, but that's hardly what you need to hear right now, is it?

Pardon, I meant: ours, we've, us, our, us. Of course I did. Because I'm one of you.

Your notes on that morning caused a special pain which I hope never to feel again. Such sickening notes, the sound of centuries of enlightenment stripping away from your consciousness, and sung out with such unanimity. You were like pigs, grunt grunt grunting for your slops, your beady little eyes all pointing in the same direction, your drippy hairy snouts inhaling and exhaling as one. My eardrums bled, I assure you, as I heard your piggy little chorus greet the sun. I'm amazed you didn't roll over and offer up your porky bellies, the only kind of future you seem to have any sophistication about.

Excuse me, one of us. Us.

You should know: I wasn't the only one offended that day. Do you know who else found your hymn disgusting? Who else found it an aesthetic crime beyond compare? Who else shuddered and felt sickened? Who else considered winking out of existence, rather than be racked by one more torturous second of your wetbrained crooning? No?

I'll give you a hint: you're orbiting it right now.

No, sorry, that's probably still too hard, so I'll just tell you it was the sun itself, shall I? Yes that's probably for the best.

I wouldn't say your hymn fell on deaf ears exactly, though they were nearly deafened by the time you finished. But honestly, the sun is billions of years old. There's nothing acceptable you can do for the sun. Avert your eyes, cover your skin, and stay inside as much as you can. That's what you can do for the sun. Don't assault it with off-key caterwauling. Don't blast it with orisons trite and pathetic. The sun is worthy of worship, but worship from you is a dishonor, that in some small measure diminishes the holiness of any thing it falls upon. Your worship causes solar flares and sunspots. Your worship is a blasphemy of the thing it worships. Your worship is a desecration. Your worship is an ugly thing smearing itself across the sun's beauty. Melanoma and the greenhouse effect are just punishments for your kind of worship.

In short, the sun hates you. As do I. But you need to understand the difference: the sun's hate for you is pure. My hate is a kind of love. While you wounded both of us that day, I still believe in your ultimate redemption. The sun would like nothing better than to burn you off the surface of the earth, but don't worry, I've had a word with it. You're safe for now. There's no need to thank me; indeed, I'd much rather you didn't. Just remember to avert your eyes when I pass, bow your heads, and stay out of my way. If it helps, think of me as a little piece of the sun that walks among you.

Yours in service,

Mountford

[For immediate distribution. Translate as necessary, but I want a copy in every set of filthy paws by the end of the week, whether they can read it or not. Tell them it's a magick talisman or their new passport or a lottery ticket, I don't care. If they just hold the words, maybe some of them will rub off.]

More Books I Have Not Bought (Yet)

2008-07-07T22:20:00.008-04:00

Secret Kneeshakes of the Amputee Masons!

Faking Leukemia for Fun and Sympathy

101 Haiku About Canning and Pickling

Blind Bulgarian Minefield Tap Dancers and Other Horrors of War

Plant a Seed and Watch It Die: A Memoir of Teaching the Hopeless

The Sweaty Man's Guide to Home Wiring

Why I am Still a Zoroastrian

A Timed History of Briefs

How To Kiss A Clown (No Tongues Edition)

What It Might Have Been Like to be Friends With Ian Curtis: a novel

The Collectors' Guide to Damaged Goods

I Before E Except After the Reichstag Fire: A History of the Real Grammar Nazis

Life on Earth With The Madonna of Conflagration

2008-07-06T20:06:00.011-04:00

The phone call was brief.

"I need you to come down here, like right now. Five minutes ago even."

"Where's down here?"

"The roof of the Bentley Building. Just hurry. I promise you're going to totally shit yourself."

You can usually trust The Madonna of Conflagration when she makes this kind of call. We originally met when she ran into the bar I was having a nervous breakdown in and asked if anybody wanted to see a duck being rescued from a barrel of molasses. I was the only person to follow her, and to this day I don't know if it's because I was worried about the duck, thought the whole thing sounded hilarious, or was intrigued at the prospect of seeing a real live barrel marked MOLASSES.

Another time I was at work. She walked in, wearing a trench coat and shades, sidled up to my desk and leaned over, whispering:

"You have got to get out of this morgue and follow me down to the park, because you will totally, totally not believe this shit that I have found."

Then she tried to glide out like the femme fatale in a spy movie, but it was basically her usual full on forward charge, just on tiptoe this time. Still, the whole thing was intriguing, so I cleared the decks as quickly as possible and went downtown. I found her by one of the huge half-dead trees that dot the city park.

"This hole in the trunk here? Stick your head in it, and look down. No, do not give me 'Dubious Look Number 7', do not ask me any questions, just do it."

So I did, and it was indeed totally worth it. The hole was about three feet up the trunk of the tree. Said trunk was completely filled with macadamia nuts up to the level of the hole. They were in the shell, which I had never seen so I had to ask her what they were.

"Do you have any idea how these got here?" I asked.

"No, but I have a theory."

She looked around.

"Hawaiian squirrels. Gotta be Hawaiian squirrels. Like,they've come back to the mainland, right? Probably floated back over in discarded SPAM cans. And they've brought their possessions with them."

I e-mailed her an article later that day that said there are no squirrels in Hawaii. She didn't talk to me for a month. Even after things defrosted, I got the impression that I was not to bring up the tree and its strange cargo ever again.

So while it was six in the morning on a Sunday, I figured the odds were pretty good that she had something worth seeing. I threw on some clothes, staggered out into the street, somehow found the subway and headed downtown. I arrived at the Bentley Building ten minutes later. She was standing outside, doing everything she could to keep from jumping up and down and failing miserably. When she saw me she grabbed my hand and started dragging me through the revolving doors to the lobby.

"Come on come on come on come on come come on GOD you are sooo slow..."

She hurled me into the nearest upward bound elevator, jumped in after me, and literally punched the button for the top floor.

"This better be good."

"This is better than good," she said, while shaking her smarting hand. "It's like, better than better than good. I don't know if you can even call this 'the best thing ever.' That would insult it."

"That's pretty good."

"Dude, are you even listening to me? Shit, I think I messed up my hand. Anyway, you will remember this morning for the rest of your life, and if you don't get excited, like, immediately, there's something wrong with you. Okay?"

So I spent the rest of the elevator ride trying to get myself excited, while she nursed her hand and watched the number lights climb, counting off the floors under her breath. We were both fairly ramped up by the time we reached the top floor. When the doors opened she shot out and galloped towards the stairs for the roof garden. I followed, and we emerged into a misty morning, in a little patch of pastoral heaven thirty floors above the city. She pulled me down a raked path, her head swinging from left to right. She stopped abruptly when she found what she was looking for and pointed down at a patch of petunias.

"There there there look look look!"

I squatted down, trying to figure out what the hell I was looking for. It took a minute before my eyes found about a dozen snails, mingling with the stems. They were in a heap but paired off within it, each couple wrapping their necks around each other while strange tendrils flowed from snail to snail.

"No way."

I looked up at the Madonna of Conflagration. She had a radiant grin on her face.

"Yup." She leaned down to whisper in my ear.

"They're fucking."

Bonus- Here is a short video of snails fucking.

Pocket Diary of a Gentleman

2008-07-05T17:05:00.016-04:00

I'm a sucker for estate sales, but I usually can't afford much: a loose volume from a worm-eaten edition of Ruskin's works, a brass shoe horn, maybe a warped andiron if the stars are right. Most recently, I scored a damp cedar chest full of amusingly stained linen. Imagine my surprise when I found a gentleman's pocket diary wrapped in a completely ruined antimacassar that rather failed in the "anti-" department. It appears to be from the early to mid 19th century, and to have belonged to a man of means and taste. A sample page follows:

6AM: Awoken from terrifying dream of Irish Catholics setting up camp in the west garden. The beasts had used the topiary as support posts for their laundry lines.

7AM: Stomach issues continue, but managed to choke down a small portion of live elver in milk as prescribed. I find myself troubled by the morality of it all.

8:30AM: Perused my backlog of Sir Jasper's Journal of Effete Concerns. Horrified to discover that the diameter of the pearl in my stick pin was 1/128th of an inch out of step with fashion.

11AM: Sodomy and badminton. Weather continues fine.

1PM: Enervated. Only able to suck the dampness from an oyster shell for luncheon.

2PM: Assignation with Hungarian prostitute. At least her procuress claims that provenance: I fear I detect a distinct note of Kentucky around her vowels. Nevertheless, the coupling was excellent, formidable and restorative.

3PM: Interminable musical salon at Wenderton manor. Why they think their walleyed daughter's mastery of the tuba is something to celebrate remains a mystery.

5PM: Free time: tied ascot, practiced harpsichord, studied pornographic French lithographs, flagellated self

7PM: Finally feeling hale, so planned to dine on medallions of fawn in a black currant sauce. Just as I was being served, a doe and her (remaining?) fawns contrived to spoil things by wandering across the lawn. Blasted things. Had the curtains drawn, but proper dinner could no longer be faced. More elver instead.

8PM: Went to Turkish baths for steam treatment and personal irrigation, only to be informed the boiler had exploded that afternoon and all the clinical tubing was out being "vulcanized" or some such thing. Infuriating.

8:30PM: Returned home. Required four snifters of brandy to soothe irritation.

10PM: Updated diary, retired.

2AM: Disturbed by nightmare of being tied to a stake and pelted with handfuls of elver by the "Hungarian" prostitute riding on the back of a fawn. Interesting that her accent was pure Magyar as she screamed the most obscene insults at me. Apparently honesty only exists in our dreams. Awoke aroused.

Portraits of Statisticians: Sir George Biddell Airy

2008-07-03T18:56:00.009-04:00

In the secret chamber under the Royal Observatory Sir George Biddell Airy sits in the lotus position and draws the world's energy into his body. He's been there for three days now, desperately trying to summon the angel. His joints ache, his mind is screaming, his soul is cracking from the strain, and he has nothing to show for it. Where is the blasted angel, the one bigger than the earth, the one with the holy flaming sword, the one that will settle this wretched problem of the meridian?

The year is 1884 and US President Chester A. Arthur has threatened the very fabric of time and space by requesting the International Meridian Conference: a meeting to establish once and for all where the Prime Meridian would lie for all the nations of the globe. Scientists of the Brotherhood of Deep and Ancient Knowledge were horrified. Arthur, the fool, thought that an official designation was simply a practical matter. His tiny politician's brain thought the plethora of national primes was a problem. He simply couldn't comprehend that these "arbitrary" lines kept the laws of the universe bound to the earth. He couldn't know that switching out these distributed bindings for a single line was no small matter. If the process wasn't handled correctly the earth would fly off its axis, either inwards towards the sun and burning or outwards to the stars and freezing. Why couldn't he leave well enough alone? Small-minded men like President Arthur were always meddling in things they didn't understand, and who had to clean up the mess? The Brothers, that's who.

Not for the first time the members of BDAK found themselves regretting that they took the secret part of "secret society" more seriously than others. Clowns like the Masons, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati: how secret were they? Everyone had heard of them and could name a couple of famous members. BDAK, on the other hand, was totally obscure, and in consequence had never successfully recruited the rich or famous or powerful. The occasional great man was approached, but invariably found joining some backwater secret society hardly worth his time, even when they promised to reveal the real secrets of the universe. Dr. Johnson had flatly refused the invitation, saying "Bee-dack? Bee-dack be damned, sir; I have better things to do with my time and good name than throw them on some bonfire of obscure iniquity and watch their ashes mount to the sky."

It still stung.

At any rate, there was a distinct lack of political pull in the organization, so infiltrating the conference and bending it to their will was pretty much out. It was then that Sir George Airy's name came up. The statistician had retired from the position of Astronomer Royal a few years before, but he still had a certain amount of critical access. Sir George had never made much of a splash as a Brother. He had never been much of a help at the rituals and was famous for nodding off during the longer incantations.

True, he had a sure hand when it came to drawing a circle of blood around an ancient stone altar, and he certainly knew a thing or two about the true nature of planets, having picked up some techniques for orbital weirding from the unearthly John Couch Adams, techniques that were previously (and strangely) unknown to the Brotherhood. Still, he wouldn't be anyone's first choice for a working as great as the establishment of a single binding meridian that could serve the same function as the many it would replace. But even in retirement he could come and go from the Greenwich Observatory whenever he pleased. This was useful, as President Arthur's wretched little conference had settled on Greenwich as the site of the new prime from all the other arbitrary possibilities, and the working would be most effective and easiest to perform from that location.

Airy's passion for the Greenwich meridian would also be of benefit. As the maps changed, and as world belief in the primacy of Greenwich grew, it would take a conduit who believed in the value of the meridian to focus that belief into the tower of thought energy that would reach out into the heavens and draw the attention of the angel. Summoned correctly, the angel would descend to the human realm and inscribe the new meridian on the sphere of the earth, using the point of his flaming sword to write out all the names of God around the ring, raising the power of the binding by orders upon orders of magnitude and keeping reality in place.

It seemed like a heavy load to place on the 83 year old shoulders of a man they regarded as competent at best. What they didn't know was that Sir George had been preparing for this moment for over thirty years. He had marked out the Greenwich meridian himself in 1851, supposedly as a way of showing the scientific establishment he was the Royal Astronomer and he meant business, but really as a way of increasing his standing in BDAK. He'd even gone the extra mile and done a couple of crude bindings to give the Greenwich line a little extra shine. The Brothers had nodded and said "yes, that's nice George," which in turn rankled, as it was never "Sir George". But over the next few decades, he clung to his belief in the meridian and nurtured it, noting that year by year more maps and charts were marking Greenwich as degree zero. When Arthur's pathetic little showboating conference had been called, Airy had already known the likely conclusion.

When the Brothers came calling cap in hand, tugging their forelocks and using his title, he was more amused than disgusted. He made a great show of his age and infirmity, doubted he still had the acuity needed to do the simplest of charms, let alone a complex working. Oh, but he would try, and he simply hoped that for all their sakes the world plunged into the sun when he failed, as burning would be the quicker death. The Brothers went away with ashen faces while Sir George chuckled to himself.

Later, as his efforts spilled over into a fourth day, he wondered if he hadn't bitten off more than he could chew after all. He was starving down here in this dank chamber. By his estimates the work should have taken no more than two days. Had he merely miscalculated, or was something worse happening? Perhaps his belief wasn't strong enough after all. Perhaps his stewardship of the meridian over the years hadn't been enough, or had been of the wrong quality, or some other factor had escaped his notice. Perhaps the Brothers had been right about him after all...

And then suddenly something clicked over and a segment of his beloved Greenwich Meridian stood before him. It was an obsidian band arcing through the ceiling and the floor of the chamber. Everything else he had ever seen in his life looked unreal compared to it. Sir George reached out to touch the line and found it to be warm like flesh. A mad urge to throw his arms around it seized him. When he did, the line almost immediately began to move. As they passed through the ceiling, Sir George knew he was sharing in the undeniable quality of the meridian, that the earth was the mere geographical abstraction, the line and its creator the physical reality.

He rode his line through the next four timeless days. Eventually his consciousness merged with the meridian, and the motion stopped or at least appeared to, as he was present at every point along the prime. It was beautiful, but it was too much for one man to merge with for long. When it came time to disengage from the meridian and return to his earthly body he felt not sadness, but the deepest satisfaction of his long career. It was a satisfaction both wise and smug. Smug because as he had moved around the world he was sure of one thing: he had seen no angel. The work was his and his alone.

Aldred Overreacts

2008-07-01T20:52:00.009-04:00

It started as a desperate bid for a bit of novelty, and now Aldred is afraid things have rather snowballed. He's got nothing to blame but his own tendency to overreact to tedium. It's a character flaw that has laid him low before, even almost gotten him killed on occasion. More than once he's woken up in the hospital, a disapproving nurse looming over him like some hideously misshapen medical monument, waiting only for the merest flutter of his eyelid to launch into a speech that inevitably began with "Well! I don't know what you thought you were doing, but you're very lucky to be alive..." He would nod, sigh, and if at all possible fall back into a coma for a few days (an imperfect ability that when it worked proved to be invaluable, and was really the only worthwhile thing he learned during a wasted couple of months in Tibet).

Aldred has a nasty feeling that he's on that track again. He had been stuck out in one of the more uninteresting middles of nowhere for weeks now. He had thought he needed a bit of solitude to clear his head and soul. On reflection, he should have gone in the opposite direction. He should have found the noisiest, foulest smelling, most garish urban center going, crammed his brain and guts with the strongest stimulants he could lay hands on, and just had a complete sensory blow out. Even if it was like that time in Macao when he ended up blind for three days and deaf for four, it would have been better than this, this...this place. That's all it was. You couldn't even call it a "dull place" or a "featureless place". One couldn't attach a descriptor to its surface: they simply didn't stick. It was a place, and nothing but a place.

The place was killing him. It was flattening him, sucking the third dimension out of him using some kind of vampiric geometry. The place was trying to kill him with blandness. It wanted to leach the pigment out of him not just until he went white, but until he went transparent. It wanted to suppress his personality, apparently by pasting over it with some sort of cosmic layer of blah. The place was out to blank him. The place was out to erase him. The place wanted to rub him out.

It was also making him a touch paranoid, but that was incidental.

He stood against this attack for a few weeks (trying to prove something, he was no longer sure what), until one morning he simply cracked. Anyone standing outside of his rented (and boring) cottage that dawn would have seen the door fly open, and a determined Aldred launch himself through the opening, wearing nothing but a determined look and a kimono embroidered with dragons. He marched to the highest point for miles, a shriveled mound that dreamt of one day being mistaken for a hillock. He jumped up and down on this for the better part of an hour, all the while chanting "I deny you, I deny you, I deny you, I deny you", until his ankles began to hurt. He then proceeded into the town, shooting the evilest of evil looks at anyone he happened to pass. At a used car lot he selected the least reliable looking salesman, pulled three thousand dollars from inside the kimono, and said "Give me something that will break down inside of five hundred miles, but will last long enough to get me out of this damned place."

Four hundred and sixty miles later, he finds himself eating an ice cream cone and standing next to the smoking ruin of a 1994 Geo Metro, in the square of what appears to be a very nice little town. The kimono is making him stick out a bit, but that was a matter easily fixed. The important thing was that he was finally getting a bit of stimulation. The ice cream was the sort of bland chocolate favored by children and was perfect. The square was a vortex of civic pride, centered on an equestrian statue of someone who had probably committed unspeakable atrocities and was therefore terribly patriotic. Aldred wasn't quite sure he liked what all of this meant, but he was relieved that it meant something.

He strolls as nonchalantly as a big man in a small kimono can, ducking into the first menswear shop he can find. He emerges soon after, clad in a blue seersucker suit and yes, a genuine straw boater. He's delighted to be in a place where such outlandish gear allows a body to blend in. Apparently he's wound up in 1890 somehow, the wrecked Metro the only thing that gives it all the lie. It's a perfect place to be before the Fourth of July, so utterly false. He'll stay for what he's certain will be excellent municipal fireworks. Why not? He's earned it.

Memories of a Clubman

2008-06-29T11:18:00.005-04:00

I've let my membership lapse, but I used to belong to quite a nice city club. You know the sort of thing: old wood paneling, cushy leather chairs, gas lamp to light your cigar by. Classy. Once I quit the rat race to become a happy and fulfilled itinerant barber I couldn't swing the dues anymore, but I remember the place fondly. There were annual events that were unique to the club which gave secret meaning to the calendar and made membership a great honor. I've dealt with the sense of geographical ungroundedness that my chosen career requires, but I've never quite recovered from the temporal ungroundedness that the loss of these events brought on.

The Feast of Reason: A sumptuous 20 course elimination banquet that lasts the better part of a week, and resembles nothing so much as a congressional filibuster in a five star restaurant. The most rhetorically gifted members of the club compete to see who can deliver the best speech giving a rational basis for the next course. Speeches are judged on eloquence, universality, and ability to make the mouth water. The weakest speakers are removed from the table at the conclusion of each round/course, until one man remains who will be awarded the title of Dessert Demosthenes. The one year I made the cut to compete (a fluke, I assure you) I was eliminated after the first sorbet. The winning 1986 oration ("Sherry Trifle Considered as an Ouspenskian Model of the Universe") is still widely quoted in certain circles today.

The Musical Rhubarb Forcing Festival: A strange legacy of the founder's horticultural madness is the suite of rhubarb forcing sheds that the club counts among its many outbuildings. As everyone knows, forced rhubarb grows so fast that one can actually hear it shooting up. Since all sound has the potential to be music when properly organized, some of the more musically inclined members of the club decided to see what could be done with the palette provided by burgeoning rhubarb. Through trial and error involving grafting, experimental soil mixtures, subtle manipulations of temperature and other arcane minutiae, they managed to produce several differentiated strains of rhubarb that can be relied upon to produce a specific tone upon being forced. The festival takes place throughout the growing season, with daily concerts to show off works new and old. It's an eerie experience: rhubarb forcing by necessity takes place in complete darkness, so one sits in the sheds blinded, taking in the creaking tones of pieces like Muller's Sonata in A Minor for Strains 1.2684 and 1.2684b and Langston's seminal Cantata Rhubarbica.

The Founder's Day Pageant: Unlike the previous two events, this one is not only open to the participation of all members but actively requires it. It began as a simple affair lasting 10 minutes and featuring three characters: THE FOUNDER, THE BANKER, and THE ARCHITECT. By the time of my membership a performance took six hours and had over three hundred speaking parts. This growth happened slowly over the 200 year history of the club, each chairman inserting his own additions. Some of these were simply a few lines added here and there, or a short scene memorializing the death of some eminent member. Others were impressive works of dramaturgy, radical re-imaginings of the history of the club that placed it in a cosmic and mythic context that it perhaps did not deserve.

For the first 120 years the pageant took place in the main library, but eventually this space was no longer adequate for mounting a full performance. The spectacle moved to an open air amphitheater for the next decade. When a new chairman was named, he found this far too rustic, so he commissioned a special theater to be built on the club grounds. This theater was only to be used for performances of the pageant, though an exception was made once for a speech by President Coolidge. To drive home the Wagnerian pomposity and hubris of the whole thing the theater was actually designed as a quarter scale model of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The pageant is a ludicrous and self-aggrandizing spectacle, of course, of course, but I have seen grown men moved to tears (myself included) by scenes like the death of the 27th chairman during a mustard gas attack in Flanders, or the heroic efforts of the junior sommeliers to save the liquid treasure of the cellars during the 1902 flood. And if you'd ever heard the death soliloquy of the youngest of those brave men, gurgled out as he sinks beneath the waves clutching a crate of Château Mouton Rothschild that tragically proved to heavy for him, you wouldn't judge me.

Stay Down Here Where You Belong

2008-06-28T09:28:00.008-04:00

It's what you'd expect from a sepia toned depiction of hell, with indistinct edges and a general blurriness that grows exponentially as the image recedes into the distance. The photo appears to have been taken out in a flat bit of desert somewhere. Stylized cardboard fires of various sizes are perched all over the place. Unconvincing demons wearing flat masks and carrying comically over-sized pitchforks are captured in all sorts of activities. One is pushing an old man into one of the "fires". Another is sharpening the tines of his pitchfork on a grinding wheel. A demon pianist is playing an upright. A demon bartender is serving cocktails from behind a mahogany bar.

I turn to the Madonna of Conflagration. "They dragged a piano and a full sized bar out to the desert? Who the fuck took this picture, Erich von Stroheim?"

"I Know! Isn't it like, the most perfectly ridiculous thing you've ever seen?"

I continue studying the photo. More demons are ostensibly torturing a bevy of scantily clad maidens. This takes up most of the foreground, and is, let's face it, the main reason for the picture's existence. I point out that the "torturing" would be better described as "cavorting" or "frolicking". She makes sure I notice that some of the poses are downright porny.

"According to the guy, that's how you can tell it's from 1916 or around about there. We were between backlashes or something. He says this one's actually super tame for the time. Like, that's why he likes it I think. He doesn't want something too smutty, but he doesn't want an absolute Disney kind of deal either."

"Which one are you going to be?"

She points to a flexible young lady with a winning smile and presumably infinite patience. A heavyset demon is holding her out at arms length towards the camera, his meaty hands clasping her hips. Her back is to the viewer, but she's arched over enough that her whole face is visible (albeit upside down). She's a dead ringer for the Madonna of Conflagration, if you put about a pound of kohl around each eye.

"Wow, he must have been glad to find you."

"You know what? He actually cried. Just a little but like, real tears, okay? It turns out that he wants to do this re-creation as a present for his grandfather. Granddad's totally ancient, and his ninetieth birthday is coming up, and the guy wants to do something special. The original of this photo is like, a family heirloom."

"Passed from sticky hand to sticky hand, and lovingly stored in the sock drawer of the master of the house?"

"Oh don't. I think it's kind of sweet. Well, sweet-ish. Anyway, it's damn good money and all I have to do is stand still for twenty minutes or however long it takes."

I go back to the picture. Towards the back, presiding over the whole thing, sits the devil himself. His throne sits on top of a pile of plaster skulls. Unlike the demons, there's no mask on this guy. They went the makeup route, giving him crazy painted on eyebrows that nearly run in a circle around his face, wavy horns that go on for a mile, and a pointy false beard that you could use to stab someone. Two figures lie at the devil's feet. One is a buxom maiden, who clutches his knee with one hand and holds what could be a pomegranate in the other. The other figure is actually being used as a footrest by the devil. Based on the pointy helmet and huge white whiskers I'm guessing this is one of the more hated political figures of the day.

"The devil, flanked by Persephone and Kaiser Wilhelm? Smut was so much more literary and cosmopolitan back then."

"Yeah, I knew you'd dig it. Anyway, I gotta split. Or uh, whatever they woulda said back then. 23 skidoo or something?"

"Works for me. 23 skidoo backatcha."

She takes one last look at the photo before putting it back in her bag and heading out. But she pauses in the doorway, bends her knees and leans back until she's in the same pose as her doppleganger (minus the support of a meaty demon), and smiles. Then she snaps up straight and walks out into the night.

This piece was partially inspired by Henry Burr's recording of the Irving Berlin song "Stay Down Here Where You Belong".

My Failed Business Ventures

2008-06-26T22:18:00.001-04:00

-Parkour Proofing: A spectacular catastrophe, based on the flawed assumption that everybody finds parkour and its practitioners obnoxious. We sold kits for installing clumps of nails and broken glass on top of fences, in foot sized nooks and crannies on walls, along the sides of drain pipes, etc. Sales were never great, and I pulled the plug when we starting running afoul of mantrap laws in several states.

-Tiny Little Finger Shoes: Sets of ten wee shoes, designed to be laced onto your fingertips and worn at all times. I knew I was in trouble when even Japanese teens wouldn't go for it. Managed to break even by donating my remaining stock to a luge camp for underprivileged children and taking a fat tax deduction.

-Great Big Finger Shoes: A pretty standard looking pair of sneakers, but with the great (I thought) hook that the soles were custom designed based on the right and left index fingerprints of the wearer. We sold two pair, one to a guy who was actually missing a finger, so we only ever produced three soles. The cause of my second bankruptcy.

-Will It Fit?: A mall kiosk franchise operation, Will It fit? consisted of an array of cubbyholes of various sizes, bearing labels like "Bread Box", "Ikea Bookshelf", "Small Refrigerator", "Antique Bird Cage", and so forth. The idea was that, for a minimal fee, mall patrons could stick their purchases into the relevant cubby in order to see if the item would fit where they wanted it to before they brought it home. People loved it, but they just used the holes without paying.

Bastards. Bastards.

-Bat Sharpeners: A place you could go to get your baseball bat carved into a spear or a short wooden sword. You could also get you initials burnt into the handle for a small fee. All I can say is that I was incredibly high when I came up with this, but unfortunately so was the VC who funded me. In his defense, he passed on the first idea I pitched, which was also called "Bat Sharpeners" and involved cruelty to animals.

Aldred Takes a Seat

2008-06-25T22:34:00.008-04:00

It's an admirable coil of rope that Aldred finds wrapped around himself when he regains consciousness. Silken, pliable yet firm, glowing white: it looks as if it would be at home on the deck of a very expensive boat. Aldred reflects that if one must be tied to a chair, waking slowly from the effects of an expertly delivered blow to the head, this is the rope to be tied with. It almost makes the blinding pain worthwhile to associate with such quality goods. Almost.

Groaning, he cranes his neck around, trying to get a sense of where he is. There's not much light besides the pool centered around the chair, and that's dim. He can tell that the floor is concrete, of the cracked and old variety. As his eyes begin to adjust he can just make out a gleam that would appear to indicate a tiled wall. He makes a little experimental shout, and hears a series of rapidly repeating echoes bounce away from him. Finally, he gives a good sniff to the air and nearly gags. The quality is unmistakable, an unpleasant musk reminiscent of urine and exhaust in an overheated urban space. He's in an abandoned subway stop.

How unspeakably gauche.

Aldred tries to remember how he got here. He had been on the beach. His plan had been to take a brisk stroll up to the lighthouse, but he had been distracted along the way by a horseshoe crab shell of unusual fineness. The carapace glistened in the morning light in a way that was simply impossible to resist. Aldred, usually firm of purpose where brisk walks are concerned, had stopped to bend over and examine it. The blow came seconds later. Reflecting now, he has a nasty feeling the shell was set out as bait, by somebody who must know him entirely too well.

Back in the subway tunnel, he hears footsteps and spies a flickering light in the distance. Soon he can make out the figure of a tall thin man carrying a five branched candelabrum. Aldred recognizes the healthy and handsome face of...well, he supposes Mountford is his nemesis, but the word is so freighted with melodrama that Aldred would rather avoid it. He prefers to think of the man as his competitor, his very aggressive and very talented competitor.

Aldred is full of apprehension. After his last encounter with Mountford, he needed to spend six months in Lapland living in near complete isolation while he herded reindeer and tried desperately to remember his name. His aggressive and talented competitor had nearly succeeded in obliterating Aldred's identity entirely. It was not the friendliest of competitions. Granted, it was a fascinating experience, but it wasn't something that Aldred was keen on going through again just yet.

Mountford stops a few feet away from him. He sits down on the floor, placing the candelabrum between them. Silently, he studies Aldred over the flames. Aldred returns his glance, and notices there's something different about Mountford. Even in this dim light, his pupils shouldn't be as dilated as they are. Aldred finds himself with the unshakable impression that while Mountford is here, his eyes are somewhere else entirely, somewhere even darker. After a few more minutes of silent contemplation Mountford speaks.

"You know, they say it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, but to my mind it's best to light a candle and curse the darkness. That way you're cursing from a position of strength."

Aldred forces himself to lock eyes with Mountford and a charge immediately begins to build in the air. Tendrils of consciousness lash out from both men and begin to grapple with each other. As they clash, shared images are formed in each of their minds: an apple tree shattered to splinters by a sudden lightning strike, a ragged pillowcase stuffed with fresh cut heather, the slag heap from a radium mine glowing faintly at dusk, a broken broom on the shoulder of a six lane highway, an incompetent exorcist being tossed from a haunted clock tower...Dozens flash by, none of them lasting for more than a fraction of a second, each man flinching occasionally as a particularly vivid or freighted image deals him a blow.

The flames on the candelabrum have been rising slowly throughout this exchange and are now almost a foot tall. Aldred sweats under their heat but Mountford seems scarcely to notice them. A small smile rises at his lips but doesn't quite make it to his displaced eyes. He's winning: he knows it, and Aldred knows it too. Mountford's images begin to dominate the stream, and Aldred finds himself knocked aesthetically sideways by the idea of a green cube sitting in a brown field. He doesn't have time to recover before Mountford conjures the sun rising in the west over an abandoned farmhouse, which Aldred weakly and only partially counters with a stone obelisk half sunk in an ornamental pond. Mountford snorts with contempt and builds a grand vision of a glass sphere the size of a planet shattering into billions of pieces while still holding its basic shape.

Aldred screams in terror, utterly defeated. In desperation he conjures the image of himself being carried off on the backs of a herd of reindeer. Unlike the other images, this one lasts for more than a split second. Indeed, it sustains for the better part of a minute, the imagined Aldred dwindling into the distance as the seemingly endless herd thunders across the frozen plain.

When the image finally fades, Mountford finds himself sitting before an empty chair, the coils of rope still wrapped around it. He howls with laughter at Aldred's cowardly retreat, an absolute indicator of the complete victory he would have had if the contest had played to its true end.

It's only when he stands up and begins to walk out of the tunnel that Mountford notices that something seems to be off with his vision, as if his depth perception was...gone. A terrible suspicion begins to form in his mind and he runs back to the abandoned stop. He hops up onto the platform and frantically searches for a reflective surface. He finds it in the form of the chromed top of an old trash can. He leans in with the candelabrum, already knowing what his distorted reflection will confirm: that bastard Aldred stole one of his eyes when he ran away.

Mountford's curses can be heard echoing out of the subway for the next five hours. The candles give out after three.

Portraits of Statisticians: Sir William Petty

2008-06-24T12:27:00.012-04:00

Famously described by William Congreve as a "Paint-drinking, skewwigged ninnybob," Sir William Petty lived to be insulted. He had at least a brief association with every significant figure in late 17th century politics and philosophy, and he seems to have been lambasted by all of them. Scholars disagree as to when Sir William began to deliberately seek out the vituperation of the great. It is an established fact, however, that the first of many journals where he recorded each insult begins with a pasted in note, believed to have been written by the captain of the ship where Petty served as a cabin boy at the age of 14:

"Thisse fowl bagg of sloth in form of boye, thisse lackluster lackwit lackey of Lusifir, thisse caldron of yncompetence, thisse lard befingered mangler of knots, thisse ill starred lodestone that ever pointeth Hellward... in short, thisse ydiot is put from off thisse ship to wander the shores of Normandee, in the sure hope that he shall bring the entire nation of France to tumble oceanward, and thus redeeme himself in somme small measure."

The captain set the tone for Sir William's future employers and acquaintances. While working as Thomas Hobbes' personal secretary he contrived to spill a bottle of very fine and rare brandy over a nearly completed early draft of Leviathan, compounding the error by setting the whole thing on fire. Hobbes' reaction, as recorded in Petty's journal, was understandably distraught:

T.H. did screech and leap about, beating myself around the head and shoulders with his burning book, all the while declaring me to be "the very stuff of which dung heaps do one day aspire to be made" and "the ditch dropping of a hog impregnated whore." I thought this last very fine, though not a patch on the previous week, when M. Descartes named me "a pustule of which one cannot tell if the greater foulness be contained within or spread upon its bloated surface," after I trod not once, not twice, but thrice upon his gouty toes. I believe it was his appalling accent that added a certain savor.

While at Oxford, Petty met Robert Boyle. Sir William delighted in neglecting the social graces around the fastidious Boyle, chewing with his mouth open when they took meals together, taking his shoes off and placing them on the table in the middle of a conversation for no apparent reason, and constantly reaching out with a moistened finger and attempting to smooth out Boyle's wild eyebrows. When he could take no more, Boyle cried out that Petty was

"...like unto a large fart in a small room, noxiously invading the senses of all men of taste!"

Petty also met John Milton during this time, who referred to him as "a purest twat, the sight of whom makes the onward march of my glaucoma a great mercy."

One glaring omission from Petty's conquests is Oliver Cromwell. During the Commonwealth Sir William did all he could to get close to and then infuriate him, but Cromwell proved either unflappable or oblivious. Finding relatively subtle tactics like sneezing in his face ineffective, Petty pulled out all the stops. He propositioned Cromwell's daughters, loudly and as crudely as possible, in Cromwell's presence. He performed obviously unnecessary amputations on key members of the New Model Army while serving as their physician. He even made a point of emitting regretful (and dangerously treasonous) sighs whenever Charles I's name came up. It was all to no avail. Sir William thought he was finally getting through when he started addressing the Lord Protector by the nickname "Ollie Crom-Crom," but was horrified when he discovered that Cromwell had fallen in love with it, going so far as to sign the brutal Act For the Settlement of Ireland with the name.

While Petty's attempts to get up Cromwell's nose were missed by their intended target, they did not go unnoticed by others, and may have been instrumental in saving him from execution upon the restoration of the monarchy. He bounced back, and had his greatest triumph when, while receiving his knighthood from Charles II, he slipped and "accidentally" bashed his forehead into the sovereign's nose, eliciting twin torrents of blood and abuse. Petty writes

I feared to have died of pleasure, as the king screamed out a whole lexicon of invective. A stream of "arseholes" and "whoresons" gave way to the sort of eloquent curse that can only come from God's anointed monarch. I was told that I was "not fit to be skinned and used as a condom by Satan"; that "the company of a dead weasel that had been rolled in the vomit of a buzzard" was preferable to mine; and that he would "take an onion studded with broken glass" and place it up my fundament if I ever crossed his path again. I have never been more proud.

Aldred Makes a Noise

2008-06-22T01:45:00.000-04:00

The silence spread subtly yet swiftly across the world on that day. The first things to disappear were machine noises: jackhammers faded out, cars began to glide noiselessly down the road, a million ambient whirs and clicks and electronic buzzings died away. It was an unsettling yet holy thing.

(Aldred notices what's going on immediately and heads for the warehouse he has been renting in case of just such an occurrence.)

The sound of the human voice goes next. Conversations weighty and banal drift away. Songs devolve into humming, getting lower and lower, eventually crossing the line into inaudibility and non-existentence. Cries, shouts, screams, sighs all warble away, suddenly useless and out of place. The verbal, the pre-verbal, the voluntary and involuntary: if it comes from the throat, it is no longer needed in this new and sacred place.

(Aldred muscles open the receiving doors, comforted that they still groan in protest, though not as loudly as he would hope. He runs quickly to the exact center of the warehouse and pounds a rail spike into the floor. He is disturbed that his hammering is already virtually silent.)

The natural world is the last thing to shut up. Clouds and tree branches still give visual evidence of a wind that should be roaring. Formerly babbling brooks roll by in eerie silence. The baseline of insect mating calls that has existed uninterrupted in some places for millennia is gone. The last thing anybody hears is the sound of the body, the high whine of the central nervous system, the low swish of circulation. Then these too are gone. Even the memory of sound fades from every brain. The silence is absolute.

(Aldred ties one end of an enormous spool of heavy green twine around the protruding head of the spike, using a special knot that he has practiced daily but had hoped to never have occasion to use.)

A deadly calm settles across the soundless world. People are beginning to stare up into the sky, jaws hanging loose, their heads so full of bliss there's no room for anything else. The globe seems to be rising and expanding, bringing the curve of the earth towards the dome of the sky. The goal —whose goal?— would seem to be compression, grinding everything on the surface against the seemingly solidified shell of the sky.

(Aldred hunts for the long crowbar, the special titanium one that the perfect masters blessed for him, and panics for a moment that perhaps it is in another safe house, too far from this one to reach in time. A moment later he lays hands on it, sighing noiselessly in relief. He inserts the crowbar through the center of the spool of twine.)

The firmament has begun to darken to a rich deep blue that has never been seen before. The bliss spreading like a noxious gas through the entire world population is doubling in strength ever second. All that crawls, flies, swims, photosynthesizes or otherwise lives will soon be ground into a fine paste sandwiched between the earth and this impossible but now undeniably solid sky.
(Aldred takes a deep breath, then runs across the warehouse floor, out through the receiving doors, leaving a line of twine behind him. For several minutes, the twine lies slack across the warehouse floor. Then suddenly it snaps taut. Aldred has reached the ash tree a mile away and firmly wedged the spool in its forked branches. The tree looks as if it were grown to receive the spool.)

The bliss swells rapidly inside every being, expanding beyond their bodies, merging into one global bubble of joy and shared experience. It is a holy thing, but the peril of the situation indicates that it has been executed ineptly, and that the bliss is destined to be hermetically sealed forever by the barrier of the sky, instead of flowing out into the universe.

(Aldred takes one last look at a sky so blue it's black, gets a firm grip on the crowbar with both hands, and pulls the hooked end across the twine as quickly as he can. He is pitched over backward by the effort and finds himself staring up into the sacred canopy, the awful heavens above. He hopes he wasn't too late.)

Thruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuummm.

The note of the vibrating twine starts quietly, all but silently. It builds quickly in the absence of any other noise, rapidly filling the uncomfortably small area of open space left. The note gets stronger and stronger, using everything in the world as a resonator to perpetuate and enhance itself. Waves of sound begin to crash against the sky, battering it with exponentially increasing force. The sky holds, holds, holds... and then is suddenly pushed back, hurtling away and shifting back into gaseous form. The expanded earth sucks back into itself. The note of the twine disperses immediately, pulling every other sound back into existence as it goes.

(That was a near thing, thinks Aldred, respooling twine as he walks the mile back to the warehouse. The crowbar tucked under his arm is vibrating slightly, and will continue to do so for the next few days.)

(Note: Some of you may have read an earlier version of this piece, in case it seems vaguely familiar.)

So Tell Me About Belleville...

2008-06-21T07:00:00.007-04:00

-It's a one horse town that's been visited by horse thieves. The horse in question was named Mr. Stuckey, and by all accounts was much beloved. He was kind to children, enjoyed carrots, micturated discreetly, and wore a straw hat with holes cut out for his ears (this may not have been by choice). In 1933 Mr. Stuckey vanished mysteriously. There were signs of struggle in his stable, and although his spare shoes were left behind, his saddle, bridle and bit were taken, leaving little doubt that Mr. Stuckey did not go of his own accord. Neither the thieves nor the horse were ever found, but under a quirk of Wayne County law the case remains open 75 years later, so Belleville retains it's "one horse" status. When we file the renewal papers each year we have to put "HORSE CURRENTLY MISSING" in the notes section.

-At night the sidewalks roll up. Then they're loaded onto a municipal flatbed truck and transported to the sidewalk storage shed, where they are carefully registered, tagged, and stacked. The sidewalks spend the night under lock and key in a climate controlled environment, safe from vandals and the elements. Assuming the next day is a sidewalk day (Saturdays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and alternate Thursdays), they get picked up in the morning and are usually reinstalled by eleven.

-We have our own currency, but it's just US dollars with "BELLEVILLE BUX" written on it in black Sharpie. The Treasury sent an agent once to investigate the large number of defaced bills emanating from the area. Supposedly he was very nice, and everyone was very cooperative. It's still not clear how the accident happened, or what he thought he'd find out on the lake. There's a series of tasteful commemorative plaques marking the various places his remains were found.

-Nearly every state in the US has a Belleville, the only holdouts being one of the Dakotas and Rhode Island. The Dakota refused its Belleville at gunpoint, and Rhode Island simply wasn't big enough. All the Bellevilles were originally manufactured in 1916 at the Evanston Small Town Foundry, the first production run for the then new industry of manufactured towns. While a few of the Bellevilles were installed right away, World War I disrupted the process, and installations didn't resume until a few decades later as part of the WPA. When Alaska and Hawaii became states, the occasion was officially marked each time by a Belleville installation. This largely ceremonial gesture has had unintended consequences for Puerto Rican statehood as all 48 of the original Bellevilles have now been installed, and the Evanston Foundry was decommissioned years ago. So-called Bellevilleistas, who demand that the ceremony must happen for true statehood to be conferred, have successfully blocked each bid. Rumor has it that Washington has suggested a square mile of the original Levittown as a compromise recently, and that the offer is being considered.

A Drink With The Madonna of Conflagration

2008-06-20T06:30:00.002-04:00

The other day I was talking to the Madonna of Conflagration, and I could tell something was on her mind. Normally our conversations are great: she gives me the latest about her various fire obsessed clients, and I laugh until my lungs hurt. I can't begin to guess how many hours we've wasted arguing about whether her clients should be called pyrophilics or pyromaniacs. But yesterday she was subdued. So we sat there in silence, until she said:

"You know, I liked you a lot better when you were into William Blake."

I pointed out that this was years ago.

"Yeah, I know, but it's just like, you could be a lot more fun then, you know? I mean, you were also an incredible pain too, but the kind of pain it was like, interesting to be around. Those poems you were writing, the ones 'in the style of Blake' but with all that militant atheist shit? Those were really trying. Incredibly, seriously trying. And that time you got a life-mask made because Blake did it, and the guy you went to didn't know what he was doing and ended up ripping out your eyebrows? You were pretty damn hard to look at while they were growing back in. I kept offering to pencil some on for you, and you were all like 'I am a mystical poet, not your fucking Barbie Make Me Pretty'. And then you went on for months about how Lambeth was this incredible place and must have all this great energy, and you could be really spiritual there, and you were totally going to move there, and become a printer and learn to draw and all that shit? And then you found out it was in the middle of London or something and not some shitty little village like you thought? And you kept trying to have visions but, like, you couldn't, because you don't believe in visions, so you started imagining what having visions might be like and you were just wrong, like totally totally wrong? And you kept going out with these women named Catherine and they were all terrible bitches, and you asked one of them 'Do you pity me?' and she threw a drink in your face? And uh..."

She trailed off.

"You were just a lot more fun then is all."

I didn't see her for a few weeks. I think we were avoiding each other. But one day I came home to find a very nice edition of Byron sitting on the doorstep, along with a note that said:

These would make you hilarious -MC XO

Music Articles That are Destined to Go Unread

2008-06-19T14:00:00.000-04:00

Kilroy is Still Here: The Enduring Legacy of Styx

Rupert Holmes: Master Lyricist

Twenty Ways Syphilis Made Frederick Delius a Better Composer

Metal Machine Music Is For Lovers

Patriarchal Pickin': The Banjo as Instrument of Cultural Imperialism

Like Dorothy, We All Love Toto

What I Imagine A Linda McCartney/Yoko Ono Supergroup Would Have Sounded Like

How to Listen to More Ska

The Tale of the Large Bells

2008-06-18T20:26:00.008-04:00

The bells were too large for the belfry, and in consequence never rang correctly. They had been installed by a drunken cross-eyed steeplejack with his mind on other things. The problem wasn't discovered until the day of the unveiling, a day that would forever be a black one in the town's history. The whole population had gathered around the town hall, everyone gushing with civic pride. The mayor took to the podium and made a dreary speech that failed to avoid making a weak joke about bats and belfries. Then the winner of the elementary school spelling bee recited Poe's "The Bells", stopping to spell out "tintinnabulation" in a moment of forced precocity that absolutely ruined the poem and set everybody's teeth on edge. Finally, the mayor pulled a cord and the cheap tarp that had covered the belfry gave way to reveal a lumpy piece of workmanship. The mouths of the bells flared out grotesquely, spilling out of the openings of the belfry and ruining its shape. Fortunately, an unaesthetic line or two didn't bother the mob, but when it came time for the inaugural bell ringing it was obvious there was a problem that couldn't be ignored.

"BONGKLAK-BONGKLAK!" went the bells, the expected rich deep bong abruptly cut off by the bells swinging into the interior walls of the belfry and each other. It sounded like a pair of very expensive buckets being bashed together, and the mood of the crowd began to turn ugly. Questions were shouted out, most having to do with the cost of these monstrosities and the exorbitant millage used to fund them. The mayor tried to lighten the mood by leading a rousing singalong of "God Bless America", but fumbled the words halfway through. This was one outrage too many and a bloodthirsty howl went up. The police had to be called in to disperse the crowd, who even in these modern times had a rope, a tree and a stool handy for a lynching. Throughout all this, no one thought to stop the bell ringers who kept the whole mess boiling with constant not-quite-bonging reminders of the disaster.

Things got worse when a summons was put out for the steeplejack to come and fix his mess, only to find he had fallen to his death in the interim (not while working, oddly enough). The belfry construction project had already had some fairly serious overruns, and there simply weren't funds left to hire a replacement, as even the least competent steeplejacks don't come cheap. Volunteers experimented for hours, trying to find a way to get some use out of the bells but were frustrated at every turn. If the bells were swung gently they didn't collide with each other, but neither did the clappers move enough to produce an audible sound. Lining the outsides of the bells with velvet produced an unsettling staccato noise which several townspeople decried as "the devil's hiccups". A grandiose plan was floated to install concealed speakers in the bells and pipe in a recording of the St. Marks Campanile. Unsurprisingly, no electrician could be found who would have a part of such an unethical scheme. One of them wrote a letter to the editorial page of the only local paper, containing the memorable phrase "a belfry full of discord and turpitude" (which was unfortunately misprinted as "a belfry full of disco and turpentine").

In desperation, the town tried to make the bells a quirky selling point for visiting the town. "COME SEE THE BIG BELLS THAT DON'T RING SO GOOD!" proclaimed the highway signs. The few tourists who did show up were inevitably disappointed by the hourly demonstration. Almost nobody bought the cheap plastic bell souvenirs, and further disaster struck when the t-shirts that were supposed to say "I ♥ the Awful Bells" ended up having "I &hearts; the Awful Bells" printed on them. A few actually sold, but only to design geeks who found the error hilarious. Eventually the town council realized that they were throwing good money after bad and the tourism campaign was abandoned.

So the bells fell silent for several years. Then, one fateful night, they fell loudly. It was inevitable really: the yoke they hung from was never meant to hold such heavy bells, and was made of shoddy wood to boot. In a March windstorm it finally gave up the ghost, splintering into thousands of tiny pieces and setting the bells free. They tumbled out of the belfry and landed in the town square with a thunderous crash. The townspeople ran to investigate the noise and were absolutely thrilled to see that the bells had finally been dispatched. There was dancing and cheering: the town had never felt so united while the bells hung over it. In an inspired moment, an eight inch pit was dug and filled with cement. The bells were placed in it upside down, their mouths opening to the sky. The cement quickly hardened and the upturned bells became a permanent fixture of the square. Ever since, the bells are filled with lemonade during the harvest festival and other civic occasions. It tastes strongly of verdigris, but everybody in town has at least a small sip to prove a point. No one's quite sure what that point is, but tradition is tradition.

Portraits of Statisticians: Oskar Anderson

2008-06-17T12:52:00.009-04:00

They fall before him like sexy wheat, the ladies do. Oskar Johann Viktor Anderson: Statistician, Lawyer, Lecturer, Geological Surveyor, Player. His German mystique is an aphrodisiac beyond compare for the impressionable young ladies of Kazan, their Tatar blood hot for that exotic sophistication. Anderson may have been born in Minsk, but he plays the Teutonic Lothario role to the hilt: wooing with gifts of "Dresden" china (bought by the crate load during pleasure trips to Bulgar) and claiming to have been dandled on Bismarck's knee as a child.

The opportunity to study in St. Petersburg comes not a moment too soon, and Oskar heads to the big city, leaving an army of bastards crawling in the gypsum dust that always seems to blanket his provincial spawning ground. Anderson quickly grows to a big fish in a big pond, wowing the academics by day, seducing their wives and daughters by night. There is more than one ribald local folksong of the period with the refrain "Oh Oskar! Oh Oskar!/Oh oh oh Oskar!", a cry familiar to anyone who strolled around the University precincts during those heady nights.

But all good things must come to an end. In 1920, Anderson had a meeting with Lenin, ostensibly to talk about Anderson's future in the Bolshevik government. In truth, the heated discussion centered on Lenin's winsome younger sister Maria, and whether Oskar intended to make an honest woman out of her, considering the condition he had put her in. Oskar replied that his long suffering wife was honest woman enough for him, and perhaps Maria could be fobbed off on that obsequious Georgian with the ridiculous tough guy nickname who was always sniffing around. Stalin was already on his second wife at this point, so this comment could only be seen as adding insult to injury, and Lenin hurled himself at Oskar, swearing he would "pull off those rotten Kraut bollocks and stuff them into that snide little Kraut cakehole." Oskar replied that he preferred sachertorte, before diving out of a conveniently located picture window and hustling himself home, where he breathlessly informed the wife and kids that they were heading west. Now.

When she asked him why, he replied that it was "a political matter".

Aldred and the Arm

2008-06-16T21:59:00.009-04:00

Somewhere in the middle of the night, Aldred awakes to the realization that there is a stranger in the bed with him. He's well past the age where this would be a pleasant surprise. Aldred is an inveterate side-sleeper, and the invader's arm is resting on the back of Aldred's head, behind the ear, pointing up as if he were standing close (far too close) behind Aldred and hailing a taxi.

Aldred knows that this is a moment for calm and clear action. Don't panic, act quickly, get to a place of safety. Carefully he works his hand out from under the pillow and lightly encircles the stranger's wrist. Then he slowly raises the whole arm a fraction of an inch, just enough to let him slide out from under this unwelcome embrace. The lifting goes off without a hitch as Aldred has a surprisingly delicate touch. When he tries to slide out from under the arm, however, he finds himself unable to move more than a token amount. The bedsheets must be restricting his movement. Not for the first time, he curses his love of snug linen.

So then, a more radical plan is needed. He's no great proponent of violence, but circumstances have left him with no other option. He tightens his grip on the offending wrist, and takes a moment to steel himself. Then he throws himself out of the bed with considerable force, still holding tight to the arm. He lands on his back, quickly leaps into a standing position, and delivers a savage knee to his enemy's solar plexus, which his grip on the arm should have conveniently placed nearby.

Except that his knee meets only air and Aldred staggers back, desperately fighting this sudden unexpected change in his center of gravity. He tries to reach out his left hand to steady himself as his right is still keeping a death grip on his opponent's wrist, but the only response from his left arm is an excruciating attack of pins and needles.

It's more or less at this point that Aldred realizes he is standing in the middle of his bedroom at 3 am, his right hand locked around his left wrist. There is no invader: his arm had simply fallen asleep to the point where it was so numb he no longer felt it as part of himself. Shortly he will find this hilarious, but his initial reaction is a sickening existential vertigo as his sleep- and adrenaline-addled brain tries to reintegrate the limb back into his sense of self. Aldred almost faints as he goes through the shock of a reverse amputation, the limb binding back to him in a surgical flash of self-awareness. He shakes this strange new limb that is suddenly under his control, as much out of sheer wonder as to get rid of the lingering pins and needles. As they recede so does the sense of newness, and the limb becomes familiar.

Aldred feels a tiny twinge of regret that at the end of it all he has performed no heroics, faced no great dangers, and received no exciting new limbs for his troubles. He gives the same old arm one last contemptuous shake and stumbles back to bed. By the time his head hits the pillow the regret has evaporated, and the chuckling has begun. This quickly gives way to snoring, a consequence of Aldred trying sleeping on his back for once.

Necromancy, Pittsburgh Style

2008-06-15T12:03:00.008-04:00

Because I'm here with my parents on a Sunday, there was no way I was going to get out of going to church. So bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, there I was warming a pew on Sunday morning for the first time in years. We sang a hymn, did a properly humble prayer, and I was just settling in for a nice nap during the sermon, when the pastor announced that it was time for "the communion of saints". I didn't remember this from childhood services so I wasn't sure what to expect.

First, the ushers walked down the outside aisles, carefully lowering each blind. At the same time someone slowly dimmed the electric chandeliers. By the time both processes were finished, the only light in the sanctuary was a bit of sunlight sneaking in between the slats of the Venetian blinds.

Then everybody bowed their heads. For a while I thought this was some kind of silent meditation, but gradually I noticed a low eerie humming. This increased in volume for about five minutes, eventually becoming loud enough to make the windows and organ pipes vibrate in sympathy. The congregation held this note while the pastor began to chant: "I believe in the communion of saints. I believe in the communion of saints. I believe in the communion of saints. I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS."

He began to spin in a circle, continuing the chant. Strangely, his voice wasn't distorted by the spinning. This may have been because of the wireless headset he was wearing, but after what came next, I'm not so sure.

The pastor's arms slowly rose to shoulder level and his head went back at a slight angle. I thought he might be doing the thing that dervishes do where they train their eyes on a particular spot so they don't get dizzy. But his eyes were shut tight.

"I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS."

He was spinning faster and faster, his robe whipping out at his sides, his stole fluttering in the breeze he had created. The congregation's humming continued to increase in volume. The blinds were rattling now, and the organ pipes were banging like bad plumbing.

"I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS."

Suddenly the ambient sunlight was gone and we were plunged into pitch blackness. At the same time, the humming and chanting stopped. All was silent and dark. I remember thinking this was much more spiritual than I remember, when I noticed a pinprick of light over the pulpit. Within seconds this had multiplied into a cloud of lights, swarming around each other like fireflies. Then they began to expand rapidly. There was a blinding flash. When my eyes recovered, I looked up to the vaulted ceiling of the sanctuary to find it alive with activity.

Well, perhaps "alive" is a poor choice of words. For there, arrayed in a gently undulating circle, were the spirits of famous deceased American Presbyterians. I saw Jimmy Stewart and Abraham Lincoln arm-in-arm, their faces lit with ecstatic brotherhood. There was Woodrow Wilson, radiating wisdom like an old testament king, and across the circle from him was John Witherspoon, his posture and aura an exact match. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan marched around the perimeter, stripped to the waist and carrying spears, proud warriors of the faith, defending it in death even as they had in life. Andrew Carnegie held court in the center of the circle, presumably because he was a local boy. He showered the crowd with golden drops of heavenly love, as magnanimous with this in death as he had been with his fortune in life.

I'm also pretty damn sure I saw Danny Kaye up there, which is weird because I thought he was Jewish.

Anyway, this went on for about fifteen minutes, until there was another blinding flash and the sanctuary was plunged into darkness again. Slowly the sunlight crept back in and the electric lighting was brought back up. Everybody stood up and looked around smiling, greeting their neighbors and shaking hands. Then they sang another hymn, took a collection, sang yet another hymn, and walked out into the day. As we were driving home I tried to talk to my parents about what had happened. They just smiled enigmatically and said they were looking forward to their usual Sunday morning Bloody Marys.

The Carnegie International

2008-06-14T08:21:00.007-04:00

I have two main reasons for being in Pittsburgh this week. One is to visit my parents. The other is to check out the 2008 Carnegie International Exhibit. It's usually a fascinating show, and this year was no exception. Some of the highlights:

-Miniature Heretical Egg Copters: Pretty much does what it says on the tin. A dropped ceiling has been installed in one of the Scaife galleries, reducing the vertical clearance to about three and a half feet. As viewers stoop to enter the room, they are suddenly confronted with a swarm of tiny egg-shaped helicopters. The bodies of the copters are real egg shells, hollowed out and cunningly filled with the workings of remote controlled helicopters. Painted in loving detail on the underside of each copter is a scene of heresy, as described in a thirteenth century Papal encyclical. The scenes can only be glimpsed in passing, and at a certain amount of risk to the viewer. A facsimile of the encyclical is on display in the middle of the room, but the copters seem to be programed to guard it at all costs, so I didn't get a very good look.

-WoodStoneRiverWindPaint nos. 1-5: A series of wall-sized canvases, done in a photorealistic style, depicting details from various pieces by artist/naturalist Andy Goldsworthy. After the exhibit finishes in January, Goldsworthy has agreed to take the canvases, arrange them artfully in the Mojave desert, and take photographs of them. Then the artist will produce new canvases based on these photos, and so on, until one of them dies or gets bored. Entrancingly pointless.

-I Get So Darn Mad!: Hole punched in the wall using the artist's own fists. This is the twelfth installation of this piece, which may explain why it had "NEVER AGAIN" scrawled in something that looked like dried blood underneath it. There has been a problem with pigeons entering the museum through the hole.

-Nobody Likes A Smartass, Series A: Twenty small still lifes, executed in oils and using an excruciatingly academic style, arranged in a 4X5 grid. I think the concept here was that there was absolutely nothing conceptual about the piece. This seems like kind of a smartass thing to do, so maybe it wasn't entirely successful. Still: nice brushwork.

-Adolph Chaplin/Charlie Hitler: Large photographic print. The artist used a computer program to merge two portraits of Chaplin and Hitler into one composite image. It all converges on the mustache, unsurprisingly, but it's the bowler with an unruly forelock sticking out of it that really makes the piece. The soulful yet crazed eyes will also haunt you for days afterward. Geraldine Chaplin sent an enraged letter to The Pittsburgh Press decrying the work, which was banned from exhibition at the Tate Modern through her intervention last year. There's been no word from Hitler's surviving relatives.

Like Venice with Funnier Accents

2008-06-13T14:40:00.006-04:00

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm back in Pittsburgh for the first time in a while, and I continue to be amazed by the changes. I'm really surprised I hadn't heard about the plans to deliberately flood the streets of the Strip District. It must have been a massive project, and I have to say it doesn't look like it was totally a success. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely some good things. The motorized steel gondolas are a very nice touch. And I love the open air live freshwater fish pens at Wooley's. But after about the fifth flower merchant in a snorkel pops up to try and force a blooming lily pad on you the charm starts to wear off. And like Venice there's a bit of a problem with...well, let's be high-toned and call it effluvia and leave it at that. It's hard to buy kielbasa off an ingenious floating grill when your stomach has recently been turned by a similar shaped object drifting past.

I Haven't been in Pittsburgh For A Long Time

2008-06-12T17:04:00.005-04:00

They've put up another statue of Willie Stargell since I was last here, and I have to say it's a bit much. It's three hundred feet tall and stands astride Point State Park like some modern colossus. That could be okay, albeit a bit grandiose, but apparently somebody got a deal on a job lot of pink flecked marble, which rather undercuts the solemn tribute they were going for. It doesn't help that it rotates either, and so fast that you can barely make out that it's a statue of Stargell, and not some menacing pink blur descending on the three rivers. And it screams. I don't know if this was intentional or if the ghost of Pops has come back to haunt this monstrosity or what, but I'm 30 miles outside the city right now and I can hear the damned thing still. I don't know how I'm going to sleep tonight.

Books I Have Not Bought (Yet)

2008-06-11T05:30:00.000-04:00

When I Am An Old Woman, I Shall Wear the Flesh of My Enemies

Knitting For Men Who Cry

What Your Colloidal Cell Makeup Says About Your Personality

97 Short Plays About Santa Claus

Being The Maytag Repair Man by Jesse White and Gordon Jump

Smugness for Fun and Profit

Latin for Truckers

My Miserable Time With the Filthy Gypsies

How to Drink Sea Water and Like It

Strong and Silent: Love Secrets of the Trappist Monks

Annie Leibovitz's Blurriest Celebrity Portraits

Brew Your Own Ether

Found while doing a Google Image Search for the Letter "L"

2008-06-10T09:18:00.006-04:00

Portraits of Statisticians: there are links to 375 images of eminent statisticians on here. According to the counter the site has been visited almost 200,000 times in the last five years. I'd say "the mind boggles", but there are some seriously awesome portraits on here. Like this one:

This is John Couch Adams, whose main claim to fame is figuring out that Neptune was there three years before it was sighted by astronomers. I can believe it. I mean, look at that big old brain, and that alienesque head tilt. Dig those Svengali eyes: I think it's entirely possible that Neptune isn't there at all, but John Couch Adams has hypnotized mankind right down to our DNA to think it's there. He was so good, he could even hypnotize machines, even ones that hadn't been built yet. Poor Voyager 2, you never stood a chance against the all-pervading mesmeric influence of John Couch Adams.

Either that or Adams knew Neptune existed because at one time he called it home. Can't you just picture him riding the supersonic winds, his head even more enlarged because the helium he needs to swell his cranial transport sac is plentiful and readily available? Imagine his eyes, ecstatic but still holding that wry gleam, as he takes in the sights of a planet four times the size of earth. He is protected by a bubble of flaming blue methane weirded into an impenetrable shield against the terrible cold, the ancient enemy of the frail Neptunians. He will float and swoop forever, his racing brain never tiring of the glory around him, his fluting laugh somehow audible above the crash of the titanic storms.

The New Swears Are Here!

2008-06-08T20:44:00.005-04:00

squelchpuddle: "listen squelchpuddle, I eat mothers like yours for breakfast."

dabhandycak: "This hand thrown mug with fingerprints all over it is a piece of dabhandycak."

calvinghole: "If you don't like it, you can stick it up your calvinghole."

stretchglove: "I wouldn't use a stretchglove like you to scratch the inside of my calvinghole."

tungstenite: "Stop looking at my calvinghole, you tungstenite!"

storch: "Oh, storch! I missed F-Troop!"

Use 'em in front of a nun today!

Aldred Falling

2008-06-08T12:57:00.007-04:00

He falls over backward, more out of instinct than anything else. Gravity is the ancient enemy of men shaped like Aldred, and a wise man bends before an unbeatable foe lest he be shattered. So down he goes, distributing the fall across his ample back, adipose tissues acting as a natural shock absorber. He feels a moment's pang, as his prized gabardine raincoat has only just been dry cleaned after years of neglect, and now here he is, pressing it firmly (to say the least) against the grass. But you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and you can't fall properly without staining a few raincoats. There are consolations at least: the odor of well-crushed clover is wafting up around him. It is a relaxing smell, and Aldred's damaged dignity is instantly repaired.

A contented sigh rolls through his bulk, and Aldred thinks to himself that if one must slip and fall, it is best to have a pastoral setting to do it in. The sky is simply perfect: the rainclouds (presumed architects of his tumble) are parting, and sunbeams are fading in all up and down the meadow. His arm stretches out, walking itself by the fingers across the ground. When the arm reaches full extension, the fingers splay out and then curl in, grasping a handful of clover. The elbow bends, the hand uproots the clover, and travels in an arc to Aldred's nose. He squeezes the clover and inhales deeply. It seems scarcely possible, but his body relaxes further. Tentatively, the hand moves to the mouth and allows it to take a small exploratory taste of the crushed clover.

The flavor is incredible, integrating one more sense into what is turning out to be an ecstatic experience. Aldred the man is no longer there: he is a heap of clover, rudely and robustly growing in the sun, an example to point to if one wanted to define "burgeoning". He is leaves and stems and roots and that glorious smell and flavor, all so delicate and intertwined, following nothing but the sun. He lies like this for hours, until mystic ecstasy gives way to earthy somnolence. As the sun begins to set, his quiet snores ride the breeze like hawks, gliding in lazy circles over the mountain below.

Simplicity

2008-06-07T11:13:00.004-04:00

What do I want out of life? Well, I suppose I want the same simple things we all do, like being able to wear a tri-corner hat with confidence; or knowing how to speak fluent Farsi despite never being called upon to do so; or being the first person to come up with a practical yet still entertaining use for the foaming reaction of vinegar and baking soda. Perhaps even more basic things, sexing geese just by the smell and all that. It's a shame that contemporary life doesn't afford us the time to pursue these basic human desires. We find ourselves forced into the drudgery of polishing doorknobs for a crust, when what we really want to do is open that little shop we've always dreamed of, the one where we use a set of custom made cobbler's tools to turn two right shoes into a pair.

In frustration, we shake our fists at the sky and —startlingly enough— the sky shakes its fists back at us. Who knew the sky had dirty thumbnails? What on earth could it get into up there? We have to admire that the sky at least knows enough about making a fist to not tuck the thumb inside, but it doesn't dull the pain of discovering one more hopeless mystery. And so we lower our fists and eyes, resting both on those dirty streets, the ones so tackily picked out with shards of lapis lazuli and crushed garnet. Our knuckles are pricked, our corneas are scratched, and the distant rolling thunder is just the sky chuckling to itself at our predicament. Truly, we are the damned, doomed to an eternity of frosty chocolate milkshakes and shattered expectations.

A Full Denial

2008-06-06T05:59:00.007-04:00

I'd like to address the unfounded rumors I've been hearing everywhere about my interest in fire. Now, I fully admit that I like a nice campfire and am entranced by a backyard fire pit. I love a candlelit dinner, a barbecue lunch, and a breakfast buffet served out of chafing dishes. When I think of holidays, I think of jack-o'-lanterns glowing in the night, their features flickering in and out. But there's nothing unhealthy about any of that: we all love these things and the fire that makes them possible. If I might spend a little more time appreciating them than you, it doesn't indicate a problem. I should be able to linger over thoughts of fire without it being misinterpreted as some sort of religious mania (or worse). It hardly means that I'm enslaved to the dark burning heart of the searing flame god, he who licks across the world leaving ash kisses on its blistered flesh. It's not like I wander the warehouse district late at night with a sacramental can of gasoline, lighting up the darkness with impromptu altars. At no time have I been known to sit with a brand new Bic lighter, flicking it on and off until all the fuel is used up, chanting "holy, holy, holy" all the while. Finally, I have never, ever, paid a prostitute an exorbitant amount of money to dress in a red and orange outfit of my own design and refer to herself as "The Madonna of Conflagration" while she sticks lit matches between my toes.

Honestly, I don't know how these things get started.

A Fragment From the Archives: Sick City

2008-06-04T06:38:00.004-04:00

I wrote this in 2006, during a period where I was trying to write a short piece each day. I'm not sure where I was going with this, but I quite like it.

He's walking down the street, early in the morning, because he couldn't sleep. Why stay in bed? He'd just be miserable: staring at the ceiling and trying to remember fragments of dreams that even he has to admit were boring. It's annoying to lie in bed and be pestered by the phantoms of your uninspiring dreams. Up off the mattress, into the tracksuit, out to the street.

He tries jogging at first, but his fallen arches scream for mercy after only a few minutes, so he settles into a brisk walk. All is disappointment and making due this day: his dreams, this body, even the city around him. He looks up and from side to side, hoping for some grand architectural gesture or solid material mark of industry to make him feel proud by association, but that moment for the city has long passed. It's all broken windows, sooty brick and the smell of an inadequate sewer system now. Even the trash littering the sidewalk looks ancient, as if people are out of things to discard.

There were such high hopes for this place once. Urban renewal, incentives for new businesses, family friendly areas, parks, culture, one of those shopping districts made out of repartitioned factories that always seem to go down well...none of it worked. None of it could mask how tired the place was. If places have souls, this one has gone through a terrible spiritual crisis, and has emerged from the other side terminally soul sick rather than triumphant. A succession of steely eyed mayors, people of supposedly awesome determination, had tried to act the pastor to the city, ministering to its needs with great compassion, while at the same time haranguing it to strive for its own salvation, but it was all for naught. The men and occasional women who had filled the post in recent decades were pointless functionaries, security guards at a museum nobody wanted to loot, let alone visit.

He felt quite at home here.

You're Never Alone With Tinnitus!

2008-06-02T21:14:00.006-04:00

Tinnitus is like a little friend who sits in your ear, singing. This jolly fellow sings all the day long. Nothing gets him down; come what may, he sings and sings and sings. It's a simple song, consisting of one joyful note, miraculously held for hours, even days at a time! Why, if you listen carefully you might hear it now:

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Oh what fun!

Fumbled Attempts at Tmesis

2008-06-02T10:42:00.002-04:00

fan-fantastic-tastic
un-likely-believable
a-partial-nother
Phil-brothery-delphia
a-bcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzing-mazing

Summertime Treat!

2008-06-01T09:12:00.005-04:00

1)Cook 2-3 cups lima beans. They need to be big ones. Think fordhook or giant calico.

2) Drain the beans thoroughly.

3) Allow the beans to cool. You can combine this with step two by cooling the beans in a colander.

4) Spread beans in a single layer on a paper towel.

5) Gently inject each bean with vodka. If you're patient, you should be able to get an eighth to a quarter teaspoon of vodka into each bean. Be environmentally responsible: use an industrial reusable syringe!

6) Halve a medium sized round watermelon. Hollow out one half of the melon, reserving the fruit and leaving about a half-inch layer of flesh on the rind. Liberally douse this layer with vodka.

7) Coarsely chop one cup of the reserved fruit and mix with the beans. Serve in the hollowed out melon half. Enjoy!

Something About Crowns

2008-05-31T08:52:00.010-04:00

I'm trying to use this random word generator to get my juices flowing this morning and so far it has given me:

nice
closet
chatted
reign
course

"Nice closet," said the king as he chatted up the showgirl. "I've not seen many like it in the course of my reign." She batted eyelashes so huge and artificial it was a wonder she didn't fall over. Luckily her sturdy Ukrainian feet provided an unbeatable counterweight. She could have hung heavy rocks from her eyelids and still remained upright.

Speaking of her remaining upright, this was becoming an increasing problem for the king. As she lead him from her dressing room to the bar, he was beginning to wonder if droit de seigneur meant anything these days. Fair enough, he was just a king, not necessarily her king, and if you wanted to get technical, the right only applied to wedding nights, and was probably apocryphal anyway. But still, wasn't kingfucking like starfucking? Weren't showgirls into that kind of thing? Dammit, didn't a crown count for anything these days?

In fact, the crown may have been a bit of a problem, but it was a point of pride for him to wear it everywhere. Sure, it was a little old fashioned, and sometimes people looked at him like it was the wrong thing to do, the haberdashery equivalent of eating one's salad with the fish fork. But he didn't get this: kings wear crowns, right? He was a king, ergo he would wear a crown so people didn't forget it. He wasn't weird about it: he didn't carry an orb and scepter around as well, or insist on being draped in ermine at all times. And it was a nice crown, a demure crown, a crown with a lowercase "c". More of a lightly bejeweled gold circlet really. When he was feeling festive enough he was known to wear it at a jaunty angle, as if to say "I am a king, but I'm a fun king."

The crown was set at said angle tonight, but it wasn't having the desired effect. The showgirl made a point of being politely flirtatious, but in a way that clearly stated "I'm an entertainer", while giving no trace of the "prostitution is a kind of entertainment" subtext he was so desperately looking for. It was becoming increasingly obvious that he had set his cap —er, crown— at the wrong sort of showgirl, the moonlighting law student type who rarely offered "extras" (and even the ones that did were usually only in it for the blogging). Resigned, he gave a weary sigh, straightened his crown, ordered another rum and coke, and asked the young lady what she thought of the ICC's relevance in relation to the rights of sovereign nations, monarchies in particular. She replied that it mattered whether they were signatories or not, but indicated that international copyright law, particularly the expansion of the Berne convention, was more her line.

The king deflated just that much more.

Household Hints

2008-05-30T05:30:00.000-04:00

We all know that white wine gets out red wine. But did you know:

Ouzo gets out Pernod?
Midori gets out Grand Marnier?
Drambuie gets out Fra Angelico?
Hot Damn! gets out Goldschläger?
Jägermeister gets out dignity?

The Power of Dreams

2008-05-29T05:39:00.001-04:00

Our nightly dreams have an amazing power to move and terrify us. They can inspire, confuse, infatuate or disgust (even all at the same time). The chemical palette of the brain and nervous system is used expertly by that master artist the sub-conscious: Dali or Francis Bacon never came as close to his nightmare canvases, Parrish was never as airy and delightful.

And ever since I had that dream about going to high school with Madonna, I've been well disposed to her. She was nice to me and she didn't have that stupid accent yet. So leave Madge alone.

That's me on the left. Or is it?

Country Living

2008-05-28T05:34:00.000-04:00

How dare you! Damme, sir, how dare you! Why if my father, grandfather and great grandfather were here we'd merge together into one extremely large and inflamed country gentleman and demand satisfaction! Your disgusting ignorance and arrogance makes my gorge rise. It rises like a tiny lifeboat, cast adrift on a turbulent sea of bile, about to be fatally dashed against the rocky shore of my spleen. Did you grow up in the country? Are your bones made from the same weathered wood that is featured in our charming fences? Does cool country water flow through your veins instead of blood? Is there manure in your hair? No? Then forever be silent on matters pastoral!

Of course that's a broccoli tree. Where in blazes did you think broccoli came from?

And Let's Not Even Get Into the Woo-Woo Crap...

2008-05-26T17:03:00.008-04:00

Back in 1982 Wim Wenders made an interesting little documentary called Room 666 . In it, he had various directors sit alone in a hotel room with a camera and answer a series of questions on the future of cinema. Godard gives a largely impenetrable but very Godardish speech. Werner Herzog decides it's very important to take his shoes off before answering the question. Fassbinder looks tired and defeated, and died not long after the film was made. Yılmaz Güney's segment was made on an audio cassette that had to be smuggled out to Wenders, as the Turkish government wasn't letting him speak to the press.

Steven Spielberg spends his entire segment bitching and moaning about how hard it is to get the money to fulfill his vision. He made this statement while working on fucking E.T., and after he'd earned more from Jaws and Close Encounters than the other directors in the film saw in their lifetimes all put together.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sucked.

UPDATE: Took spoiler out of title. Some spoilery stuff in the comments still.

Feeling a Little Peaked

2008-05-26T08:45:00.005-04:00

For some reason it's taking me forever to finish Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. I'm a third of the way through the second volume, but it's taken the better part of two weeks to get there. Lately, every time I pick up a book I get sleepy. Either this lovely cool spring we're having is very conducive to snoozing, or I've got an undiagnosed medical condition that's killing me by inches. Whichever, I wish I could stop falling asleep while holding heavy books over my face (I like to read while lying on my back). I don't think my nose can take another involuntary smack.

Also falling asleep reading Peake means your dreams tend to be populated by creatures like Abiatha Swelter.

It's hardly restful.

Some of My Crimes

2008-05-25T07:44:00.011-04:00

1980: Used a fake ID to vote in the presidential elections. I was only seven, but I was just that passionate about John Anderson.

1986: Violated Sizzler's "All You Can Eat" policy by eating more than I could.

1993: Charged with grand theft auto after making an unsuccessful claim that stealing a Volkswagen that was sitting in a puddle was kosher under maritime salvage laws.

1997: Sued for breach of contract after delivering a three hour lecture at the Learning Annex in Topeka on the importance of canine portraiture in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, instead of the introductory "Joy of Juggling" course I had promised.

1999: Target of a seemingly endless stream of nuisance charges while working a part time construction job in Clearwater, Florida. A junior assistant DA finally let me know my problems would go away if I would take the "HUBBARD WASN'T ALL THAT" bumper sticker off my pickup. Opted to head back north instead.

2004: Charged with indecent exposure in Portland, Oregon. Acquitted after pointing out that Utilikilt's sizing charts did not take the wide-hipped yet long-legged gentleman into account.

2007: Nearly caused an international incident when my telegram to Doris Lessing —warning her that a restraining order was in the offing if she didn't stop showing up drunk on my lawn at 3 o'clock in the morning— was intercepted and printed in The Guardian. Libel charge was quietly dropped after I produced surveillance camera footage and a thick folder of fervid mash notes in Ms. Lessing's distinctive hand.

Order and Disorder, Context and Content

2008-05-24T07:12:00.000-04:00

My personal files, both paper and digital, are in a state of disarray. I keep everything: old phone bills, pay slips from 1996, expired coupons for websites that no longer exist, shipment confirmation e-mails for things that have long since been received and broken, and so on. It would mitigate things a bit if I kept all this stuff in some semblance of order, but of course I don't. Most of the paper stuff is crammed into a single cheap filing cabinet. The bottom drawer bent itself out of shape the last time I opened it and doesn't close properly now. For that matter, it doesn't open properly anymore. If I want to file something, I cram it in the gap. This isn't much of a step down from my old filing method: that involved opening the drawer, looking for a folder that had room, stuffing the document in, and then shutting the drawer and walking away before I had time to question whether this was a particularly adult way of doing things.

The digital side is worse. Some files are on floppies. I haven't bought or built a computer with a floppy drive in about five years. For others, my back up solution was to e-mail the file to myself. This seems like a great idea, until you realize that I've had a half-dozen web based mail accounts, some of which I no longer have the password for, some of which simply don't exist anymore. I've settled down with gmail now, but my wild past still haunts me. The files in these accounts were just back ups, but the originals weren't treated well either. The hard drives containing them are either sitting in disused PCs that I haven't got around to stripping for parts, or were in PCs that I did strip for parts and the drives are now sitting in unlabeled anti-static bags...somewhere. A hard drive in an anti-static bag is about the size of a paperback book and slides easily —nay, pleasurably— into any available nook or cranny. In our house, once a nook or cranny gets filled other crap get piled in front of it. Then more crap gets piled on top of that. Then some of the piles fall into each other, generating new nooks and crannies. I think this is how planets get formed.

One especially galling example occurred in both the physical and digital worlds. Back in 2004 I wrote a few dozen pages as part of National Novel Writing Month. I'm sure the digital files are here somewhere, but I haven't found them yet. My efforts are being hampered by the fact that my external hard drive enclosure is on the fritz so I can't search the old unlabeled drives that way (even if I could find them all). If I got desperate enough I could install them directly into my PC, except that the IDE hard drive is going the way of the floppy drive, the ISA bus and the AGP slot, and I only have SATA ports left free, alas.

(If the preceding sentence was mostly gibberish to you, congratulations on being at least partially well-adjusted.)

Fortunately, I had the foresight to print out a copy of my fragment. All is not lost! If I wanted to, I could scan it in. Except...Vista doesn't have a driver for my scanner. Boo, hiss! Ancient flatbed scanners need love too. The five of us with still-working examples of this particular model are extremely disappointed and will tell all our friends. Luckily, I'm Captain Savvy of the good ship Plans Ahead and this PC also boots the Ubuntu flavor of Linux. Ubuntu does have a driver for my scanner and it works swimmingly, as this photo set attests. Hooray! Oh, but the Linux part of my system has been hosed since a recent update and I haven't gotten around to fixing it.

Well never mind, at least I've got a nice paper copy to read. Except there don't appear to be page numbers. And it appears to have been dropped. Several times. In fact, I've seen well shuffled decks of cards that were in better order than this manuscript. Also, the narrative is feverish to say the least, and it's been about three years since the last time I had a look at it, so I'm having a little trouble sorting it out using context clues. Does our hero getting tasered by the mayor come before or after he finds a pair of panties in the library's storage closet? Does the discussion with Baron Secretary come before or after the strange lunch with Hector (Who. Talks. Like. This. For. Some. Reason.)? Is the gangster Little Cliffy B menacing and then friendly, or friendly and then menacing? Was it strictly necessary to name check both Blake and Rockwell Kent in the scene where the hero is leading the bedazzled townspeople into the underground tunnel (and please tell me you weren't planning on serving up some of that "hero's journey" shit here)?

Whoops, that last one is less about context than it is about the embarrassing content flashing before my eyes. Anyway, all this is a roundabout way of saying that what I had hoped to post today was an extract from the archives, but the piece I wanted to work with is proving inaccessible at every turn. So sorry.

Jerry Colonna

2008-05-23T06:04:00.001-04:00

No, that's not Gurdjieff in a wig, It's Jerry Colonna! I've become slightly obsessed with him in the last few days. One of my vaguely pointless long term projects is to rate everything on my iPod, using a playlist that serves up unrated tracks randomly. On Monday, the album Music? For Screaming!!! came up. This is one of many oddities I grabbed last year during WFMU's second 365 Days Project. I recognized the voice, but couldn't quite place it. A little searching showed me that I knew it not from the original source, but from Mel Blanc's countless imitations in old Warner Brother's cartoons (like the worm in this one).

Colonna's main claim to fame stems from his association with Bob Hope, on his radio show and from numerous appearances in the Hope/Crosby Road movies. I have a terrible confession: I've never seen any of the "Road" movies, but based on this clip from The Road to Singapore I really need to:

There's one particular track on Music? For Screaming!!! that's been getting stuck in my head, an exceedingly daffy version of On the Road to Mandalay that kicks the Kipling up a notch by adding bits of Gunga Din to the mix, besides the usual verses from Mandalay. I work in a dismal cube farm, and the temptation to stand up and start singing this at the top of my lungs in true Colonna fashion is becoming harder and harder to resist. I can think of worse ways to get fired. Or maybe promoted: who knows what's a winning strategy in this economy? Maybe Jerry Colonna imitations are just what we need. Maybe a good one contains the secret resonance that can reverse the condition that men call "a recession", by pushing the true and perfect economic vibrations up through the octave, producing the fifth perfect real being food of qwazimaxistantiko, which you may know better as "the wood pulp that satisfies" or "money"-

No, sorry, wait, I'm running Colonna and Gurdjieff together again.

I'll leave you with one last link, again to WFMU, this time to Kliph Nesteroff's loving page on Ol' Bug Eyes.

Ibsen plays Retitled as Joss Whedon Properties (or maybe it's the other way around)

2008-05-22T21:01:00.000-04:00

Buffy the Master Builder
Wildduck
Alien: When We Dead Awaken
They Call Him Angel But His Real Name is Brand
Dollhouse