Verbosities

Just a Flesh Wound

So, for some unknown reason, I started bleeding from my ear canal today.

That’s either portentious or a harbinger, correct? I’ll have to check my Big Book of Haitian Harbingers to make sure.

It’s not the ear drum, I had it looked at today by a real accredited medical professional, honest. There’s apparently just a small freshly raw patch that’s bleeding just a centimeter inside the canal. “Is it possible it’s a psoriasis patch,” I asked the doctor.

“Could be. Why, do you have psoriasis elsewhere?”

No genius, I’m taking a wild stab in the dark that this blood is the result of a brand new skin condition I didn’t have until my ear started dripping onto my collar.

Who gets psoriasis in their ear? I’m prone to getting pretty well dried out all over my face and head if I’m not moisturizing properly, including my earlobes, but inside the ear is another story altogether. Psoriasis explains the freshly raw patch, the blood, and how I’m going to die alone.

At least I’ll be able to keep myself busy with the itching and peeling.

I also learned today that those people who have the near-death experiences are quite likely experiencing a sort of brain suffocation that happens in the wake of death where the brain is slowly strangulated for about twenty minutes after the body dies. Naturally, if you’re predisposed to believe that death is just the final stop on the way to a better place, then this is just a minor inconvenience. If, however, you’re an atheist, this could very well be like a bad acid trip combined with a severe panic attack twisted together with every negative emotion one could possibly think of.

So I got that going for me too.

You know that sometimes I only play at this morosity stuff, right?

Here’s a legitimate question for you… In the Philly airport I saw a Muslim woman in her hajib(? – the headdress thingy) pushing a custodial cart. Now, someone has to clean toilets, but if she was devout enough in her faith to wear the headdress, wouldn’t you think that faith would preclude her from cleaning the toilets of pork-eaters and liquor-drinkers?

Maybe I’m overthinking this.

Managed to get Dylan’s Modern Times for Christmas, and listened to it on the way home from the airport. My knee-jerk reaction after my first time through?

Oh, so he’s gone and made his JJ Cale album now?

That’s actually a compliment. Speaking of Cale, woke up to Skynyrd’s version of Cale’s “Call Me The Breeze” on the clock radio this morning. Has to be the only song in the catalog of theirs I can stand, and the fact that it’s Cale’s has something to do with that I’m sure.

In the spirit of the Altman movie The Player, let’s play a game… With a few potentially terrible movies opening soon, I’ll give you what I’m guessing was the pitch, you click the link to see if your guess was correct. Deal?

· It’s like Bring It On meets Drumline*

· Imagine Stand and Deliver meets Dangerous Minds

· It’s basically Shrek without the central narrative

· It’s like Born on the Fourth of July without the cripple or the controversy

· Take La Femme Nikita and cross it with Big Momma’s House

God help you if you got more than two correct.

*Could also work as “You Got Served meets Drumline,” or “Drumline meets Drumline.”

I sat next to a kid on the plane to Milwaukee last week (Midwest Airlines, two by two seats that are both leather and spacious) who was all of seventeen and wearing a Pink Floyd hoodie. I wanted to take the two hours on the plane to explain to him that there’s a big wide world outside of the standard high school outcast’s Floyd fetish, giving him a stroll through my iPod to show him where he can go once he figures out – as most of us high school outcasts did – that Floyd is overrated.

Sadly, he was too wrapped up in a fantasy novel that was presumably about the Great Orc Hunt of Middle Earth or somesuch. Maybe instead of telling him that his music tastes are going to change, I should have just reassured him that he might one day get laid, and that Tolkien is not a litmus test for potential mates.

He should also get rid of those smoke-shaded spectacles too. Just a thought.

So tomorrow I head to Indianapolis, and will be staying with Rachel in her no-cable/no-Internet palatial estate. She doesn’t even own rabbit ears for her TV, so the chances I’ll be watching even a single bowl game Saturday or Sunday is nearly nil. New Years’ Eve has us rolling down to see Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise. Should be a good time, assuming I don’t go nuts from being disconnected like this for a few days in a row.

Happy New Year to y’all.

Give Me Back My Wig

What I picked up with my Xmas iTunes gift cards:

John Wesley Harding – Bob Dylan
Naturally – JJ Cale
The Band
Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers

Also stole for iPod purposes my dad’s copy of the Mark Knopfler/Emmylou Harris album, which is going to have to grow on me. It’s nice, but it sounds too much at times like the Eugene Levy/Catherine O’Hara stuff from the film A Mighty Wind.

Rick Danko

Sitting in the Milwaukee airport, flight’s delayed and I’m at minimum a full hour from needing to be near the gate for boarding purposes. Bah. It’s not like I really need an excuse to blog, but here we are.

Christmas was nice, although I’m having a little bit of guilt over the virtual abandonment of my dog over the last month or so. Between Vegas, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years’ I’m leaving him at home five weekends out of six, and I know he’s antsy about the whole thing.

Now, he gets well taken care of by the sweetly retarded dogsitter from down the block while I’m gone, but still spends long stretches alone and presumably confused. A couple weekends ago I took him down with me to visit Al, and despite only having dumped him in the Can’t Hang Condo for about five hours, he was jittery and upset when we came back, like he was trying to tell me he thought I wasn’t ever going to be returning.

So after next weekend’s vacation I’m going to have to spend some good quality time with the little guy, as much to readjust him as to ease my own guilt.

So New Years’ should be fun, as I’m headed to Indy to see Rachel, taking her to Bloomington on NYEve to hang with Mr. and Mrs. Daddy. I booked the flight and hotel for free with my miles and points, and I just have to try hard not to spend money like a Rockefeller for the rest of the trip to stay afloat.

I’ve been on a huge Dylan/The Band kick lately. I think I’ve watched The Last Waltz twice over the last two weeks, the soundtrack is in constant rotation (including right now as I type), and I’ve been tearing through the Dylan stuff on my iPod pretty steadily too. Now, thanks to Pauly and my step-sister, my habit will be further enabled through their generous iTunes donations. I think I’ll pull Dylan’s Modern Times and The Band’s “brown album,” but I’m open for suggestions on the rest. Here’s what I have on both sides of the fence:

The Band:
The Last Waltz, Music From Big Pink, Before the Flood.

Dylan:
Blonde on Blonde, Royal Albert Hall, Bootleg Series I, II, III, Highway 61, The Basement Tapes, Time Out of Mind.

Naturally, Blood on the Tracks and John Wesley Harding are on the list too, but if there’s anything you feel strongly about, speak now. And pick up the track “Apple Suckling Tree” off Basement Tapes if you get a chance.

I regret today that I’m traveling and didn’t take advantage of one more day on the ground here to head out to some place called the “Mars Cheese Castle” prior to my departure. It sounds like the grandest place on god’s green earth, if you ask me.

Don’t be conspicuous, but right over there? That guy looks just like Harry Shearer. Shh… not everyone at the same time! Real subtle y’all.

Heading to the gate, I’ll see you around.

Herman Fucking Wouk

Yeah, um, sorry about the below. I had a(nother) little health scare this week, which leaves me wondering exactly when I can figure on seeing fear turn into a productive and proactive approach to maintaining my weight/cholesterol/colon/flat feet/psoriasis/all of the above.

Naturally, I’m currently drinking at 3PM and just left the grocery store with two pints of heavy whipping cream and a pound of butter to go with the pancetta and fettucine I am cooking for dinner. Here’s to productive and proactive procrastination!

Flew out of Philly yesterday, plane was delayed. Big surprise there, although I’m nowhere close to the cautionary tale spouted by breathless cable news correspondents embedded at JFK parroting the same old bullshit you hear on Easter and Thanksgiving every year – it’s raining somewhere, call ahead, don’t bring your big bottle of shampoo with you and think you can get through security.

I had a McGriddles at the airport and was only two hours late to beautiful cloudy Milwaukee.

By the way, on the shelf in a bathroom in the Milwaukee airport there were two books – a Louis L’Amour western lying atop a glossy coach’s manual entitled Complete Linebacking. If you could identify two books cuddling spine-to-spine doomed to lie three feet from exposed snausages, I would assume this particular combination would indeed be the most secure in their synergistic masculinity.

Least secure? Bridget Jones’ Diary sitting atop a Christopher Lowell home improvement tome.

Headed out last night with my dad and his wife, along with my long-time friend Michael from college to a wine store/bar (2004 Rosenbaum Zinfandel – aggressive at first, finishes chalky and tart – not very good), followed by a trip to a new(ish) martini/”tapas”* bar called “KA.” Actually, it’s spelled “K” “A” “umlaut,” and although I don’t really know how to pronounce it, I can affirm that extraneous punctuation makes everything at least 20% more expensive.

*Are you a Spanish-themed restaurant? No? Then knock it the fuck off with this “tapas” bullshit. Please and thank you.

I managed to get drunk last night on white wine, red wine and gin, and lost a prop bet when I set a stupid low over/under line on a “Combined Tattoos” wager at 4.5 without properly considering that the bartendress with the nose ring might be good for at least six tattoos all on her own.

She had eleven. Michael took the over. Shit.

Speaking of the bartendress, as my dad and his wife are regulars at this joint, a variety of service personnel were trotted over for introductions, including the attractive nose-ringed bartendress. I offered a handshake along with the introduction, and shook her hand like I meant it. She immediately said, “Well, that was certainly a firm handshake.” Didn’t seem to be ironic or sarcastic, so I’m curious as to what that meant. Am I supposed to just give her my hand and let her control the shake (“The Charles Nelson Reilly”)? Or do I offer the hand but bend the wrist towards the floor and let it hang there like a wet fish (“The Paul Lynde”)? I don’t know what the hell she was expecting, but where I come from, if you’re going to shake a hand, shake a hand. Sheesh.

As we were finishing up our last round of drinks last night, a couple of friends of my dad’s walked in, and he invited them to sit and have a quick drink with us. They were married, about 40-45, and she was easily on the north end of his bell curve for attainable women. As we got to talking, she mentioned she was a high school teacher for advanced placement literature. Eventually I asked her what her favorite book was, and she immediately offered A Prayer for Owen Meany, which happens to be my favorite book as well. We started talking about the book, she’s obviously engaged with me directly in the conversation, and just as soon as she says something about how she’s constantly looking for books to keep the young men in her class engaged, my dad jumps in and starts talking about Herman Wouk.

Herman Wouk! Come on! I don’t care if her husband is right across the table (and stewing a little bit in his own juices, as she casually mentioned that she has a “hard time getting him to read,” and here she is excitedly talking books with a younger man), at that moment the invocation of Herman Fucking Wouk was paternal cock-blocking of the highest order.

You heard me.

It’s not every day that the stars align and I’m graced with an attractive woman who wants to talk about something that I can effectively and gracefully discuss at length, and somehow my old man finds a way to completely derail the conversation. I’m not saying I would have had a chance to score, all I’m saying is that were this woman flying solo, and were I devoid of induced patriarchical interference, I could have had that woman eating out of the palm of my hand in fifteen minutes.

Fuck.

Then again, she had that funny Wisconsin accent, and all the women up here reek of Gouda. At least that’s what I need to continue to tell myself…

Here’s How It Works

1) Fixate on how much you suck.

2) Amplify said fixation into a frenzied hurricane of self-flagellating deprecation.

3) Allow said hurricane to surreptitiously spread its destruction into far-reaching corners of your head. This part is kind of like the wake of a massive power outage when your refrigerator and the water treatment plant in your town come back online, and you’re scared to eat most of your leftovers and they tell you to boil what comes out of your tap. In other words, if one thing is poisonous, you just begin to assume it’s spoiled everywhere else too.

4) Assume the circular logic of self-defeating prophecy (I suck / no one wants to hear me bitch / I can’t talk to anyone about this / I’m going to suffer in silence / I’m a horrible person with no friends / I suck) to be true and allow it to feed on itself.

5) Profit?

It’s been an exceedingly difficult couple of weeks, for no real reason in particular – just a lot of little tiny ones. If I can somehow put away the idea that I’m better off just wallowing quietly in the corner, I’ll be back soon enough. Until then, Merry Christmas y’all.

A Quick One From Saturday Night

“I bet when he was a kid, they all called him ‘DickBro.’” Matty gestured over his shoulder and across the bar to the multi-millionaire with the gourmet paunch and safety goggles. “Look at him working this crew. How bad do you think he wants to get laid tonight?”

He was heavily in the ear of the third woman I’d seen him pressing in the last half hour, and she was somewhere between mildly uninterested and looking for any opening to get the hell out of there. I nodded back to Matty. “If he wasn’t rich, he’s not getting any at all.” Even from fifteen feet you could tell his game was clumsy. Hell, even the little animated paperclip he unleashed on society has more charisma than he does.

Matty asked the obvious question. “When do you think he tells them he’s loaded? That’s the play, right?” I nodded again. “If I were him, I’d lead with that. That’s all he’s got anyway.”

Cut to fifteen minutes later and DickBro has worked his way to within earshot of Matty and I, and has managed to corner Speaker’s friend Dacia. Amusingly enough, he chooses this as an opening line:

“So… are you a stripper?”

Dacia was agog. Matty, Speaker and I were cracking up. She looked to Speaker for salvation, but Joe was having far too much fun watching this train wreck unravel to step on in. As DickBro continued to pepper her with questions, Joe and Matty and I looped Rachel (Mrs. Human Head) and Bob into the conversation.

“‘Are you a stripper?’ Who the hell opens with a line like that?” Joe couldn’t have been more amused.

Rachel dropped her jaw and asked, “Oh my god. He didn’t say that, did he?”

“Yeah,” I piped in. “That’s a hell of a backhanded compliment. You know, I bet we can do better than that. Backhanded compliments I mean.” I turned to Rachel and said, “You know, whatever you’re doing is working – but you should totally try sit-ups next.”

Bob jumped right in too, “Your hair looks the same as it did last time I saw you. That’s great.”

“Your tits really look good for your age.”

“That’s a really good decision to have your hair hang over your ears like that.”

“Those pants look comfortable… I think my mom has that pair.”

“Your hair looks great for not having showered this morning.”

“I see you’re working on your ‘front-butt.’” Leave it to Bob to drop the backhanded compliment that almost resulted in getting slapped by a very game Rachel. We were cracking each other up for a good half hour solid like this (not to mention Sunday’s barrage aimed at Dacia), and DickBro was naturally oblivious and still pounding Dacia on some elusive chance he thought he had of scoring. I thought Bob had dropped the line of the night with the front-butt, but DickBro wasn’t done. As if Daddydamus had predicted it decades (or at least an hour) before, I heard this exchange verbatim just as Speaker was walking away. Talk about playing your trump card:

“So your husband… is he wealthy?”

Side note: F-Train, you’ve been linked. I dunno how I missed that.

Everything and Nothing, Along With Mushrooms, Infinity and Dark Energy

I stumbled across an article today (linked below) that got me thinking along a parallel track to a book I’m currently reading. The book is Sam Harris’ The End Of Faith, which is an analysis of reason versus religion. Anyway, I was talking to a friend in regards to why I am an atheist, and we got to talking a bit about this article, which I found terribly interesting. She had mentioned energy and karma and purpose in lieu of Christianity, and I emailed her back…

I’ve taken enough psychedelics to have an unfounded suspicion (but not a “belief”) that we are all a collection of a single energy which operates in a band of frequencies that are either complimentary, dissonant, or somewhere in between. If scientists were to print a paper tomorrow that “proved” this, it wouldn’t surprise me. A discovery of that nature says something about the universe, and says something about our existence in terms of a collective, but it doesn’t say anything about the “purpose” of this collective or if there is a puppet master who took part in its creation and/or continues to take any interest at all in the individuals who make up the collective.

In other words, even with a couple of nice nights on mushrooms, I’ve never been presented with adequate evidence to assume anything about the philosophy of what I suspect to be the reality of our existence, and I choose to withhold applying mythologies to this philosophy until such time that adequate evidence exists.

I don’t really believe that there actually is such a philosophy. A mathematical constant to explain how this energy can exist and co-exists in this reality maybe, but an active reason that is philosophical and not scientific in nature as to why the energy exists, no.

On that note, I was reading an article about black holes today, and how scientists are getting closer to creating one in a lab environment (what could POSSIBLY go wrong?): “Cosmologists now theorize that the total energy of our entire universe might be zero, after we add up the positive contributions from matter and dark energy to the negative contribution of gravity. That means if we create just the right conditions in the lab, we can create a completely new universe basically out of nothing. It’s simply a matter of balancing the cosmic books!”

The article quotes NPR: “Is this a joke? No, say a bunch of physicists. … One day it may be possible to go into a laboratory on Earth, create a “seed” — a device that could grow into a universe — and then there would have to be a way to get that seed, on command, to safely expand into a separate, infinite, unexplorable but very real alternate universe.”

It’s wildly interesting to me to think about the possibilities in all this. With the advances that could be made to get to this point, we’d be in a position to essentially create infinity, while technically creating nothing (the “balancing the books” with dark energy). It would certainly provoke a lot of questions that are philosophical in nature, but becoming more and more answerable through scientific experiment.

Do we exist as a piece of infinity? Seems to be intuitive. But since infinity is likely balanced by dark energy to become a sum of zero, does that not mean we also exist in nothing at the same time?

Someday we’re going to realize that we don’t have to mythologize infinity and nothing, nor do we have to assume that the opposite to these mythologies (i.e., religion) to be immoral chaos and nihilism (“Okay. So we take ze money you haf on you, und ve calls it eefen.“). We’ll be able to begin the enormous undertaking of theologizing our own existence in terms we can actually support through repeatable observation, and actively begin to shed first-century thinking in an attempt at understanding through science. I hope it starts to happen in my lifetime…

Leftovers…

Before I post a couple of quick things, I wanted to direct your attention to a new blog written by some very familiar names. Up For Sports is well worth a visit, an RSS subscription, a major advertising buy, and your undying loyalty.

Moving on, I was live-blogging the Ravens/Bengals game last night with the intention of posting to UFS, but I realized rather quickly that whatever combination of gin and fatigue I had beating my poor body into submission was going to result in missing the second half, thereby killing my good intentions. Here’s a taste of what you missed, in my favorite non-football related post of the first half:

831PM – I finished downloading some Russian porn just now, and I think we need to set up an exchange program with our San Fernando Valley specialists. Their camera work is sloppy, the angles are lingered upon for too long, and the male character looks malnourished and straight out of the prison camp extras line from “Schindler’s List.” Now, I’ve seen enough Japanese porn to know that not every adult actress needs a big Teutonic cock to choke on, but for chrissakes I can’t help but feel that generic Anglo-Saxton guilt when the skinny guy with the buzzcut and two week stubble needs a sandwich more than a self-conscious blowjob. I mean really.

And here’s a quick story, cribbed from an email to my friend The Doc regarding last week’s ThanksMas/ChrisGiving trip home to Michigan:

So my mom is the queen of the malpropism, where she often mangles what it is she means to say into something sometimes humorous. To wit, we used to have a tradition when unwrapping presents of guessing what was in the box before opening. However, my dad spoiled that one year by guessing, “It’s a basketball,” when, in fact, Bob had deflated a basketball and wrapped it in a box that could have been a sweater or pants instead. So on that day the tradition changed to only guessing absurdly wrong answers, just in case you somehow guessed it correctly. Well, a number of years ago my mom picked up a box that probably was a sweater or pants, shook it side to side to hear the muffled slide of thick fabric, and proceeded to mangle her guess of a child’s metal craft kit into the now infamous, “It’s an ‘Erection Set.’”

She’s usually good for one or two of those a year. So as we’re watching John Fogerty perform the Thanksgiving football halftime show, she asks, “Is that the guy who sings that song ‘Polk Salad Annie?’” Naturally, this is a conversation stopper as she gets blank looks from her children. I offer, “Uh, do you mean ‘Mustang Sally?’” She looks confused, but agrees for about thirty seconds before coming back into the room. “No. ‘Polk Salad Annie!’ You know,” she starts to sing this next part, with no discernable melody along for the ride, “Polk salad Annie / Gator’s got your granny.”

Bob and I crack up. It’s Alzheimer’s. Has to be. I can’t imagine anyone ever wrote two lines in a song that were as nonsensically stupid as those two. So my mom gets mad that we can’t remember this tune somehow and runs upstairs to pull up “The Google.”

Sure enough, Elvis wrote and recorded “Polk Salad Annie,” and she was even right about the lyrics. Unbelieveable.

More later, but go check out Up For Sports. We’re launching slowly, but should get our feet under us in short order.