President Salix Diabolus

Caution: This post was processed on equipment that also processes nuts.

After a night of reflection, my eyes hurt from shining the LED directly through the pupils. When my curls dried out for the second time I was surprised to find myself thinking. These were no ordinary thoughts; I was consumed by an intense hunger and found relief and satiety in passages of cheddar and pages of summer sausage. The cheddar was melted and easily scooped up with morsels of bread. Toasted.

The ensemble was sublime in ways that would be best imagined if my brain were made entirely of taste buds. No time to think; gotta taste.

At times like these, when it's late at night and I's gots the hunger, I watch old movies. So I was watching Tron, starring The Dude, neon, and papier mâché. If you haven't seen it, don't worry, it's unnecessary. Perhaps you've seen Tron 2: Master Control Program's Got Guns and Raybans, Bitch. I think it was released under an alternative title, The Matrix, and I guess it made some coin.

Idea for a movie of my own: A man discovers that 'Miller Fisher' is actually one person, not two. Measured conviviality abounds (within reason) and he is hailed as a man of great usualness and superhuman averageness. In the ensuing sequence, we follow the protagonist's journey far beyond ticket booths and turnstiles to the very edge of mass transit on a banal (but typical) commute to an ok part of the Upper West Side from deep, deep inside Queens' sooty heart. Along the way he becomes disillusioned with the promises of rhythm during a breakdancing spectacle by the pregnant b-girl troupe The Water Breakers at 42nd Street. He arrives at his office, on time, and nothing about his demeanor says that he's going to put in any less than eight hours today. He begins to do typical 'work' things such as moving papers about and spanking the secretary with a stapler tucked between his ear and his shoulder [will consult employed people for more details]. This goes on for one hundred twenty eight minutes before we cut to a group of adorable babies playing amid a litter of kittens batting at balls of yarn on the 89th floor girders of a construction site for two minutes. In the background, we hear gay* flute arpeggios and tambourines. Fade out gradually to black and silence.

Did you feel it?

Alright, you guys like politics? I don't know much about all this high falutin' political what have you except that I think we should start voting for trees. They make oxygen and fruit and they're not weak on terrorism or immigration. They've got strong morals, except for that satanic willow Salix diabolus. He's a bad seed. And his sap tastes like high fructose corn syrup, because it is.

* The intended connotation here is 'merry'. (Yes, this is part of my effort to wrest the English language from those who would seek to stick it up their bums.)

Watching the road

Sometimes I think I'm the only person who doesn't know what he wants, which is a silly thing to think. Often, I think that maybe I'm just not picky enough. Less often, I think that I don't think about it enough and so haven't proactively developed a taste for anything. Rarely, I think that I just haven't yet encountered anything resembling something I would want. But I don't really believe that. I've exposed myself to plenty. To plenty in excess of plenty multiplied by wastage of time raised to the power of whatever.

It turns out that I have been thinking and that I know more about what I want than I knew I know now, nearly new as the knowledge is. Call it maturity or inevitability, but maybe the sum of all indifference is truth or even wisdom. Well, I'm eleven years short of forty so let's not get carried away just yet. Instead, let's call it 'about freakin' time.'

Is this about a woman? No, it's about my job. Somehow I've made a decision about which I wasn't aware until I heard myself say it and--oddly--it made so much sense! I talked about what I've been looking for with such confidence and eloquence that the stuttering, indecisive, impassionate person in me put down his spray bottle of bleach, pulled off the rubber gloves, and, for the first time, let some dust settle. I'd been so busy fretting about the order and congruity of everything in my life that I wasn't experiencing my experience, just cataloguing it and shelving it neatly, plenty in excess of plenty multiplied by 29 years. I'm glad that someone was watching the road.

Viva la Revolución Antiséptica!

I've written at length, though never coherently,* about the mockery we make of curbing the spread of nosocomial infections by insisting on wearing ties. Fie upon the tie et cetera.

Anyway, ties are only the beginning of my usually pointless griping. The original idea for my anti-sartorial campaign came in the cliched form of a dream. Actually, it was a nightmare, but it wasn't as scary as it was boring and horribly written and shot. The director was probably asleep during filming. Suffice it to say that the talentless protagonist (through whose eyes this farce was depicted) was being interviewed at a prestigious teaching hospital for a residency position and was not clothed in the complete and traditional interview getup.

Namely, he was missing a tie. But also a jacket, a shirt, and pants. And he was unshaven and crusty-eyed. I mean, he had all of these things with him but he was holding them in his hands as if to say, 'I have no use for these! Ask me your questions, sir, and do not mind the hole in my boxers, for I am confident that you will find me to be nothing less than professional.'

Interpret this however you want, but I take it to mean that something must be done about clothing. Obviously, given the popularity of sculpture, nude photography, and sex and pornography, I am right. Don't argue with me, for I can weave a straightjacket of syllogisms around you faster than you can say 'that doesn't make any sense, you idiot.' And it's true, I am an idiot, I should know.

The point is that in addition to banning the necktie in the hospital we must also ban sleeves, white coats, and pants. Every time a tie, shirtsleeve, or pant leg brushes over some germy metropolis on one person's backside, it takes some of those citizens on a ride to the next person's face and, of course, the physician's lunch and no amount of hand sanitizer or handwashing will address the domino effect of cross-contamination. What we need is leadership on this issue. What we need is a Truman Doctrine--a Marshall Plan if you will--for the containment of microbial evil. While I'm no leader, I will gladly take up my position as behind-the-scenes pragmatist and insidious instigator of antimicrobial attrition and realpolitik. A neurotic germophobic George Kennan if you will (and if you won't).

We must therefore institute funding for an armory consisting of the weapons necessary for this war--for make no mistake, that is what this is comrades and we must not shirk our responsibilities! What this plan amounts to is the distribution of scissors to a contingent of able-fingered guerilla housestaff who will use them to carry out lightning raids, cutting dangling bits of clothing not closely adherent to the bodies of caregivers in the hospital. These soldiers of sanitation will fly by nursing stations snipping off germ-dinghies and bacteria-boats as they swarm, bringing back the sleeveless look from the outskirts of fashion onto the catwalk of the clinically responsible.

We must then fortify our offensive with daring propaganda. This is no time for bashfulness comrades, for the revolution cannot wait. Our message must be clear and strong:

The noose of the enemy chokes you! Off with your tie!

Cut off support to the enemy of the people! Cut off your sleeves!

Pants are the haven of the antisocialite germ! Remove them from our midst!

May the sounds of steel kisses and flying fabric resonate in the halls of healing! Viva la Revolución Antiséptica!

* On a parenthetical lever, I don't want to give you the wrong impression. This post will certainly not be coherent either. Homie don't 'play that' and he's n't about t' start today. D' n't question m' use of the apostrophe. It's ours to dispense with as we each please. I don't come to your house and tell you not to end sentences with a preposition.

I want luscious bounce and body in my revolution

The rain splishles in plipples and plooples and all that I can think about is how liberating it would be for me to have hair that bobbles as I walk. Also, it would be spectacular to have a soundtrackle.

I love pseudoalliteration almost as much as I love myself. What is it about vanity that puts people off? I'm not vain, and I go to great lengths to prove it by actively not being vain in front of other people because obviously they're all looking at me and waiting for me to bust a move (for that is indeed what I might do on the bus from time to time). So I constantly shoot other people looks to figure out what percentages of their brains are occupied by me and my dry split ends. Also, I wonder if they can hear my soundtrack. It's really good. Danny Elfman and Michael Nyman are always getting into their shenanigans while Zbigniew Preisner packs his Polish cable runner into a suitcase and ships him to the West, and Eric Serra makes really interesting sounds by hitting John Tesh over the head with a Korg.

It holds me together.

Actually though, this is what everyone else is thinking:

That guy keeps looking at me. Can I see my reflection in the bus window? Alright, I need to do this without anyone noticing that I'm doing it because that would be vain. I know, I'll act like I'm gazing at that homeless guy across the street with a look of pity on my face, and I'll use that to get a good look at my hair and forehead wrinkles. Are my ears really that big? I bet that's what he's looking at. He can't get enough of my huge elephant ears. Look at all these plastic surgery ads. I wonder why they advertise on the bus.

What does this have to do with the issues? How far would granting me gorgeous curl body and volume advance the cause of bettering the human condition? How does this seemingly trivial topic fit in with the by now famous themes of this acclaimed issue-laden blog--namely humanism, virtuosity, righteousness, seriousness, counterterrorism, war, the economy, and evil (it's all there people, check the labels)? I promise you that I will dispense with each of these items one by one and explain, in detail, what it has to do with humans and so on. I can do it while I wait for the hair serum to work.

[Intelligent debate about important things interrupted by the military-industrial complex. No you shut up, we do exist.]

So, to sum up, ending the suffering of all but the most foregone people can be accomplished with little if no effort and won't cost us more than twenty cents over the next three years. And for just fifty-nine cents more we can supersize our order and save those last few poor sods as well.

And that's how deep conditioner saved the world.

Frisbee golf

On Sunday I went out with a couple of friends to play frisbee golf. The game isn't quite as athletic as, say, ultimate frisbee, but it's also not as ridiculously unsporty as real golf.

You get three discs: a 'driver,' a 'putter,' and a medium range disc. The driver is heavy, aerodynamic, and incredibly difficult to control. The putter is the lightest, most precise disc but it has the shortest range. The goal is to get any one of your discs into a 'hole,' which is just a metal basket with chains to slow your disc down and guide it into the basket.

Keeping score is just like in golf. Also as in golf, some holes are farther away and harder to get to than others. Some are just plain ridiculous; because we were playing in the middle of a forested park, most of the 18 holes were right the middle of the trees. In one case, the hole happened to have a tree fall right on top of it, as in this photo.

Goethe and the proverbial substance

In its finality, the cul-de-sac of knowledge impresses those who've been disappointed by education as the mode and mark of social evolution. It is where, in order to learn more (that is, to drive through the proverbial living room of the proverbial house at the end of the cul-de-sac and out into the backyard and through the proverbial fence and into the darkness beyond, perhaps into a ditch or ravine of some sort where we might meet an early but satisfying proverbial death), we must peer over our shoulders at what we learned before we turned into the cul-de-sac o'proverbs after we bought 'cigarettes' at the proverbial corner store when the (proverbial) man said something kind of profound but not so much really because he was selling cigarettes at a corner store and of course every once in a while he'll say something that's not completely bereft of substance as he exhales. That sort of thing makes me feel warm inside.

That reminds me of the time when Goethe and I were camping in a totally appropriate male-bonding sort of way, making 'smores and conversation and dispensing wisdom and recyclables (and recyclable wisdom) across arcades of sparks and embers. He was sugar-high and said something like--and I am translating his medieval German--'Yo Cauliflower, monkey library Simon as scallops handbanana cheek absolute yellowcake* sportyshine leaf-faucet National Public Radio fork.' I'm paraphrasing; my medieval German isn't as superbly excellent as my English.

My memory does fail me at times, but this time I am fairly certain that what G-Tonez was trying to tell me was that we must reflect upon our past if we are to avoid living hand to mouth. To me this just sounds like an elitist assault on the decent hard-working hunter-gatherers in society, especially the ones who have amnesia. But even though he probably meant collective and mostly scientific memory--the (proverbial) shoulders upon which we stand before we can advance as a species--social memory is no exception, I think.

The problem is that memory does fail, and social memory is no exception. One might say that, because of the sheer noise involved in the laying down of memories on a social scale, it is impossible to nuance them with those subtle (and essential) features that temper the imagination and tame the reflexes. Indeed some social memories occupy such an inflamed corner in our collective mind that even accessing those memories tends to lead to wildly impulsive, base, even animal responses. Case in point: September 11, 2001. Despite it not being the first nor the worst event of its kind, our self-proclaimed keepers of the social memory (journalists, politicians) have wrapped us so tightly and rigidly in the inflamed axons of its memory that to move one way or another, to reach into our pockets for nuance, becomes impossible at least as part of the mainstream discourse.

Whenever I use words such as 'mainstream' and 'discourse' I know that I've gone too far and need to shut up.

* I would like to stay off the no-fly list, please, because I have places to go from time to time.

Are you racist?

Nobody who's not an anti-racist, don't not raise your hand!

Did you pass?