Filed under: Free Association, Uncategorized | Tags: fox news, puffkin, Sarah Palin
I am sitting here at work and the walls come crumbling down. The cubicle walls, that is, the ones made of corkboard dressed in industrial carpeting. My response to disaster is to blog, to spend an hour helping a friend concatenate two Excel columns, to read Wonkette, drink cold coffee, to write follow up letters to the ladies who interviewed me last week for a job. My response to the piles of work that wait as patiently as a rattlesnake is to be too sick, too tired, too depressed, too stressed out, too weird, too white, too atheist, too poor, too applying-for-grad-school, too static-y-hair, too rather-be-diving, too i-wanta-a-dog, too minimal, too maximal, too bored, too boring, too born.Too anything and everything, really, to deal with this THING that I do not want to deal with. Which is this thing that is a foot and a half away from me, next to the stuff owl Puffkin I bought at an airport in Minneapolis, next to also a much cherished water bottle with Burton’s Batman logo printed on it, under, also, an empty hanger and a computer printout of a bunny rabbit yawning.
The shrink said today that it seems, to me, my parents are different parents now, after the election. This follows that likely, I am a different daughter. And this is why we don’t talk, and dread the holidays, and express poignant disinterest in each others lives. It seems silly that Sarah Palin could do this to a family, but she did. I will hate Fox News forever for playing the mind games they do with stupid people like my mother, who is no longer “simple” as I use to say and think, but outright “dumb as rocks.” I hate thinking this about Mom; I always thought her to be a sweet, nice, simple Christian lady, a blank slate, if you will. It’s like some ornery kid came into class and wrote VAGINA on the blackboard in big, crude letters. That’s what Fox News did to my mother’s head.
I am making a vegan Tater Tot casserole for Thanksgiving. One of these ingredients is “crumbles” but there is no other explanation. Wikipedia tells me “crumbles” are the butter, salt, sugar crusty mixture in British desserts, but this seems strange in a tater tot casserole. In the world of vegetarianism, crumbles often mean the soy crumbles used in substitute meats, but judging from the recipe it looks like crumbles are used as a crusty, topping, so this doesn’t make much sense either.
Meanwhile, work continues to pile and while my boss is gone today, he will be further disappointed in me come Monday, and things will further crumble, although not so much crumble because they’ve already done all that, but there are crumbs on the floor that roll around and spiral in the gust, like the weird dirt in front of my building that literally dances in a way that is mesmerizing and alive.
Filed under: Crazy Talk | Tags: blogging aboub blogging, failed writers, field of dreams
… and the primary reason is that I am a Failed Writer. Blogging is a blessing for Failed Writers, it provides us with an outlet that is both anonymous and brimming with potential. A blog, much like graffiti, stands in the face of the world, bold, defiant, mystified by an unknown creator. While some may see it as deface, others view it as an art, or secret language, or a welcome splash of color. Unlike journaling, the public life of a blog validates confessional scribblings as something other than masturbatory.
Think of Failed Writers as a movement: a mass exodus of unpublished wordsmiths out of the soul-sapping landscape of advertising copy and short pieces for Women’s Health, and into a brave new Mars unpopulated by editors.
The other reason I started this blog is because I felt compelled to archive my own perspective of the tumultuous era we live in. I’m not alone; the thousands and thousands of new blogs that pop up every month profess the same insight and if there was blogging during the 1960’s, the results would be the same.
My friend J, a brilliant blogger – who unfortunately stopped when Facebook came along and satifised his penchant for quirky commentary and heart-stopping linkage - says he always makes sure each blog he writes has a “take away” quality. My attempt at “take away” quality is failing me. Really, I’m not in a place where I can surf the net all day looking for unique links on hot-button issues in order to drive readers to this site. Nor can I spend my free time “guerilla” marketing: digging, tweeting, delicious book-marking, begging other bloggers to put me on their blogroll, etc.
Basically, I’m just hoping that someday I’ll write something, and they will come. The Field of Dreams logic.
I loved Ray Liotta in that movie. Just thinking about his Shoeless Joe Jackson is making me seriously warm inside. Liotta’s Shoeless Joe is how I like to imagine my own writing identity: just a kid who loves the game.
Filed under: Obama Porn | Tags: afghanistan, collapse, michael ruppert, obama, obama dreams
Yes, it is largely about a man speaking urgently into a camera from room cobbled together with exposed brick. A shaft of light from above recreates the atmosphere of an interrogation room. You can practically smell the booze on his breath. He smokes cigarette after cigarette, pets his dog, and tells you, YOU, you sitting in that chair, that the collapse is coming. And goddamit, you believe him. Ten minutes out of the theatre, you’ll come to your senses and dismiss him as merely a crazy guy who has a point…but for an hour and twenty minute, you’ll believe him, every word. Maybe you’ll even buy seeds – like he told you too – and store them… just in case. He was right in 2005 when he publically predicted the economic collapse, maybe he’s right again. I mean, it’s just common sense, right? We will run out of oil. We will. There is no doubt about it. And when that happens…[New York Times]
It is these moments that I regret not believing in God, because I can’t believe in the devil. If I believed in the devil it would logically follow that Dick Cheney will be tortured for eternity, naked in a frosty, concrete room, his eyeballs melted by some otherworld instrument, anaconda-sized worms sucking at his tiny penis with their lamprey mouths. But, alas…
So anyway, this guy, Michael Ruppert, I’m reading his blog now. He prides himself as having “the gift of critical thinking,” although I’m inclined to say he’s obsessed with critical thinking, it’s like an OCD tic with him, just like wiping down the doornobs with Lysol for twelve hours. But he manages to find the articles in Reuters, AP, and coming out of Europe that are really important, that just flat out stating what is going on, the stuff that is completely boring to the common man who would rather watch pundits parody themselves on noisy news improv shows.
I’m scrolling through his list of links and this one catches my eye:
Obama’s advisers at war over Afghan conflict
President accused of dithering as leaked memo reveals bitter divisions over strategy in his inner circle [Independent]
So pretty much anything with Obama in the title catches my eye. I am a “fan girl,” as J likes to say, and indeed, you would be smart to take anything I say about Obama with a grain of salt because I was in KMart last night and passed a display of basketballs with Obama’s face on it and wanted one SO BAD. [Kmart]
But it’s interesting because two nights ago I had my very first dream about Obama. Not a week earlier I was lamenting the fact that I had never had a dream about the one person I probably think about twenty times, and here it happens, I’ll try and keep this short.
I’m in the Diamond District, a clamorous strip of wholesale jewelers near Rockefeller Center that is, uncharacteristically, one of my favorite neighborhoods in New York (I’m allergic to noise and never wear jewelry). It’s very early in the morning and the only people around seem to be wearing suits, holding briefcases, and sporting expensive shoes that clack. Several are gathered around the green-railed entrance of a subway station, gazing down into the stairwell as secret service men exit. I join the crowd. Peering down, all I see are concrete stairs and a wall of blank, linoleum squares. A man who looks like Obama but isn’t, steps into view and smiles. We cheer. This happens again with another Obama look-a-like, and again. Soon, the street becomes crowded with men who look like Obama, all smiling so BIG, all wearing long, black coats and white scarves (like the boys me and M followed that one night, the ones who were walking with Liam Neeson all the way to the Astor hotel).
Then, the real Obama walks out, unmistakeably him. From the bottom of the stairwell he smiles and waves. Some touch his coat as he passes. We follow him, but he disappears in a sea of look-a-likes all moving in different directions.
Somehow, I ended up in a boat on the East River. It’s a “water taxi”, not like the ferries that take one to New Jersey, but a real Yellow Cab taxi with a rear motor and a turbaned driver who says “where to?” I tell him to Ellis Island where I am sure, somehow, Barak Obama is headed. The turbaned taxi captain is equally excited Obama is in the vincity and we speed off in a sea of spray until, halfway there, we see a tiny island up ahead. The island is really more like an untethered pier on which a series of gym lockers rise from. The be-suited crowd I had seen earlier had swum to the pier and clasped to it, their briefcases loose in the water behind them, gazing up at Obama, who was smiling and smiling and shutting his locker and smiling.
But from the article:
The West’s military strategy in Afghanistan slipped even deeper into confusion yesterday after President Barack Obama flatly rejected all four options for increases in troop levels presented to him by his team of national security aides…
The delay was prompted in part by a last-minute bombshell from the US ambassador in Kabul. In two cables to the President, Karl Eikenberry argued it would be a bad idea to increase troop levels because of the ineptitude of President Hamid Karzai, who finally secured a second term last week after the fraud-marred mess of the August elections.
It goes on to talk about how this ambassador has come into direct conflict with Obama’s military advisers. Well…la ti da! Obama made be accused of dithering, but I am singularly impressed with man’s insistance on following through all possible leads before making a decision. That is what you call diplomancy, which is something that annoys the hell out of me from people I live and work with on a day to day basis, but something I demand out of my represenatives.\
I’m sort of getting tired of writing now, and have to go and celebrate my 2 year anniversay w/my boyfriend, but more later…
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: i hate my boss, i hate my job, my job sucks, tent camps
I’m just going ramble along here, just ramble along because it’s my blog, and I can do that. I will not be paying any attention to grammar, spelling, proper capitalization, or what have you and this is also because it’s my blog and I can also do that. And if I feel defensive and open up a blog post in a hostile, guarded manner, I can do that too.
But okay, YES, I’m in a foul, foul mood: two parts self-aggrandizing, and one part contentious. Last night the Big Madam, the Director of Development here at this terrible theatre company I work for – the one that puts on astoundingly mediocre plays and is managed by a medley of middle-aged men and women with dissociative- personality disorder – asked if i could have a meeting with her about “report structure” and didn’t really know what the hell she was talking about because near half of what I do here is work on financial and statistical reports, but there certainly is not a “structure” in any practical use of the word, and besides, what the fuck? She could not be more palpably disinterested in me and what I do.
So I go out that night and I am feeling hateful. I was hateful all through the late-night, Brooklyn showing of “Muppets Take Manhattan,” hating on this kid sitting directly behind my hearing aid asking relentless questions to his humoring dad all night. I’m Hatey McHate because I’m convinced I’m going to get chastised in an Oprah kind of way, because the Big Madam is like that, very Big-Shot Inspiration, she can ignore you all the days long, but goddamn it she’ll LISTEN and TALK if its outcome will work in her favor. She’s the kind of person that won’t necessarily say “you are doing a terrible job” but “what can we do to help you work better” which only serves to make her feel okay, not me. It just puts me in a position where I can’t fight back.
And I was right!
What she was talking about with the “report structure” was f “report” in the adjective sense, as in who I report too. She’s decided that I’m going to report to this other Manager, which is sort of a demotion. A demotion in spirit. But also, she’s like “we can’t keep having these credit card errors” meaning the errors that I make because I’m stressed all the time and can’t see numbers so I will do things like charge a patron $4000 when I’m supposed to charge him $400 or schedule a payment to be charged in 2009 rather than 2010 like the patron wanted and anyway we are getting a terrible reputation for being incompetent and it is and there is no other way to put it, totally my fault. i suppose i should just be effing grateful that they have decided it is more financially responsible to try and work with me rather than firing me and hiring somebody who isn’t daydreamy and maybe actually cares about this fucking company and whether or not some douchebag rich patron is correctly charged in installments when that douchebag rich patron could clearly PAY IN FULL because he has a fucking FOUNDATION in his or her name.
but i don’t feel grateful. i feel the opposite of gratitude, which is, i guess, what? what is the opposite of gratitude? rejection? if it’s self-hate and super hostility toward the people who make me feel this way then hello HELLO, i feel the opposite of gratitude.
no no no, really, I really WOULD like to live in a tent camp. I’ve thought about this hard, and in detail. I wouldn’t be able to shower much and likely would be wearing the same clothes and would smell bad and eventually not have moisturizer or deoderant much, so i sit and think about that, living in a tent camp, and reading, reading books I find in the garbage and eating pizza rinds out of near-empty boxes tossed behind dorms, and it still STILL sounds better then coming here every day and fucking up and fucking everybody else up and not having any understanding why this is happening or what i can do to change it and you know what, i don’t even fucking WANT to. I don’t know how this happened but I am NOT a technical person and the people who keep hiring me for such nonsense are MORONS in the first place, as am I for thinking all this bullshit would ever be is a day job.
no, no, no, Fake Americans, it’s my life, certainly so, just the mildly-dyslexic subordinate of a 25 year old guy with a beard. THIS IS ALL.
Filed under: Populate Canada Now, Uncategorized | Tags: Fort Hood, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Sgt. Kimberly Munley
Somewhere in Texas, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is in an intensive care unit, in stable condition after he killed and wounded dozens of people during a shooting spree last week in Fort Hood.
A few weeks ago on House, James Earl Jones played a murderous African dictator who is hospitalized for something mysterious and I imagine the scene in Fort Hood to be similar: conflicted nurses and doctors keeping a terrorist alive, uniformed men standing by with muted expressions, lots of whispering behind reflected glass, etc.
But is he a terrorist? The right is screaming ‘YES’ the left is screaming ‘WAIT’ and the MSM is blessedly focused on memorializing the dead, reporting the spare facts blindly as they leak. If Hasan is a terrorist in the sense that he plotted in cahoots with a network of Islamic extremists, it would engorge the Right’s culture of fear…and they want it bad, so bad they are eating their fingers and their hands like caged researched chimps. If Hasan is a lone, religious psycho who cracked under the threat of deployment, then it creates an unprecedented nuance in the psychological state of our countrymen.
To me, Fort Hood is not about the danger of Islam but the danger of neglect. Columbine, Oklahoma, the Beltway Sniper were all murderous acts by men whose uncomfortable personalities were dismissed by those around them. We tend to do that with “off” people, angry people, and teenagers who read gun catalogs. We tend to do that with lonely-looking men with round faces and receding hairline. If you just showed me a picture of Hasan, I’d be tempted to conclude he collects star wars figurines and is a virgin. His chubby, open face sits heavy on his olive uniform like a snowman dressed for battle, a straightened paper clip for a mouth, a length of licorice for a uni-brow . I would think: this is a man who joined the army because he needed an identity that commanded respect where his individual person does not.
Likely, I would not consciously articulate any of these things, but only judge in an abstract manner, not so much judge as assume.
If a reader of Gateway Pundit was here right now I know exactly what he or she would say. They would start listing off all “evidence” that he is a Muslim terrorist connected to Obama (by attending some kind of panel that the Obama campaign was associated with somehow) and that he exchanged emails with a Yemeni cleric who is on record for supporting al Qaeda. Then they would say why I’m even wasting digital ink empathizing with a guy who murdered 13 soldiers, suggesting
Of course my heart goes out to the soldiers and their families, but their deaths are only part of what will redefine the political landscape from here on out. How we approach our new-found terrorist celebrity, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, is an issue for the country at large. Ghandi said, you can judge a nation by how it treats its animal and its prisoners. You could also say one can judge an ideology by how it exploits a madman.
Update: I sincerely wanted to express my admiration for Sgt. Kimberly Munley, the cop who brought Hasan down. I delight in the fact that a woman put down a Islamist, ANY Islamist who subscribes to the following passage from the Koran:
“Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband’s) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of annoyance):…
Filed under: Crazy Talk, Mentions of Dogs | Tags: daydream, fort tryon, health care debate, jogging, leahy, rilo kiley
Distracted and dreamy always, but lately it’s been laying on pretty thick, this daydreaminess I equal parts despise and cherish. I wake up way too early on Sunday and realize I left my bike chained up downtown the night before where A and I were eating jalopeno poppers and verbally galloping around a variety of topics from cats to big chins to the luxury costs of “drying out” (the latter with a man in a faux-captain’s cap).
So I get up early and climb into the exercise clothes cobbled off eBay from sellers in key swing states. It’s a good, brisk fall day and I skip out and down the high building stoop, wave to Gladys, the super, as she is stands in the entrance of the trash alley, waiting for a handyman. Leahy’s “The Skater” - a frenzied, whirling composition for the fiddle - is first on the shuffle and it isn’t hard to get myself up the steep paths that snake around Fort Tryon Park. Just as I hit the blurry, Bob Ross-y view of the Palisades, another jogger – black woman with a lovely figure and a bouncy permed ‘fro – appears out of my left. She impressively trots into the apex of my perspective like some child in an important piece of cinema, running away from the camera down a dusty, dirt road. She resembles, uncomfortably, my shrink, and I’m seized with a kind of paranoia that it could be her and that here I am, chasing my therapist, sort of, past a garden of newly-dead Heather. Just like a dream a character on ThirtySomething would have.
Down Cabrini Boulevard and back, all the dogs strain against their leashes as I pass. Turned back toward Fort Tryon after Madonna’s “Hung Up,” and finished the home stretch to my apartment with Rilo Kiley. The calico visage of the Palisades are now on my left and I get another blindside sensation, a strong, hopeful sense that it is, in fact Spring. For a moment I really do think so and smile to myself all happy that Summer is coming and things will start growing and be green. An audacious self-deception, the debilitating reality of piles of papery leaves and hot wood-smoke aroma should be enough to keep a sane person seasonal. Maybe it was the Rilo Kiley, whom I would not be surprised to learn were some mythical spawn of Persephone herself.
I run down a hill and cross the deadly intersection where Broadway splits like a nematode into clone of itself called Sherman Avenue. I’ve got a wedding to go to in New Jersey so everything from here on out is going to be about turning a job-interview dress into something more fitting for a cocktail. I hop up the steps of my building and wave again to the super who is still stands around waiting for something to save her from trash-alley that sucks at her backside. Sticking my key in the door I look down at somebody else’s rollled up log of the New York Times and squint to see the headline:
Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House
And I start running up the stairwell screaming and all the dogs in the building start barking and I even slip on the last step and bang my knee but keep on screaming and running into the apartment where my roommate is like “what the fuck?” and we read the article and high-five and I make myself a victory sandwich.
Filed under: Populate Canada Now | Tags: blingee, gay marriage, gay marriage law, maine
Filed under: New York Citisms | Tags: elizabeth lecompte, the public, weather, william dafoe, wooster group, world series, yankees
Why I insist on taking in second-hand information as truth is beyond me, especially when it takes ten seconds to check the weather reports myself. I said I was going to bike in today to this person and the person said “oh, well, you know it’s going to rain, right?” So, I did not ride this morning because that person’s eager attempt at small talk was somehow LAW. But it is bright and sunny.
Then, this person tells me “oh, well, it doesn’t look like it’s going to rain today after all,” and I wanted to smack them. I’ve been wanting to smack people a lot lately, mainly because I’m tired and without a tangible project to distract me from cynical observations on everyday life.
The Yankees won and I’m kinda okay with that now after listening to Phillie fans call us terrible things on The Daily Show. Even though I don’t care about grown men in pantsuits chasing a ball around, or their obnoxious fans spilling beer all over themselves and screaming predictable things, I am happy New York continues to be the absolute best at all things (except airports).
Free tickets to The Public last night where J and D swear they saw William Dafoe in the lobby but he was invisible to me. Perhaps, like a pair of lost sunglasses, he was on my head the entire time. Who knows. Dafoe is performing in Richard Foreman’s “Idiot Savant,” at The Public all month and this is terribly exciting. Dafoe is one of the few Hollywood actors who paid their dues performing mind-blowing avant-garde theatre with The Wooster Group during the seventies, before Martin Scorsese casted him as Jesus.
William Dafoe (right) during his Wooster Group heyday
Elizabeth LeCompte, the artistic director of The Wooster Group, the subject of a million theatre-major thesis’s, was his cougar. She is an insanely brilliant person who walks around her apartment while several TV’s are going at once just to sort of grasp the rhythm of these converging noises and images and then takes what she’s learned from the experience and applies it to Eugene O’Neill. She freaks people out by using blackface in chilling, poignant ways. She is eleven years older than William and they were together for a million years before he ran away with a much younger woman.
Somehow this all feels like Paul Dano being taken under the wings of Julie Taymor and then they become lovers and then he leaves her when he is still young but she much older and the time they’ve wasted on each other just isn’t the same kind of time. I don’t know, it’s a real love story to me, with a real tragedy. The kind I always thought I’d have, maybe can still have.
So I was excited to see William Dafoe, like meeting Samson or Abelard. He was apparently “right in front” of me…I saw nothing but a lot of men in long coats and expensive gloves and none of them had the pockmarked anchor of a chin or the newspaper cartoon smile. Maybe it’s for the best.
Do you ever love a book so much you walk down the street hugging it in one arm like a teddy bear? This is how I walk with Roberto Bolano’s 2666.
