| Language, any particular language, is usually less adept at describing a construct with contradictory or simply essentially divergent qualities than it is at describing the niceties of hierarchies or more harmonious, or at least homogeneously definable, phenomena. Let's just say this is true. It's not that important, actually, it's just a sort of triangle, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, when describing, say, a person who possesses a number of traits which one usually does not find ensconced in the same individual, one might rely on a formulation like this: he's one part John Wayne, one part Nikita Kruschev, and one part rodeo clown. While there's no obvious defect in this itself, there seems to be a laxness in establishing how many parts, basically, numerically, compose a person. Is it three? Two? Or five, or seven? The smaller numbers are probably more likely to be chosen just because it's more theoretically manageable, but you could just go on identifying dissimilar parts FOREVER and your terrified dinner guests would be POWERLESS to stop you, lacking any formal grounds for objection. I guess they could just ask you to stop talking, but they should know by now that when you stop talking, the party's over. | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment   |
| I was walking about on the vernal equinox; the temperature had jumped between the day before and that day by about twenty degrees, and I was glad to be without a coat.
One thing I forgot about winter. The cold air doesn't hold moisture very well, so when the season begins, all the things that you can normally find by scent (plants, things being cooked, the myriad unidentifiably but affecting traces of things that tell you where you are and what's around you) slowly begin to disappear, until eventually that sense reaches its annual obsolescence.
As I walked, the sky clouded up and a timid rain began to fall. Suddenly I was aware of the humidity in the air, the change seemed to reach backwards into the year and connect the present with the past. I closed my eyes and just breathed, feeling grateful for the sudden situation in discernable things, wet leaves, cut grass, wood burning. The air was ardent, the air was the palm of someone's hand, faintly moist and electric, urging me. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| The cinematography is so subtle and lovely.
Towards the end, Delmer starts talking about the forgiveness of his transgressions; I wonder if there is any correlation between a uniquely American brand of facile forgiveness and the moral dubiousness of the country as a social enterprise. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| #1: No, I cause I don't eat eggs, sweety.
#2: You don't eat eggs? Are you a lesbian?
#1: Yeah.
#3: I got somethin' prickin' me!
male employee: (talking in barry white voice) What's the-what is it?
#3: Somethin's prickin' me in my pants. Right here.
m.e.: ...Here?
#3: No, it's prickin me in here.
#2: I swear, it was the order taker we had!
chef: Uh-huh.
#2: She was sucking everyone's brains out. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | This post has been redacted because it was ridiculous. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Every so often, one hears a discussion of the prevalence of autism in the general population which involves an argument that goes something like this: although there is a proportionally greater number of diagnoses of autism now than there was, say, forty years ago, this is not necessarily indicative of a higher actual incidence of the disorder, because some portion of the current amount of diagnoses is generated by way of a differing or more inclusive definition than was once used. But perhaps this line of thinking would confuse a mutable theoretical construct with a phenomenon constrained by physical laws; it seems wrong to suggest that there may be a constant level of "true" autism precisely because the understanding its nature is still evolving. Otherwise, one is (or so it seems to me) in the awkward position of asserting that some forms of autism are more authentic than others. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| How to make a turkey sandwich:
1. remove expensive, freshly-baked italian bread from refrigerator.
2. place loaf on antique breadboard.
3. pause for a moment with knife over unbroken surface, thinking about how many loaves of bread have been cut on this board by past generations in your family. feel warm, part of something.
4. realize half-way through bread that knife is extremely dull, retrieve new knife.
5. there are no sharp knives anywhere. feel like unwitting participant in bizarre social experiment.
6. cut through bread with unusual force necessitated by useless knife. realize that knife has deeply scored precious antique cutting board.
7. realize this while bread slices are in toaster.
8. there is sawdust deeply embedded in bread slices.
9. put some turkey and mustard on bread and eat anyway. make careful mental note of own displeasure.
10. hours later, begin absentmindedly chewing on tiny pieces of wood loosed from between teeth. spit convulsively at first and then resume thoughtful mastication, resigned to phylogenic recapitulation. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I got into a bad habit in my early teens, encouraged by my brother and his then-girlfriend, of giving people bereavement cards on their birthdays. I thought it was simultaneously the cleverest and most sophisticated way to indicate that I loved them, but it was probably neither.
After a while, I grew tired of this practice; it began to seem like merely one instance of a more important idea, that of pretending to be calamitously ignorant, and so while I stopped doing it, I felt inspired to explore similar alternatives. It was a sort of gateway joke to more subtly obnoxious and irritating jokes.
I would give people thanksgiving cards on valentine's day (with inscriptions like, "Bring that nice girl over for turkey! What ever happened to her, anyway?"), I would pretend to have given people cards intended for someone else with weird, revealing messages, sometimes I would write long, rambling notes in the most obscurely conceived cards I could find (e.g. hepatitis Easter: uncle) and send them to people when there was no proximate holiday.
Anyway, this is all just by way of introduction to saying that I saw a card in a store today that was categorized as "Wife religious" and thought the first line inside would read, "With deepest condolences..." | | comments: Leave a comment |
| images, and the search terms I used to find them(note: the search terms were not applied as phrases):
"royal pain in the ass"
"entelechy"
"ectopic party"
"pachyderm anaesthesia" (honestly!)
"tolkien OCD problem"
He's gone, man. Stop calling. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Lying suddenly between wakefulness and sleep. There was a dream about a praying mantid, and then I was dreaming and seeing the dark ceiling of my room at the same time; intense, brilliant verdance like a vine was climbing and reaching into the empty space of my vision in regular intervals, emanating from nowhere and from everywhere. It would germinate in sharp green nodes, then coruscate outward in thick, bright strands and fitful convolutions, vibrating in a gradually attenuated pattern, then fade rapidly. A vague purple bathed the vaccuum of its departure.
This happened about five times before I realized that my cell phone was ringing. The tone was the synaesthetic hallucination. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | I wrote a parody of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by that name, but I'm not gonna post it here because it's really too silly to exist. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I ate so many of these Altoids Raspberry Sours that my tongue hurts. Is it the malic acid coating, I wonder, or the citric acid mixed into the confection itself? One never knows. Ouch.
Someone almost drove into me today. They were going pretty fast. I wonder what would have happened if they hadn't swerved away just in time to avoid it. As I turned and drove off, I looked at the woman who was immediately behind me: her face was frozen in a mask of terror, lips spread wide over clenched teeth, her hands gripping the sides of her head, and she sat in her car, not moving for a few moments until someone honked at her. She seemed much more frightened than I felt, but I didn't really have time to react. I guess she saw what seemed to be about to occur. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| 1. My room was quiet while I was asleep and dreaming, moments before I woke up this morning, except for the antique drone of the fan I keep running through the night to soothe me. The dream ended suddenly (the scene involved me making horse shoes, and there was a chess game involved somewhere too I think) and my eyes split evenly open. I got up and opened the curtains. Clouds again; familiarity and disappointment are lovers, their bodies waiving distinction. Snow covers about half of the ground and mirrors the sky's shallow blanketing. The bird feeder is starkly black and distinct against the lake of white, a broken tree. Suddenly a red-breasted cardinal alights and nibbles the seed, small and bright, like a little fire burning and unconsumed, beautiful and alone. It eats, stops, looks around, eats again, looks around some more. It looks directly at me and I smile.
2. Walking to the car, I notice that the pine trees at the far end of the lawn, about a hundred feet from the house, are sheathed in a thick congress of blackbirds, rustling and swaying lightly in the breeze. I stop and wait until I have their attention because I know they're watching me. Then I say something loudly to them, but without shouting; a few of them take off immediately, then more, and in the confusion that ensues, they nearly all leave for neighboring trees, setting off the blackbird equivalent of a turf war, with many dozens of birds filling the sky above me and shrieking imprecations, landing and taking off from tree branchs, squabbling amongst the pine needles and cones. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| If you haven't heard of the SCA, here's their website. They're an interesting group. I want to go beyond what they consider creative.
I want to start a Society for Disruptive Anachronism.
Upon reflection, other possibilities: Society for Distracting Anachronism, Society for Unexpected Anachronism. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| are hilarious. Examples, from the small-town newspaper that I've been reading recently:
-A headline: "Minestrone Versatile Soup"
-One entire section of the newspaper is devoted to the history of the region, and exclusively features items which are not news, which are actually the opposite of news, e.g. Remember that real bad snowstorm of '73? or, Do you recall the ice-skatin' rink they tore down five decades ago?
-The daily lottery/horse race/etc. results are presented in a consolidated group, printed as a small block of text, in which is inserted a phone number for a twenty-four-hour hotline, and underneath it in smaller type is the identification, "Gambling Problem Help". I thought it would be funny to call them and ask for hot tips, lotto numbers or somesuch but they probably get a lot of non-jesting calls of that nature already. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I was at a Sears today. Perhaps it's just the location I went to, but they seem to overstaff their stores by a significant factor. There seemed to be more employees there than customers, and they were just standing around and chatting with each other. Sometimes I would pass a group of two or three employees and slow down a little, expecting the alpha employee to approach me and make some kind of offer for help finding something, but this did not occur.
First, I needed to get a staple gun, which I did. As I was walking away, I passed the large-appliance area, where there were, and I'm not exaggerating, like six employees standing in a hymenopteric clump. When I walked by they all realized that at least one of them had to ask me if I needed help finding anything. One guy finally did, and I said that I was looking to buy an oven and could he help me out, just because I thought suddenly that I didn't know anything about buying a new oven and this might be a good opportunity to find something out. He said he couldn't. I stood there, not knowing how to take this. Was it possible that he didn't know where they were? No, because we were standing two feet away from an oven, and immediately surrounding it were dozens of other ovens. Was he suggesting that this request was clearly without merit, since we both knew that we were standing right next to an embarrassment of ovens? Certainly it was, but since when are sales clerks allowed to say no to painfully ludicrous requests? Suddenly I noticed something. He was standing across the foot-wide aisle from the oven section.
"Oh, you guys can't work this side of the aisle, right?" I asked jokingly, figuring that this was like him if they're allowed to go to the bathroom alone.
"No," he replied stiffly, "I just do the microwaves."
I have not the words.
No, wait, here they are: screw you, Sears, for instantiating the human resources equivalent of crippleware. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| I have a headache. And I can't sleep.
We're all adults here, and surely it will not surprise anyone to acknowledge the limits of any linguistic system in expressing the variety of subjective experiences that may be described with a single term; I do not know if the green I see is the green anyone else sees, and I do not know if your headaches are like my headaches. As I type that I wonder, has anyone ever had the headache I'm having right now before? Maybe a not-me person has. Anyway, the subjective experience I'm having in my "head" (and I use the quotation mark there to indicate that linguistic signifiers are arbitrary) makes me think of nothing so much as a herd of yak, hither and thither tumbling in gently surging waves over a cliff in the early morning mist, their yak falling-song caressing the trees and grasses and all living things, as observed from far enough away to perceive the yak as tiny yakkish motes, their cries a lullaby (it was a late night and I was just drifting off).
So, I have a headache and I can't sleep, but as a result of those two conditions I'm in a situation which is not either of them individually and yet is only possible with their mutual contribution. The whole is thus both less and more than the sum of its parts, because one might argue that my state is a singular one, as it is not strictly both headache AND insomnia but rather an alchemy of their concomitance.
UUUUURG
I got an e-mail today from someone who was of the belief that "things wouldn't work out" between us, unless I "have a 3,000+ mile-long penis," in which case, we "maybe could talk". This is a perfect illustration of the difficulties and misunderstandings involved in trying to make platonic friends on the internet. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
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