New Year's Resolution

5 posts per week.

Uh, just as soon as I return from my semiannual Taming Of The Cacomistles in the desert. Thursday. Like I always say, keep clicking "refresh." Something new and clever is bound to appear soon.

Gold nuggets

• If the Special Lady can have a crush on Liev Schreiber, who hit on her at a restaurant, I am surely allowed a crush on Carla Bruni, who did not hit on me at a restaurant. Or maybe she did. Why do you automatically assume that she didn't? Huh?


• Please note my superhuman restraint. Now watch me violate that restraint with the brutality of a Siberian tiger snapping its hempen tethers. The 49ers finished 7-9 this year with a surprising victory in their last game against the Broncos. I knew they would win, however, since I have magic powers. "Corn Chips The Greek" correctly called their 4-12 season in 2005, and correctly called their 7-9 season this year. Little good my powers do me, other than augmenting my smugness and helping the Special Lady to win $100 in her office pool.


• When AW's special doctor-pager goes off, it usually says stuff like "car v. pedestrian" or "ladder fall", but the other day, it said "lion mauling," which turned out to be an unfortunately accurate description.
  
• I have about a week left on the West Coast before I return to tropical Baltimore. An Xtreme, manhood-affirming camping trip to Death Valley beckons on Sunday. But part of me doesn't want to leave the Bay Area; it's been so fucking beautiful. Valley oaks, scrub oaks, black oaks, blue oaks, Coast Live oaks, tan oaks, bay, madrone, manzanita, toyon, amanita, bobcats and hawks &c... and don't get me started on liar's dice at the Buddha Bar.
  
• Via PY: check out this article on Sri Lankan masks representing various diseases. The middle one (in the image above) is Bihiri Sanniya, the demon of parasitic worms and and stomach diseases.

We're at least a decade away from a reacharound machine

Mrs. Fesler, my junior high school English teacher, always touted the virtues of the "Golden Grabber," the name she bestowed upon any arresting opening sentence in an essay. I hope that she would be proud of the following:

If you really need some spare cash, you can volunteer to get fucked up the ass by a machine for precisely five minutes until a viscous vehicle for radioisotopes is ejaculated into your rectum; you must then allow endoscopic imaging and 360-degree SPECT/MRIs of your colorectal tract for the next 24 hours.

HIV is a problem. Condoms work pretty well. Trouble is, lots of folks don't use 'em, and plus, plenty of women in this coercive little world don't have much control over condom use. So the ideer is to develop an effective and cheap microbicide, allowing the fuckee to grease up the vagina or the anus (maybe even in secret), and thus to pork away with fewer worries.

But. Nobody really knew what properties were necessary for an effective microbicide. E.g., how far did it have to, you know, go up there? How long did it have to persist? Enter CH and colleagues, riding to the rescue.

The topic is fascinating and complex, and deserves far more respect than this giggly blog post. But whatever. So CH and colleagues test out microbicides and their performance against semen surrogates. Like I says, they get volunteers to simulate anal and vaginal sex for five minutes (tragically, the median duration of sex) with a fuckin' machine until a researcher presses the "ejaculate" button, spewing forth a gel laden with a particulate radionuclide complex. 24 hours of monitoring and imaging follows.

Anal sex is particularly tricky for microbicides, in part because the wall of the colon is only two cells thick, and in part because there's so much real estate to cover. (Incidentally, it's estimated that there are approximately equal numbers of "anal sex events" between heterosexual couples and gay couples; the frequencies kinda even out.) Among many interesting results, it turns out that within a few hours, the jazz can "migrate" six feet up the colon. And by the way, yes, taking a massive dump may be an inexpensive (if unreliable) means of post-exposure risk reduction.

Anyway. Sleep well tonight, knowing that people way smarter than us are still working on this problem, and marvel that they somehow manage to refrain from making juvenile jokes about it.

El Castillito

In a parallel, more just universe, El Castillito is the West Coast equivalent of Katz's. A line of tourists snakes out the door, across Church St., and into Safeway, where customers kill time by reading In Touch magazine. In this delicious universe, the print of a bullfighter is joined on the wall by framed glossies of celebrities: Richard Dean Anderson, Loni Anderson, Kurt Andersen. Hey, isn't that David Caruso hamming it up with a quesadilla suiza? Ronnie Lott's head looks tiny, for once, next to his Super chicken burrito. Photos of Teamsters leaders, politicians, Bay Area icons (Huey Lewis, Rickey Henderson, the great-great-granddaughter of Lola Montez) jostle for prime real estate behind the cash register.

A sign marks the exact table where Mark Linn-Baker so memorably ejaculated on Shelley Long's tortilla chips in the 1980s romantic comedy Friends With Privileges. Another sign reads "Send A Burrito To Your Friend In Toledo." Smug SF locals remind their out-of-town friends to "get the bottled Coke. It's Mexican. Real sugar."

Why is it my favorite burrito? They grill the tortilla, simultaneously melting the cheese. 3 kinds of beans to choose from. Avocado or guacamole. Option to add onions & cilantro. And-- most importantly-- they re-grill the marinated chicken upon taking your order. The finished product is 2 pounds, easily, and is so delicious that you hardly need to add their avocado/tomatillo salsa. The place hasn't changed much over the years. The name "El Castillito" is remarkably difficult to spot, and is even absent from the sign above the door. They've added a juice machine, and diversified their salsa collection, but it's pretty static.

Update:
Chef brother: "Why do you like that place so much?"
Me: "Come on. It's fantastic."
Chef brother: "It's all right."
Me: "All right? All right? Are you kidding?"
Chef brother: "Low standards."

Corn Chips & Pie Will Return

in Thunderball.

In the meantime, here's a fistful of anecdotal chaff:

• Purchased an espresso pot from a great used cookware store on Divisadero in SF. Upon learning I live in Baltimore, the guy behind the counter told me about hangin' with Divine in Venice Beach during the 1980s. "Glen" wore a white muumuu to the beach. He loved to drink Diet Pepsi in bulk and jump up & down on a friend's waterbed. That's about as crazy as the stories got.
• Robin Williams was behind me in line at a bookstore. I didn't catch what he was buying, so we may feel free to speculate that it was a point-of-purchase book about unicorns. There is a better joke here somewhere, but I don't have it in me.
• While I was riding the Airport Beer Dragon in Miami, the woman next to me turned & said, with no intro or buildup, "I just got out of a very abusive relationship." She then described how her boyfriend, a vicious ex-con, threatened to kill & skin her dog while she was away for the holidays. I glanced around nervously & said loudly, "Well, sounds like you blew it! He's quite a catch! Hop on that train before it leaves the station! Gotta run!"
• It is a glorious day in the Bay Area.

Solstice nuggets

What does one do when one's flight to San Francisco is canceled? There are really only 3 socially acceptable options: 1) drink, 2) blog, or 3) drink and blog.

• This is a typically perceptive post from Dervala Hanley on depression, on Against Depression, and against depression. I had vowed to read Peter Kramer's book earlier this year, and now I must follow through. Damn it.
• I know I'm a week late on this, and I'm sure sports talk radio has made the point... but since I now live in Baltimore, I feel obliged to comment on the Knicks-Nuggets brawl. Here on Carmelo Anthony's home turf, you see that kind of thing every day. What happens to snitches on the streets of Baltimore? Open-handed slaps and panicked backpedaling. It's ugly.
• Speaking of slaps, I was discussing revenge daydreams with a friend the other day. Sure, some people deserve a sharp blow to the throat. But others merely deserve a soft, chilly, damp slap, right across the ol' muzzle. The kind of greasy slap where the hand lingers on the face. Almost more push than slap. The mere thought delights me.
• I'm thinking about devoting an entire week of Corn Chips & Pie to photographs of marine life. That giant halibut plucked a chord deep within me. F# minor.

I know you like analogies

The situation of an obscure blogger waiting for web traffic reminds me of a driver sitting in a line of cars, waiting for a signal to start the ignition and to drive into the cargo bay of a waiting car ferry. It is an interminable wait. One anticipates the moment of action: all you gotta do is turn the key. Shift into first. Release the clutch. In you go.

Unfortunately, I tend to dwell upon the unremarkable task before me. I overthink it, you know? And so when the time finally arrives, I turn the key. I shift into first. I release the clutch. I slam into the car in front of me. My container of flammable liquid—perched with foolish nonchalance upon the dashboard—tips over and empties its contents onto my crotch. As my mouth opens in surprise, I release the walnut pipe that had been clenched manfully between my teeth. As ember meets kerosene, my testicles explode in an eerily beautiful fireball. I jerk and writhe uncontrollably, inadvertently jarring the lever controlling the trunk, thus releasing my troupe of rhesus monkeys wearing Semtex belts (I’ve been training them for strictly artistic purposes) in full view of the customs & immigration officials.

So I’d like to thank Mr. Uncle Grambo for his kind mention of this blog on Valleywag. I fear, however, that even his considerable torque may be insufficient to budge this blog from the iron jaws of obscurity. Plus, this is the post that will greet new visitors. All I had to do was drive the fucking car into the ferry. And now I’ve set my crotch on fire again.

But hey, there's a picture of a really big halibut just below.

Gigantfisken

Here is a good website. It reports odd incidents involving marine life around the UK. Sperm whale beachings, tropical fish far afield, etc. Via the site, I found the accompanying picture of the world's largest halibut. Our waggish Norwegian fisherman also posed for another picture in which he simulates riding on the back of this monster from the briny depths.

As the Norwegian newspaper report states, "Uansett om det er reduksjon i prisen, så tjente han seg en pent dagslønn på gigantfisken." Hey, I hear that!

Also: my memory's not what it used to be, and I am many years removed from my stint on the Argentinian whaling vessel (El Pato Agujereado). But I'll be damned if this is ambergris. That woman should be ashamed of herself, exercising the nation needlessly like that.

From each according to his ability...

...to each according to his need. But what need, precisely? I think China needs to get the World's Tallest Prostitute on a plane to Inner Mongolia.

Here's why.

Just call me Ron Mexico*

Owing to an unusual turn of events, I found myself in Mexico City from Thursday until Sunday. Somewhat surreally (and uncharacteristically, I hasten to add), I experienced the megalopolis through the sensory filters employed by the top 0.001% of the Mexican economic elite. Cheerfully superhuman concierges. Absurdly good food. Pouilly-Fuissé and top-shelf tequila. Black SUVs with tinted windows; chauffeurs who were former matadors & who regaled us with tales of broken spines and altitude-handicapped bulls (bulls in Mexico City are smaller than bulls at lower altitudes, due to pulmonary necessity). Gated communities with private equestrian centers; ostentatiously tasteful cedar libraries with books on 16th century legal theory, and with a creepily clichéd first edition of Mein Kampf in Spanish. Blowhards and quietly brilliant rich men. Trophy wives with nonstandard facial geometry.

Luckily, we were able to get away for a while. The zocalo at night was hallucinatory: giant colored LED displays of holiday cheer loomed over the periphery, while groups of young people performed aggressive Indian dances in unison. It smelled like roast corn and propane. The mountain town of Tepoztlán is what I imagine Taos to be like: gorgeous and haunting if you can ignore the fucktard New Agers. A "doctor" with a stethoscope around her neck (in a touchingly simple bid for credibility) and her mascara-heavy tranny sidekick read my aura, for the hell of it. There was a problem when their Windows 95 operating system had trouble running the crude program designed to randomly spit out horoscopic gibberish... but I was assured that my aura was so crushingly powerful that the computer couldn't handle it. It was ok. Outside, a mariachi band played with flair and bogglingly tight coordination. A wedding party was breaking up. Cloudlike white flowers spilled out of the ancient church.

*My professor in an infectious disease class once referred to the Michael Vick herpes case as an illustrative example of asymptomatic shedding.

[---+++---]

Look, the fact that I haven't posted in a while doesn't necessarily mean I thought the last post was all that great. All right? Will you get off my back now?

Also: good for Our Boy.

Pole explorer heads north

Hedy moved to Washington, D.C. from Poland when she was young. She and her husband raised two boys on little money, and could ill afford extravagance, but Hedy was determined to expose her kids to the Realm of the Metropolitan. DC wouldn't do: "Washington was a mausoleum then. Well, it still is."

But Baltimore-- now, Baltimore is a "real city." So every week, she took her two sons to Baltimore, walked the streets, and simply stood there on one particular corner. She instructed the children to "feel the pulse of the city rising from beneath the sidewalk." One day, a man approached them, and gently inquired why this little trinity made weekly appearances on the corner. Hedy explained her educational goals, and noted that Baltimore was as far as she could afford to take them on the train.

That winter, during another one of their vibe vigils, three men approached Hedy and gave her an envelope. Inside: cash for train tickets to New York. A reservation at the Hotel Dixie. Cash and recommendations for restaurants.

I am aching to add a joke of some kind here, but I'll just let this one be.

I am thinking

about just hanging it up and providing a mirror to Amitava Kumar's site.

The Web would be left with an alarming dearth of juvenile, unfunny jokes re: fecal matter and/or sexual situations, though. Who would step in to fill the void?

No pictures of Britney's twat here

Why not make it a perfectly mirth-free week?
Check this out and observe Josh Marshall, whose prose usually matches the tone of his banner photo (eyebrows wryly raised & forehead slightly wrinkled, ready to wonk the crap out of Social Security privatization), string together the adjectives "noxious," "risible," and "fetid" with nary a pause for refreshment. And not unfairly so. Not unfairly so.

marginal dollar

It's rare that such an intense admiration for a writer and such a spittle-inducing frustration with her words coexist in my soft & misshapen head. I know it's just an honest and human yowl, and mostly a frustrated blog post about Iraq.* Plus, everybody wants to give the pious a good cockpunch. But come on. There's plenty of low-hanging fruit for you do-gooders, and none of it involves marching.

This is true even if you're fucking stupid, breathtakingly lazy, and possessed of only the wherewithal to plop your gym-toned asses on your Brno chairs and give money. I'd like to create a site called "Marginal Dollar." It would employ a small team of smartypants economists & epidemiologists & such to identify a weekly Worthy Recipient of one's donations. The choice would be as scientific as possible but ultimately one of arbitrary taste. Usually small programs but not necessarily. Click to donate. Leave the thinkin' to others, who will be wrong much of the time but right some of the time. At the moment, it's hard to go wrong giving money to "orphan disease" mitigation programs like those for childhood helminth infections, expansion of DOTS TB control programs, &c.

I know it may sound like I've sipped the Public Health Kool-Aid. But it's hard to ignore that self-righteous pricks like Jeffrey Sachs are right (in overall message, even if you argue with the details): international health is grossly, obscenely underfunded. Though we may rightly gnash our teeth about Iraq, malnutrition and disease are the biggest evils in the world. That is staggeringly obvious. And it's not only recalcitrant and/or malevolent geopolitical forces that dictate outcomes. A huge part of it is simply money.

It is incredibly pathetic that Bill Gates has revolutionized the scope of public health research through his donations. To repeat myself, it is incredibly pathetic that the payroll of the AL East is half the annual budget for the WHO. It is incredibly pathetic that the CGIAR network loses core funding from country donors every year. It is incredibly pathetic that two days of US military spending in Iraq would be sufficient to meet the annual spending goals set to wipe out TB & thus save 2 million lives a year. The only silver lining is that marginal dollars count. Marginal dollars that you can give, and that might actually do something useful besides making Sally Struthers stop weeping.

Look, I oversimplify, and I am not arguing that we should remove attention from Iraq. But what little I've said is true. Give me that. And give me your money so I can buy some small-batch bourbon instead of this rail "whiskey," which I'm pretty sure is just ethanol.

*State-sponsored violence, and violence in general, arouses more outrage than state-condoned passivity in the face of massive human suffering. Easier to let a man get hit by a train than to push him in front of it. Maybe this makes ethical sense. I dunno.

I invented four things in my sleep

• A donut shaped like a sea urchin with spines of crystalline caramel.
• A baseball preening ritual wherein one ostentatiously places one's Oakley wraparound shades atop home plate for subsequent retrieval following one's 360-foot home run trot.
• A "lost" Gunter Grass novel about rabbits, along the lines of Watership Down.
• A new kind of stripey pants.

This is the blogging equivalent of mentioning in conversation that your muscles are sore, or that you actually don't care for Cornish hens. Id est, nobody cares, I think.

Choose Your Own Adventure

You and your brother push aside the rusty grating, and descend into the inky blackness. To the left, you see a faint glowing. To the right, it is pitch black, but you hear a Latin drumbeat that evokes Tito Puente.

If you want to head to the left, turn to page 14.

If you feel the "ritmo" of the right, turn to page 87.

[no subject]

You don't need a blog named "Corn Chips and Pie" to tell you that time passes quickly, more quickly than any of us can understand. But blogs exist to generate superfluous syllables. So.

When I lived in Washington, D.C., I knew a beautiful lady named Cora. She was born in Maryland, on a tobacco farm, during World War I. At the very end of her life, when she had lost almost everything she had ever known, she somehow retained her kindness and social grace.

She had Alzheimer's, and went through periods in which she could remember the dress she wore when she learned her father had died of a heart attack (she was in a cornfield with her sister), but could not remember where she was. She was in a nursing home with flickering fluorescent lights and yellowing linoleum, surrounded by caring but numb Ethiopian nurses.

Thus, when she expressed sincere bewilderment at the disappearance of tobacco farms and the ascendance of strip malls in Maryland and Virginia, it was plain that Alzheimer's was not to blame. "What happened to all the farms?" she asked, wide-eyed. Memory loss? No. She remembered every year of her life up to around the turn of the century. She spent most of her life as the maid for a piano salesman. "A Jewish man. He was always very kind to me. As white people go, I have no complaints with the Jews. Always very kind."

No, she remembered everything: the second world war, the postwar boom, the civil rights movement, the sneaky creep of incomprehensible technology. But she could not understand how the landscape of her childhood-- of her adolescence, of her adulthood, for God's sake-- could be so transformed. I myself only have anecdotal evidence of this. Once was a sorghum field, now it's a Linens & Things. You got it; you got it. But just drive west on 66 from DC. Or explore 'round Gaithersburg. Even if you never saw what came before, you will get a feeling in your marrow. An unpleasant feeling.

But the ethics & aesthetics of suburban sprawl are totally irrelevant. Cora was utterly bewildered, scared even, at the changes wrought upon her world. And she died-- Cora died alone, through no fault of her distant relatives who did their part-- alienated and dizzied, but with a subtle, straight-backed defiance. She broke institutional rules by using Scotch 3M double-sided tape to mount prints of fruit-bowl still lifes. She complained about the unruly sycamore trees, left untrimmed outside her 5th-floor window. She clucked and shook her head at coverage of the DC sniper. Muhammad and Malvo were sniping from former irrigation ditches, from outbuildings, from stands of fencerow dogwoods.

Cora never got married, and convinced me that she was happy with the decision. There was one man in particular, a man with whom she'd had a 15-year relationship, but it just was never quite right. He'd died. Her old boss had died. Many of her relatives had died. Time just flew right by, and she never really got a handle on things, and now there was an Outback Steakhouse in her daddy's back 40, and there you go.

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I never thought I would say this, but the 49ers lost to an inferior team today.

I have lived in several major metropolitan areas: SF, DC, NY, and now Baltimore. In 3/4 of those cities, it was easy to find natives who didn't give a flying fig about their sports teams. Most sane people would argue that this is a sign of a healthy, vibrant community. Still. It's nice to be in a city where the bars are packed on Sundays with purple #52 jerseys. People love their Ravens, and hate them too. It was 24-0 in the 4th quarter today, and the crusty old guy next to me was bitching about McNair to general approval. He threw me a bone by reciting half the roster of the 1947 San Francisco 49ers-- the team that beat the Colts 14-7 in Kezar Stadium half a century ago.

I am finding that I love Baltimore.

Thanks

I am thankful for Rickey. Pay him.

I am thankful for Lindsay. The Altmans are surely smiling through their tears.

I am not thankful for Blogger. Why are my posts invisible sometimes? Why didn't I use Typepad?

Late nite man-nuggets (Ayn Rand, cigar, football, 007)

• From the Washington Monthly: "The Gingrichites were a bunch of high school kids who got hooked on Ayn Rand and then forgot to grow out of it. They had obsessive personalities but no serious experience of the world, and this toxic combination led to a genuine, sincere, completely delusional belief that Atlas Shrugged wasn't a monomaniacal flight of fancy, but a blueprint for society that could actually be put into practice. They were the guys who rant from soapboxes in Hyde Park, but with nice suits and silk ties."
• I am smoking a small cigar right now. I cannot tell if I enjoy it.
• The 49ers are now 5-5, one game out of first place in the NFC West, and all across the country, Niners fans have turned to their friends and said "Hey, they could make the playoffs." All these fans attempted to convey withering irony when uttering this absurdity, but they overdid it a little, and if you looked in their eyes, there was an insane little gleam, and tiny droplets of Anchor Steam were flying out of their mouths. This is a 7-9 team, foax. I swear.
• I quite enjoyed Casino Royale, but I looked at my ticket stub, and the truncation of the title evoked what might have been an even better movie: "Casino Roy." Starring Alex Karras and Fred Willard.

'nother note

Just a brief word before I get back to whatever it is that I'm supposed to be doing:
There is a very distinct type of person who is very common in Baltimore. He is very thin, maybe heroin-thin, maybe just morning wine & Utz potato chips thin. He has a long ponytail and a cigarette. He has a black tanktop with dried paint on it, and he has tattoos. He has a baseball cap. He may be a contractor. He has three teeth. He is Caucasian, but his skin is really the color of bloody clay.

note

This is a big-tent country for people with unusual obsessions and fantasy lives. For the most part, America condones and even encourages all kinds of stupid single-mindedness among those with disposable incomes. All part of the gorgeous tapestry of life, etc. There's nothing wrong with it, unless you are a Chris Ware character whose life is ravaged by a lifelong devotion to action figures. But I presumptuously offer one suggestion.

If you find yourself Googling "Matt Houston fan fiction", you might stop and consider whether your unhappiness and your hobby have a common causal antecedent. And, hey, maybe you could try to wipe the slate clean. Start over. (There are several of you out there, so take heart.)

Go balloons!

Biggest douchebag. Hmm. There were so many spectacular douchebags in this campaign, it would be unfair to pick a winner. But I am unfair. I pick George Allen. Sweet as it was to see Rick Santorum's retarded children weep onstage Tuesday night, it was even sweeter to watch George Allen concede this afternoon.

And it isn't just his racism that earns him the bag-- it is carrying that fucking football wherever he goes. Hey, there he is, tossing the ol' pigskin around before he votes! Hey, let's have a little catch at Rosa Parks' funeral! And of course, just before his concession speech, he whips out the football & tosses a little girly-armed dying quail to a supporter. What an asshole.

And I should know. George Allen and I are both effete aristocrats who wield football talk in much the same manner that Ian Faith wielded a cricket bat-- as an affectation. The common folk love the NFL, I'm told, and so I keep it real with a few 49ers* references.

*Who are moving to Santa Clara, home of office parks and guys named Marshall with job titles like Solutions Coxswain.

I didn't mean THAT, but now that you mention it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUvDdzBr5Fk

Holy Toledo.

Ken Mehlman got beat up a lot as a kid

Share with me, if you will be so kind, a restrained fist-pump. Gently close your eyes, tilt your head slightly downward, ball your fingers into a fist, and slowly tuck your elbow in to your side.

If you are a lawyer, I think that it would be fun for you to head to Virginia or Montana to do pro bono work. It's like sprinting down from your $45 seats at the MCI center, anxious to start scrappin', because your Brendan Haywood is trading surreally long, whip-like swings with an Atlanta Hawk.

Just watch out for Rove; you don't wanna end up like that Pistons fan who thoughtfully provided his fat head as a punching bag for Ron Artest. My suggestion is this: throw beer at Rove and make him charge you, then feign a mental disability.

Nuggety clusters

• No reason to be optimistic, other than a refusal to let the Republicans sap all hope from this country. Vote early, drink immediately afterward.
• This whole Borat thing is totally overhyped. I mean, what, exactly, is funny about a naked hairy man with fat-pillows shoving his nutsack into another naked hairy man's face? What's so funny about bringing a small bag of feces down from the bathroom at a formal Southern dinner party? What is so funny about the line, "all other countries have inferior potassium"? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing funny about those things. Best movie ever ever.
• 49ers: I stand, resolute, at the prow of this 3-5 ship. A stiff wind of derision blows. My hair is flatteringly ruffled. I squint at the horizon, and see the Lions, Rams, Packers, and Cardinals on the schedule. My cruel mouth twists into a slight smirk. 7-9 ho!
• Not to get too navely gazey (recall, however: this is a blog), but I thought I'd recap last week's structured blogging experiment. Monday: workmanlike and unspectacular. Tuesday: I liked my joke. Wednesday: running on empty, I turned to Jack Evans. Thursday: a really weak finish. Friday: let's just pretend I posted on Friday. Verdict: "structure" and "form" are like barbed wire fences to the gamboling chestnut mare of my creativity.

Let's start your week off right

Great world we live in here. Kudos all around. Nice one.

"In one course, an advanced trauma treatment program he had taken before deploying, he said, the instructors gave each corpsman an anesthetized pig.

“The idea is to work with live tissue,” he said. “You get a pig and you keep it alive. And every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded creature.”

“My pig?” he said. “They shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire.”

“I kept him alive for 15 hours,” he said. “That was my pig.”"

Thursday: reading, watching, doing, wanking

Such a fucking lackluster topic. I should have called an audible & done something else, but I just want to be done with it. The schedule-based blogging experiment ends this weekend.

So. I can recommend the following media/consumer experiences, experiences of which I am currently availing myself:
Re-reading is all I can muster while in school. Now re-reading: Joan Didion's Where I Was From, Lloyd Brown's The Story of Maps, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Listening to early Stones-- Aftermath, Out of Our Heads. Also Can, Ted Leo, The Vines. Recent theater movies: The Prestige (good), The Departed (great). Recent Netflix: Duck Soup, Easy Rider, Aliens. Just consumed a nice Barolo with a lorazepam. Also: try to reach your personal ceiling for garlic consumption. 'Sfun.

I also recommend making a pomander ball whilst watching the Warriors lose game 1 of their season. It is very soothing.

Wednesday: Esto es "topical humor"

The blogger's crutch, the easy laff. Everyone does it; it's ok. Sometimes, you know, you just need a cheap & quick post for the ol' Hump Day.* So you take a headline from the paper, add a joke involving hot anal sex, water sports, or an "edgy" racial jab, and your work is done for the day. I'm going to break our blogging appointment today, though, because I am even lazier than that, and because P.W. Botha died, and I wanted to just remind you of this: Ninety years of life are rarely wasted on somebody less deserving. Here's a nice valediction.

*There's this character I occasionally slip into when speaking with my brother and a couple of friends, who respond in kind. His name is Jack Evans. He is a businessman. He speaks loudly on the telephone. He says things like "just shoot me an email" and "I'm gonna bounce a couple of ideas off you" and "I hear that, buddy." When picking up the phone, he says "Jack Evans." He talks about "working for the weekend" and "cracking open a cold one," but when he is working, he is all business. He may be funny only to me & my coterie.