Do not bark up that tree, that tree will fall on you

Can I be the Browns GM? I promise I won’t trade for a Broncos running back. Reuben Droughns my ass. OK I have to go.

None shall escape the Judgment

Cars Driven 2005
Pontiac Firebird owned by Carmelita the in-home caregiving personality
Minivan owned by guy I work for
Acura owned by guy I work for
My mom’s PT Cruiser?
Dad’s pickup truck? Maybe? Have I been in Cleveland in 2005?
Land Rover owned by Gabe
That other one

I’ve run through about every potential way I can avoid doing work today, except this one. Which is not to say that this is the blog entry equivalent of a clip show (and that, the subsequent ‘this’, is good or worth your time in any way. In fact, where you would get that kind of impression I can’t say). The ways I have avoided doing work include going to a different job for a while, taking off the hardtop and putting on the soft top on someone else’s Jeep, reading a very long article about the proposed NY Jets Westside stadium, thinking about whether or not my earlier contention that I don’t give a shit about people in comas is holding true (still going), wondering whether I lost one of the two cats I am currently project-managing (pretty sure I did; screen door was open [I didn't open it] but the cat can deal with a dirty pepperland courtyard just fine), stumbling up and down 57th street several times, loitering/ogling undergraduates, standing on the other side of 57th street tracking panhandling troop movements, looking at a satellite picture of the building i was sitting in to see if my idea of what the roof looks like is what it actually looks like (it is). You can also add making this list to the list itself.

Larger points:
Why not get an MFA. NANCY THE BUSINESS MANAGER GAVE ME A #$)# CHECK I AM RICH! not actually: $118.25

Anyway, MFAs.

She drags your laundry through the street….
What’s the deal with Steve Earle? Is he just inconsistent on account of being a psychopath/almost dead or whatever? His idea of a rugged country guitar-rock record about the American Taliban was a very good one, on paper at least. I wouldn’t be wondering if there weren’t 45 seconds of unaccountable silence at the end of this Steve Earle song on this CD.

Another thing: Is William Kennedy good? Can I get a call from the replay booth?

I stopped reading The Recognitions by William Gaddis because it was beginning to make me deeply unhappy, both regarding my ability to get through good but extremely challenging fiction quickly and my general actual mental healthy, which it was peeing on pretty much.

Can I get a ruling on how selfish it is to not want to work a 9-5 job? Ordinarily selfish or galactic failure to lessen the burden of your fellow man

Like striking out the pitcher

This was initially going to be about the guy who played Dr. McCoy on Star Trek died a couple of years ago and nobody was appropriately respectful of his passing. Then I realized that I wasn’t sure if he had actually died so we went back to the drawing board. Why are you dressed like that. Stop it. I had medium-sized plans for a long post about how Jim Nantz/Billy Packer almost gave me congential heart defects yesterday simply by being dumb but we don’t hate, we appreciate here, at least for the next five to ten minues. I have to make some kind of list of information about regional pool tours; I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing, exactly. That’s not right. I have some idea but I could probably gnaw that idea down a bit. Also, respect my sports prognostication gangster, I am one University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign national semi-final victory away from claiming victory (or half-victory, because I have a stakehorse) in the L___ P_____ office pool. I have to go now. Did anybody else see that shit where they found a Japanese submarine with folding bombers in it from WWII and the bombers were for filling with bubonic plague rats to drop on America. apparently the alternate plan was to just build a big ramp in Tijuana and shoot old people with rabies into San Diego on big skateboards why the fuck am I wasting my time. I keep waking up early.

special condoms (…)

I’m probably opening myself up to the emotional/intellectual equivalent of what Kansas did to Marquette in the Final Four three yrs ago but whatever, I’m going to try to get heavy, related to Whet’s shit about qualitative judgments on mainstream culture through the lens of Whet’s post parelleling Tom’s post about some guy’s article about the fiction of Jonathan Lethem. It bears mentioning that I have read exactly 1 book and a handful of articles by same and have no pressing plans to change that anytime soon. Not because I didn’t like the one book or handful of articles but because I have no money and Jonathan Lethem books do not show up in the Powell’s free box with any frequency. Let’s wait on this for a minute.

First, though, are Ten Things I Do Terribly, at the behest of Mascaro:
10. Moderate the intake and evangelicization of Special Treats
9. Give a shit about whether or not a person who will never be conscious again gets to eat free goo for another one to 20 years
8. Sit still (I’m not saying my soul is too big for 9-5 work or something, I’m saying I have something like homemade ADD, a disease that should be renamed “Just Being Dumb and Fidget-Prone”)
7. Feel comfortable about my knowledge base in comparison to other people I know and the people what write for books now
6. Preserve my occasional forward momentum in the culinary arts/sciences
5. Maintain a baseline facial expression that is not suggestive of anger towards other people in my immediate vicinity (Example: this summer it was suggested that I looked like I wanted to kick a baby that was walking past me when I thought I was actually smiling at it. Him i mean)
4. Confrontation ,or at least telling people things that I think they don’t want to hear, or rather telling people things I don’t want to tell them.
3. Dressing myself in a manner befitting a 23 yr old college graduate
2. Brushing my teeth. Not in terms of frequency but the value of each individual brushing project
1. Dealing with retail professionals.

Anyway, my take on the whole (insert altitude)-brow hegemony in modern artistic U.S. fiction: I understand Leonard’s knock on J. Lethem for spending an awful lot of time hashing out themes and medium-height truth in comic books, American pop culture, etc, at least based on the way Leonard presents Lethem’s 10 or so books, almost all of which sound like they are about superheroes, detectives, or just Jonathan Lethem’s childhood. Not that Jonathan Lethem is particularly guilty of solipsism or navelgazing. I had much the opposite impression of Motherless Brooklyn, which I dug at the time but have come to regard as pretty wispy in the longview. Anyway, I take the criticism of Lethem at face value, but I’m not sure why exactly Leonard freaks out at the end and starts taking swings at MTV/a bunch of writers/various generation groups. The rhetorical stronghold of devout classicism is sort of appealing, in that it presents the audience with a simple choice. Instead of embracing changes in culture, reject everything (always easier to do) unless it’s been verified by some formula (50,000 fawning references in dignified periodicals, 100 homages/instances of influence in appropriately serious works of art, themes discussed ratified by a panel of people who do not laugh at fart noises, even when the fart noise is actually funny).

Maybe I’m looking for a fight with Leonard (I clearly am, maybe not with Leonard but with someone) but this sounds somewhat like an advocacy of a canon of literature/culture/art, which I don’t have a terribly strong opinion about (well, I do have a strong opinion about it — there should be no such thing — but I didn’t pay enough attention or take the right Hum classes and I don’t know enough fancy words to get away with wielding a strong opinion about that). Anyway, that’s a bunch of dogdirt. You read what moves you, what attracts you. Jonathem Lethem or anybody else isn’t beholden to anyone to class up his writing with big themes or a literature PhD’s sense of context or historical scope. That’s not the author’s job, or the typical reader’s job. I’m running out of steam because I have this weird knotty feeling in my throat (unrelated to the topic at hand- i think it has something to do with the falafel I ate yesterday) so I’m going to motor away. But yeah, TV that guy.

Just when I thought I found love, she shitted on me

I’m getting sick of this shit where I am so scientific about my NCAA picks that I chose the overdog (in this case Alabama) to pull the reverse upset because everybody thinks a 12 seed is goign to win, even though I have other 12 and lower seeds winning. My heart hurts because the SEC sucks at basketball. And now I know Miss. St. is going to get crushed by Stanford despite the best intentions of God and everyone else involved. I can’t talk anymore, I’m going to start crying about how UW Milwaukee won even though i wanted them to win. I have to go.

You might try accepting Jesus Christ as your savior

Not my best few days ever; i figured getting a small paycheck would make me feel better and it didn’t, since I had to give most of the small paycheck to cingular, who are wankers, and then there is just a line of other companies waiting to ask me for large portions of future paychecks. This is what happens. Anyway, I’ve been making a list of small self-improvement projects in the spirit of James Gatz but I keep getting severly disrailed by failing to even superficially obeying several or all of the items on the list. Mostly the list consists of “1. Find more reliable sources of income” “2. Develop rewarding relationship with Great Spirit” “3. Spend less of what little money you have on intoxicants”. “4. Write original and moving pieces of fiction.” Now I’ve had to dial things back to like “1. Don’t sleep all day” “2. Try to read something, if you can.” “3. Do not eat entire package of sauerkraut.” I’ll bounce back, especially if my new plan comes through, which is to sabotage one of the elevators at work, get it in it, get hurt, and then sue the building management company. Maybe I shouldn’t talk about this too loud.

On a related note, (I apologize for the banal quotidian rants about personal etiquette. You asked for it?) why the fuck can’t I walk from floor to floor in this goddamn building unless there’s a fire? I mean, is walking up or down stairs really as undesirable as a fire that threatens the building? That said, you are allowed to walk from floors 13-16 freely. that said, why do people insist on getting off at their specific floor in the elevator. Say you work on floor 14 and you get on and floors 13, 15, 16 have already been pressed. Why not just get off at 13 and walk up one flight, or get off at 15 and walk down one flight? You will get there at the exact same time, and you will not enrage the people waiting to get to 15 or 16. Am I belligerent or do I have a point here. I think these are not mutually exclusive. I don’t care anymore. I want to be spending more of my time working on my bracket or sleeping or writing about Stan Van Gundy and i am doing none of those things right now.

The Glory of Man

These are heady times we live in. I spent about 15 minutes tonight bitching about the availability of off-brand seltzer water at the Hyde Park Co-Op. I did this complaining in the Hyde Park Co-Op while a guy in a purple fur coat loaded his cart with three-liter bottles of Wildwood grape soda, genetically modified strawberries, off-brand corn puff snacks, and a shitload of Palmolive. Something about his general demeanor made me think he was going to do something deeply immoral involving some or all of those purchases. The NCAA brackets came out and I have one word on the topic: New Mexico is winning at least three games. I have to watch Back to Bataan now as research for the forthcoming work of original fiction about the life of Stan Van Gundy. It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American public.

Vo ist Jones

I’m having a hard time deciding which Van Gundy brother is a more viable framework for a story about the death of love. I have to get out of bed now, against my will. Does anybody know how to get a list of basically every important baseball stat from last year in comma delimited form so i can make a spreadsheet. Please for me. Also important: they disinterred Lee Harvey Oswald in 1981 and sawed his head off and placed a piece of tape on the skull that was like a nametag. Then I went to the office this morning and the girl who I think is cute that works in the glass-walled legal staffing firm in the lobby, she looked like Lee Harvey Oswald.

Crushed by Satellite Dish

So I went ahead and made this piece more attractive. My next project is to prepare a Frederic Remington-style scultpure of a man on a Segway about to be hung by a vigilante mob, and then photograph it, and then use that photograph for the cover of issue 2 of the Journal of Speculative Celebrity Fiction. It might be easier just to draw the sculpture, or to leave out the sculpture angle completely. Anyway, please to enjoy the new phenotype and bark at me, please, bark at me, we will have a nice conversation.

Cherokee Maiden

Clinton sleeps on floor so elder Bush can have bed
In the past two months I think I have claimed variously that Jonathan Kozol, Norah Jones, Louis Menand, ESPN’s Page 3, indie rock, the PR industry, the publishing industry, Jose Canseco and homemade pornography are all the self-contained death knell of the American political left as a viable worldview/self-indentification.
12 Angry Whales