The Blog with Cobwebs

Drunk Jenga (serves 5-6)

2007-03-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

Ingredients:

1 passed-out roommate
misc. household items

Preparation:

Stack items atop passed-out roommate. First person to wake the drunk loses.

A. Radl 3/17/07 courtesy of A. Sarkarati.

What I've been up to lately.

2007-01-16T04:21:00.000-08:00

Okay: you’re right. You saw right through me. You always see right through me, and I hate that. Sometimes I feel like other people want me to lie to them, you know? You were always a little smarter than the average bear, if not necessarily smarter than the average bear with the smarts of twelve bears. But let’s put that to the side for now. My point is, I’m sorry I haven’t called. And you’re absolutely right; my voicemail was not broken for six months. I did get your messages. Well, the first three of them anyway. At a certain point I just delete messages without listening to them. Call ID works just fine if I need to know who’s trying to get a hold of me. I’ve just been super busy and haven’t had time to call anyone back for, well, it’s been going on for a good while now. Things have been hectic. Six weeks, maybe, I’ve been working on this one thing, and otherwise I just keep to myself. Doesn’t sound like much, but trust me it’s been quite an eventful couple of weeks. I’m really sorry about this. When things settle down some, next chance I get I’ll make it up to you.

What have I been up to lately? Well now, that’s a very good question. And by good I mean hard to answer. I mean, it’s not like I could just come out and tell you what I’ve been up to lately. Actually, I guess I could tell you, but it gets complicated after that. No, I’m not blowing you off. God, let’s never fall out of touch like this again, okay? What’s it been, two months? Okay, shit. I get it. Didn’t I already say it was my fault? And I’m sorry I can’t stay here much longer. No, I really have somewhere else to be.

Nothing would make me happier than skipping off to the pub down the street right frieking now. Maybe we could catch a game on one of the plasmas, drink some Anchor Steams, eat fried things. Next chance we get we’ll go to that one you like, the one next to that coffee shop. Are you kidding me? What the hell kind of bar doesn’t have a plasma screen? It’s the 21^st century, you know. This is the future; aren’t all the TVs supposed to be made of plasma and science now? Whatever. At least we could get all caught up on what’s been going on with you. Me? Nothing. Nothing worth talking about. Let’s not get into it. I know, I know…now that I think about it, maybe the pub isn’t such a good idea.

The problem is, I could tell you what I’ve been up to lately. But then I’d have to kill you.

I know, I know, people say that shit all the time. I mean, it’s funny. Ooh, look at me I’m in the CIA or whatever. It’s one of those mom jokes that isn’t really a joke but for some reason certain people laugh every time single time they hear it. Sometimes I’ll be talking to a dude and it’s usually it’s one of those guys who don’t articulate themselves all that well and get by on whatever catchphrases and worn-out punchlines they pick up from the ambient pop culture or whatever and manage to string together. Every once in awhile I’ll get stuck in a conversation with a guy like that, and like clockwork it comes up that he thinks Adam Sandler’s movies are the funniest goddamn things in the history of the world, especially the sports ones. I’ve probably been been cornered dozens of times at parties by sweaty dudes with thick necks who feel compelled to rattle off as many lines from Adam Sandler movies as they can remember. It’s remarkable, sort of like being at the zoo when the chimpanzees start throwing their shit I guess.

I think what I'll do is, maybe I’ll have a dinner party or something pretty soon. It would be nice to see everyone. I really need to be better about that. Oh, and if one of our other friends tells you anything about what I’ve been up to lately, try not to listen and make sure you hug them tight when you part ways, because you will never see that person alive again. And I will come after you as well. My advice is that you never leave the safety of your home except under the cover of darkness, although you should be mindful that I’ll probably be lurking in some shadow, waiting for you to wander haplessly by. Also do not linger atop flights of stairs, retrieve your car from empty parking garages, eat food you did not see prepared with your own eyes, start your car without checking for mysterious wires running to your starter from under your seat, and be sure you commit to memory the nuances of my particular gait; that will make it harder for me to sneak up on you.

I’ll give you a call you this week, I think I’m free on Thursday. Promise: sorry I’ve been so flaky. But I’ve been busy, you know? Well, I guess you actually have no idea. But that’s for the best. Maybe it's only interesting to me, is the funny thing. I best be getting a move on. You know you can call me whenever, right? No, I’ll pick up the phone this time. Unless I’m busy or sleeping or something. You take it easy.

Weeds has a Retarded Silent Aitch.

2006-08-02T15:52:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to Weeds, a series on the Showtime Television Network.

Dear Weeds,

I don't normally open electronic correspondences from your network Showtime; I happen to think Pat Riley is a greasy, self-satisfied glory-hound who stabbed Stan Van Gundy in the back just as he threw him out the window of a moving car. Point is, I hate everything that might be associated with Pat Riley. This includes the Showtime network, for reasons that should be abundantly clear to you.

Also, a very dear friend of mine works for you and insists she didn't put me on the subscriber list for your network, adding that she would never put anyone on the list for such a crap network. But things have been slow in the old inbox lately, so I opened the message and lo, there was an advertisement for your second season.

Based on the African-American couple standing a bit in the background of the cast photo, I correctly surmised that your show is about selling marijuana in a place you wouldn't normally find African-Americans: suburbia. Without having seen your show, I can say with some confidence that no matter how good it might be, you would have been better off shelling out the extra money it would have taken get Chris Tucker. I mean, did you see Friday After Next? Then again, if you could have gotten Chris Tucker you'd be on HBO, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Because HBO doesn't send me spam.

But seriously, Weeds. I'm never going to watch your show, but I'd like to thank you for giving work to Elizabeth Perkins and Mary Louise Parker. I don't understand why attractive, perpetually middle-aged actresses can't get steady work any more than I understand my own lifelong obsession with attractive, perpetually middle-aged actresses; it just kind of is what it is. And even if the work isn't steady, I don't lose sleep at night about whether or not Meryl Streep or Jody Foster or Helen Hunt or Annette Benning or Barbara Hershey can put food on the table. But Elizabeth Perkins? God, she could have been dead drunk in the gutter for all I knew. I had a crush on her when she was in the vastly underrated Big, which came out in 1988, before Tom Hanks was even a vastly overrated actor. You probably don't remember that, Weeds. But I do.

And Mary Louise Parker is actually more of a thespian than an actress, AND I have her cofused with the girl who played Dorothy Parker in that one movie. Come to think of it, that other girl was in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Hudsucker Proxy, so I'm way off base with that middle-aged thing. Maybe I'm part of the problem here.

But Elizabeth Perkins!

All the same, Weeds, I'm a little curious about your tagline:

"Putting the herb [punct. sic.] in suburb"

I guess you're what passes for an expert these days, so I'll ask you: does one pronounce the first letter of the word 'herb'? You're rhyming it with 'suburb' here, so I assume you're in the 'uuuurb' camp. And that's cool. I mean, in Spanish all the aitches are silent, if you can believe that. But it's worth pointing out--and I don't mean to quibble with you, Weeds, I really don't--that you're broadcast on Showtime and not Telemundo. Although I do wonder if, in that event, you'd have the juice to break El Gordo y la Flaca's stranglehold on primetime Latino entertainment. Maybe if you hired Erik Estrada and his psychic pals, you could make a demographic push. Whatever. Point is, Weeds, that you're filmed in English, and the word 'herbs' has a fucking aitch in it. So maybe you should take that into consideration.

Maybe we should all just put that in our pipes, and smoke it.

Yours,
Gabriel

as long as you're here

2005-08-10T04:38:00.000-07:00

in lieu of blogging, i've been working on this all summer:

http://photobucket.com/albums/a136/granqueso/

Vagary

2005-06-19T04:15:00.000-07:00

1. †a. A wandering or devious journey or tour; a roaming about or abroad; an excursion, ramble, stroll. Obs.
Freq. in the 17th c., chiefly in verbal phrases as to fetch, make, or take a vagary.

†b. to play his vagary, of a horse, to leave or refuse to follow the proper or desired course. Obs.—1

c. An irregular course or distribution.

†2. A wandering in speech or writing; a rambling from the subject under consideration; a digression or divagation. Obs. (passing into sense 5).

3. a. A departure or straying from the ordered, regular, or usual course of conduct, decorum, or propriety; a frolic or prank, esp. one of a freakish nature. Now rare or Obs. (passing into sense 4).

†b. Without article: Frolic, gambolling. Obs.

4. a. A capricious, fantastic, or eccentric action or piece of conduct.

I'm pretty sure I left Coda a voicemail the day before his birthday or the day after, but he never called me back. Not that it bothers me when Coda doesn't call me back. We've had some lively email exchanges but our phone conversations have generally been one-off affairs, not really part of an ongoing dialogue or anything. Not that I have a leg to stand on the returning of phone calls tip; I'm at +5 for outgoing calls made vs. return calls made (meaning there's three people I'm supposed to call and eight people who are supposed to call me, applying somewhat subjective and arbitrary rules of etiquette) but if you consider email correspondence roughly equivalent to returning a phone call, which I do, then I'm at -8, unless you count friendster testimonials, which I don't, in which case I'd be at -13 for the year.

Coda did call me back, though, even if it took him a couple months. I'd run into him on IM and demanded to know where the hell he'd been. "Falling in love," he said somewhat cryptically, as if that means anything at all to me.

So You Wanna Be a Hip-Hop Hero

2005-01-29T13:01:00.000-08:00

Science they say, has made poetry impossible; there is no poetry in motor cars and wireless. And we have no religion. All is tumultuous and transitional. Therefore, so people say, there can be no relation between the poet and the present age. But surely that is nonsense. These accidents are superficial; they do not go nearly deep enough to destroy the most profound and primitive of instincts, the instinct of rhythm...Let your rhythmical sense wind itself in and out among men and women, omnibuses and sparrows, whatever comes along the street, until it has strung them together in one harmonious whole. That perhaps is your task--to find the relations between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity. To absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly, and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole and not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy again by means of characters no spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesised in the poet's way...

Virginia Woolf, "Letter to a Young Poet" (1932)

chores

2004-06-20T19:53:00.000-07:00

my good friend the Q, who lives in boston these days, just applied for a job to be one of those people who stands in front of other people whose lives have been deemed more precious, in case somebody else decides to start shooting at that person. as part of the application process, they screened her for mental defects. "It was weird. They asked me if I'd been starting any big projects lately. Like if I'd started writing a novel," she reported.

what in the world does that have to do with your willingness to take a bullet for somebody else, I wondered. "Oh. They were trying to figure out if I was manic-depressive. It's one of the symptoms," she answered, because I'd been talking out loud without realizing it. again.

shit! that's serious stuff!! didn't the exact same thing just kill beloved character actor ronald reagan? and hadn't my helper monkey Major Blood just start writing a novel? and if we're sharing the same toilet, does that put me at risk? i figured it just might, but the only way to know for sure would be to have chowder get tested, since he actually drinks from the toilet.

"Chowder, would you willingly take a bullet meant for somebody more important than you?" i asked him. he mumbled something that sounded like a yes, so i sent him to apply for a job with those people. he came back two hours later, and he mumbled something that sounded like they'd given him a job protecting the mayor of japan's wife. in Japan. he's going to be shipping out to Tokyo at the end of July. this set my mind at ease for a moment, because he'd passed their little test.

my relief proved short-lived once i did a little research on japan. christ, they're probably deporting him because he failed the psych exam. i decided that keeping Major Blood occupied with menial tasks would slow the mad cow that was probably eating her brain, so i made her responsible for all the chores that chowder'd been doing. or was supposed to do. Major Blood threw on her cowboy bebop apron and laced up her rubber gloves to clean the fridge, but then she slammed the door shut immediately and ran away, babbling imprecations in her native tongue. i went to see what had spooked her.

a mold has been growing in there for awhile, but everytime i told chowder to clean it out he said he'd get to it, then play another game of Madden on the rookie level after trading both pro bowl teams onto the 49ers and turning down all the difficulty sliders. that's not so bad in and of itself, but Major Blood swore off killing after her honorable discharge from the Army, and i certainly can't kill the mold. it has grown strong, and become sentient.

the mold knows.

we've crossed a bridge today. a bridge too far, to my thinking. not only do i not have anywhere to keep my leftover chinese food, but by inadvertently striking the spark of life, chowder has rendered either evolutionary theory or creationism moot. what's worse, i'm sure there isn't even a branch of metaphysics capable of dealing with this situation, so all the religious studies majors i know have wasted their lives. chowder's ineptitude has officially become dangerous, if it wasn't already. God save the mayor of Japan's wife.