The Happy Stevensons

Stevenson Missing and Presumed Dead

2005-04-08T16:39:00.000-07:00

Mr. Stevenson's whereabouts are unknown at this time.

All inquiries about his collection of literary works can be forwarded to The Driv'ler: www.drivler.blogspot.com

Long live Tom Kafafian

2004-11-15T22:30:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, my latest Tom Kafafian post hasn't made it to the number 1 spot. In fact, it has dropped away from the first page of results.

Good news, though: Brian/monstro has #2 and #3 on the list!

A Pickled Signifier

2004-11-13T18:27:00.000-08:00

Despite my recent exhortation, nothing new from the peanut gallery these past couple days.

Am still half-cocked and loaded.

Today’s drink of choice: Hennessy Cognac .

Tom Kafafian Tom Kafafian Tom Kafafian

2004-11-12T07:14:00.000-08:00

Today, when attempting to see if my man Tom Kafafian[1],[2] has posted any new blog entries, I found out that, at least on msn.com, searching for "tom kafafian" will yield MY blog post about Tom Kafafian before Tom's home page! In the interest of becoming the foremost Tom Kafafian aficionado (by the way, that's Tom Kafafian, not Tom Kavavian or Tom Kafavian or Tom Kavafian), I'd like to push myself even higher up the list. Therefore:

Tom Kafafian
Tom Kafafian
Tom Kafafian
Tom Kafafian
Tom Kafafian
Tom Kafafian
Not Tom Kavavian or Tom Kafavian or Tom Kavafian, but...
Tom Kafafian.

I've reprinted my initial reactions to Tom Kafafian's website below. My comments were originally posted in response to monstro's irate rant about the Tom Kafafian WinAmp Skin (see also monstro's illuminating follow-up, "Kafafian spelled backwards is devil"). What is the Tom Kafafian WinAmp Skin, you ask? Well, apparently the Tom Kafafian WinAmp Skin redirects web browsers to Tom Kafafian's home page, whether the WinAmp listener wants to go or not.

My initial commentary:

Having for some time now been an aspirant in the Order of Kafafian, I was excited to get Brian’s tip on the Kafafian Winamp skin. The website (www.tomkafafian.com) offers all that the neophyte to Kafafian lore could want: pics of Tom’s gratuitous bangs, his album cover art, setlists for concerts you’ll never see, and did I mention his fabulous bangs? It’s hard to decide on a favorite part of this website, but if pressed, I would have to go with the “Tom’s Hand-written lyrics and artwork” section, which attempts to prove the following things:

1. Tom’s lyrics were not, in fact, written by a supercomputer, but by a real man, with real feelings and real bangs, on real lined paper.
2. That anyone, regardless of preference in musical style, can carefully study the lyrics to Tom’s “At the Station” and begin signing Tom’s checks in no time.

Besides the lyrics, one gets to see the inner workings of Tom’s mind through all the stick-figures and scribblework adorning the lyrics. After seeing the artwork, particularly that on “Circles,” Tom takes a place in my heart right next to Stevie from Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” another diligent artist expressing similar breadth of intellectual pursuit.

If you live in the NY/NJ area, don’t bother to go to the website: you’ll be able to pick out Tom on the L.I.E. According to the “Bio” section, Tom writes most of his music while driving. Given that we already know that he writes lyrics by hand and includes doodling in the lyric-writing process, you’ll most likely see Tom on the motorway, veering wildly and “trading paint” with other cars while exploring the depths of the human soul. When his car rams into yours, please yell that Jason sends his love.

Since writing this, my fascination with Tom Kafafian hasn't ebbed one bit.

This morning's drink of choice

2004-11-12T06:23:00.000-08:00

What am I drinking with my cereal this morning? A 21 year-old MacAllan (Highland) oak-finished.

Haven't changed my underwear in three days, but still not sloppy enough to drink blended.

So how is the weather? (a few notes from where I am)

2004-11-11T22:22:00.000-08:00

It’s been getting colder around these parts. Chilling, in fact.

And I’ve been drinking.

A lot.

Every day, Ruthie talks less, comforts less, breathes less. She’s retreating into herself. The lotus blossoms that so recently grew in her footsteps have been replaced by brambles. And my melancholy has reduced me, like a homeless signifier, to talking to myself in empty metaphors and similes.

This could be what has pushed me to start heavily drinking. Or, it may be the result of the alcohol. I'm not really sure at this point. I put 25 years of whisky down my gullet yesterday. That makes 120 years in the last week. I can vaguely remember reading Samuel Johnson with Wilbur last week, but now our company is Bukowski. Like the poet Alvaro de Campos and his opium, I’ve fallen into shit poetry “as into a ditch.” And worse, the shit poetry has fallen into me like a burning gutful of whisky. Wilbur seems alarmed at my sudden looseness, but he’s also strangely gleeful. I suspect he thinks that I’ve finally been stripped of my pretensions by this maddening solitude. I suspect he’s right.

A note:

A few days ago, during a solid Irish drunk, I heard off-key singing: “If I should call you up, invest a dime/ And you say you belong to me and ease my mind/ Imagine how the world could be, so very fine..” It took me awhile to identify the tune as the Turtles classic, “Happy Together.” It took me longer to identify the singing as my own.

A note:

I don’t think I’ve seen Kellie all week. Ruthie makes sure that she and Kellie remove to another part of the house at my approach, retreating and locking doors between us.

A note:

I plugged the phone back in the other day. Almost immediately, it rang. I picked it up and belted out my Turtles song at the top of my lungs. After regaling my anonymous caller a few times, I decided to take my act on the road. Ruthie had seen fit to hide my keys from me.

A note:

Two days ago, after witnessing Wilbur’s clueless reading of even a Bukowski poem, I threw a pen at him. That is, I threw a pen at Wilbur. Unfortunately, I’ve never had Bukowski within range. But you can bet that if I did, I’d give the old barfly the pen-throwing of his life. Anyways, I was so drunk that I telegraphed the whole throwing action, making it far too easy for him to dodge it. He quietly leaned over, picked up the pen, and said,

“A Montblanc Boheme Gold Citrin.”

Unimpressed by what may have been Wilbur’s single greatest show of polite learning thus far, I said, “smart ass,” and looked around for something larger and more expensive to throw at him.

A few minutes later, while Wilbur was picking the shards of a Lino Tagliapietra banjo-shaped handblown glass vase out of his hair, I collapsed a bit, wept a bit, and told him that he was my best—and only—friend. It seemed the right thing to do.

One side-effect of all this drinking is the wretched imposition of truthfulness. Another side-effect followed on the heels of this will to verity: the compulsion to narrate the most painful and embarrassing experiences of my life. While I halfheartedly cleaned his wounds and the floor, I poured out stories of my illustrious residence in some of California’s finer mental hospitals, my history with my bastard of a stepfather, and even the story of how I got my groove back. And I drank. Finally, as my tales were almost at an end and as the room began to sway, I got up to wrap gauze around Wilbur’s still-bleeding head. Looking down, my bleary eyes seemed to see green goop oozing from his skull. I vomited upon his head and shoulders. It seemed the right thing to do.

A note:

Even after all this, he came back yesterday. Such a puppy.

An exhortation:

So, gentle readers, consider this drunken jag an opportunity to ask me for any narrative and not be denied. For the moment, I am your bloated, bloodshot Sherezehade. I am naked, I am unabashed, and am drinking myself out of the recognition that my crest has fallen.

2004-11-11T10:49:00.000-08:00

For Avram: I exist.

I've been so gone, I'm Mr. Gone

2004-11-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know that I've been mighty quiet this last week. Just poking my head out of the hole to tell you all that I'm still alive, and that you should check out FictionBlogs (a directory of weblogs devoted to creative writing).

“What if Socrates was guilty?” I thought, and said:

2004-11-04T21:43:00.000-08:00

I was born on a day God was sick.

Wilbur interrupted me: “God don’t get sick. Ain’t that why he’s god?” I ignored this, and reiterated:

I was born on a day
God was sick.

Everyone knows that I live,
That I’m bad, and they don’t know
About the December of that January.
For I was born on a day
God was sick.

There’s an emptiness
In my metaphysical air
That no one’s going to touch:
The cloister of a silence
That spoke with its tongue on fire.
I was born on a day God was sick.

Brother, listen, listen…
Okay now. And don’t let me go away
Without taking along Decembers,
Without leaving Januaries.
For I was born on a day
God was sick.

Everyone knows that I live
That I chew…And they don’t know
Why in my poems,
A dark disgust of coffin,
Rasp frayed wind
Unraveled from the Sphynx,
The great questioner of the Desert.
Everyone know…And they don’t know
That the Light is consumptive,
And the Shadow fat…
And they don’t know the Mystery sums it up…
That it is the hump
Musical and sad that in the distance denounces
The meridian passage from the limits to the Limits.

I was born on a day
God was sick,
Grave.

I finished the last lines of the Vallejo's "Last Words" and proffered some readings on Decembers and Januaries, on limits and Limit, then pulled out those somewhat dusty, pedestrian arguments and tried to freshen them up for Wilbur's sake:

JS: “I think that Vallejo knows that God doesn’t get sick, at least like you or me. Or, lately, just me. What do you think he means by this?”

WW: “That God was sick in some other way when this Vallejo guy was born.”

JS: “Yes, and what might be implied by God getting sick in other ways?”

WW: “Not sure I get your question there, Mr. Stevenson.”

JS: “If God doesn’t cough, and God doesn’t sneeze, and God doesn’t run a temperature, what kind of sick might we be talking about?”

WW: “Sick in the head?”

JS: “Yes, I think that’s a start. What would it mean, then, to know that God was sick in the head when he created YOU?”

WW: “Yer walkin’ a fine line here, Mr. Stevenson.”

JS: “No, Vallejo is walking; we’re just trying to trace his footsteps.”

WW: “I’m not sure I like where he’s walkin’.”

JS: “Well, I’ll put it this way: do you think you’re a worthwhile being in God’s universe? Do you think you’re worthy in God’s eyes?”

WW: “Well, I haven’t put much thought into it…but I reckon so.”

JS: “Okay, then. Look around you. Look at all the things I have: fine china, antique furniture, that exquisite lamp there, my silverware—remember when I had you practice setting a proper table the other day? That was fine, heavy, real silver silverware, wasn’t it?”

WW: “Yessir, it was.”

JS: “And think of my wealth: I showed you my portfolios the other day, didn’t I?”

WW: “Yessir, and quite a lot of money you got.”

JS: “Why is it that I, a devout Athiest, have so much, and you have so little?”

WW: “My momma used to say that the bible preaches ‘blessed are the meek.’”

JS: “Yes, but the bible neglects to mention that I could bulldoze your shack and pay a judge to look the other way while I build a shopping mall over your corpse. How blessed would you be then?”
`
WW: “Not very.”

JS: “So I ask again, is it fair that I have so much, and you have so very little? Is it fair that other Christians have so much, and you have so little?”

WW: “Don’t reckon so, Mr. Stevenson.”

JS: “Another poet, Alexander Pope, once wrote, “WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT. I suppose that, even if God is sick, he’s still right. He’s the definition--the reference standard--for ‘right,’ isn’t he? And if he’s always right, and life often seems so wrong, doesn’t that mean that your torturous life has little to recommend itself to his favor?

WW: “Again, I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at, but I reckon so.” [here I was glad I hadn’t given him any of my books on biblical hermeneutics]

JS: “What I’m getting at, Wilbur, is that maybe you were born on a day God was sick. Maybe I was, too.”

Solace

2004-11-02T20:09:00.000-08:00

On this day of election, in the face of the uber-politicization of the blogosphere, I give you a moment of quietude (and the sound of a cricket chirping).

Silence.

Chirp.Chirp...........................Chirp.Chirp.

A Letter from Candace

2004-11-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

I thank all of you for the kind comments I received after my last maudlin post. I feel that I might continue this diary a bit longer. Just yesterday, I received an email from “Fiction Blogz,” which reminded me that, while I myself don’t write fiction, I am supporting the efforts of others. Also, I received another letter that reminded me of just how much good I do for those around me, if only they are willing to ask.

I received an email yesterday from Candace, my niece (my father’s older brother’s son’s daughter, if you must know). Although she’s seventeen, I haven’t seen her for three years. We carry on an intermittent email relationship; I listen to her puerile prattlings, and she calls me “cool.” Of course, my coolness is a function of my history of opposition to her side of the family. I always seemed to disrupt family functions, and since she’s now a teenager, her enemies’ enemies are her friends by default.

I sometimes offer my advice in those matters for which her father has no talent. For instance, I successfully convinced her not to “go down on” Danny Perelli, a sophomore and son of a construction worker. I suspected—and rightly so—that she was only dating this boy because his clothing, hairstyle, and piercings infuriated her father. When the time again came to make a similar decision, I did approve of Edward LaBlanche III, a senior and future heir to the LaBlanche Hardwoods empire. His father, Edward LaBlanche II (whose father, in turn, was named “Bill”) had gained some notoriety for establishing “The Tree House,” an organization helping child burn victims, set up primarily to take the heat, as it were, off Edward II’s ruthless clear-cutting of the Pacific Northwest Redwoods. I successfully predicted that Candace’s “investment” would shift “Eddie’s” gifting bracket up from teddy bears to rings and necklaces. This is not always the case in relationships, so I first had her do serious investigative research of “Eddie’s” previous girlfriends to establish his Gifting Portfolio (hereafter, “G.P.”). Like his father, it seems that young Mr. LaBlanche could be induced to philanthropy if apprised of certain benefits.

I also convinced Candace not to drink wine coolers with her friends, telling her that such wanton frivolity was beneath her. Instead, I had her return a list of her father’s liquor cabinet contents, suggesting she only imbibe of the finest cognacs and scotches. Some may call this, “contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” but I would instead assert that I am contributing to the refinement of a young adult. Without me, where would she learn these things? Her father certainly isn’t willing to sit her down and have “The Talk,” explaining the differences between single malt and blended whiskeys. The man is a Neanderthal. If left to her own devices, she’d not be able to tell a cognac from any old brandy. I’m sure we can all agree that this would be a travesty to the process of maturation itself.

But I digress. The letter, which I’ve reproduced below, contains some disturbing information:

Hey, uncle Moneybags!

How RU? Im so pised! Dena Rawley is suuuuuch a bitch! She took Bobby Riley to the dance when she knew I wanted him. I even got that ho Felicity Newell out of the way to get him. By the way you’re advice to tell people she had siphilis was AWESOME! Nobody will touch her now. Dena Rawley is a hole! Bobby’s GP is thru the roof too! If Dena comes too Math with a new gold bracelet on, Im gonna claw her bitch slut eyes out!

The other day I mentioned to dad how you screwed up Christmas dinner by calling aunt Venus a dirty slimy hore. HA! He said they should have put a stratejacket over your mouth too. He told me AGAIN that if you ever tried too contact me I shouldn’t say anything too you. HA! Im writing you right now!

I need to tell you that some freaky ass dude is looking for you. Yesterday I was in PE and some weirdo was hanging at the fence. I thought it was another guy like last year who got caught for jerking it to the JV field hockey team. He walked up to me after school and I thought he was going to be a perv but he said “do you know the wereabouts of Jason Stevenson?” Well first he made sure who I was but he wanted too know were you were. He had a suit on. Very proper. You would have been impressed. Anyway I thought you would want to know.
Late, Candace

Treach'rous Phantoms in the Mist delude

2004-10-29T19:47:00.000-07:00

Five days have past; five mornings, with the length of five deep nights, and again I cast another message to float upon the waters of the vast, lonely expanse of the internet.

Five mornings spent with Wilbur, struggling over texts, wondering if one lifetime is enough to train him for a single decent conversation. At least I’ve spent five afternoons with Ruthie, rejoicing in her newfound willingness to speak. Things are still uneasy between us: I wonder if she’ll ever speak in anything other than a loopy gait, or if she’ll ever again reduce the dosage of her meds to a level that allows for some form of coherence.

I installed a site meter on my blog, then removed it when I found how few people came to visit. There was always a hope that others were hovering in the wings, silently sympathizing with my sentimental wanderings; I was foolish to submit that hope to empirical testing. One needn’t cite Dr. Johnson to realize that hope is hope precisely because it’s ephemeral. Now, driven to an equally vaporous despair, I wonder if I should quietly shut the doors on this little industrious cottage. I might rather retire to my study to write my memoirs, every third thought being of the death of the author. Mr. Anonymous, I think I may finally have come to see your point. I’m just not sure I’m into it.

Two Dreams

2004-10-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

Server rack of Amontillado

Two days ago, I promised to report on the developments with Ruthie over the past two weeks. I’ve been withholding, only because I fear that I cannot adequately communicate the particular mix of fright, madness, and sentiment. I’ll simply get it over with.

Two weeks ago, one day previous to last post:

I’d been having that dream again—not the one where I flee across an abstract America, but the Amontillado dream.

I’m back in my office in San Francisco, inside the closet, chained to a wall. Where the closet door should stand, an empty server rack sits. One of my nameless assistants, one on whom—like all of my nameless assistants—I had heaped endless abuse, carries a server unit toward me. He slides the server into the rack, blocking a part of the doorway. As the server rack becomes filled with one, then another server, my “doorway” slowly becomes walled in. Finally, only one rackspace remains, the small shaft of light pouring into the small space and poorly illuminating my shaking body. The closet suddenly gets darker, and I look to the small gap to see the face of the nameless assistant.

“Say it,” he says, and I now realized with doubly dawning horror that I am not in Poe’s “Amontillado,” but Bradbury’s. I will have to cry out to a deity with whom I hold no truck. My cries will be a formality. I will surely die.

“I’ll give you anything if you release me,” I whimper. “You can have my playbill signed by San Francisco cast of “Rent,” my 1972 Longines Ultra-Chron timepiece, even the keys to my brand new Land Rover Range Rover with Custom Luxury and Entertainment Packages! Just please let me go!”

“You seem to think you’re in the wrong story,” he replies coolly—much more coolly than any assistant ever replied to my harangues. “This isn’t ‘Aladdin and His Magic Lamp.’ You know what I want.”

I won’t say it. Without saying it, he cannot seal me in. Dramatic irony is a prerequisite to this murder. My loathing for ambiguity, for anticlimax, for poor direction wells up in me, and I almost choke myself trying to force the words back.

To no avail. As if from far off, I hear a voice I recognize as my own:

"For the love of God, Montresor!"

The last server slides into place. I am entombed in darkness, my screams buried under the whirring of the cooling fans.

* * *

I awoke drenched in sweat. My eyes rolled in their sockets, found Ruthie next to me. She looked down at me with loving concern and wiped the perspiration from my forehead with a washcloth. Then, something happened that told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had lost my mind.

“You’ve been very sick,” Ruthie said.

When she spoke, I realized that I must have headed deeper down into dememtia. This was so cruel an hallucination! And to have consciousness enough to question my sanity! At no other moment have I been so ready to admit to the existence of the Divine Being, for to be granted what I most wanted—my wife’s recuperation—and to have the awareness that this was only a projection of my fevered brain—this could only be engineered by some viciously comic higher power.

I think I may have started to cry at this point.

Ruthie leaned down and kissed my forehead. “You’ve been sick for a long time, honey, but you’re getting better,” she said. A wave of unreality washed over me like the tears that were by now assuredly streaming down my cheeks. I remembered that once, when I had taken LSD, I had realized not only that I was insane, but that my state of imbalance might be irrevocable. At that moment, I had prayed to God to regain my insanity. Six hours later, I had sworn off LSD for good. But here, now, what could be sworn off, and who prayed to?

I started moaning. Ruthie curled up next to me. “There, there,” she soothed. “You’re much better than you were last night. You’re not ranting, or screaming, or anything of the sort. I’ve been reading your favorite poems to you in your more lucid moments.” She beckoned to the dresser, where my bleary eyes could barely make out The Collected Wallace Stevens, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death. She held up a volume of Amichai, saying, “would you like me to read some more?”

This was finally too much. I completely broke down. Ruthie, doe-eyed and smiling, continued: “I’ll get you some pills and a bit of sandwich. We have a lot to talk about, but you just need to get better right now, honey.”

I had slipped from consciousness again before she made it to the door.

* * *

When I awoke next, the fever had broken. I remembered nothing save the strange fever-dream in which Ruthie had started speaking to me. For a moment, I was elated as one waking from a dream of wish-fulfillment and thinking such fulfillment inheres in waking life. A moment later, the hope is dashed, and one bears the fardel of making one’s bed, rather than downing a handful of sleeping pills.

I had just finished making such a bed when Ruthie walked into the room. “Good morning” I said, as I always say as if I’ll be met with anything but silence.

“Good morning, honey,” she said, smiling. “I made some coffee for you. I thought we could maybe eat breakfast on the porch this morning.”

Blog Verite: Great first blog lines

2004-10-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

WARNING: AT CERTAIN POINTS, THIS POST RELIES HEAVILY ON USE OF THE “F” WORD TO ILLUSTRATE CERTAIN NORMS OF BLOG COMMUNICATION. PLEASE DO NOT PRESUME THAT THIS POST REPRESENTS A FALLING-AWAY FROM THE PROPRIETY GENERALLY MAINTAINED ON THIS BLOG.

In a recent post, friend-in-blogging weirdloverwilde asked for great first lines to books. As I’ve done little sentimental traveling lately, I proposed to journey from “Next Blog” to “Next Blog” (see upper right corner of this screen) in order to find exceptional first lines to blog posts. These first lines should, I thought, capture the spirit of “blog verite.”

When climbing into the carriage to do this sentimental cyber-traveling, I was reminded of an appropriate stanza from Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird”:

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

Tease out what you will.

I stopped traveling when my pity was spent. I realized for the first time that the blogosphere is an epic expanse of loneliness. Pictures of sickeningly anthropomorphized pets (dressed up as princesses or Groucho Marx or Bettie Page or others) are a given, and there are some whose loneliness is so vast that they’ve stooped to anthropomorphizing vegetable matter (“my roses are sick today,” “my garden is doing well!”). Always there to curdle my pity were advertisement blogs for mortgage rates and pornography, as well as the gibbering masses, yearning to break free of grammar and spelling conventions:

yo yo.. me now toking to yp.. she not tt bad.. she tok to me abt love love stuffs.. well.. love's so unpredictable.. i mean.. u may lke a person who doesn't even noe u existed.. life's juz so unfair.. sometimes u may sacrifice more for the one u love.. but dey did not even notice tt u actually did it for dem.. life's juz so unfair.. actually life's nv been fair.. haha.. todae got the fun fair.. (http://icygibbon.blogspot.com/)

Before my heart was irrevocably sickened, I gathered these stand-out first lines:

Some have “hook”:

one in a million 'ooglies' come out so perfect

You are earth!

“Beacause of my swallowing problem my food preferences have changed.”

“I don't know if I ever thanked you for helping me leave my husband.” (written by crawled_away)

“I am online to type my pain.”(written by ohiofrank)

Incidentally, you’d be surprised how many bloggers are online to type their pain. As for ohiofrank and crawled_away, it appears they not only want everyone to know how amazingly fucked up they are, and how they amazingly got together to fuck on her husband’s birthday. Bad fiction, or bad verite? I’d rather not find out.

You’d also be surprised to see how many bloggers are online to publicly register the present course of their fucked-up-ness, as “A Tormented Mind” does:

“I truely feel like for once in my life I can't possibly fuck this up.”

You’ll also be surprised at how many of those who swear they’re not going to fuck things up have fucked up the spelling of this very sentence, in a sense foreshadowing that, yes, lack of forethought, analysis, and revision will ensure that they fuck things up again.

Some first lines are downright kinky:

“All I can say right now is that Manny Ramirez better be licking the mud off of Mark Bellhorn's cleats.”

Some first lines are robustly kinky. Wondering what might replace Burroughs’ famed “Steely Dan III from Yokohama?” Ponder no more:

"This is the first (but certainly not the last) entry of the politcal journal concerned with the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator."(I imagine this one takes several “D” batteries)

Some don’t need a great first line to be downright kinky.

And I’ll not deign to provide the link for this one:
.".. pass i'll pixs for wombat I free gay porn of free photos of nude gay black men"
(Gay wombat porn? I’ll admit that even I, a former resident of San Francisco, California, am totally clueless on what this might entail. I now sorely regret having let my subscription to “The Journal of Sexual Deviancy” lapse.)

Finally, what about this title for a blog post, a la “Sesame Street”:
“Which one of these bishops does not belong?”

The answer, of course, is "the one with the vagina."

Phone-y Calls

2004-10-23T16:31:00.000-07:00

My phone pal[1], [2] has been up to no good again. Throughout the last day and a half:

“You are—,” click.
“in--,” click.
“danger--,” click.
“from a--,” click.
“party--,” click.
“very--,” click.
“close to--,” click.
“you.” Click.

For now, I’ve unplugged the phone. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner: no one else even knows my number.

Where's Wilbur?

2004-10-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

Strange--I posted this entry earlier today, but it seems to have been deleted. Hopefully, this one stays up.--JS

Two weeks ago:

I stepped outside to smoke one of the Cigaronne cigarettes I’d picked up on my monthly trip to town.

I walked out into the woods, sat down on a stump surrounded by woodchips, and lit up. For a moment, I wished I was with my old friend and mentor, Roger Clay, smoking several cigarettes to his one large Macanudo 54 ring size cigar, enveloping ourselves in wreaths of smoke and good conversation over a glass of Glenfiddich Scotch. I would be arguing—erroneously—that David Hume had severely damaged philosophical endeavor, and Roger would be pointing out that philosophy goes where its practitioners can take it, and that Hume had not only taken it in a direction it needed to go at the time, but that he was responding to the works of those I’d not yet thought worth reading. I’d bring up the flaws of Hume’s argument against causality, and he’d laugh, knowing that I’d taken my ideas from cribbed lecture notes, rather than close readings, of Hume’s texts.

I took another pull from my cigarette and imagined myself once more in the presence of this Ravelstein, learning by experience that the best talk of history, philosophy, and literature was accompanied by the best food, drink, and smoke. I’d mention a poem, say Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Roger would set down his cigar, leap up, dash into his house, and return with a book, which he would place in my hands. “Old So-and-so, the great translator of Rilke, worked for fifteen years on his edition Elegies,” he’d say, “and this same So-and-so lauded this new translation.” He was filled with this kind of information, and like his cigars, he only partook of the finest literature. We only live a short time, and we can't waste precious life on that which doesn’t come highly recommended. “Take the book, it’s yours.”

“I couldn’t take this,” I’d say, knowing that I could never win the battle. “It’s too much. I insist you keep it—”

I’d lapsed into reverie for so long that I’d only barely registered a slight chill—no, an itchiness—no, a what is that?—that had started in my legs and had progressed up to my chest. Snapping out of my fantasy, I identified the sensation: things were crawling on me.

I leaped up just as I felt the first bite. Looking down, I saw that the stump was infested with large, red ants. I started viciously scratching my chest, and the shock wave of this act alerted ants across my body that the time had come to wage war. I felt two, three, then undifferentiated innumerable tiny stabs before realizing that I was covered in an undersuit of ants. In my panic, I screamed like a little girl, scratching and itching and leaping as I started trying to strip away my clothing. To my surprise, my screaming didn’t stop while I was trying to do all these things at once, and I heard myself, “ay! Ay! Ay! Ay! Ay!”, wailing, scratching, unbuttoning, scratching, jumping, scratching, wailing, wailing, unbuttoning, and whipping myself into such a frenzy that I actually hindered myself from promptly removing my clothing. I was down to my underwear, violently smacking my chest, biting an arm, whipping my ant-filled hair back and forth, when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.

It was Wilbur. He was pointing a gun at me.

“Ay ay ay ay ay,” I said, as Wilbur lowered the gun and yelled out something like, “Pangloss!”

I yelled back, “Ayayayaywhat the fuck are you doing, Wilbur?”

He yelled the same word again, then hollered, "is that you? Do you need some help? What can I do for you?”

I had rid myself of most of the ants by this time, and although I was still in frenzy mode, I had enough sense to realize that between ants and rifle slugs, those tiny creatures that had raised welts all over my body were the lesser of two evils. I yelled, “get the hell away from me, Wilbur,” my voice mixed with fear (of that rifle) and bravado (from just having survived an ant attack). I started stepping slowly backwards from him, “ay”-ing as I went.

He stepped forward, trying to close the distance between us. “But…Mr….Mr…Stevenson? I can explain…what’s happened to you?”

“AY.AY.GET.AWAY.FROM.ME.YOU.CRAZY.BASTARD.AY.” I said forcefully, as if I was stating that the square root of 81 is 9, or that Lesotho is a country in Africa.

Then I tore off to the house, almost ripped the screen door off its hinges. I locked the screen door, the living room door, the deadbolts. In my panic, wedged an antique American Fanback Windsor Side Chair against the door, an action for which even panic-fear cannot provide excuse.
I panted, whimpered.

A few seconds later, a quick look out the living room window told me that Wilbur was either gone or sneaking around another side of the house. I quickly made the circuit of the first floor, locking doors and furtively glancing out windows as I ran. I called for Ruthie to stay upstairs, then bolted up the stairs, taking them three at a time. Ruthie met me at the landing.

Here’s what she saw: her husband, sweating profusely, underwear halfway off, naked body covered in red welts, twitching and scratching and digging at his hair, muttering quietly: “ay…ay…ay…”

“Everything alright, dear?” she said in her lilting, pilled-out voice (see tomorrow’s post for backstory on Ruthie’s re-emergence into the speaking world).

“Ay…ay…Wilbur tried to kill me!” I panted.

“You know, I had a strange feeling about him,” she said. “I couldn’t really place it. Now we know: he wants to kill you.” She smiled as if she had just figured out a pesky crossword puzzle entry. “Well, I wouldn’t chat with him much in the future, what with him trying to kill you and all.”

“Er, yes honey. Probably not a good idea,” I replied, and then for good measure: “ay.”

“Let’s go watch some Poker on the TiVo,” she said. “I know that’s your favorite.”

My panting was slowing now, and the pain of the ant bites rose as my panic level dropped. After I applied ointment to the greater part of my body, we did watch television together, each of us taking turns cooing to Kellie and intermittently discussing the statistics of certain poker hands. At one point in the afternoon, she said to me, “by the way, you weren’t smoking out there, were you?”

“No, no,” I said. “Just…getting close to nature. Too close.”

Backstory: The Great Magician Jannsen

2004-10-21T16:35:00.000-07:00

(I)

Mostly, Jim (my real father) came up with ideas. Some were downright crazy, but others were elegant and pragmatic. My father seemed unable—or unwilling—to distinguish the ludicrous from the useful; rather, he approached the natural and social sciences with a jazzer’s improvisatory mien. He even had an odd way of talking that reflected playful combination: somewhat like Cockney rhyming slang, his speech was peppered with alliteration, substitutions, neologisms, and strange metonymies. Later, when Jannsen sued to take over Jim’s part in the company, he would cite this predilection for outrageous speech as one of the qualifiers for Jim’s mental instability. Since Jim preferred amazing others with his combinatory powers over convincing professional mediators of his sanity, Jim can be said to have given away his share in the business.

Jannsen’s role in the business was primarily to secure patents for my father’s ideas and to wait for others to either use an idea based on this patent (in which case he would sue said party), or to wait until someone asked to use the idea in an invention (in which case he would work out an amicable settlement). When an idea was born with a full-fledged will to market, it was advertised on infomercials with by a host who served as a stand-in for my father. You know this man, of course: Tom Galiel has been coming into your living room for years, selling you all kinds of useful crap that my father either invented or improved upon. Not all of these made the piles of cash you’d expect, but they endeared the buying public to a certain kind of smarmy marketing. Remember the Pocket Pan-Fryer? What about those amazing four-bladed windshield-wipers? I am the rightful heir to the Healthy, Fast, Wok Repast dynasty (“Just stir it…and defer it!” says the infomercial audience).

At first, my mother must have found Jim entertaining. By the time I was ten, though, it was obvious that she viewed him solely as a source of wealth: he spewed out profitable ideas like an always-spouting oil well, and while Jannsen took on the task of refining the natural resources of his partner’s mind into cold, hard cash, my mother worked on the homefront to anchor Jim to the real world enough to subsist on a daily basis. He would fly to Paris to study architecture, he would stand all day in a supermarket to watch people’s wavering movements as they chose this breakfast cereal over another, he would lay on his back and silently watch the stars. General curiosity was Jim’s grand calling.

Jannsen and my mother met often to discuss my father’s well-being. Initially, Sally (my mother) reported to Jannsen on Jim’s dreams, for he often spewed forth ideas in his sleep—intellectual property that could be tapped without cutting their rightful owner in on their fair market value. Over time, Sally and Jannsen’s business relationship didn’t develop into a love relationship, but instead cut out the middle man. Judging that they’d garnered enough wealth from my father, they shut him out of their lives. Jannsen moved into investment banking, and Sally moved in with Jannsen.

(II)

My mother, eager that one of us might extend an olive branch, had left us alone for the afternoon. It appeared that Jannsen had been first to bend.

He looked down at me, smiled for the first time since I’d met him, and asked me, “would you like to see a magic trick?”

Jannsen had only recently replaced my father as head of the household, and I had been wary of him to this point. His manner had seemed cold (as much an individual personality trait as a Scandinavian thing, I would later find out), as if he viewed me only as a formal addendum to acquiring a new wife and a new household. At this moment, the possibility that my father might be replaced by a magician went a long way toward smoothing the transition.

“Bring me those dollar bills I hear you’ve been saving, and I will make them multiply magically!”
I ran to my room and grabbed the money, ecstatic. Even at ten years of age, I knew that magic was sleight-of-hand and misdirection. Already I understood his Tooth Fairy magic-logic; he was going to somehow pull more money from a sleeve or such in an attempt to buy my love. At this point, my love was for sale. I had been saving my father’s sporadic allowances for a year now. I was up to four hundred and thirty-five dollars, nearly three-quarters of the money I’d need to buy a pint-sized version of the Italian racing bicycles I’d seen in the movie, “Breaking Away.” Money in hand, I ran back to the kitchen table and sat across from him.

“We have a hefty pile of cash, don’t we?” I found myself already liking the way he talked about my money, saying “have” as “haff” and “hefty” as “hafety.” I thought I might even ape some of his pronunciation.

He took the bills, straightening and placing them in his left hand. Twirling his right hand over the stack, he chanted, “voolah, zoolah, moolah!” I braced for the transformation. Would the money come from the sleeve? Would my eyes be directed away at the last possible moment? I watched his hands intently as he grabbed the bills between his thumbs and forefingers. “Zoot!” he cried, and ripped the bills in two. He proceeded to rip the bills—mostly twenties but with a couple hundreds—into quarters and then, with some difficulty, into eighths.

“This part is very important,” he said, winking at me. “Go and get the scissors from…wherever you keep the scissors.” I leapt up and sprinted to the kitchen. I assumed that I would find a wad of bills, but when I opened the junk drawer, I found only discarded insurance notices, rubber bands, a package of sheet rock screws, and the requested scissors. My curiosity at this trick now very much piqued, I rushed back. “No running with the scissors,” he lightly scolded, and I blushed a little. “This is not a trick that need be rushed,” he added. He took up the scissors, said, “zam. Zalla. Zee!”, and carefully cut the bills into sixteenths, then thirty-seconds. He scooped up the shredded pieces from the table and threw them into the air above me.

“Hee hee!” I giggled as pieces of twenties and hundreds sprinkled on and around me.

He extended his arms out, palms opened toward me: “ta-dah!”

I waited for a second. Brushed money out of my hair. Five seconds. My eyes widened. Twenty seconds. Still, nothing happened. Forty seconds. A minute and a half. He sat silently, an expectant smirk on his face. Finally, after two minutes, I asked, “when will it happen?”

He hammed up his supposed ignorance: “When will what happen?”

“The magic,” I said, still hopeful. “When will my money multiply?”

His countenance returned to the impassive state I had observed in the preceeding weeks. “Oh, yes. That,” he said, suddenly dismissive. “It won’t.”

“Huh?”

“Your money’s gone child. Don’t you know that money’s no good when you cut it into twenty pieces? Don’t you know that magic is no more real than those silly Gods in the stars or in bibles?
I was silent. I felt a lump rising in my stomach, a kind of roller-coaster preamble that couldn’t decide whether to introduce dread or excitement. Was this part of the trick? “I don’t understand,” I mumbled.

“It’s simple, little one. Or, must I draw a map for you, tear it up, and throw the pieces on your head?”

I started to cry. Just a little at first, a whimper really, but when I saw that no response was forthcoming, I started heaving out my grief in great blubbery heaps.

“Yes, yes. I get your point,” he said. “The shattered illusions of youth and all that apparatus. Listen to me: when you choose to stop crying, I’d like you to go to your room and write this down:

“I have been duped by the great magician Jannsen. I will be a cleverer boy in the future.”

(III)

Twenty years later, in the old man’s last months, Jannsen and I truly bonded as father and son. I had seen very little of my real father over the past decade, and had completely lost contact with him after he moved from his dingy, cluttered hovel to a tidy, antiseptic sanitarium. I had recently overcome my own bout with agoraphobia, and was now contending with Ruthie’s upwardly mobile arc of mental illness (why does insanity seem to swarm around my family?) Now, I was to serve as a part-time nurse to my stepfather and one-time employer, a man who had spent no more of his fortune than absolutely necessary on his loyal stepson. I had gone to a public high school, had paid my way through a public University, and now held an unassuming job in marketing. Jannsen, too, had a son, a effete fop of a man four years my elder from a previous marriage. This man, Sven by name, had been educated—at Jannsen’s expense—in the finest European academies, and had taken as his life’s work the expenditure of his birth father’s capital. Every month or so, I would track him to a suite in Paris or a villa in Tuscany, forcing him to talk briefly to his father over the phone. Sven was usually too busy spending his father’s money to talk for more than a couple of minutes, but these few minutes were enough to greatly please Jannsen. Jannsen wouldn’t come out and tell me he was proud of his son’s lifestyle, or even of his son’s disregard for him; rather, he registered his approval of his son by redoubling the day’s efforts at humiliating me.

Although he had not deigned to help me with even a word of recommendation at any point in my career, Jannsen was quick to point out my failures in the business world at our every meeting. He said I lived above my means. He said I’d married horribly. He said I’d never amount to anything. Whenever he went off on one of these tangents, I smiled the smile of the duped. He had always shown only enough concern for me to apprise me of his unconcern, yet now I, duped again, smiled while emptying his bedpan, while taking his temperature, while turning his cancer-ravaged body so as not to invite bedsores. The nurse came only twice per week, and I was expected to do the job of a hospice worker in addition to my normal job. Since most of my business was already conducted via computer at that time, I set up shop in an empty bedroom of Jannsen’s house, foregoing much daily contact with my wife at a crucial time for her mental illness.

I said that we bonded as father and son. This is true. No less than three times per day, he would ring the little dinner bell I’d given him, croaking, “son! Son!” I would come into his room, lean close to him, and hear him say, “son, don’t even think about touching the Monterey properties. I’ve already signed them over to Sven.” Or, “son, tell Sven that I’ve given him my collection of cars,” or, “Son, you thought you’d live in this mansion with my ghost? The realtor already has a bidding war on his hands, and every penny will go to Sven.” He called me son. I treated him as a son should. And every day his derision worsened. Every day, I kept the same tenuous hold on my sympathy. Even in his utmost cruelty, he was met only with my now-stoic, now-stupid smile: ha! You got me again, old man. I smiled, I cleaned up his bloody vomit, I waited.

I stopped waiting in his final weeks. He hadn’t the strength to even grab the bell anymore, and I would now have to lean very close to hear his whispered mockery. One morning, I waited until he was at his most cognizant, and removed a folded piece of paper from my pants pocket. I unfolded it and held it before his face. I then read it aloud to make sure he understood. The contents of this note, written twenty years ago in a child’s hand, were as follows:

“I have been duped by the great magician ~~Jannsen~~ Jason. I will be cleverer in the future.”

I had stricken his name and added my own on the same day I wrote the lesson. Below this, in a more mature hand, was a number. By his widening eyes, I guessed that he recognized the number to one of his offshore bank accounts, an account that could be said to represent his grandest achievements of siphoning, embezzling, and general fiscal backstabbery. There were actually many such accounts, but this account in particular held a special place in my heart. This was the account in which he had first deposited funds stolen from my father, even while Jim was still married to my mother. By extension, Jannsen had stolen from the very woman he would marry and later drive to an early, ugly death. And now, its contents were mine.

Jannsen started to say something, so I leaned in close. “Quite a bit more…” he wheezed, “than 435 dollars…I was beginning to wonder…if you would ever learn that lesson…Son.” He paused, gathering the breath to pursue another sentence. “I hope you enjoy…tearing Sven to pieces.” Then, he made a halfhearted attempt to bite my ear.

I said, “goodbye, dad,” and left it at that, walking out of his room, his mansion, his life. He was afterward attended by a Certified Nursing Assistant I’d specifically chosen for her ineptness. After having drained the accounts, I nobly ceded to Sven on matters of Jannsen’s materiel. One might think that Sven would be gracious about this division of wealth, but he seemed to think that he had gotten the short end of the stick—of course, he had received the short end, but one can only blame his father for having more hidden wealth than legitimate. In the end, I think that Sven’s repeated death threats stemmed more from the necessity of his leaving Europe than from the actual distribution of assets. Nor am I so cold as to discount Sven’s grief over his father’s death.

Hopefully, now that I have disappeared from the scene, my step-brother can finally begin the process of healing.

Fanmail for the Common Man

2004-10-20T14:40:00.000-07:00

I recently received this anonymous email:

I thought I’d ask you a question off-blog. I find your blog interesting, but I’m not sure what you’re doing with it. I mean, I’m in on it, but I don’t know that I’m still into it. This is what I see you doing with your blog:
[much unnecessary conjecture, mostly academic, omitted by editor—JS]
...the problem with your blog is that there is no narrative coherence. One minute, you’re talking about your wife and child. The next, they’re gone. Same for your neighbor. You get sick, write some wacky stuff, then you pop back onto the blog like nothing happened. And what happened to all that “sentimental traveler” stuff?

You talked in your last blog post about readership. How can you expect people to keep tuning in if they have no idea what to expect, or even what the point is?
--Anonymous

Points well taken, Anonymous (Brian? Avram?) I’ll admit that I’ve been remiss in mentioning both Ruthie and Wilbur. Certain things happened after I recuperated from my last bout of illness, things that influenced my decisions in posting entries on this blog. If there is a problem with my blog, it’s that I started talking about these people and then tried to make my life a bit more private.

You’re right about all of it, though: the disjointed entries, the lack of sentimental moments, the disappearance of Ruthie and Wilbur. I’m sorry you’re not into the blog; in fact, I never asked that anyone be into “The Happy Stevensons.” Like most blogs, this is just a space wherein I can tell others about my life. That is, as you say, the point. I never assumed otherwise.

You, though, demand narrative coherence, and narrative coherence you shall have. I’ve had enough time to sit and mull over the events of the past two weeks. I’m looking forward to giving you the synthesis you so desperately need. Backstory, sub-plots, confessional, mirth and misery: all for you, Anonymous. That’s how far I’m willing to go for someone who takes the time to read my blog.

Oh yes, and free toasters for all three of my other readers.

I’ll even throw in one of my father’s famous Pocket Pan Fryer(R) units.

Footnote Fever

2004-10-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, the only seeming justification for continuing a blog is the expectation of an ever-increasing readership. If I am telling my innermost thoughts and feelings to complete strangers, one thinks, I should at least tell those thoughts and feelings to as many strangers as I possibly can. I am guilty of this, but I also know that my numbers have hit a plateau. Having, at present, fallen out with Wilbur, my former pupil (maybe fodder for tomorrow's post), I must foray into the blogosphere to find new friends and fresh ideas to emulate.

I recently stumbled upon a fascinating blog--fascinating for the fact that, although the author writes but one sentence per day, the blog has seen several thousand visitors. The One Million Footnotes blog includes this Prospectus:

Footnotes to a nonexistent book, a series of observations, a novel without the plot, the autobiography of an imagination, linked poetry of the everyday world, an impossible goal.

Most posts convey a metaphor, some catch a sentence in mid-stream, and a few present a story in themselves. I'll leave you to explore the blog, but the entries go something like this (I've borrowed examples from others so as not to steal Mr. OneMillionFootnotes' thunder):

"Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."

or this:

"In the middle of a silence deserted as a street before a crime."

These posts are chock full of reader comments. In the interest of creating a similar readership base, and in deference to the blog’s author (who has a damn decent idea) and in emulation of my father-as-innovator, I propose to take an actual footnote from a real work and offer it up for discussion. It is my hope that, severed from its original context and recontextualized in our present sphere, the footnote will take on an richness heretofore undiscovered. I’m dealing very much here in found poetry.

I offer up one of editor Gwin J. Kolb’s footnotes from the Yale edition of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. The following is footnote 5 of page 62 (Book XV of Rass.):

"See p. 36, n. 4, above."

Feel free to post your wonder and admiration below. More importantly, tell me how you connected on a deeply personal level with this line.

Fiction 59 Recycled

2004-10-17T21:24:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed from the link at the bottom of my blog, I am a supporter of fiction bloggers. I find that the blog is an excellent medium in which to experiment with narrative. I am, of course, no writer of fiction. Besides finding the endeavor too taxing, I believe that one can find an infinite amount of interesting material in one's daily life, if only one properly attunes one's sensibilities. Unfortunately, I am only now recovering from several weeks of wretched sickness. That is, I am, at this moment, attuned to very little. In the interest of keeping the bloggish lines of communication open, I'm putting some literary micro-scribblings on the blog.

I occasionally write short—very short—works of fiction. These stories are necessarily less than sixty words. If I have to write for more than four minutes, I discard the piece. Here are a few of those pieces of "Fiction 59"—the clean ones, anyway.

If you have any sensational stories of 59 words or less, throw 'em on the pile: the great thing about this exercise is that we can only applaud them. Any negative criticism will be met with: "I only had four minutes and 59 words. What the hell did you expect?"

Big Sam
I smiled weakly and he slapped my back again, heaving a big doofus laugh across the lunchroom.
“You get it? Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“I got it.” ha.

And then, unexpectedly, with big, doofus clarity and big, doofus candor: “you never get ruffled, man. I respect that.”

I smiled weakly with regret at having rubbed shit in his sandwich.

The Sims
The trash-stink under the sink was almost undeniable. A glass in the sink was suspect, but not enough to merit washing before I poured some soda and returned to the computer. Sinking back into the simulated family, I happily piloted the father-figure through making the bed.

From the bathroom, Wifey yelled for a towel, far-off and too vague anyway.

Equation
Next to me, my niece screamed delight as the maglev-powered roller coaster pitched into a high-G hairpin. My face re-anatomized, pulling my lips into a rictus scowl.

Thrown toward the loop at 65 miles per hour, an equation solved itself unbidden: the magic of childhood equals a low center of gravity.

Miles and Coltrane 1959/∞
Story goes that after a show, Miles laid into Coltrane for marathon soloing.

“The ideas keep coming,” pleaded Coltrane, “and I just can’t stop.”

Said Miles, “try taking the motherfucker out yo mouth”
- - -
Nowadays, in Heaven’s Big Band, Gabriel is lead trumpet and Sonny, sax. Miles and Coltrane are in the backline, stuck playing changes for the Man.

Intertextual Graffiti

2004-10-15T02:50:00.000-07:00

I’d rather not begin every other post with the phrase, “I apologize for my last post.” I’d rather not struggle to make sense of the gibberish I seem to write in those feverish states. I’d rather not, for instance, make the claim that there is a self-referentiality undergirding the presentation of gibberish AS gibberish in my recent post, and that the Christian and demonic references of this post’ hyperlinks form a discourse ostensibly competing with the otherwise “flat” epistolary text (ie. text viewed without reference to hyperlinks), deconstructing the binary relationships of Jesus/Demon, meaning/gibberish. I’d rather not ponder if there are actually terms of differentiation between web text viewed simply as text and web text viewed as doorways to other texts. That is, I’d rather not constantly write about what I write. That approach may be too insular even for me.

I said I’d rather not do these things, but in rehearsing my wishes, I did them anyway.

As for my sicknesses, I’m not only ravaged, but exhausted. If I don’t get better by tomorrow, I’m going to drive to the nearest town and see a doctor.

The REAL Victrola!

2004-10-14T21:12:00.000-07:00

Hodely hoo yah! De de da dum! Back from haunted heaven, you ask? I'm here to spin the oldies. Fanfare! Da de! Trumpets and squiggling saxophones and much slapping of muzzy bellies! Dum! De! This the latest dancin' craze, this tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk:

I was the shadow of an Actor slain,
By the false censure of the critics' train.
I was that bit of mirrored role and I
Live on, fly on, in the reflected eye!

That's it for now folks! Tune in later for more hits and misses!

And a long-distance dedication to you-know-who: Gene Evil's "Possession is 9/ 10 of the Law. "

Apologies for last post

2004-10-12T16:24:00.000-07:00

I must apologize for my last blog entry. I have been sick, people. Very sick. Seems I got hold of the laptop in a fever delirium and dashed off a bit of gibberish. I am most embarrassed at quoting Alanis Morrisette's "Uninvited." Whereas the song itself is eerily catchy, I'm apparently not the only one who writes during states of delirium. "An unfortunate slight?" Tripe. Space filler. The song would have been better served if she had substituted her patented off-key wailing for half the lyrics. I had always assumed that, in a proper delirium, I would quote the early, William S. Burroughs-influenced Steely Dan, or maybe Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here." But Alanis Morissette? Even my dementia is slipping.

As for the content of the post, I can only assume that I was being a wee bit paranoid. I must have thought someone was breaking into my house. Maybe I was freaked out about all the calls [1], [2]. As for my mis-quote of the Thin Lizzy classic, "The Boys Are Back in Town," I think it might originate in one of Brian's posts from some time back.

Or, maybe I was just batshit crazy.

Crank up the Victrola!

2004-10-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

He says:

Must be somewhat heartening
To watch shepherd need shepherd
But you you're not allowed
You're uninvited
An unfortunate slight

He says:

Who can it be knocking at my door?
Go 'way, don't come 'round here no more.
Can't you see that it's late at night?
I'm very tired, and I'm not feeling right.
All I wish is to be alone;
Stay away, don't you invade my home.
Best off if you hang outside,
Don't come in - I'll only run and hide.

He says:

I don’t feel you anymore
You darken my door
Whatever you’re looking for
Hey, don’t come around here no more

But I says:

The General's back in town!

A bit of the old punch-in punch-out, my droogies

2004-10-10T16:14:00.000-07:00

I felt I should briefly check in, if only to tell my readers that I'm not dead (yet). I'm in a worrisome spot. Remember that job that I never mention? I never mention it because I haven't really been doing anything work-related since I moved here. It only took two months for my employer to notice that I've left off work. He sent me a polite email voicing his dismay purely as the outgrowth of concern for my personal well-being (why he feels FORCED to talk to me in this way is a tale for another time), but the ultimatum was there: do your work, or say goodbye to the company and its big, fat paychecks.

So back I go, yet again fighting off sickness, to the number-mill. Cry for me, Argentina.