PSA: Television shows with very powerful episodes reflecting on death, in their fifth seasons

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "The Body," "Forever"
Six Feet Under, the last four episodes

Unsolicited Advice, VIII

Stop using these words:

formulate
utilize

You don't need them. Nobody does.

New word: Blahgger

n. 1. someone who insists on blogging about the mundane, quotidian details of his or her life; 2. someone who posts mediocre photos of progeny, pets or home repairs on a blog

In Defense of Poppery, VI: "Dog Park"

Pop example: "Dog Park" by Saturday Knights

What redeems it: "Dog Park," as one online reviewer states, straddles rap and rock -- with, I'd say, an occasional hint of much-hated reggae. It's shamelessly themed, discussing the abandonment of the singer in terms of the dog his (now ex-) girlfriend also left behind.

Everything in the song is sung in terms of the dog -- which is what redeems it.

The humor inherent in discussing your girlfriend's leaving you in terms of having to take her Chow Chow (my most hated of dogs) to the dog park causes "Dog Park" to be the essential opposite of Across Five Aprils' "A Year from Now" (see "In Defense of Poppery, V"). Where Across Five Aprils laments in glorious, melodramatic detail, the loss of the singer's first (AND ONLY, EVER) love, the Saturday Knight's singer is mainly concerned with the practical ramifications of his girlfriend leaving -- like his having to take care of her stupid dog.

Except that the dog isn't stupid. The singer takes the dog to the dog park, in fact, and meets someone new. He suddenly becomes a very enthusiastic dog owner. Promising to shower the dog with gifts, he says to the dog:

I wouldn't trade you for a stone fox terrier
I wouldn't trade you for a Spanish waterdog

This is where the song goes from maintaining a metaphorical thematic connection to dogs to a ridiculous, LOLly reference-on-every-line preoccupation with them. The singer begins chanting "best in show" in the background, presumably about both the dog and the woman the dog has allowed him to meet.

The references become so hyperbolic that by the end, the song ends up having an "It's Raining Men" optimism without even the seriousness included in that song. (Recall that in "It's Raining Men," the single-girl angel had a problem that she ultimately solved by "raining men"; plus, if you think about it, men falling from the sky is a scary rather than a fun-and-fancy-free proposition, and wouldn't be very sexy if it actually happened).

The song satirizes itself -- which is the best kind of satire.

Rating: Three whippets.

PSA: The winner of this year's Thanksgiving dog show.

The pointer.

Quantifiable Living: Selves-frazzlement scale

Emotion: Frazzlement due to over-busyness

Units of measure: Selves

How it works: Frazzlement (anxiety) levels can be measured in the number of selves that would be required to allow you to take a Caribbean vacation without guilt.

Selves should be measured with the original-you calibrated at zero. Thus, if you are currently taking a guilt-free Caribbean vacation, your frazzlement level is at 0 selves.

A typical day would require at least one self to free you for a Caribbean vacation. The number of selves required on any given day for frazzle-free vacationing should be calibrated by attempting to imagine a schedule for each self that would allow the multiple selves to feel capable and useful but not overwhelmed.

Example:
You have to pick up a jar of peanut butter from the store: 1 self
You have three newspapers to put out at once: 5 selves
You have to fill out insurance forms, pick up a child from daycare, take out the trash and clean the bathroom all at once: 7 selves (with 3 for the forms)

It is unnecessary to calibrate the scale for personal laziness or sour dispositions, as these are legitimate considerations in determining subjective frazzlement levels. However, pity levels for particularly lazy, sour or high-strung individuals may be calibrated according to personal criteria. (Levels of pity will not necessarily correlate to number of selves.)

Limits: Particularly guilt-ridden people will find this scale useless, as their dispositions likely render them incapable of taking a Caribbean vacation without guilt.

People who hate the beach, the Caribbean or vacations in general may have difficulty using this scale.

Travel time, expense and the potential stress created by booking and embarking on a Caribbean vacation should not be considered in the frazzlement scale.

Elaborations: This scale is flexible and may be useful for partial days as well as averaged over whole days, weeks or months.

Mode and mean are both relevant measurements for frazzlement, as it is legitimate and useful to discuss both the highest number of selves necessary in any given day as well as the average number of selves you would need to experience a guilt-free lay-out on a Caribbean beach.

Recipe for learning about haute cuisine (Excerpted from email to Heather, 6 June 2007)

I got into the chef books after picking up a biography called The Perfectionist about a French chef who shot himself in the head in 2003.

If you're at all interested in the weird world of French cuisine, the intro to that book was a pretty good primer for me -- and if you read any farther than that, I recommend doing what I did: get the book out of the library, read about 40 pages initially and then put it down, reading a few pages at a time up to about 80.

Then let it sit there quietly while your maximum number of renewals run out.

On the day that it is due, go to the library and sit in an uncomfortable wooden chair for several hours, racing to finish it before the library closes.

THIS is when you'll start to really enjoy what may have started out as an academic exercise in willpower; this is when you'll get to know the man, Bernard Loiseau, and wish that he was still alive. It's tough breaking into the world of three-star french cuisine for you, but it's even tougher for HIM, and right around that point in the book where you had stopped before is where the anecdotes begin.

It was after that that I started looking up and putting holds on chef books. Of course, I've read the requisite Anthony Bourdain phenomenon, Kitchen Confidential, which I would recommend for its colorful descriptions of kitchen manners and its advice on garlic (in short, that people who don't have time to mince fresh garlic don't deserve to have any garlic at all). I've also listened to A Cook's Tour, which was less good, unless you'd like your food descriptions to take place in exotic locales, in which case, it's your best bet.

I'm somewhat disappointed; I was going to recommend Ruth Reichl to you and now you've revealed that you've already read two of her books. I read those books in semi-reverse order: Garlic and Sapphires, Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me With Apples (instead of the chronological TatB-CMWA-GaS order).

If you've already read Garlic, then I recommend the other one that you haven't read. If, like a more normal person, you've read them in order and are left only with Garlic, I say go ahead and read it while understanding this: that it's not the same as the first two, the tone is somewhat different and the timeline is shorter, but also that it's her time at NYT that made her famous enough to write those other ones and find an audience. Sometimes I found her discussing her disguises to be annoying, but I did always enjoy her about-the-food writing, and some of the recipes -- though I have yet to try them -- looked promising. [Ed. note: I still have yet to try them.]

One set of chef books that I thought was really excellent (and which I would recommend above the others I've listed so far) was Michael Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef, The Soul of a Chef, and The Reach of a Chef. The second and third don't come up to the standard of the first, but they do continue what I think is Ruhlman's true theme: the pursuit of perfection in all areas. I liked his writing enough -- the clarity and subtlety of his anecdotes reflects his subject matter very nicely (form! content!) -- to purchase a book he wrote on neonatal heart surgery called Walk on Water. I think he's the only nonfiction writer I've been faithful to as though he were writing novels -- typically I would follow the subject matter rather than the actual author, with nonfiction.

If you're interested in Italian cookery (as opposed to the French), Heat by Bill Buford was also pretty good, affording some decent and memorable story-telling. The movie "Mostly Martha" is also cute and definitely worth watching. ("Bella Martha" in its Italian title, I believe.)

I have Toast, but I haven't read it yet.

Flying should probably be its own reward.

My girl, passing a tattoo parlor: Can I get a tattoo?

Me: Do you have money?

My girl: How much do they cost?

Me: Probably $75. Do you have $75? Because if you do, I'm going to make you pay me for lunch.

My girl: No. I have it in my pouch at home -- I'll go home and get it.

Me: Okay. You'll have to get there and back in 45 minutes.

My girl: I can't fly!

Me: If you could fly, I'd get you a tattoo.

[My girl jumps up and down a few times.]

Me: That's called 'jumping.' That's not flying. You're not going to learn to fly that way.

My girl: You have to jump to fly.

Me: Good point. That is the first step.

I am breaking up, with you.

I am wearing grey long underwear with tiny purple and pink flowers printed on them. I’ve had them since high school, and they’ve worn out and ripped in back, in a long line-turned-to-a-hole down my thigh. No one will ever see them, though, so I let them stay in my drawer and save me every time I need to wash the thin silk ones I got to take to China.

I’ve rolled them down today, in a two-inch flat swath that stretches from hip bone to bone. I am aware of the stretch, aware of how I look with bikini-cut underwear underneath them, the thin straps crossing my sides alone, over that bone that juts out more than ever. I’ve lost a lot of weight.

The awareness is yours, though, created by you. It’s an awareness of you more than of myself.

That was all you wanted to create – like God, blindly indifferent to the unwakened desires of his creatures before he made them – as though I’d wanted to know just this, my own power. As though I’d wanted an education.

The new self-consciousness – not insecurity, the opposite – is a kind of knowledge. It must be why scholars focus so myopically on whether Adam and Eve had sex in the garden, before the Fall.

“Maybe they did, but they had no lust,” some speculate.

But that doesn’t make sense. I had no lust.

My desire was, as the curse says, “for my husband.” The whole person. Not a part to use.

My desire was for the work that happens between two people, between midnight movies, between kissing and groping. I kept waiting for it, my hands tentative and untouching until I could grasp what wasn't there.

I wanted all of it, you see, especially the unfilled spaces, especially the interstitial reflections on how to be a better person – I wanted you as a reason to be a better person.

I am glad I stopped before I realized I was the only one wanting this. Slightly before, but I’m glad I did. You had been dividing me.

I should have known earlier, by the way we discussed my body as a separate entity. I should have known by how often you told me you weren’t paying attention to what I said or wrote, or the way we laughed at things that were mine and serious.

I couldn’t know earlier, though. I could not have understood the possible divorce between part and part. I was trying, always, to be a whole person and could not see the severing between me and me as it happened.

I get it now. I see myself as a series of parts, as an intoxicating array of them, as a set of qualities I can use to force the between-questions, to force men to do the work with me – to love me.

I could manipulate you, or anyone, in pieces.

This is never what I wanted. I wanted the work of being together – of being a together person.

All I have now is this empty, unconsoling reward.

PSA: AIM (Aggravatingly Inserting Messages)

Me, on AIM to my girl(1:12:19 PM): Hey, J----. I'm bugging you while you're writing to Marc!

Me (1:12:49 PM): Look at me bugging you!

Me (1:12:59 PM): You can't write to Marc while I keep doing this!

Me (1:13:02 PM): Ha ha!

[My girl laughs uproariously for two whole minutes while she tries to form a reply by AIM.]

Me (1:14:23 PM): :0

My girl (1:16:13 PM): ok i get you r sily nis im trying to wit to marc

[I wait until she's started back on the email, so the window will pop up in front of it again and get in the way.]

Me (1:16:24 PM): Hahaha

[My girl: "Alicia!" We both laugh.

This derails her for ten minutes.]

Dream: I haven't even been reading any Anne McCaffrey lately...

It’s dark, or almost dark, but the dusk is gritty and uncertain, darker in some places and less in others, in a way that makes me think it’s ash creating it, blocking out the sun – or the moon.

There is a woman with dark brown hair that curls around her shoulders, and she holds the standards. The flags themselves are rich brown and burgundy reds, and I can’t see what the emblem is. They’re on gold-and-wood poles, and she carries two.

There are dragons behind her, at least two, but I only see one at a time. That one is also deep red, dark like too much blood, and has the dart-shaped head, two long animal arms that end in claws, wings, a spike-ended tail, haunches. It sits over and on and around the castle, sometimes in front, sometimes behind, sometimes paying attention to us, sometimes looking beyond us. It’s inscrutable, but interesting to watch. I am not afraid of it.

When the dragons are vanquished, or vanish, I go inside the castle. It’s set down into the ground of the hill, like a bunker, but the front entrance opens onto a wide, cleared, inset park. The sides of the hill curve around the small park – a court, actually – like arms hugging it, lovingly, actually – comfortingly. It must be a good defense. Most of the castle is hidden from view from any other vantage point – this is the only real entrance, unless you can fly.

There are no moats at all. The castle entrance is parched, barely growing grass, and people walk over it all day.

I go into the castle, and it’s more high tech than most would expect – not outfitted with command consoles or anything military or laboratory-like, just not medieval – and in the back, on the upper level that juts out onto the rock of the mountain behind it, is a Salvation Army.

I go inside, with my brother and his wife, who become other couples as we’re in there, but are always together and happy and always out of my reach, and to the housewares section. I don’t need anything there, but I look.

I come across a plastic comforter bag half-filled with stuff, sold as a set or with additional things I’d choose to put in, and start to look through it.

There are tank tops, all in size S or XS, all my new size, and I take them out and fold them individually. One says “America First” on it, on a patch that would sit between my heart and throat. Another has a Chinese character that, if I wore it, would sit right above my belly button. It’s a black character set in a small peach-colored oval, on an otherwise green-and-olive swirl.

I don’t discriminate. All of the shirts are in the bag I chose, so I’ll keep them all, and I’ll add more from housewares – they’re tools, even the tea cups and saucers and plates, for deciding how to live and executing. There are other things in the bag, but I don’t get to check them before I wake up.

When I wake up, I have the sense that a vampire is standing over me, waiting to puncture my neck, and I let him.

What I most want you to know.

You will only grow old alone if that's what you choose.

Even if you choose that, you're not powerful enough to keep things and people in the world from loving you; the best you can do is refuse to acknowledge or feel it -- refuse to acknowledge or feel for them.

Go ahead.

But it takes more energy than anything else I've ever done.

PSA: Sir, your truck appears to be on...oh, wait.

Observed: A semi with a metallic cover on its grill painted to resemble flames shooting up from the radiator.

PSA: "You can't sing here! This is not a concert hall!"

My girl, pleadingly, as a song she loves to sing comes on (but she can’t sing along because we’re at the chamber of commerce): “Oh, Alicia!”

Me: “Do you need me to skip this one?”

My girl: “No, it’s okay. If you hear me singing it, slap me on the hand like this." [Demonstrates how to slap her hand; ten seconds later, she starts singing absent-mindedly.]

Me: “I’m not going to slap you!”

My girl, dismayed but laughing: “I can’t HELP it!”

Midnight, in my kitchen (A third prose sestina)

Last night, I stood on a chair with a weak supporting bar between the legs and stretched my hands up toward my kitchen light, which blew as soon as I flipped the switch on Sunday. I stressed the glass trying to turn what ended up being unturnable, and it creaked resistance before beginning to go – counter-clockwise.

The clock in my kitchen is the only one I haven’t turned back yet. I must like the mental correction of having to subtract an hour – it’s a constant reminder: I’m not there yet, I’m not there yet – which I know is perverse. I'm backward.

I am unfaithful to you. I’m here, then not here – in the kitchen making egg salad: putting the eggs on to boil, selecting watercress and rinsing it, putting it green on top of the plastic bag I took it from, running back in to type – but you don’t know the difference. It’s all one time to you.

Lucky for you, too, since time doesn’t turn back. You wouldn’t get those minutes returned to you if you had to wait for me.

The light’s cover wasn’t a screw-on. It’s held up by three nails, each keeping tension on the indented lip of the fixture. I was unfaithful to its form and kept trying to force it around, loosening it from one of the nails, but not enough to pull it down. My arms ached; I stretched backward to peer up at the whitened glass and promised myself that I’d fix that last clock, which ticked at me from the table.

I would have gotten to the clock just in time to turn it backward on the hour – 1 a.m. – if the light hadn’t been so unfaithful to me. It kept threatening to fall, and just as my arms threatened to give out, I saw the nails as I turned, and twisted them out.

That stupid, unfaithful clock continued unheeding, ticking away an hour in the future. My shoulders were clenching. I pulled the light down just in time, turned away, almost fell backward off the chair.

My faith has gone backward – I’m backslidden, they’d say, gone down the slippery slope into unfaithfulness. (Dear God, why don’t you love me? You’re so far – but it’s not even you I’m talking to; I’m not turning toward you. Does some internal clock always tell us when it’s time to head away from the light? Is the desert necessary in one’s late twenties, sans babies, sans prospects, with only self to focus on?)

The light recedes, if it was ever really there, heading backward until it’s a pinpoint. This time it’s definitely not me being unfaithful; it’s you.

Last night, I picked up the clock and considered turning its knob, watching its hands cradle the correct minute and rest between accurate hours.

But the time to be unfaithful wasn’t over.

I screwed a new bulb into the kitchen light socket, but let the pinprick continue heading backward, illuminating only my past.

The clock continues an hour in the future, turning my kitchen into a prophecy.

PSA: "Prose sestinas" and other stuff I made up

In college, I wrote a rambley, two-page, impossible-to-title thing that ended up getting published in the Minnemingo Review (semiannual campus literary magazine), as "untitled."

It rambled on a few topics, bringing them up in different orders and contexts, including Captain Picard from Star Trek TNG, a deer heart, earl grey tea (obvious connection to Capt. Picard, there) and salvation. It was weird, but I liked it.

I mainly liked that it seemed to have a structure behind it, despite its being freewriting and essentially unedited. (I changed two words in the last line.) I decided that since it came back to the same topics repeatedly, I'd call it a prose sestina. I'll never write a real sestina -- a medieval form poem that follows a complicated pattern of end-words through six stanzas and a tercet -- and it seemed the closest I'd ever get.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote what seems to be the most famous sestina, about a grandmother, a stove, an almanac, tears, a child and a house. I'm not sure whether nouns are mandatory for end-words, but they do seem like a good idea when you're going to have to use them six times.

The challenge of a sestina seems to be in getting things to stay interesting the whole time, in moving on with only the same words to help you express yourself. Maybe that's why I like it so much. Using old materials to make something new seems to be a theme in my life.

Anyway, it's mysterious, the reasons for liking things and for writing what we write. I write prose sestinas to see what I think, not to tell what I've thought.

So yesterday's "prose sestina" I call the second one, thanks to Capt. Picard and the deer heart, and I understand that it's not very well-structured. It's cheating.

But it's surprised me by being concerned with what I've been concerned with, recently and in general. It comes as close to a manifesto as I have right now, in its obsession with seeing -- correctly and incorrectly; supposing we see but not, really -- and hearing, interacting with the environment, in its quotidian detail, and it's all 100% true.

I have always been concerned with truth.

The next one is all true, too, and its structure is better.

Blood Flower (A second prose sestina)

Blood Flower is a milkweed and contains a white milky poisonous sap that exudes from the foliage when cut or damaged.

Extract of the root is used as an emetic and laxative. A decoction of the plant is used as an abortifacient (a substance that causes abortion).

*****

I feel sick and I wonder how long I’ve been bleeding into my stomach. Surely I have an ulcer by now – perforating, as I sit here – leaking stomach contents into my body, letting them float free around my other organs.

It seems like a mediocre lesson: Everything has its place. Letting things out where they don’t belong is dangerous. I imagine blood mixing with acid and leaching out into the rest of me.

I am sitting in the library, in a corner, near windows, at a desk. The window frames touch each other at the corner, coming to a wooden-cornice meeting point that rounds off the edge with three gentle, relieved stripes running sill to ceiling. They were obviously planned as a pair, not jumbled in like some corner-to-corner windows. One of them is secured by ADT.

I can see everything from here. I’m facing the window that looks out onto the back entrance of the library, the entrance everyone uses, and I can see through it to the airlock double set of double doors, the people (patrons) coming and going; as it grows darker, I see also everything behind me reflected in my twin windows. I can see the two desk carrels behind me, one twentysomething man at each, and the Dr Pepper bottle one of them has placed, illegally, by his study materials. I pull out my glass bottle of diet peach-mango green tea (with caffeine) and put it on the sill next to me.

My stomach still feels empty, hollow, and I wonder what happened to the dinner I just ate: Are black beans and jalapenos and cheese and tortilla running in tiny winding rivers down to my feet? If they were, would my feet swell? Would I be able to remove my shoes?

My feet feel fine.

It’s my stomach; it’s my heart. Maybe I’ve had too much caffeine.

I’m wearing my headphones so that no one will try to speak to me. It’s like I’m invisible with these on. It’s like I’m a panopticon operator.

One twentysomething boy runs past me, behind, and appears ten seconds later outside, at the back entrance. He’s on his cell phone. I can’t hear him because he’s outside, but I pretend it’s because I have my headphones on.

I might stay here forever.

What a scary thought.

The boy with the Dr Pepper is still behind me, pretending to study.

I look up and stare at the reflection in the window, the soda’s yellow cap and maroon label, and something moves – I realize I’ve also been staring at a person, outside, a woman who looks like a man or vice versa, who shifts, looks at me, goes inside. I don’t know her. Or him.

I can see myself floating in both windows, face-to-face and in profile, wearing the headphones, putting my chin in my hand, leaning into the desk. I pretend to study my computer.

Maybe I need more caffeine.

I want to listen to something, but I can’t decide what. I want to listen to everything at once – I want to hear all the good songs I know at the same time, to pile comfort on comfort until it feels like sinking into a giant, white down comforter. Maybe every song blends, like every color, into nothing, into white; maybe all the noises together turn into silence. I am listening to silence now, but I wish it were louder.

The cell-phone twentysomething comes back inside.

“How long are you going to stay here?” he asks his Dr Pepper friend.

“Probably til nine,” Dr Pepper guy says.

“Til it closes?” Cell-phone guy asks. “My dad’s going to come pick me up so I can go check into the hotel. Do you want me to bring my tools here?”

I’m glad I’m not listening to music.

“It feels like high school,” Dr Pepper guy says.

“Yeah.” Cell-phone guy. “Keep seeing double?”

Dr Pepper guy nods.

I think I’m getting a headache. It’s creeping in from my ears like the taste of a copper penny or a nine-volt battery, or blood. It’s thin and wiry, and I imagine the nerves stretching from my ears across my scalp, firing tiny pins of pain across my head, criss-crossing like a net. Cell-phone guy gets another call and is outside again.

When he returns, I catch only part of the conversation.

“You’re a caffeine drinker,” he says to the Dr Pepper guy, who says something I can’t hear.

“I’m getting a car from Fairfield – they’re putting me in the system,” cell-phone guy continues. Dr Pepper guy gets up and they leave. I look down the skinny stack I’m next to – Mystery, MCD-REU – to the librarian at the end, her blue shirt and white-white hair a shocking contrast, and watch cell-phone guy, his back to me, check something out and leave. Two people walk around the corner outside, passing both my windows, and come in.

There is nothing in my stomach. There won’t be for a long time.

I put on “Blood Flower” by Tilly and the Wall.

You'd better watch where you're walking
There might be somebody's blood flower growing
You'd better watch what you're doing
Don't go fucking around in the garden

It’s darker and darker outside. I have nothing else to do.

My hands smell like pennies.

I might stay here til they close.

PSA: How to deal, overly literal edition.

My girl, of a papercut she got while putting invoices into envelopes: “Ow – it hurts.”

Me: “Suck it up.”

My girl, pulling in her breath and holding it for half a second, then exhaling and pausing to think: “I can’t.”

Confessions XXVI

When I was 15, I spend the four days of Thanksgiving vacation teaching myself German. I got up to the week 6 lesson in my Berlitz self-teacher and was able to read a paragraph on "der Fleisch" and "racht"ing and could probably have asked anyone (all conjugations) for sugar in my coffee. If I'd been a coffee drinker.

I started teaching myself German just in case my class won the Daimler-Chrystler award of a month-long summer trip to Germany, and then just in case I wrote the winning essay for my class.

I stopped teaching myself German after going back to Spanish class the following week and only being able to remember "Strasse" instead of "calle" when trying to say "street."

Please hold for technical difficulties.

This blog will be down for maintenance, temporarily.

Emotional maintenance.

On the part of the author, exhausted by a two-post-a-day pace, a recently completed JFH, grad school application personal statements, interpersonal difficulties, etc. etc.

Please stand by, though not literally, or indulge yourself in reruns until sweeps week.

PSA: Feel-good, girl-power bands with half-hour albums

All Girl Summer Fun Band
Tilly and the Wall

Local Trivia: Its the best place.

Observed bowling hall sign: "Highland Bowl: Duck pin at it's best." (Upper left corner of the website.)

I'm hoping "it's best" is a heretofore unknown type of duck pin bowling, or possibly the name of the bowling hall itself, rather than an egregious grammatical error.

PSA: Binary Betty

Over the last month or so, my car has been sending binary-coded signals into the atmosphere -- if showing them on the odometer counts as "sending signals into the atmosphere."

Among the messages she's sent are:

100000
100001
100010
100011
100100
100101
100110
100111
101000
101001
101010
101011
101100
101101
101110
101111

My only hope for our survival is that none of these mean "destroy our planet now," or else that no one is paying attention.

Local Trivia: Zodiapet

The other day on Route 9 north, there drove past a van marked "Zodiapet: Animal Massage, Animal Communication."

Zodiapet uses Reiki, crystals, and other New-Agey stuff to help you talk to your pet. Dead pets, too, because "communication is telepathic."

I don't have any pets right now, but probably the cats we had as kids are dead, now; or those cats from the farm; or the twenty or so birds I've had over the course of my life, all of which are now dead (with one possible exception, in China).

But I want to take it one step further. I felt like I knew, generally, how my pets were doing when they were alive. What I want to know is how I can exploit this angle for monetary gain.

I mean, think about it: If we could talk to Barney, what would he say that would help us impeach Bush? If we could talk to the pets of the stars, how much money could we make selling their stories to Star magazine or the like?

If you want in on this plan, Zodiapets is holding a seminar in New Haven= -- "If Only They Could Talk" - Animal Communication Class. It's $35, and pre-registration is required.

Let me know if you're interested. I will donate room and board to anyone who wants to commute from my place to New Haven and then give me a detailed rundown of the general themes and weirdnesses of this conference.

Mix: Democratic Republic Patriots (in a Consumer Age)

"The Freest Man" -- Tilly and the Wall
"Free" -- Cat Power
"Fake Empire" -- The National [as heard in Obama campaign commercial]
"Free To Decide" -- Cranberries
"If I Had $1,000,000" -- Barenaked Ladies
"Free at Last" -- dc Talk
"Jesus Was A Democrat" --
"Buildings & Mountains" -- The Republic Tigers
"Fly free. Then take a right." -- Good
"The Employment Pages" -- Death Cab For Cutie
"Sell Sell Sell" -- Barenaked Ladies
"Start a War" -- The National
"Dear Sirs" -- El-P
"The National Anthem" -- Radiohead
"The Freest Man (CSS Remix)" -- Tilly and the Wall

Mix: All together now: Pinko-commie mix for hippies

You've seen the mix for Fascists -- now here's one for the severely socialist among us.

*****

"One In A Million" -- 2005 Million Man March
"Back In The USSR" -- Billy Joel
Chinese Daddy Cool
"Two of a Kind" -- The Story of Little Tree
"We Both Go Down Together" -- The Decemberists
"Unundustrius Worker" -- Good
"It's Not the Spotlight" -- Beth Orton
"Do I Want Another Working Day?" -- Skallander
"To The Workers of The Rock River Valley Region, I have an idea concerning your predicament, and it involves an innertube, bath mats, and 21 able-bodied men" -- Sufjan Stevens
"Common People" -- Church of Rhythm
"Not The One" -- Collective Soul
"Lose Yourself" -- Eminem
"Babiy Yar" -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko, read by Milt Commons
"We Come Together" -- Newsboys
"Happy Together" -- The Turtles

Mix: @#%$ [Explicit]

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Local Trivia: "Video Temptations"

This is the name of an adult video store on the Berlin Turnpike.

To this I say "try again, guys."

As far as I can tell, there's nothing coy, alluring or "tempting" about sodium lights and money shots -- they're the opposite of tempting. They're instant, badly plotted gratification.

I could degenerate into a series of suggestions for pun-laden alternate names, here, but I won't.

Feel free to suggest your own in the comments, though.

PSA: "Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn't even notice."

The other night on the local Fox news station, Channel 61, there ran a feature on girls kissing girls. The feature ran alongside the story about our local papers shutting down, though it ran about five times the length of that story -- probably about ten minutes.

It showed the same video of two hot coeds kissing in a bar repeatedly (probably five times), even slowing down the footage, either to let us better critique technique, to get us more turned on (because non-lesbian women kissing each other is SO HOT), or to try to fool us into thinking it's different girls the third and fourth time.

They interviewed girls in New Haven bars, most of whom said they understood the fun of kissing other girls to get men's attention, but wouldn't do it, themselves.

Well, good to know, Fox.

We hope you win a Pulitzer for this groundbreaking report.

Local Trivia: New England Safety Shoe

And here I thought all we had was the clam chowder.

Mix-up: Veronicas

I confess, despite this not being a confessions post, that I bought the Veronicas CD, "Hook Me Up," at Newbury Comics last week. I couldn't help myself.

On listening to it multiple times -- because this kind of perverse addiction never goes down easily -- I began to play a relational Tetris with their themes. When put in a proper order, the fictional woman singing the songs appears to be going through a relationship.

I re-ordered the songs here for your convenience, with original track numbers and a one- to two-sentence summary for each, using the name Veronica to indicate the fictional woman in a relationship and "you" to indicate her crush/boyfriend/ex.

This may be useful if you ever find yourself with the Veronicas album and want to program it to make sense.

Let me know if you have alternate orders that make more sense to you.

*****

1. Untouched: Veronica soooo wants you.

6. Take Me on the Floor: Veronica’s been waiting all night for you to pay attention to her.

8. Popular: Veronica is so awesome she can hardly stand it.

7. I Don’t Wanna Wait: Veronica wants you; now decide whether you want her or not – quickly!

2. Hook Me Up: Veronica wants to go somewhere far away.

4. This Love: Even if Veronica goes away now, you’ll still be together and in love and everything, don’t worry.

5. I Can’t Stay Away: Veronica shouldn’t be with this other guy, but she can’t help it.

9. Revenge Is Sweeter (Than You Ever Were): You left Veronica for someone else, and now you want to be back with Veronica, but that’s too bad, jerk.

3. This Is How It Feels: So you rejected Veronica, did you? Well, now it’s your turn to be rejected.

11. All I Have: If Veronica had realized you’d be this upset, she wouldn’t have slept with that other guy.

12. In Another Life: Veronica really, really loves you, but she can’t stand being so far away from you any more, so she’s breaking up with you. Maybe next time, buddy.

10. Someone Wake Me Up: You and Veronica broke up; it was a mutual thing, but it still really pains her.

13. Goodbye to You: Bye.

Our version of the horses that go throughout the earth.

Me: “There’s a tow truck towing another tow truck!”

My girl: “Oh my GOD!”

PSA: Herald and Bristol Press go under?

As the Hartford Courant has reported today, the Herald (New Britain, CT) and the Bristol Press newspapers, owned by the Journal Register Company, are up for sale.

Or they should be.

Instead of trying to sell the papers as the assets to the communities they serve that they are -- or that they would be if they were properly staffed in any department, or, say, had a Web platform chosen by actual people instead of by some sort of bizarre lottery that included only terrible, terrible options, as though by a robot determined to take over the world by inflicting alternating tedium and confusion on readers -- JRC seems determined to let the Herald and Bristol Press go down without any kind of fight.

They're not in negotiations with any buyers, said publisher Ed Gunderson, according to the Courant, and it seems they're not interested in beginning any.

JRC announced that it wanted to sell the Herald building months ago, to make way for a greenway, residential and retail buildings in the center of New Britain as part of the city's revitalization plan.

They're also not interested in printing the only story in town today -- their own -- despite the Courant's coverage, ABC Channel 8 filming outside the building this morning, and multiple calls and visitors who knew the news but didn't have the inside scoop.

But that's the Journal Register Company way; it was listed as one of the ten worst companies of 2006 by 24/7 Wall Street for their decision to pay 415 million for a group of Michigan papers, for which 274 million of the price was assigned to "Goodwill."

Not the nonprofit organization that you and I love for used furniture and clothes, that is, but corporate charity.

As though they'd decided that making money, in a business that was losing newsroom employees and press operators and everyone who works in the newspaper industry, by the dozen, was overrated.

In September 2005, according to 24/7 Wall Street, JRC's stock was trading above $20 a share. In 2006, when the article was written, it was down to $5.74. This year it dropped below a dollar, was de-listed, and dropped some more.

JRC's stock has been at a penny for a long time now, and in theory, they considered filing for bankruptcy (then didn't), so the writing has been on the wall for awhile.

But it's only upper-level JRC's idiocy in management and maintenance of the newspapers that's brought them to this move, and the most frustrating part of it all is that like Kenneth Lay or other Enron execs, or like the idiots who end up with golden parachutes from other companies, the jerks at the top get rewarded, and the people who suffer are the ones on the bottom.

Not just the employees, though, not in an industry that actually produces something (unlike Enron, which just seemed to sell shortages and fear -- and still failed, despite an infinite human capacity for these products). The citizens suffer. Local communities suffer. JRC doesn't care.

The alternative explanation to JRC being idiotically run is that it's being diabolically run. Maybe JRC execs are anti-newspaper. Perhaps they're anarchists, or rogue capitalists looking for monopoly in a post-regulation world, trying to garrote a free press before screwing the public.

More likely, they're a bunch of idiots in a room cavorting through big business like lords in a feudal society, wanting to exert small-minded control over an industry best run on big ideas like liberty, civic responsibility, and finding the truth.

JRC is painfully, ironically committed to a complete lack of transparency, not only in dealing with the public (the blackout on publishing a story in these papers about their own demise, for instance -- I mean, are people just supposed to wake up on Jan 13 and know, magically, that their papers will never show up again?), but in dealing with their own employees, and equally committed to constricting and obfuscating their business practices internally by circulating memo forms that don't make sense, that need to be signed by every level of management (guaranteeing nothing will ever get done) and yet that don't include enough sign-on lines to include all the required signatures; not allowing firing or hiring of employees without a labyrinthine process of proving they're necessary or incompetent, respectively; and adhering to a policy of positions themselves becoming defunct when the person occupying them (say, community/education reporter) happens to move on to another job.

The only explanation for handling a business in this manner is that the top tiers of JRC are full of men who decided to band together after meeting each other on a "choke fetish" Web site, and form a business they could choke to death. How else to explain the way they've dominated and gutted their company, making bad decision after bad decision while explaining nothing and listening to no one?

Or perhaps they were taking their cues from the Bush presidency.

Whoever let people like this into the American business mainstream should be ashamed -- and how.

PSQ: Does anyone know somebody at INS?

It turns out that my friend who died in June, Mimi, had a daughter.

The story is unbelievable, or would be if it weren't true. Mimi's daughter was born while Mimi was still unmarried and 18, and the father's parents took the baby from Mimi. I guess in Ethiopia, as in many more traditional societies, the father and his parents have more rights than an unwed mother, because the baby's grandparents kept her from Mimi until they passed away a few years ago.

Mimi had started the process of becoming an American citizen in 2007, after living in Italy and Canada, in order to bring her daughter to the U.S.

Then she died.

Her husband Mohammed is trying to get Blen, her daughter, to the U.S. now. He's looking for help with the process, connections in relevant offices, and advice from people who've done similar things.

Any of you who can help, let me know.

PSA: It's like in that movie, "Paperclips," except without the Holocaust.

Yesterday in the parking lot at the paper I looked down at my lumberjack-Kurt-Cobain-flannel shirt and saw the absence of a paperclip. It bothered me all day. I felt almost naked.

I put the large paperclip on the hole- (not button-) side of my shirt after English class one day, taking it from my English teacher's desk, slipping it on and just never removing it.

That was twelve years ago.

I left it on through countless washes and days wearing the shirt. It wore down to a dull tin tone over time. I played with it when I was bored or nervous, and refused to lend the shirt for Halloween three years ago because I was worried it would fall off or get lost.

When I went to college, it symbolized what I'd learned in high school; when my English teacher died, it symbolized my memory of him.

I'm not devastated over the loss of a paper clip, but it was something, and my shirt feels heavier without it.

Accusations IX

People who like "Missed the Boat" better than "Parting of the Sensory" or "We've Got Everything" on Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. You're just so, so wrong -- morally and aesthetically.

Snow Patrol, for putting out an album with several half-good songs and a 16-minute track at the end that proves they could have done a lot better on all the other tracks.

Winterpills, for showing up at Iron Horse Music Hall before I knew Iron Horse Music Hall existed, for the tour for an album I didn't know existed at the time. (I know that's unfair to them, but think of how it affected me.)

PSA: Matt & Kim & me

I went to see Matt & Kim in Northampton, MA on Wednesday, all by myself.

You are jealous of me now: either for my going to the show, or else for the superior knowledge of music and ineffable coolness that must be ascribed to me for going to a Matt & Kim show.

I will blog about my experience at the concert, which started with a local (Eric) and was opened by the most hilarious punk duo on the planet (Best Fwends), in an three-part series, starting, uh, later. Mostly because I have so much less time to blog these days, and because it's hard to come up with ideas, but also because I have a lot of good stuff to say about (2/3 of) them and want you to pay attention to each separately.

So look forward to that.

Movie: Hoodwinked

Hoodwinked is one of three films I’ve ever seen for which, as soon as it had finished, I went back to the beginning to listen to the audio commentary. I only ever do this when a movie I expected to be bad turns out to be better or more affecting than my wildest expectations. (The other two are Riding in Cars With Boys and Accepted.)

Actually, with Hoodwinked, I went back to the end to listen to the audio commentary, as the resume feature picked up at the point I’d left off on, in the middle of the credits. I learned there that a sequel was being planned, which made me pretty happy. (It's slated for 2010.) If it’s anything like its predecessor, it will be full of self-referential, clever moments that could only have been crammed into a story as bizarre and familiar as “Little Red Riding Hood” by writers, directors and editors as familiar with the bizarre and familiar gestalt of contemporary culture and pop phenoms as with the preceding decades of film-school features that set the standards they’re “filming” by.

The movie starts in media res, in the “what big eyes you have” climax of the fable. Red Riding Hood shows up to find the wolf in Grandma’s bed, wearing a Grandma mask (which I thought at first might be Grandma’s actual face, somehow removed by the wolf – eww, gross – but which turns out to be plain plastic). Grandma stumbles out of the closet bound and gagged after Red insists the wolf isn’t her granny, and in a brilliantly absurd and unsettling move, just as all three main characters are about to begin what promises to be a knock-down-drag-out fight in the living room, an apparently insane, screaming, axe-wielding woodsman in lederhosen crashes in through the window, wielding his axe, wearing lederhosen and screaming. Insanely.

This was pretty clever, and the sudden cut from this to the blackout title and outside-the-house-cops-milling-everywhere, “steadycam-filming” investigation beginning, made it even more clever – especially since everything is CGI, not steadycam, or any other kind of cam. I like that attention to detail and willingness to go beyond what’s necessary. (Like the outtakes at the end of Toy Story II.) What got me, though, what convinced me that I could settle in in front of this movie with a small bowl of ice cream or a quesadilla – or, to tell the truth, both – was the sudden appearance of the frog special investigator, Nicky Flippers. The suit, the debonair attitude, the shiny froggy skin, the pencil mustache – all references, and obvious ones for those in-the-know (invisible to the uninitiated), to the Thin Man movies.

The commentary admits this, and points out the presence of the court reporter dog as a reference to Asta, a terrier that shows up in all the Thin Man movies. The wolf is patterned after Fletch, and the commentary also refers to Wallace and Gromit’s “The Wrong Trousers,” saying the writers insisted that others involved in creating the movie watch it. Those are my kind of writers.

The story of how the wolf, Red, Grandma and the axe-wielding, lederhosen-wearing, screaming maniac woodsman, end up in Grannie’s living room, gets told four times from each of the characters’ perspectives. Red’s is first, followed by the wolf, the woodsman and finally, Grandma. Yes, it’s like Rashomon.

The in-between moments are stellar, and there are enough of them, and ridiculous enough, that you don’t notice the holes in the plot.

I mean, I assume there are some, but I didn’t notice any.

And who cares if there are.

Each of the character’s stories is entertaining on its own, with Red’s the most straightforward and each subsequent story both less and more practical – less practical in that the characters are involved in increasingly silly situations, and more practical in that the absurdities present and unremarked-on in Red’s story are explained piece by piece.

The mystery lasts awhile, but the pleasure of knowing who the villain is starts during the lederhosen-wearer’s version of the story, at the latest. Around this point, the villain starts going over the evil-genius edge, and by the big reveal, the actor who plays the villain (you can tell I’m trying hard not to spoil it for you here) has made his character into a perfect insane evil character, a great balance of the mad scientist’s attention to the big, crazy picture, and his focus on the details of his insecurity. (He makes one of his henchmen change his name from “Keith” to “Boris,” for instance, mocking Keith for having an unscary name. He stops to consider this in the middle of his big-action ending.)

So you figure out who the bad guy is relatively early on, but it’s all to your good. “We weren’t trying to do Memento,” they said in the commentary. (Good.)

They call themselves the “Napoleon Dynamite of animated films,” thanks to their lower production values and lower budget, but admit there’s no way of thinking so far about independent animated movies.

Well, I look forward to that day if this is the product of that out-of-the-Disney thinking.

Bring it on, honey.

PSA: JFH

I've picked up another Job From Hell for these next few weeks, all. I'm not sure I'll be able to keep up with my blog responsibilities.

If I do, all my posts may be frustrated diatribes against The Man.

Just to warn you.

Oh, that strange, high-pitched shrieking? That's the sound of me becoming hopeful.

President Barack Obama.

I have never been prouder (heck, I've never been proud) of America.

Confessions XXV

I've reverted to Jars of Clay's eponymous album today. (Think "Flood" and whatever you were doing in 1995.)

This is probably a bad sign. I was 15 and horribly depressed when I was listening to this album this loudly and constantly, last.

I suspect it's the result of repressing my feelings, as though I were living with my Mom again, for the last two weeks.

PSA: Vote!

I voted this morning, and I have a sticker to prove it.

PSA: Betty's more miley than Cyrus.

This Saturday around 7:30 a.m. on the way to the NEPCA conference (for the second time), outside of Providence, my hatchback car Betty turned the big 100.

She seems no worse for wear with 100,ooo miles on her engine and after 18 years of long service.

Hurrah for Betty!

I believe that in New England in November, the proper gift is a good winterizing, and possibly new tires.

Local Trivia: NoAd to the X-treme (I-95, R.I. edition)

Exit 5B off I-95 West in Rhode Island has a big blue sign indicating the amenities available at that exit.

However, instead of the logos of fast food restaurants and gasoline stations, the sign lists generic "Economy"-style amenities -- the logos all in white, with a blue border line and blue lettering, a la Sainsbury's "Economy chicken lunch meat: Contains at least 73% chicken parts" -- including but not limited to "Gas Station," "Family Restaurant" and "Deli Store."

Mix: Computer Future (edit)

"The sound of telegraphs marching against the castle" -- Good
"How I Could Just Kill A Man" -- Rage Against the Machine
"Computer World...2" -- Kraftwerk
"Machine in the Ghost" -- The Faint
"Computer Rock" -- Beck
"Fitter Happier" -- Radiohead
"Computer Says No! (Hystereo Remix)" -- Hyper & Jhz
"Machine Gun" -- Portishead
"Bone Machine" -- Pixies
"Inside My Soul" -- Pink Computer
"Give Up On Ghosts" -- Computer vs. Banjo
"Computer Camp Love (Villians Remix)" -- Datarock
"Memory Machine" -- The Dismemberment Plan
"I Robot" -- Alan Parsons Project

Bonus Track: "Computer Love" -- Zapp

Local Trivia: "I can see my cell from here!"

Interstate 95, Exit 72: Rocky Neck State Park, one of the few free-and-public beaches on Connecticut's Gold Coast.

One mile later on Interstate 95: "Entering correctional facility area: Do not stop."

Mix: Free 5 (Disc 1)

All of these songs were downloaded freely and legally, and I rate them all 5/5 stars.

"Walk On The Moon" -- Asobi Seksu
"Buildings & Mountains" -- The Republic Tigers
"Boom" -- Anavan
"Just Impolite" -- Plushgun
"No More Running Away -- Live" -- Air Traffic
"Lost to the Lonesome" -- Pela
"My Russia" -- Wovenhand
"Freeze and Explode" -- Cassettes Won't Listen
"Song For A Sleeping Girl" -- Devics
"Chinese Handcuffs" -- The New Year
"Young Bride" -- Midlake (CWL remix)
"Like I Do" -- Minipop
"Get Us Home" -- The Panics
"Threnody" -- Goldmund
"Broken Arm" -- Winterpills
"Satellite" -- Static Revenger
"Falling Out" -- The Sammies
"Nitrogen Pink" -- Polly Scattergood
"A Forest" -- Bat For Lashes

Mix: Free 5 (Disc 2)

"Daylight" -- Matt & Kim
"The Mae Shi vs. Miley Cyrus See You Again" -- The Mae Shi
"Pot Kettle Black" -- Tilly and the Wall
"Black Fur" -- Fredrik
"Love During Wartime" -- Little Beirut
"Pale Sun" -- Darker My Love
"Ashley" -- The Dodos
"Is There a Ghost" -- Band of Horses
"Half Eaten Erasers" -- The Good Ideas
"Sun In An Empty Room" -- The Weakerthans
"Handkerchiefs" -- Winterpills
"Make Mine Marvel" -- The Dead Science