Avoided Halloween weekend this year. Halloween. The only holiday of the year really worthy of celebrating. God, what is wrong with me?

Jatasya hi dhruvo mrityur
Dhruvam janma mrtasya ca

1) The Call of Jury
The last two weeks have been spent beneath the florescent lights of the King County Courtroom. As is the nature of such democratic rites of passage, I'm not allowed to speak on the nature of the trial until it's over. The deliberation looks like it'll be slated for Wednesday of next week. Transportation/time sacrifices aside, it's a relatively simple commitment and if nothing else, an experience I can add to the long list of I Survived It. All right, maybe that's a bit cynical. But truth be told, I have no idea what I'm actually going to get out of the experience once it's through. I'm imagining one of those long, soul-searching coffeehouse conversations where we weigh the pros and cons of the legal system and conclude that justice is the Mother of Suspicion. Or a Pink Ostrich.

2) Halloween
I'm going as Waldo. Trying desperately not to be mistaken for Rivers Cuomo.

3) The Autumn of Our Disposition
The leaves are crimson now. I am an animal of deficiency. I need food. I need music. I need literature. I need Yerba Mate. I need casual sex. I need new socks.

4) It's 7:37 AM and I'm so feeling the quantum slip.

Don't Dance at Our Carnival

We dedicate this feast
To all the gypsy beast and bandits;
To the rough of heart who couldn’t stand it
In the sands of war;
To all the vexed, betrayed and sex-crazed;
Roaring voices reprimanded;
Here’s our chorus side-winding up
Through the palace floor.
We dedicate this feast
To fallen priests and foiled rivals,
Learn our faces from your children,
You are our warriors no more.
For today, we are the wild, tyrannic
We’ve captured your Prince of Panic
Don’t dance at our carnival.

And to the rest of you, awake, now,
From the windows where you wait now,
Tell the Prince we’re taking over from today.
Tell him: “You’ll hear us, you will see us,
“You will fear us, you’ll believe us”
“When we say you’re meter’s up
“And the time has - come to pay.
“So don’t dance at our carnival.
“Don’t dance at our carnival.
“Don’t dance at our carnival.”

The ground beneath your feet is lifting,
Everybody shift it down,
Before we ain’t got no more days
Around to celebrate.
Years from now, they’ll dig our memorandums
And our ancient tantrums
Sing them to their sons
As the Euphrades hibernates.
And when our seeds of legacy
Rise up to form their paradise,
We’ll guard the gates where they all
Fold their hands to speak and pray.
For today’s the day we rise volcanic,
Singing to our Prince of Panic:
“Don’t dance at our carnival.”

Operator, standby:
Weatherman’s in high-tide;
Tell the nineteen networks
Armageddon’s got an alibi;
The boy in the angel wings
Says that he is seeing things:
Flood in the aquarium;
Fire in the city streets.
Come quarter-to-eleven,
Napalm wagon’s gone to heaven,
And the sky is gonna freeze us,
Quick – ‘Say cheese’ for Jesus.
Party’s in the arboretum,
Tarot frauds and shorts for freedom;
Orphans, inside - curtain down
On Dr. Sousa’s suicide.
No, we ain’t never gonna see the year
Two-thousand-sixty-nine…
We ain’t never gonna see the year
Two-thousand-sixty-nine…

Beasts and bandits, will you wake now?
From the windows where you wait now?
Tell the Prince we’re taking over for the day.
Tell him: “You’ll hear us, you will see us,
“You will fear us, you’ll believe us
“When we say you’re meter’s up
“And the time has - come to pay.
“No, you won’t dance at our carnival.
“Don’t dance at our carnival.
“Don’t dance at our carnival.”

I'M LISTENING TO:


CITIZEN COPE - Every Waking Moment


YO LA TENGO - I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass


SAM COOKE - At the Copa


THE ROOTS - Game Theory

---

I'M WATCHING:


MATADOR - dir. Pedro Almodovar


SUSPIRA - dir. Dario Argentio


SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY - dir. Sydney Pollack

---

I'M READING


ON BEAUTY by Zadie Smith


MY MISPENT YOUTH by Meagan Dauhm


THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy

Your Money Is My Money Too (Vol. II)

ABRIDGED LIST OF THINGS PEOPLE HAVE NEVER RETURNED
(Arranged by initials)

AK
- Italian wristband
- Jar of 64 Buttons
- This American Life – Guatanomo Bay Transcript
- Jules et Jim - Criterion Edition (DVD)
- Vertically striped navy blue/white handerkchief
- Brian Eno – Music for Airports (Vinyl record)
- My Former Soul

CC
- Brass knuckle and matching dog collar
- Ivory cigarette holder
- Tibetan Book of the Dead (The Irreverent Version)
- Hedwig and the Angry Inch (DVD)

LS
- Everything acquired from high school to freshman year of college (Cunt)

NJ
- Egon Schiele Poster
- AM/FM headphones
- $175

OF
- Portable tiki torch
- War Against the Kitchen Sink by John Guare
- Dumb & Dumber (DVD)

RG
- 3 red and yellow tinted martini glasses
- Sexual Revolution (Various essays)
Strobe lightbulb

XL
Middlesex by Jeffery Euginides
Dress your family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

Everything You Owe You Owe To Me
(Please notify if missing something)

AK
- Beige Driving gloves

EC
- Amadeus by Peter Shaffer
- Things Acquired In The Sea

IN
- Living Terrorism (by ?)
- Nostradamus – The Antithetical Comic Book Series
- The Beatles - White Album

JB
- Casablanca (DVD)

JG
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- The Best Erotica of 2004 (Various)
- Cyberculture Textbook
- Elizabeth (VHS)

RG
- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul – Criterion Edition (DVD)

XL
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Everybody get nekkid...

'Cause today's my 22nd birthday.


BICHEZ.

"If age was measured in consciousness, I might probably be close to a hundred… but a hundred what?"

I thought this picture was funny.

This is another one of those "don’t-expect-this-to-make-sense-because-I’m-drunk" posts. Sorry. Actually, I’m not really all that drunk anymore, but I am currently fighting a killer vodka and red bull hangover. This is so – what’s the word? – gay. Without the obligatory after-sex. I mean, this has very quickly become The Season of Piling Addictions: thumbtack thievery, reality TV shows about the fashion industry, Stud Horse poker and some other things we won’t mention. And as if my sleep habits weren’t erratic enough, now caffeine has found its way back to the top of the heap. I tried to scavenge my Dad’s video closet to find a golf tournament he may have taped back in 1989. (This is a fail safe cure for insomnia.) Low and behold, it wasn’t there. Now it’s 5:30 AM. I’m going to temple in five hours. I surrender.

I have a hard time knowing what to write in here these days. Something to do with being unable to commit to paragraphs. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe I’m embarrassed by state of my life and have outgrown the urge to complain about it. I mean, you get to a point when it’s no longer introspection and it just becomes repetitive narcissism. The fact of the matter is that it’s nobody’s fucking business unless I say it is. The only reason I bring this up in the first place is that a few people I’ve lost touch with since I moved out of Chicago seem to be using this as a resource for what’s going on in my life. It hasn’t been that for quite awhile. If you know me beyond mere proximity, chances are that I will tell you what’s up. No need to assume I’ve been shipped off to an asylum or developed some crystal meth habit.

Having said all of that, I would like to try to write more often. I figure if I can’t finish paragraphs, I can revive the 1-5 list, though this morning it’ll be 1-3--- since I just took an Excedrin PM.

---

une. Lloyd and I went down to the Diplo party at Neumos. Everyone was wearing orange. Not that I have anything against the color per se (Okay. I don't like the color orange) but it was everywhere. I found this creepy. Like a surprise Florida State pep rally. And I’m not even going to try to analyze this. The night itself though turned out to be a lot of fun. It reminded me of some of the nights out with The Doom Troopers back in Chicago. Also, I think bourbon has just become my drink, and I’m not even sure that I like it.

deux I have vague plans to move out to Capitol Hill at the end of the month. That if I find a job in the next couple of weeks that will take care of the rent. And to cover an even further prospect, I’ve decided I’d like to move back to New York when the timing’s right. I thought about leaving in the fall, but frankly, I just don’t have the wherewithal to pursue it at the moment.

trois. On Friday, I went to R Place with Paul. It wasn’t the first time I’ve been there, but I could only stay for about a half-an-hour before I actually started to feel physically ill. They weren’t wearing orange exactly, although they did more or less all look the same. (Smell a theme?) You either had your aging bald grease monkeys or your spraytanned-striped-polo-shirted-I-swear-I’m-not-a-Republican-retail zombies. When did gay men go white trash? And how are gay men supposed to be arbiters of good taste when they’re all wearing the same haircut? We will elaborate on this later.

Time to take my superficial ass to bed.

Fortuituous Return - An Overture

So this is the opening to OCCAM'S RAZOR, a short story collective I'm developing with my friend Xiaochang. It's rare that I share my writing publicly over the internet, so savor the occassion....

----

Fortuitous Return

An Overture

You’re not supposed to believe it could happen like this.

Time has crept behind you like a pantomime. There’s no use speaking back. There’s an enormity in your walk these days that leaves a loitered specter on every street you walked before. Your hands and feet are on loan, shaking frantic with a lack of recognition. Gone are the days when you used them as your vehicle for expression, an exit from the caged, hissing enmity of your bones. Gone are the days where you lay on the beach with your arms cast up, reaching out into that bedlam of distant stars and jets, receiving a strange transmission that coils through the maze of your fingerprints and shoots straight into your heart, whipping you into a monster, chiseling you into a man.

You hear them coming from more than five blocks away. One ambulance, then another. You back up into a dilapidated brick wall you didn’t see coming, your shoulders crashing in perfect alignment with a pair of electric pink graffiti wings. You find yourself face-to-face with the traffic of this three-point intersection on the Chicago Northside. The “six corners”, as it’s referred to in this particular neighborhood.

Like so many of the intersections in this city, there’s a fatalistic perplexity to them; an intergalactic convergence of past, present, future. A danger from below. They are places that bring the entire world down to a single tether. Places with a perennial, almost menacing déjà vu. Places where people have been known to have strokes from simply waiting at the corner. Places where people plan to meet, then never find one another. Places where people clear out during storms, for fear of an increased probability of getting struck by lightning. Places where people are afraid of looking up; where tourists forget their maps; where senses merge and explode—where accidents wait.

The traffic shifts out onto the sidewalk. They come now in spectacular blur. (One ambulance, then another.) You study the unfazed pedestrian jowls, the willfully deaf marching up the train platforms in the same narcoleptic cadences, the eight foot transvestite in the bright red fright wig spitting into her paper bag, tossing it over her shoulder and crossing the street with a lax neglect. She misses the ambulance by a mere gasp of a second, then proceeds to strut into the revolving doors of the Wells Fargo, her ass jouncing like a hopped up mare, before and after everyone. She is spitting into the face of death, you decide. She has become supernatural without knowing. She is dancing with dinosaurs, reborn to herself. She can see the future in a way that you can’t.

You close your eyes and slam your wrists against the wall, hanging there like a decrepit crucifix ornament. You stretch your arms out to the of your graffiti wings, pleading them to take you up and dissolve you into a gas. But when you open your eyes again, you are back; back into barbaric concert of the streets, where the pneumatic bodies have filled them up, where they spin and shake around like sand, swayed by the sounds of domestic belligerence and nervous jazz. Back into the hypocrisy of the living, who forgot they weren’t dreaming, too stranded in the tremors of solitude to walk in accord. You swing your hands back into your pockets and watch the sirens shrink into the avenue and get swallowed up by the evening before you can insist that it take you along with it. You wonder where it must be going and force a scenario under pressure.



They’re headed west down Fullerton. Toward Logan Square. The building is above a liquor store and ear, nose and throat clinic. Typical story, really. A Puerto Rican landlady eaten alive by her canaries. The granddaughter has climbed halfway up a fire escape and is spitting out the gnawed off ear of her stuffed polar bear. She screams holy murder as the paramedics take her by the arms and pull her into a police van. (This is how her father was taken from her back in December.) They’ll assure her that she’s not in any trouble and unsuccessfully attempt to reach her Aunt Lucia, who is supposed to be working at the CTA booth at LeSalle and Van Buren, but fell asleep in the furniture department at Sears during her lunch break. Turkey and red onion. She should have known better. She will curse herself for being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” as so many others do. She will resolve to stop attending Sunday mass, tell her priest that: “Destiny is a starvation for coincidence.” She is probably right. No one is ever where they should be. Everything is just barely being held together.




Do these stories seal a space between you and the anonymous world? Do they recover a link to the unexceptional? Do they unbolt the corkscrewed lampoons crammed into each shrill, narcoleptic corner of this city? Do they confirm all those feverishly real, giddily debilitating blue strokes of recognition you experience upon meeting a face (or even the suggestion of a face) with a sort of inexplicable familiarity about it? The sort with an unrequited history that you’re incapable of tracing back, but are almost certain – no – unquestionably certain exists?

Or is really much simpler than all of that?

Because it’s like this: it is 1983 and you are thirty-three years old. You’ve shaved your head into a Mohawk like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. You are thirty-three years old, terrified you may never really finish “coming of age.” Thirty three years old, and standing before a crosswalk, waiting for someone to take your hand. Thirty three years old, and still no closer to knowing anything at all.

*


No, you’re not supposed to believe it could happen like this.

The nostalgic chime from an ice cream van is drawing upon you. Sounds of Latin children follow them as they breaking hands with their mothers, running out into the street like jackals. You’ve heard this melody before, though you can’t seem to locate when and where. Someone is singing along now. A hostage voice. A child’s voice. Near, then from faraway. Soft and sweet and sinister.


Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son, John,
Went to bed,
With his trousers on,
One shoe off,
And one shoe on!
Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son, John.


The crowds irrigate. The voice crescendoes. The streetlights strobe. The billboards go blank. You look around you to see if you’re alone. You are not. There is a girl, a girl of seventeen in her underwear, standing just a kitty-corner away. Her back is turned away from you. Her arms are clasped upon her shoulders. Her arms are crossed upon her chest. Her gallant red hair is floating up like a cobweb. She is turning around now with her head down at the gutter. You can’t make her out in these shaking lights. She looks up at you, slow and afraid. The light above her thunders out and freezes there in a cryogenic blue. Her arms slide away from her bare breasts like an emaciated Venus. It’s her, you’re thinking. Your schoolboy infatuation. Your beacon saint of past, present and future. A girl whom you left by the riverbank sixteen years ago.

Yes, it’s her. It’s B.

She points out at the remaining four corners. It’s them, you say aloud. The boys in flapping collars. The boys in turquoise ties. The boys of Belvedere Academy. The boys whom shared that same beach, years ago, swapping your dreams with their arms cast up. Edward. Geoffery. Ralph. The Doom Troopers. The only faces you will ever know.

Yes, it’s them. And they want you back.

They leave their corners to congregate at the one left empty. B is standing there watching you, seeing the future in a way that the four of you can’t. Four, you think. The number of wings beneath a tabletop of chair. Four. The number of wings on a dragonfly. Four. The number of strings on a viola. Four. The number of seconds it will take to run across this junction to meet them in embrace, then start your entire life over again.

You dip one foot into the asphalt. The song recapitulates:


Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son, John,
Went to bed
With his trousers on,
One shoe off,
And one shoe on!
Diddle, diddle, dumpling,
My son—

BOOM! The traffic whineys to a halt. The force comes crashing into your side like the foot of a giant. The impact bolts you into the air, turning you upside-down into a curling flail of limbs. The man in the ice cream truck springs out as you collapse onto his windshield. The van whittles back-and-forth before falling to its side. Your bones smash onto the asphalt then out it comes, a spattering rainbow of ice cream bars shooting from the rear-view window, landing around you in a lathering, sticky carnage. Your spine is ticking. Your canines quake. And the children have broken hands with their mothers, running out into the street like jackals. They’re seizing up the carnage by the fistful, cramming their mouths with your evidence. They’re biting at the cops who have stocked up at the curb to pull them back to the sidewalk. He’s still alive, says one cop to the other. They can hear them coming from more than five blocks away. One ambulance, then another.

The song is playing still.

Bloody Motherfucking Asshole

Poetry is no place for a heart that's a whore

And I'm young & I'm strong

But I feel old & tired

Overfired



And I've been poked & stoked

It's all smoke, there's no more fire

Only desire

For you, whoever you are

For you, whoever you are



You say my time here has been some sort of joke

That I've been messing around

Some sort of incubating period

For when I really come around

I'm cracking up

And you have no idea



No idea how it feels to be on your own

In your own home

with the fucking phone

And the mother of gloom

In your bedroom

Standing over your head

With her hand in your head

With her hand in your head



I will not pretend

I will not put on a smile

I will not say I'm all right for you

When all I wanted was to be good

To do everything in truth

To do everything in truth



Oh I wish I wish I wish I was born a man

So I could learn how to stand up for myself

Like those guys with guitars

I've been watching in bars

Who've been stamping their feet to a different beat

To a different beat

To a different beat



I will not pretend

I will not put on a smile

I will not say I'm all right for you

When all I wanted was to be good

To do everything in truth

To do everything in truth



You bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody mother fucking asshole

Oh you bloody...



I will not pretend

I will not put on a smile

I will not say I'm all right for you

For you, whoever you are

For you, whoever you are

For you, whoever you are

Reverse Chronologies

Backs to the Future
Source: University of California, San Diego
http://www.physorg.com/news69338070.html

Tell an old Aymara speaker to "face the past!" and you just might get a blank stare in return because he or she already does.

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.

Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.

Appearing in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, the study is coauthored, with Berkeley linguistics professor Eve Sweetser, by Rafael Nunez, associate professor of cognitive science and director of the Embodied Cognition Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.



"Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on have not only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model," said Nunez.

The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it was dubbed the "language of Adam." More recently, Umberto Eco has praised its capacity for neologisms, and there have even been contemporary attempts to harness the so-called "Andean logic" which adds a third option to the usual binary system of true/false or yes/no to computer applications.

Yet, Nunez said, no one had previously detailed the Aymara's "radically different metaphoric mapping of time" a super-fundamental concept, which, unlike the idea of "democracy," say, does not rely on formal schooling and isn't an obvious product of culture.

Nunez had his first inkling of differences between "thinking in" Aymara and Spanish, when he went hitchhiking in the Andes as undergraduate in the early 1980s. More than a decade later, he returned to gather data.

For the study, Nunez collected about 20 hours of conversations with 30 ethnic Aymara adults from Northern Chile. The volunteer subjects ranged from a monolingual speaker of Aymara to monolingual speakers of Spanish, with a majority (like the population at large) being bilinguals whose skills covered a range of proficiencies and included the Spanish/Aymara creole called Castellano Andino.

The videotaped interviews were designed to include natural discussions of past and future events. These discussions, it was hoped, would elicit both the linguistic expressions for "past" and "future" and the subconscious gesturing that accompanies much of human speech and often acts out the metaphors being used.

The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits "nayra," the basic word for "eye," "front" or "sight," to mean "past" and recruits "qhipa," the basic word for "back" or "behind," to mean "future." So, for example, the expression "nayra mara" which translates in meaning to "last year" can be literally glossed as "front year."

But, according to the researchers, linguistic analysis cannot reliably tell the whole story.

Take an "exotic" language like English: You can use the word "ahead" to signify an earlier point in time, saying "We are at 20 minutes ahead of 1 p.m." to mean "It's now 12:40 p.m." Based on this evidence alone, a Martian linguist could then justifiably decide that English speakers, much like the Aymara, put the past in front.

There are also in English ambiguous expressions like "Wednesday's meeting was moved forward two days." Does that mean the new meeting time falls on Friday or Monday? Roughly half of polled English speakers will pick the former and the other half the latter. And that depends, it turns out, on whether they're picturing themselves as being in motion relative to time or time itself as moving. Both of these ideas are perfectly acceptable in English and grammatical too, as illustrated by "We're coming to the end of the year" vs. "The end of the year is approaching."

Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn't command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future by thumbing or waving over their shoulders and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones only exactly in reverse.

"These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon," Nunez said. "That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn't have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.

"But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all here we have a basic concept that is utterly different," he said.

Why, however, is not entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and Sweetser argue, is that the Aymara place a great deal of significance on whether an event or action has been seen or not seen by the speaker.

A "simple" unqualified statement like "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" is not possible in Aymara the sentence would necessarily also have to specify whether the speaker had personally witnessed this or was reporting hearsay.

In a culture that privileges a distinction between seen/unseen and known/unknown to such an extent as to weave "evidential" requirements inextricably into its language, it makes sense to metaphorically place the known past in front of you, in your field of view, and the unknown and unknowable future behind your back.

Though that may be an initial explanation and in line with the observation, the researchers write, that "often elderly Aymara speakers simply refused to talk about the future on the grounds that little or nothing sensible could be said about it" it is not sufficient, because other cultures also make use of similar evidential systems and yet still have a future ahead.

The consequences, on the other hand, may have been profound. This cultural, cognitive-linguistic difference could have contributed, Nunez said, to the conquistadors' disdain of the Aymara as shiftless uninterested in progress or going "forward."

Now, while the future of the Aymara language itself is not in jeopardy it numbers some two to three million contemporary speakers its particular way of thinking about time seems, at least in Northern Chile, to be on the way out.

The study's younger subjects, Aymara fluent in Spanish, tended to gesture in the common fashion. It appears they have reoriented their thinking. Now along with the rest of the globe, their backs are to the past, and they are facing the future.

The Please Catalogue, July 2006

BOOKS The Waves by Virginia Woolf / The Diviners by Rick Moody / Gaudi: The Man and His Work by Joan Bergós and Marc Llimargas








MUSIC Gabriel Yared - Self-Titled / Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope / Various Artists - The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered







ENTERTAINMENT Cache / Dave Chapelle's Block Party / Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List

Color & Light

BOYS by Rick Moody

BOYS ENTER THE HOUSE, boys enter the house. Boys, and with them the ideas of boys (ideas leaden, reductive, inflexible), enter the house. Boys, two of them, wound into hospital packaging, boys with infant-pattern baldness, slung in the arms of parents, boys dreaming of breasts, enter the house. Twin boys, kettles on the boil, boys in hideous vinyl knapsacks that young couples from Edison, NJ., wear on their shirt fronts, knapsacks coated with baby saliva and staphylococcus and milk vomit, enter the house. Two boys, one striking the other with a rubberized hot dog, enter the house. Two boys, one of them striking the other with a willow switch about the head and shoulders, the other crying, enter the house. Boys enter the house speaking nonsense. Boys enter the house calling for mother. On a Sunday, in May, a day one might nearly describe as perfect, an ice cream truck comes slowly down the lane, chimes inducing salivation, and children run after it, not long after which boys dig a hole in the back yard and bury their younger sister’s dolls two feet down, so that she will never find these dolls and these dolls will rot in hell, after which boys enter the house. Boys, trailing after their father like he is the Second Goddamned Coming of Christ Goddamned Almighty, enter the house, repair to the basement to watch baseball. Boys enter the house, site of devastation, and repair immediately to the kitchen, where they mix lighter fluid, vanilla pudding, drainopening lye, balsamic vinegar, blue food coloring, calamine lotion, cottage cheese, ants, a plastic lizard one of them received in his Christmas stocking, tacks, leftover mashed potatoes, Spam, frozen lima beans, and chocolate syrup in a medium-sized saucepan and heat over a low flame until thick, afterward transferring the contents of this saucepan into a Pyrex lasagna dish, baking the Pyrex lasagna dish in the oven for nineteen minutes before attempting to persuade their sister that she should eat the mixture; later they smash three family heirlooms (the last, a glass egg, intentionally) in a two-and-a-half-hour stretch, whereupon they are sent to their bedroom until freed, in each case thirteen minutes after. Boys enter the house, starchy in pressed shirts and flannel pants that itch so bad, fresh from Sunday school instruction, blond and brown locks (respectively) plastered down but even so with a number of cowlicks protruding at odd angles, disconsolate and humbled, uncertain if boyish things — such as shooting at the neighbor’s dog with a pump-action BB gun and gagging the fat boy up the street with a bandanna and showing their shriveled boy-penises to their younger sister — are exempted from the commandment to Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself. Boys enter the house in baseball gear (only one of the boys can hit): in their spikes, in mismatched tube socks that smell like Stilton cheese. Boys enter the house in soccer gear. Boys enter the house carrying skates. Boys enter the house with lacrosse sticks, and soon after, tossing a lacrosse ball lightly in the living room, they destroy a lamp. One boy enters the house sporting basketball clothes, the other wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. One boy enters the house bleeding profusely and is taken out to get stitches, the other watches. Boys enter the house at the end of term carrying report cards, sneak around the house like spies of foreign nationality, looking for a place to hide the report cards for the time being (under a toaster? in a medicine cabinet?). One boy with a black eye enters the house, one boy without. Boys with acne enter the house and squeeze and prod large skin blemishes in front of their sister. Boys with acne-treatment products hidden about their persons enter the house. Boys, standing just up the street, sneak cigarettes behind a willow in the Elys’ yard, wave smoke away from their natural fibers, hack terribly, experience nausea, then enter the house. Boys call each other Retard, Homo, Geek, and, later, Neckless Thug, Theater Fag, and enter the house exchanging further epithets. Boys enter house with nose-hair clippers, chase sister around house threatening to depilate her eyebrows. She cries. Boys attempt to induce girls to whom they would not have spoken only six or eight months prior to enter the house with them. Boys enter the house with girls efflorescent and homely and attempt to induce girls to sneak into their bedroom, as they still share a single bedroom; girls refuse. Boys enter the house, go to separate bedrooms. Boys, with their father (an arm around each of them), enter the house, but of the monologue preceding and succeeding this entrance, not a syllable is preserved. Boys enter the house having masturbated in a variety of locales. Boys enter the house having masturbated in trainstation bathrooms, in forests, in beach houses, in football bleachers at night under the stars, in cars (under a blanket), in the shower, backstage, on a plane, the boys masturbate constantly, identically, three times a day in some cases, desire like a madness upon them, at the mere sound of certain words, words that sound like other words, interrogative reminding them of intercourse, beast reminding them of breast, sects reminding them of sex, and so forth, the boys are not very smart yet, and as they enter the house they feel, as always, immense shame at the scale of this self-abusive cogitation, seeing a classmate, seeing a billboard, seeing a fire hydrant, seeing things that should not induce thoughts of masturbation (their sister, e.g.) and then thinking of masturbation anyway. Boys enter the house, go to their rooms, remove sexually explicit magazines from hidden stashes, put on loud music, feel despair. Boys enter the house worried; they argue. The boys are ugly, they are failures, they will never be loved, they enter the house. Boys enter the house and kiss their mother, who feels differently now they have outgrown her. Boys enter the house, kiss their mother, she explains the seriousness of their sister’s difficulty, her diagnosis. Boys enter the house, having attempted to locate the spot in their yard where the dolls were buried, eight or nine years prior, without success; they go to their sister’s room, sit by her bed. Boys enter the house and tell their completely bald sister jokes about baldness. Boys hold either hand of their sister, laying aside differences, having trudged grimly into the house. Boys skip school, enter house, hold vigil. Boys enter the house after their parents have both gone off to work, sit with their sister and with their sister’s nurse. Boys enter the house carrying cases of beer. Boys enter the house, very worried now, didn’t know more worry was possible. Boys enter the house carrying controlled substances, neither having told the other that he is carrying a controlled substance, though an intoxicated posture seems appropriate under the circumstances. Boys enter the house weeping and hear weeping around them. Boys enter the house embarrassed, silent, anguished, keening, afflicted, angry, woeful, grief-stricken. Boys enter the house on vacation, each clasps the hand of the other with genuine warmth, the one wearing dark colors and having shaved a portion of his head, the other having grown his hair out longish and wearing, uncharacteristically, a de-dyed shirt. Boys enter the house on vacation and argue bitterly about politics (other subjects are no longer discussed), one boy supporting the Maoist insurgency in a certain Southeast Asian country, one believing that to change the system you need to work inside it; one boy threatens to beat the living shit out of the other, refuses creme brulee, though it is created by his mother in order to keep the peace. One boy writes home and thereby enters the house only through a mail slot: he argues that the other boy is cryptofascist, believing that the market can seek its own level on questions of ethics and morals; boys enter the house on vacation and announce future professions; boys enter the house on vacation and change their minds about professions; boys enter the house on vacation, and one boy brings home a sweetheart but throws a tantrum when it is suggested that the sweetheart will have to retire on the folding bed in the basement; the other boy, having no sweetheart, is distant and withdrawn, preferring to talk late into the night about family members gone from this world. Boys enter the house several weeks apart. Boys enter the house on days of heavy rain. Boys enter the house, in different calendar years, and upon entering, the boys seem to do nothing but compose manifestos, for the benefit of parents; they follow their mother around the place, having fashioned these manifestos in celebration of brand-new independence: Mom, I like to lie in bed late into the morning watching game shows, or, I’m never going to date anyone but artists from now on, mad girls, dreamers, practicers of black magic, or, A man should eat bologna, sliced meats are important, or, An American should bowl at least once a year, but these manifestos apply only for brief spells, after which they are reversed or discarded. Boys don’t enter the house at all, except as ghostly afterimages of younger selves, fleeting images of sneakers dashing up a staircase; soggy towels on the floor of the bathroom; blue jeans coiled like asps in the basin of the washing machine; boys as an absence of boys; blissful at first, you put a thing down on a spot, put this book down, come back later, it’s still there; you buy a box of cookies, eat three, later three are missing. Nevertheless, when boys next enter the house, which they ultimately must do, it’s a relief, even if it’s only in preparation for weddings of acquaintances from boyhood, one boy has a beard, neatly trimmed, the other has rakish sideburns, one boy wears a hat, the other boy thinks hats are ridiculous, one boy wears khakis pleated at the waist, the other wears denim, but each changes into his suit (one suit fits well, one is a little tight), as though suits are the liminary marker of adulthood. Boys enter the house after the wedding and they are slapping each other on the back and yelling at anyone who will listen. It’s a party! One boy enters the house, carried by friends, having been arrested (after the wedding) for driving while intoxicated, complexion ashen; the other boy tries to keep his mouth shut: the car is on its side in a ditch, the car has the top half of a tree broken over its bonnet, the car has struck another car, which has in turn struck a third, Everyone will have seen. One boy misses his brother horribly, misses the past, misses a time worth being nostalgic over, a time that never existed, back when they set their sister’s playhouse on fire; the other boy avoids all mention of that time; each of them is once the boy who enters the house alone, missing the other, each is devoted and each callous, and each plays his part on the telephone, over the course of months. Boys enter the house with fishing gear, according to prearranged date and time, arguing about whether to use lures or live bait, in order to meet their father for the fishing adventure, after which boys enter the house again, almost immediately, with live bait, having settled the question; boys boast of having caught fish in the past, though no fish has ever been caught: Remember when the blues were biting? Boys enter the house carrying their father, slumped. Happens so fast. Boys rush into the house leading EMTs to the couch in the living room where the body lies, boys enter the house, boys enter the house, boys enter the house. Boys hold open the threshold, awesome threshold that has welcomed them when they haven’t even been able to welcome themselves, that threshold which welcomed them when they had to be taken in, here is its tarnished knocker, here is its euphonious bell, here’s where die boys had to sand die door down because it never would hang right in the frame, here are the scuff marks from when boys were on the wrong side of the door demanding, here’s where there were once milk bottles for the milkman, here’s where the newspaper always landed, here’s the mail slot, here’s the light on the front step, illuminated, here’s where the boys are standing, as that beloved man is carried out. Boys, no longer boys, exit.

Verse 21:11 from the Gospel of St. Trystan

INSTRUCTIONS FOR WRITING SONGS THAT SAVE THE WORLD
Sit up from your bed each morning and press your left palm firmly to your ribcage. Count back from your lucky number and rise out from your spine as it grows into a fist. Take a walk around the same block twice and say "Good morning" to your neighbors. (Even if you send them turning on their sprinklers and sprinting inside terrified.) Return to your kitchen table and replace yesterday’s carnations with souvenir straws from places you've never been. Take another bite from your apple as you recite the obituaries in the paper to your goldfish. Write down five things you did yesterday that you’ll never do again. Tap your foot against the floor as if it’s the world’s one and only rhythm. Send off your memory to somewhere tropical and dust off your 400 watt crystal ball. Read the opening to Mrs. Dalloway in your spinning chair till gravity breeds a giant in you. Stand at your window to imagine the sounds of trains and hunger and disappearing oceans. Whistle "Amazing Grace" in a paraplegic’s praise of undiscovered planets. Switch to the classical FM station and summon up landscapes from the dead. Dance improbably to Mahler’s 5th and stop to watch the ceiling swell. Say: "This life is just a replay of all the things you forgot the first time." Then make a song that defies continents; that drives dormant souls out of silence; that redeems love to the disappointed; that swings open every front door to a prehistoric chorus measured by panasonic waves of souls unanimous. And when you play it for your mother over the phone, don't poison it telling her it’s "all in progress." Color over the words that crave flesh and history--and never deem the lesson done.

The Ann Coulter Obsession Continues....

One day I will write about my obsession with Ann Coulter. But not today. Today, I'm merely coming out of the closet with a bad political cartoon.




HILARITY

Study: Earth (likely) hottest in 2000 years

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It has been 2,000 years and possibly much longer since Earth has run such a fever.

The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia."
A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that Earth is heating up and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.
This is shown in boreholes, retreating glaciers and other evidence found in nature, said Gerald North, a geosciences professor at Texas A&M University who chaired the academy's panel.
The report was requested in November by the chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-New York, to address naysayers who question whether global warming is a major threat.
Last year, when the House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, launched an investigation of three climate scientists, Boehlert said Barton should try to learn from scientists, not intimidate them.
Boehlert said Thursday the report shows the value of having scientists advise Congress.
"There is nothing in this report that should raise any doubts about the broad scientific consensus on global climate change," he said.

Other new research Thursday showed that global warming produced about half of the extra hurricane-fueled warmth in the North Atlantic in 2005, and natural cycles were a minor factor, according to Kevin Trenberth and Dennis Shea of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a research lab sponsored by the National Science Foundation and universities. Their study is being published by the American Geophysical Union.

The Bush administration has maintained that the threat is not severe enough to warrant new pollution controls that the White House says would have cost 5 million Americans their jobs.

(Watch as lawmakers argue saving the planet could ruin our economy-- 2:24)

Climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes had concluded the Northern Hemisphere was the warmest it has been in 2,000 years. Their research was known as the "hockey-stick" graphic because it compared the sharp curve of the hockey blade to the recent uptick in temperatures and the stick's long shaft to centuries of previous climate stability.
The National Academy scientists concluded that the Mann-Bradley-Hughes research from the late 1990s was "likely" to be true, said John "Mike" Wallace, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington and a panel member. The conclusions from the '90s research "are very close to being right" and are supported by even more recent data, Wallace said.
The panel looked at how other scientists reconstructed Earth's temperatures going back thousands of years, before there was data from modern scientific instruments.

For all but the most recent 150 years, the academy scientists relied on "proxy" evidence from tree rings, corals, glaciers and ice cores, cave deposits, ocean and lake sediments, boreholes and other sources. They also examined indirect records such as paintings of glaciers in the Alps.
Combining that information gave the panel "a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years," the academy said.

Overall, the panel agreed that the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years, though relatively warm conditions persisted around the year 1000, followed by a "Little Ice Age" from about 1500 to 1850.

The scientists said they had less confidence in the evidence of temperatures before 1600. But they considered it reliable enough to conclude there were sharp spikes in carbon dioxide and methane, the two major "greenhouse" gases blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere, beginning in the 20th century, after remaining fairly level for 12,000 years.

Between 1 A.D. and 1850, volcanic eruptions and solar fluctuations were the main causes of changes in greenhouse gas levels. But those temperature changes "were much less pronounced than the warming due to greenhouse gas" levels by pollution since the mid-19th century, it said.
The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization chartered by Congress to advise the government of scientific matters.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Nowhere Man

To read the First Act treatment for MIRACULOUS LIVES - The Berserker (which has been described as by my friend as a "sociopathic Angels in America"), click on the graphic below:

I'm going to make an effort to blog more frequently after suspicions that I've been killed in a limo accident. But as for now, I'm bereft of things to say, so I'm going to post a few selections from the website that consumes most of my time spent at the computer these days...



Ann Coulter Pie Throwing Incident


Parody of Britney Spears CRACKING. Oh wait, this is legitimate.


Bette Davis at 400 years old on the Johnny Carson Show.


"Sugar Baby Love" - AIDS Campaign


Is Wayne Brady going to have to CHOKE A BITCH?

100 Things (Well, actually 50... which I guess makes this Part 1 of 2)

1) I actually liked the movie Titanic.
2) I own over 200 rolls of scotch tape.
3) If you wake me up in the middle of the night, there’s an 8/10 chance that I’ll never get back to sleep.
4) I am obsessed with the atlas of my spine.
5) I thought I was beyond guilty pleasure until Jason got me into The Real Housewives of Orange County.
6) Back in grammar school, I only listened to classical music and 50s Motown.
7) I also used to spend hours trying to memorize the World Book encyclopedia, but in the end, gave up and drew mustaches on Todor Zhivkov and all the other communist dictators.
8) I believe tetris is probably a metaphor for everything else in life.
9) It can take me up to two hours to completely unpack
10) If I go more than three days without a salad, I take it out on the world.
11) I am automatically drawn to people whose names are toward the beginning and end of the alphabet.
12) “Tortoise” is my new favorite world.
13) I also like the words “pneumatic” and “rhododendron”.
14) I’ve been ending most of my sentences lately with “man” or “dude” due to feelings of homosexual inadequacy.
15) It’s nearly impossible for me to leave home without spending money.
16) I’ve been smoking Marlboro Lights since I was 16.
17) I’ve been trying to quit smoking since I was 18.
18) My ideal meal would start off with a spinach salad with pears, pine nuts, strawberries, kiwi and raspberry/poppy seed dressing.
19) The main course would be grilled unagi over basmati rice, garlic shrimp skewers and baba ghanoush.
20) And for desert, lemon gelato over a cranberry walnut tart.
21) This is possibly the gayest meal ever.
22) My cat of thirteen years died last week.
23) I own the new Lindsay Lohan album.
24) I used to be so ashamed of my Filpino heritage that I actually tried to pass myself off as Navajo Indian until I met someone in 5th grade who was doing the opposite.
25) When I was four, my parents would take me to Kareoke bars where I’d perform renditions of Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton tunes in a brown apron and cowboy hat.
26) The last movie I saw was Hard Candy last Friday, which I would probably rate a B or B+.
27) I prefer straight porn.
28) I dyed my hair black last night after nine months of red.
29) I am currently trying to get over my vocal crack after years and years of not performing.
30) No matter what I start, in the very beginning I’m plagued with reservations about it, or at least my ability to do it well.
31) I have written 5 full length plays. ( Subterraneously Here, Aquaculture, Hands On Her Spine, The Animal Cracker Box, Here Come the Alligators)
32) I am embarrassed about the fact that over half of those titles have references to animals in them.
33) I was mugged last March on Lakeshore Drive.
34) I’ve easily seen the movie Beetlejuice over 100 times.
35) I am afraid of gay bars.
36) I’m almost positive I have hyperhidrosis.
37) I have frequent cravings for Haagen Daaz pistachio ice cream.
38) I overuse commas and parentheses.
39) I’ve been “blocked” for over a year, which is to say that I have too many ideas and not enough focus.
40) I have no idea where I want to live anymore.
41) In spite of everything, I’m fairly sure that some form of God exists.
42) I’m just not so sure where I stand with Him, Her, It... whatever...
43) I start kickboxing classes next Tuesday.
44) I have horrible posture at the computer.
45) Spring is my favorite season, probably because it’s the shortest.
46) My current dream is to have enough money to buy organic.
47) I spent all of last April ignoring politics, which I am only partially ashamed of.
48) I still haven’t received my tax returns.
49) I have no idea what the next few months will bring.
50) My parents had originally planned on naming me Henry.

The previous two weeks have been something kind of miraculous. Aside from all the things going on that need my attention, I've been procrastinating hardcore. Here's a list of a few I've seen in the last couple of weeks that I might given mini-reviews of later, but for now you're just going to have to deal with the letter grades.



The Devil & Daniel Johnston A
Thank You For Smoking B+
Inside Man C+
King Kong B
Videodrome D+
A History of Violence C
Tsosti A-
V for Vendetta B+
Wild at Heart D