What are you now ? The portion left to sleep is
crying in your sleep. They want to take your leg.
Your oximeter chirps behind you. Behind me,
Bandit steals a kiss from the Frog.
Ssomehow we smoked and snorted
our way into the same bed, mother and son.
If the Snowman and Fred saw us like this
they’d chew each other to the bone.
Fear Baby
Alan fled New Brunswick and his people there early last spring, fled their venomous cuisine and their aimless humping, their fiddleheads and their homemade maple rum that inflamed even the oldest of turds to fits of priapic square-dancing and, later, rutting against the corner of the bar ; he fled his mother, who had convinced herself it was her shyness and crippling passivity that drove Alan’s father to walk into the sea, and who, after having found the need to “ideate” a new life for herself, sat down one evening in February, shut her eyes, and imagined a darling baby, “a beautiful baby all my own” (Alan found that particularly galling), a baby not made of skin and bone but of fear and anxiety, bundled and swaddled just like a real baby, tender and needy just like a real baby, the idea being that caring for her fear baby would help her come to terms with her weakness rather than let it shame her as it had all her life, which seemed to make sense to Alan, except after a few nights of this, he found his mother in her chair, red-faced and groaning, her hands crushing each other in her lap, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out she was choking the ever loving shit out of her fear baby, which now she was calling Alan ; but most of all, he left Moncton because Veronique wasn’t ever going to come back.
All Things Being Equal
I’d rather have a cubic zirconium
Than acerbic meconium.
Heat Nap
I fell asleep for a bit this afternoon and dreamed that I got a call from my agent. James Franco had requested me personally to teach him bird calls, specifically California shore bird calls, which apparently were my specialty. I was skeptical, not sure I could deal with a dilettante trying to learn in a week what had taken me my entire birding career, but I took the job. When I arrived, James Franco was sitting on a metal chair in a poorly lit concrete bunker, in an orange t‑shirt and brown pants, whistling like a lunatic. Uncertain if I should interrupt, I started to set up my playback system, which involved reel-to-reel tape recorders, a Super‑8 movie screen, and cockpit headsets. Franco stopped me. He didn’t want to learn how to identify birds by their calls, he said. He wanted to learn to whistle like the birds. I told him that wasn’t my thing, and he said, “David, we have to learn to speak to the birds. They’re never going to learn how to speak to us.”
Dreamy
What does it mean when you dream you’re at a gallery opening watching a video installation of Madonna in a nightgown and tear-stained make-up slapping a young, blond, naked Alec Baldwin with a gun ? (One monitor is a wide shot loop, one a wide slo-mo, one a close-up of the pistol nipping Alec’s stamen.)
Asking for a friend.
The Odds Are Not In My Favor
I started running today. I’m not a gambler, but gun to my head, I’d say the odds that I continue running in the coming days are as close to 0 as as my ass is to the ground. Oh, wait that’s my stomach. “So you’re saying I still have a chance…”
Not really. I’m 54. I haven’t run in 15 years. I’m whatever word comes after “morbidly” in the obese continuüm. (My vote goes to “Morbid-Pro”.) Also, I hate running, and I have an arthritic knee, flat feet, and neuropathy.
So, I’m kinda hotshit, is what I’m saying.
Tonight I ran like this : one minute run, then one minute rest. Repeat that seven times. The good news ? On the last rep, I actually ran two blocks before I gassed out.
The other good news is I have done this before. When I was in my early 30s I decided to start running. I was in terrible shape then too, and I started the same way, increasing the time by one minute every week and slowly decreasing the walking. And it worked. I was running three miles a day in two months. At one point, I was up to seven miles a day.
So I know this can work, which doesn’t mean it will. Especially when I don’t really care if I can run seven miles. Or three. I just want to be able to run and hike as easily as I ride a bike.
Because as out of shape as I am when it comes to running, I have surprisingly decent cycling conditioning. After not riding for three months (thanks to the holy trinity of crappiness : illness, weather, and illness), I got on my bike and was back to riding 15 – 20 miles on my lunch hour rides in a few days. I want to balance things out : glutes and quads, not one or the other.
Plus my cycling goals now are so time consuming. 100 miles a week, 50 mile rides once a week, 2500 feet of climbing a week, etc. That’s hours of riding, which I would love to do, but I don’t really have the time. To reach a huge running milestone, all I have to do is run twelve minutes without walking. One mile. If I could do that, I’d call the Queen and take her to lunch — it would be a bigger accomplishment than riding a century.
It’s not going to happen, but I’m posting this just in case.
A Brief Life of Bruno Schulz
As a boy in a part of Poland that is now part of Ukraine, Bruno fed sugar granules to houseflies so they’d have enough strength to survive the winters. Later, he wanted to be an artist. He went to college, but he was shy and thought little of himself, so he had nothing. Some friends pitied him and found him a job as a school teacher. He didn’t like teaching, but his students remembered him as an awkward man who nevertheless transfixed them with stories every day from bell to bell.
He wrote stories as well, but he didn’t think they were good enough to publish. Nonetheless, in 1933, at age 41, he traveled to Warsaw with the hope that Madame Nalkowska would help him. As a favor to a friend, she agreed to give him ten minutes of her time and let him read a few pages of his collection to her. She kept the manuscript for the day and phoned him that evening to say she would be honored to help him publish his collection, The Cinnamon Shops. Five short years later, he received the Golden Laurel Award from the Polish Academy of Literature.
In 1941, the Germans forced the Jews of Drohobycz into the Ghetto. Schulz escaped the camps, however, when an SS Officer, Felix Landau, admired his work and retained him to paint murals in his home. Landau had a violent rivalry with another SS Officer, Karl Gunther ; one day, Gunther walked up and shot Shulz dead, saying, “There, I’ve shot your personal Jew.”
[This is a distillation of David Grossman’s fine “The Age of Genius” from the June 8 2009 issue of The New Yorker]
The Real Work
It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work,
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
– Wendell Berry
Something from Anthony Burgess
We probably have no duty to like Beethoven or hate Coca-Cola, but it is at least conceivable that we have a duty to distrust the state. Thoreau wrote of the duty of civil disobedience ; Whitman said, “Resist much, obey little.” With those liberals, and with many others, disobedience is a good thing in itself. In small social entities — English parishes, Swiss cantons — the machine that governs can sometimes be identified with the community that is governed. But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, the governing machine becomes remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction ; it treats us as abstract statistics ; it controls an army ; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective.
– From The New Yorker, June 2012
The Long Goodbye
I copied this poster for Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye from a tweet by Cassian Elwes. It’s one of my favorite films, an irreverent adapataion of Raymond Chandler’s novel. The poster is by Jack Davis, the great MAD Magazine cartoonist. I like how the poster uses the MAD format to make itself hip and to poke fun at itself at the same time. The movie itself has none of this snarky comic tone, but it doesn’t matter. The poster captures the film and the era perfectly.